This article was originally published in UCSB's ' The Current '.
A new study offers some of the strongest evidence yet that viewing art doesn’t just move us emotionally — it changes how we think. Researchers at UC Santa Barbara found that people who viewed artistic film shorts showed measurable increases in creative thinking compared with those who watched entertaining, “non-art,” videos.
“Art confronts us with the unexpected,” said psychological researcher Madeleine Gross, who led the study with co-author Jonathan Schooler, also in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences. “It pushes us beyond surface-level perception, into broader, and more abstract ways of thinking and perceiving. Those same processes appear to support creative thinking.”