Art and mirror neurons: hope and empathy for everyone!

It was 2019 when the WHO (World Health Organization) officially recognized that art supports health in many ways including: alleviating psychological symptoms caused by trauma or abuse, giving relief to those suffering from acute pain, supporting those suffering from neurological disorders and other pathologies. Many were surprised, many others were not.

Even before, Alain de Botton and John Armstrong said it in 2016 in the book "Art as therapy", in which a very sensitive and suggestive aspect was also outlined (and not for this reason not true): art (practiced and/or enjoyed) "gives hope". "When painters show us a better world than the real one, they do not do it because their eyes are not able to grasp its imperfections", but they do it to make us feel "immediately satisfied and acquire an openly optimistic vision of life and the world".

In addition to the activation of hope, which is always very welcome and useful for us and society, between the person and the work a real empathic process is triggered that extends to many other psychological aspects. The more we observe the artistic manifestation, the more our brain will tend to translate its contents into emotional and sensory stimuli. This explains why, for example, looking at a painting of a desert for some time you can get to feel the heat on your skin.

It is what is called "identification" caused by the now known (but still not sufficiently considered) "mirror neurons", the neurons of empathy.

Vittorio Gallese was the first to study them, defining their functioning as a deep tuning (activation of certain neuronal circuits) that makes us feel the same sensations and emotions that another person experiences. According to Gallese, and then others after him, the same mechanism would be activated whenever we are faced with an artistic object, or other expressive work, which in some way touches the right "strings" of our unconscious interiority.

So, to sum up: art, made or enjoyed, supports health, helps prevent and treat diseases, and triggers human factors such as hope and empathy. Which is not bad.

I think that often art is put in the same place where sport is put, and in general the things that do well in a natural way. Those things praised, sometimes awarded, photographed, published, included in rankings, in projects that from TV end up in the cellar.

Those things that one in a million accesses success, and everything around is silent.

But it is not so much the scarcity of stages and pedestals that do damage to art, and therefore to man, but the fact that its essence is dispersed, the extreme vital function for human beings.

But in spite of the lack of adequate consideration, people continue to make art (and sports), even in that dim light that an increasingly commodified system grants, because perhaps it is precisely now that there is more need for it.

Hope and empathy? Yes, thank you.

Miriam Fusconi