What if the thing we call art is just something humans learned to take seriously after we got too old to call it play?
A toddler grabs a crayon when she’s upset and starts scribbling. A teenager puts on headphones and disappears into a song. An exhausted lawyer takes a weeklong music class and suddenly describes her life as technicolor again. A burned child forgets, for a few minutes, to ask for morphine because a theater troupe has made the hospital room more interesting.
We tend to put these experiences into different categories. One is childhood behavior. One is entertainment. One is a hobby. One is medicine. But maybe we’re overcomplicating it.
Psychobiologist Daisy Fancourt spends much of her work studying what happens to us when we engage with the arts. Her research touches everything from music and painting to theater, dance, storytelling, mental health, and the aging brain. Her 2026 review of the field identifies 50 different mechanisms that may contribute to the psychological benefits of arts engagement, from emotion regulation and reward to social connection and cognitive processes. Fancourt’s 2026 review in Nature Reviews Psychology argues that no single mechanism is likely to explain the effects. Instead, multiple interconnected processes appear to be involved.
The more I look at that research, the more I keep coming back to a simpler possibility: Maybe art is play that grew up.
Not literally. Not all art is playful, and not all play becomes art. But the border between them may be considerably less natural—and considerably more cultural—than we usually assume.
What Do Art and Play Have in Common?
The word art carries a lot of baggage. It suggests skill. Training. Standards. An audience. A finished product. Maybe a gallery wall and someone standing six feet away from your painting with their arms folded.
Play doesn’t require any of that.
Stuart Brown, the psychiatrist who founded the National Institute for Play, describes play as an absorbing, apparently purposeless activity that is enjoyable, voluntary, and capable of diminishing our usual sense of time and self-consciousness.
That description fits a four-year-old with crayons. It also fits an adult doodling during a meeting, singing in the shower, making up a story for a child, dancing alone in the kitchen, improvising a melody on a piano, or picking up a guitar with absolutely no intention of becoming a guitarist.
The difference may not be what we’re doing. It may be why we’re doing it—and what kind of attention we’re bringing to it. When we make art for a grade, a paycheck, a competition, or an audience, we’ve added external purposes. But the moment we start experimenting just to see what happens, something changes. We aren’t necessarily producing something. We’re playing with something.
Art Can Give Us Somewhere to Put Our Feelings
Fancourt tells a story about her own toddlers in a conversation on Hidden Brain: when something upsets them, they sometimes reach for crayons. The resulting marks aren’t necessarily pictures. Sometimes they’re angry scribbles. Sometimes they’re repetitive shapes. But the activity seems to give the children something to do with a feeling that doesn’t yet have words.
I’d call that play. And I’d argue that the same impulse survives adulthood.
Fancourt also describes a premature baby in a neonatal intensive care unit who was crying and refusing to feed. The baby’s mother began singing a lullaby, and within minutes the baby calmed and began feeding again. The story isn’t evidence that singing magically regulates every distressed infant. It is, however, a striking example of art functioning as an interaction rather than an object: voice, rhythm, attention, relationship.
Then there’s the burn ward.
Fancourt describes a boy with severe burns who was waiting for morphine when a theater troupe began performing for him. He became absorbed in the performance, laughing and smiling, and stopped asking for pain medication. The performance didn’t change the burns. It changed what the boy was attending to.
That distinction matters because attention plays a substantial role in the experience of pain, and research on distraction for pediatric pain has found that distraction can reduce acute pain under appropriate circumstances.
Art isn’t anesthetic. But sometimes it gives the mind somewhere else to go. And that is a very old function of play.
The Brain Doesn’t Just Reward the Payoff
One of Fancourt’s most interesting points is that the pleasure of art isn’t necessarily confined to the moment when the pleasurable thing actually happens.
A song can be exciting because you know the chorus is coming. A joke can become funnier because you can feel the punchline approaching. A mystery can keep you awake because you need to know who did it. The anticipation is part of the experience.
That’s important because anticipation is also one of the fundamental ingredients of play.
What’s behind the door? Can I make the jump? Will I catch it? What happens if I try this? What happens next?
This doesn’t mean that art and play use one identical “play circuit.” The brain is not organized into neat little boxes labeled ART, PLAY, and TAX PREPARATION. But research on motivation and play does point toward overlapping systems involving anticipation, reward, curiosity, and positive affect. In animal research, for example, rats engaged in social play produce 50-kHz ultrasonic vocalizations associated with positive affect and reward-related processes.
Research by Stephen Siviy and Jaak Panksepp on mammalian social play examines the neurobiological systems involved in playful behavior and reward. The important connection isn’t that a rat playing with another rat and a human reading a murder mystery are having the same neurological experience. It’s that both can make uncertainty itself rewarding.
And that is one of the things play has always been very good at.
Why Can Scary Art Feel Good?
Here’s where the art-play connection gets stranger. Why would anyone voluntarily watch something designed to frighten them?
Fancourt discusses the idea of aesthetic distance: the psychological gap that allows us to experience fear, sadness, or disgust through art without responding as though the event were actually happening to us. You can watch a fictional shark attack without jumping into the ocean. Usually. That idea has an interesting cousin in play theory.
Johan Huizinga argued in Homo Ludens that play takes place within a space set apart from ordinary life, with its own rules, boundaries, and temporary consequences. Later game scholars made the idea of the “magic circle” central to discussions of games and play. The two concepts aren’t identical. But they point toward something remarkably similar.
A game lets you lose without losing your house. A horror movie lets you experience fear without an actual monster breaking down your door. A novel lets you inhabit somebody else’s grief without having to survive the event yourself.
Art and play can create spaces where we can experience possibilities without having to experience all of their real-world consequences. That may be part of why both can be so absorbing. And it may explain why the distinction between “serious” art and “frivolous” play gets strange when you look closely.
A child pretending a cardboard box is a spaceship is practicing imagination. An actor pretending a stage is a spaceship is making theater. The activity is different. The underlying permission—to temporarily treat one thing as another—is remarkably similar.
Art Gives Adults Permission to Be Beginners
Then there’s Shea, the attorney Fancourt describes as living a life that had become “gray rather than technicolor.”
She took a weeklong music course at Berkeley College and rediscovered singing. It would be easy to turn that into a story about hidden talent. I think there’s a more interesting explanation.
She got permission to be a beginner. She didn’t need to become a professional musician. She didn’t need to monetize singing. She didn’t need to become particularly good at it. She just needed to make room for something she enjoyed.
That matters because adulthood has a funny habit of turning every activity into a résumé item.
What are you learning? What are you accomplishing? What’s the outcome? Are you good at it? Could you sell it?
Children rarely need this justification. They can spend forty minutes drawing a picture of a dinosaur riding a bicycle and then abandon the masterpiece on the floor. Adults call that a waste of time. Then we wonder why we don’t have enough time to do anything that makes us feel alive.
Csikszentmihalyi’s research on flow offers a useful parallel. Flow involves deep absorption, diminished self-consciousness, altered perception of time, and an intrinsically rewarding quality. Those characteristics overlap strongly with play. They also show up in artistic activity.
You don’t have to call the experience “play” for the psychological machinery to look familiar.
Practice Doesn’t Kill Play
There is, however, a complication: Art isn’t always effortless.
Sometimes you have to practice. A lot.
Fancourt discusses research suggesting that roughly fifty hours of engagement with a new hobby can help someone reach a level of competence that makes deeper enjoyment possible. That doesn’t mean fifty hours is a magical threshold, or that beginners can’t enjoy themselves. It means that skill can open doors to experiences that weren’t available when we were first starting out. This creates an apparent contradiction.
Play is supposed to be free of external goals.
Practice has a goal. But anyone who has learned to juggle, play an instrument, dance, paint, write, improvise, or throw a decent baseball knows that getting better can itself become fun.
At first, you’re thinking about every movement. Later, the movement disappears. At first, playing a song requires concentration. Later, you can get lost inside it.
At first, improvising feels like trying not to make a mistake. Eventually, the uncertainty itself becomes interesting. Practice can make the playground bigger. That’s why I don’t think play and discipline are opposites.
Practice can be the bridge that lets us play at a higher level.
What Does Art Do to the Brain?
The science gets particularly interesting when we move beyond individual anecdotes.
Fancourt’s 2026 review of arts engagement identifies 50 possible mechanisms through which arts participation may affect mental health, spanning psychological, biological, social, behavioral, and physiological processes. The authors argue that no single mechanism is likely to explain the effects; rather, multiple interconnected processes may operate together. Read the full 2026 review in Nature Reviews Psychology.
That is a much more interesting picture than “art makes your brain happy.”
Art can involve:
- attention
- emotion
- memory
- movement
- prediction
- social interaction
- meaning
- novelty
- skill
- reward
- and sometimes simply getting completely absorbed in something for a while
Those ingredients overlap heavily with what we already know about play. That’s not proof that art is play. But it makes the distinction increasingly difficult to treat as obvious.
Creative Experience and Brain Age
There’s another intriguing piece of evidence.
A 2025 study in Nature Communications used machine-learning “brain clocks” to estimate biological brain age from patterns of brain activity and connectivity. Researchers examined people with expertise in tango, music, visual arts, and video games and compared them with matched participants who had less experience. Across the creative domains, greater creative experience was associated with lower estimated brain age. Read the full 2025 Nature Communications study, “Creative experiences and brain clocks.”
The differences were several years in some groups. That’s fascinating, but there’s an important caveat.
“Brain age” isn’t a literal measurement of how many years old someone’s brain is. It’s an estimate produced by a statistical model from patterns in neuroimaging data. And the finding doesn’t prove that taking up painting will make your brain younger. What it does show is that creative experience is associated with patterns of brain organization that correspond to lower estimated brain age.
The researchers also included a pre/post-learning component, providing evidence that short-term learning was associated with changes in estimated brain age, although those results were smaller than the effects associated with longer-term expertise and the study itself has important limitations.
The honest conclusion is also the more exciting one:
We are beginning to see measurable traces of creative experience in the brain, and we don’t yet understand all of what they’re telling us.
So Is Art Just Play That Grew Up?
Maybe that’s the wrong question. Maybe the better question is:
Why did we ever decide that play belongs to childhood and art belongs to adults?
A child picks up a crayon and makes marks because making marks is interesting. An adult picks up a brush and makes marks because making marks is meaningful. A child invents a story because there is nothing else to do. An adult writes a novel because there is nothing else they can do until the story gets out of their head. A child dances because music happens. An adult buys a ticket to dance because music happens.
We put these things in different boxes.
Play. Art. Hobby. Craft. Performance. Creativity.
But underneath the labels are some remarkably familiar activities: experimenting, pretending, repeating, discovering, anticipating, failing, trying again, getting absorbed, making something that wasn’t there before.
Maybe art isn’t simply play that grew up. Maybe it’s what happens when play refuses to grow out of us. And maybe that’s why the arts can feel so disproportionately important.
Not because they are productive. Not because they make us more employable. Not because every painting is secretly a workout for the prefrontal cortex.
But because, for a little while, they give us permission to do one of the things human beings have always been extraordinarily good at:
making a world and then stepping inside it.
That’s play. And that’s art.
Sources and Further Reading
Coronel-Oliveros, Carlos, et al. “Creative Experiences and Brain Clocks.” Nature Communications 16 (2025): 8336. Read the study.
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: Harper & Row, 1990.
Fancourt, Daisy, Argyris Stringaris, and Pier Luigi Sacco. “Mechanisms Underpinning the Mental Health Impact of Arts Engagement.” Nature Reviews Psychology 5 (2026): 290–302. Read the review.
Fancourt, Daisy, and Andrew Steptoe. “Cultural Engagement and Mental Health: Does Socio-Economic Status Explain the Association?” Social Science & Medicine 236 (2019): 112425. Read the study.
Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1949. First published 1938.
Panksepp, Jaak. Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Siviy, Stephen M., and Jaak Panksepp. “In Search of the Neurobiological Substrates for Social Playfulness in Mammalian Brains.” Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews 35, no. 9 (2011): 1821–1830. Read the paper.
Brown, Stuart, and Christopher Vaughan. Play: How It Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul. New York: Avery, 2009.
Fancourt, Daisy. “What Art Does for Your Brain.” Interview by Shankar Vedantam. Hidden Brain, 2026. Listen to the episode.
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