Pharmaceutical companies, make room for this news: Art can be used as a painkiller too.
As research shows, music helps ease emotional pain, and at the very least, it helps us relax. In a recent Italian study, researchers found that visual art can help ease physical pain.
Researchers in Italy asked twelve men and women to judge 300 pieces of art, and rate it as ugly or beautiful. While the participants judged the art’s aesthetics, the researchers zapped them with a laser pulse.
A design student at University of the Arts London created this useful work of sci-art by putting unfamiliar units—such as “as many grains of flour as people on the planet”—on a measuring cup. The piece is part of his Domestic Science collection, which aims to help people “better conceptualize certain scientific constructs”—although the designer, Harry White, noted in an e-mail that “the measurements vary from being quite accurate to almost a joke, a reflection on the nature of measurement in science.”
His other pieces include evo-cut, a “set of cutlery designed according to the principles of population genetics and natural variation,” and You’re one in a million, “containing a million dots, one of which is yellow,” to help people “feel what a million and a millionth are like.”
