How Art Reveals Hidden Connections

Many artists believe that art’s true value isn’t just in what people see in a gallery or museum, but in how it changes the way they see the world afterward. Can art help people view reality in a richer, more nuanced, or simply different way?

To explore this idea, we conducted a study with two groups of participants. One group engaged with art, while the other did not. We then tested their ability to find unusual connections between words. Some word pairs have obvious links, like ‘to see’ and ‘bright.’ Others are less obvious or even surprising, like ‘to see’ and ‘song.’

Our results showed that people who engaged with art were better at finding these hidden or unexpected connections compared to those who didn’t. This suggests that art could play a role in boosting creative thinking, which often relies on the ability to discover and link non-obvious ideas. These findings are reported in the article titled ‘Meaning Making in an Art Context Affects Semantic Distance: The Case of Semantic Inconsistencies in Written Language,’ published the journal Thinking Skills and Creativity.