On Why I Keep Going Back to Museums

Art, Beauty, and What They Do to the Brain

I was about thirteen or fourteen the first time my family had to physically drag me out of a museum.

It was the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. I had been there for a couple of hours, stopping at every single painting, reading every label, trying to understand not just what I was looking at but the story behind it, who made it, when, why, what was happening in their life at the time. My family wanted to see the highlights and move on. I wanted to stay until closing time and then go to the gift shop and buy every book they had. I don’t think I fully understood then why I felt that way. I just knew that being inside a museum felt completely right, a kind of peace and excitement around the learning experience that I didn’t find anywhere else. I felt like I had to absorb as much as possible.

At school I always loved art history classes, especially in high school. I had art books I read for pleasure, I remember a book about Edward Hopper’s work on Cape Cod that I used to read every summer, I think it was Edward Hopper: Summer at the Seashore, looking at all those quiet scenes by the water. Looking back, I sometimes wonder why I didn’t pursue art history more seriously. It was clearly something that gave me a lot of joy. But somewhere along the way, as I got older, I stopped going to museums as often. I’m not entirely sure why. Life got busier, I moved abroad several times and was so focused on traveling and on new experiences that spending hours in a museum stopped being a priority. That particular kind of absorption, standing in front of something and really looking at it, quietly disappeared from my regular life without me noticing.

A few years ago I was going through one of the hardest periods of my life. A lot was happening at once and everything felt heavy. I was living in San Francisco and one afternoon I went to the de Young Museum to see the Tamara de Lempicka exhibition.

I think that was the day I got that feeling back.

Her work is bold and confident, women painted with a kind of self-possession that I have always found compelling. I had studied her in high school and was fascinated by her, especially her ability to reinvent herself at any age, her sense of fashion, and her connection to Vogue and the Art Deco world. Going to that exhibition felt like a relief. I came away with a sense of peace, a focus on something beautiful instead of something difficult, and, this is harder to explain, a strange kind of confidence. Something about standing in front of her work gave me that back. It brought me back to that feeling of safety and curiosity I had always felt in museums. The one I had somehow lost. I think what museums give me, and what I had as a child but forgot for a while, is a very specific kind of attention. The kind that asks you to slow down, look carefully, and be genuinely curious about something outside yourself.

There is real research behind this. Studies have found that spending time in art museums can reduce stress and anxiety, lower cortisol levels, and shift the mind into a more open and reflective state. Some healthcare systems now actually prescribe museum visits as part of mental health care; I recently read about Swiss doctors prescribing museum visits as they explore how public gardens, galleries, and art spaces can benefit people in ways we hadn’t fully considered before. I recently came across the work of Dr. Tara Swart, a neuroscientist, who breaks this down even further. Beauty, she explains, can actively calm your nervous system. Engaging with art can be neuroprotective, meaning it actually protects the brain over time. Visual harmony has been linked to reductions in stress markers like cortisol and blood pressure because your brain has to work less to process what it is seeing, which reduces overall cognitive load. Aesthetic environments lower reactivity in the brain’s limbic system, when what you are seeing feels ordered and visually coherent, your brain registers fewer signals as potential threats. And regular exposure to art, museums, music, and creative environments has been associated with reduced risk of cognitive decline over the long term.

I can completely see it. I notice my nervous system calm down when I stand in front of Impressionist paintings, Monet’s landscapes, Degas’s ballet scenes. There is something about that kind of art that transports you somewhere else, even for a limited amount of time.

The idea of slow looking, really staying with a work of art rather than glancing and moving on, is being taken seriously as a practice with genuine psychological benefits. I recently read How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci by Michael Gelb, and one of the seven principles he identifies in Leonardo’s approach to life is Sensazione, the continual refinement of the senses, especially sight, as a way to enliven experience. One of the practical suggestions for developing this is visiting museums and spending real time with art you love. It’s something Leonardo apparently practiced deliberately, and it’s something I think most of us have forgotten how to do.

But honestly, I didn’t need the research to know this. I knew it at thirteen in Amsterdam, and I was reminded of it that afternoon at the de Young. Standing in front of work you love, work made by someone whose life and vision genuinely interest you, is a form of absorption that takes you out of your own head. It engages your curiosity, your eye, your sense of meaning. It asks you to notice and observe and think. And in doing all of that, it gives something back.

I keep going back to museums now. They do something for me that very few other things do, they slow me down, they focus me, and they remind me that beauty is worth paying attention to.