In the early 1980s, Swedish researchers interviewed almost 13,000 people about ordinary things: whether they went to the cinema, concerts, museums, art exhibitions. Then they waited, and tracked who was still alive years later.
The study, led by Lars Olov Bygren and published in the BMJ in 1996, found something that surprised even the authors. After controlling for eight other factors — income, education, smoking, exercise, existing illness, and more — people who rarely attended cultural events had a higher risk of dying than those who attended often. The relative risk for the rare attenders came out to 1.57, meaning meaningfully worse odds over the follow-up.
Attending a concert does not directly repair a heart. So what is the mechanism? The leading guesses are the ordinary ingredients of a full life: cultural events pull people out of the house, put them among others, give the mind something to chase, and lower stress. Culture is a vehicle for the things that keep people well.
This is a correlation, and the authors said so plainly. People who go to museums may differ from those who do not in ways no survey fully captures. But the effect survived a long list of controls, which is more than most single explanations manage.
Later cohorts have pointed the same way. Work by Daisy Fancourt and Andrew Steptoe, following older adults in England, found that people who engaged with the arts even occasionally had lower mortality over the following years.
For a builder of cultural life, the study reframes attendance. A full house is not just a good night. Over a population and enough years, it may be a public-health outcome.
Sources
Bygren, L. O., Konlaan, B. B., & Johansson, S. E. (1996). "Attendance at cultural events, reading books or periodicals, and making music or singing in a choir as determinants for survival." BMJ. · Fancourt, D. & Steptoe, A. (2019), BMJ, "The art of life and death."