Your Brain on Art with Co-Authors Ivy Ross and Susan Magsamen
In this episode, Ivy Ross and Susan Magsamen, co-authors of "Your Brain on Art," share their insights on the emerging field of neuroarts. They discuss how the arts and aesthetic experiences can measurably change the brain, body, and behavior, and how this knowledge can be translated into practices that advance health, well-being, learning, and community development. They explore the connection between nature and neuroaesthetics, and how indigenous cultures have historically integrated arts into their way of life. They also emphasize the importance of agency and self-judgment in engaging in the arts for mental well-being.
Join the conversation to learn how creativity can enhance our lives and amplify our potential, regardless of our artistic abilities. "This is the book I've been waiting for my whole life." - Ivy Ross. Listen now to learn how the arts can transform your life!
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Quotes:
Nature is the most neuroaesthetic place there is…because it is sound, light shape, texture, and temperature. So that environment enlivens all of our senses. - Ivy Ross
Aesthetics enliven our senses, makes us feel alive, and actually keep us alive.” - Ivy Ross
We just don't want to cope. We want to live. We want to amplify our potential. - Susan Magsamen
Show Notes:
Ivy Ross: She said, Let's get a dialog going between neuroscientists and people in the arts. And so it was like Noah's Ark. We curated, you know, two visual artists, two dancers, two digital artists. And she brought her neuroscientists in from Johns Hopkins. And we had this amazing afternoon at my home. And afterwards it was so fruitful. She looked at me and said, I've always wanted to write a book on this. Do you want to join me? And I said, This is the book I've been waiting for my whole life.
Ivy Ross: Ivy and I call it neuro arts as a field. And it's really the study of how the arts and esthetic experiences measurably change your brain, body and behavior, and importantly, how that knowledge can be translated into practices that advance health, well-being, learning, flourishing community development.
Ivy Ross: Nature is actually the most neuro esthetic place that. And that is our true nature. That's where we came from. And it's the most neuro esthetic because it is sound, light shape, texture, temperature. when we talk about the arts, we're talking about theater, poetry, visual arts, dancing, writing, architecture, because space changes the way we think.
Ivy Ross: we've been focused on productivity since the Industrial Revolution, thinking that would make us happy and healthy and we pushed the arts aside because of that. And I think the experiment is showing that it failed. Susan and I went back and looked at indigenous tribes, of which there's still 500 of them, and they didn't even have a word for art because storytelling, dance, graphics, that was their culture, that was the way they lived. And I think it's time that we go a little backwards in order to move forward.
Ivy Ross: I like to say that when I think about this field, I think about an elephant. And depending upon where you touch it, you get something very different. And I think it's really extraordinary. elephants are ancient, they're big and they're really old. And think what I was saying is really true is that, you know, historically, our ancestors relied on these neurobiological truths about how we bring the world in through our senses. And how, you know, we're born with 100 billion neurons, and those neurons connect through a process called neuroplasticity. at a synaptic level, we create neural pathways, and those pathways help to build our brains. It basically everything we do, our movements, our memory, our moods, our emotion, all of the skills that we have come from this ability to create these very salient and complex neural pathways. We've organized the book in a couple of different categories. One is just straight up mental wellbeing. How do we live in our most stress free, anxiety free lives? How do we really navigate the twists and turns of our lives? And what are some of the ways that different types of art forms can do that? And Then we looked at serious mental illness and trauma and PTSD, where we all throughout our lives will have trauma. But sometimes we have micro traumas and how can we address those? Then we looked at physical health, learning, community engagement and then flourishing because we just don't want to cope. We want to live, we want to amplify our potential.
Susan Magsamen: We all have the capacity to live at this sort of higher level. So that includes things like curiosity, being able to playfully explore the world, think about the way that our sensory experiences touch us, and also how we make and behold, this idea of building muscle around flourishing kind of breaks down into six foundational attributes, curiosity and wonder, awe enriched environments, creativity, ritual, novelty and surprise.
Ivy Ross: The great thing is you do not have to be good at the arts for it to have a great benefit for you. I think a lot of people stopped engaging in the arts from when they were children because they were told they weren't good at something or there's a lot of self-judgment and to get the benefit, you can be drawing stick figures or rainbows or as an adult, even coloring in a coloring book to get the benefit for your brain and body.
Susan Magsamen: You can hum in the shower, you can doodle. You don't have to be good at it. You can sing to the radio, right? You can dance in your living room. And so I think it's also important, this idea of agency, that these are things that are available to you, that you have control over, whether you're the maker or the beholder.
Doro Bush Koch: You don't have to have done painting as a child to take it up as an adult. Well, my brother, I don't know if you know is George W Bush. So he was president of the United States, as you know, when he finished being president, he wasn't quite sure how to spend his time. He had his time in office. He wasn't going to be one of those presidents that second guess the next president. He wanted to let them do their job. And so he took a painting and literally he had never well, when he was in the White House, he had masterpieces on the walls. He never even looked at them. But after he became president, he took a course at MoMA. He started doodling, and then he became a painter. He's now been painting for maybe ten years. And I'll never forget I was at my mom's house and he called and he said, Well, I've become a painter.
Ivy Ross: He's a fantastic portraiture artist. his work is really about the essence of a person. And I think it made me understand your brother better by understanding his art.
Ivy Ross: saliency is a term that's used in neuroscience to help to explain how and why something is important to you. You have so many sensorial stimuli coming into your body all the time and those senses trigger feelings that trigger emotions, that figure thinking. your brain has to filter out inputs that your brain doesn't think is important so that you can focus on the things that are important. And so something that is salient to you is something that's either important to you for practical or emotional reasons. Researchers have been discovering that highly salient experiences like arts and esthetics actually help to build new synaptic connections. These synaptic connections, as I was mentioning earlier, are how that we store knowledge and how we actually can retrieve information and these salient networks, the salient experiences turn out to be as unique as your fingerprint.
Ivy Ross: And the great thing is that your brain also prunes out to make room for these new experiences. Some of the. Old connections. So we're actually rewiring our brain, the more new salient experiences we have.
Ivy Ross: There's a researcher in Texas named James Pennebaker, who's done a lot of work in expressive writing for 25, 30 years. And what he has seen that the ability to write down how you're feeling and sometimes even sharing something that you haven't shared with someone else a secret helps to lower what's called cognitive load. So lightens your load, makes you feel better.
Ivy Ross: There's a game for children with ADHD that actually enables them to spend more time concentrating. There has been VR headset with a program for burn patients who are in tremendous pain, but in the VR headset, they're in a cold setting in Alaska with penguins, and literally their brain takes the pain away because the body thinks it's in a cold situation. So those are two examples where VR or the digital world is helping as well as, like I mentioned earlier, connecting people through the arts or teaching people. There was during COVID dancing for Parkinson's, people from all over the world were able to dance together online because of the Internet. So there's a lot of uses of digital arts, VR that are truly helpful.
Ivy Ross: In the book, we talk to first responders who are doing things as simple as woodworking and welding and painting, doodling that really helps with PTSD and ongoing trauma.
Ivy Ross: Susan and I, together with Google's support, did an exhibition, which was really the first time that the public got to experience what Neuroaesthetics is about. What we did is it reminded me when you're talking about enriched environments, we had three different living rooms, situations, each one totally different textures, colors, music, scent, artwork, books, and they were very much designed to be very different from each other with different scents and colors and textures.
Ivy Ross: the book that Ivy and I wrote really came out of a need to bring this work to the general public, to outside of academia, outside of researchers, to be able to show how this could affect us every day in so many of the places and spaces that we inhabit.