We are the only species that creates and experiences art – not just visual art but music, poetry, dance, theater, and even architecture. The impact that art has on us cannot be overstated, as it affects cognition, mental health, and physical wellbeing.
Today’s guests are Susan Magsamen of the International Arts + Mind Lab at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and Ivy Ross, vice president of design for the Hardware Product Area at Google and an artist and designer in her own right. Magsamen and Ross co-authored a book about the brain and the arts; the new field of neuroaesthetics is, as they say, “the closest thing to magic.”
Find out how we don’t just create and enjoy art – we are actually shaped by it, improved by it, made healthier by it.
Embracing art just once a month can extend your life up to a decade! Find out how easy it is get started, which arts have an impact on both sides of the brain, and why art makes us better people.
Plus… Hear from one of my own patients about how adding art to her environment boosted her recovery from a devastating stroke.
Phil Stieg: Whether you like to listen to music, go to the theater, or actually create art yourself, most of us think of these activities as pure entertainment. But scientific studies are revealing just how important and powerful art is in our lives. In fact, as our guests today will reveal, art may actually be essential to both our physical and mental health.
Our guests today, Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross are experts in this topic known as neuroaesthetics, and they have written one of the most complete, informative, and enjoyable books about this field, Your Brain on Art. Susan and Ivy, thanks so much for being with us today.
Ivy Ross: It’s a pleasure. Thank you.
Susan Magsamen: Thanks for having us.
Phil Stieg: The title of your book is, Your Brain on Art. What motivated you or why did you write that book?
Susan Magsamen: So we wrote your brain on art because there was so much information about how our brains change on arts and esthetic experiences that nobody knew about. And we felt that by just sharing this information with the world, people could begin to use the arts immediately because they’re accessible and they’re affordable and they’re impactful. And we wanted to get that information out.
What we didn’t know is that coming out of COVID, when the book was published, people were hungry for more, and they wanted to feel more alive, and they wanted to figure out how they could change their brains and change their lives. And so I think the book really hit at an amazing moment when humanity was really suffering.
Phil Stieg: Let’s explain to people what you mean by neuroaesthetics.
Susan Magsamen: Sure. So neuroaesthetics, in its definition, is the study of how the arts and esthetic experiences measurably change the brain, body, and our behaviors. And importantly, how that knowledge is translated into specific practices that advance well-being. And so the field of neuroarts is really about creating a whole new field that’s never really existed before, where we’re using the arts in service of humanity.
Ivy Ross: And when we say the we say the arts, it’s really those things that allow us to creatively express. So everything from dance, singing, painting, poetry, even architecture, because space changes the way we think. So the arts are not just the visual arts. It’s those things that allow us to creatively express ourselves.
Phil Stieg: When I think of esthetics, I’m thinking about, obviously, something that’s beautiful.
Susan Magsamen: Not all art is beautiful. And art, in many ways, as a maker, is about catharsis and about understanding ourselves. It can be about physical health or mental health or community building. As a beholder, the art offer us opportunities for perspective taking, for learning from each other, for empathy, for compassion, for understanding ourselves and the world around us, for creating synchronicity. And so beauty is an aspect of nueuroaesthetics, but in no means is it the whole field or why the arts are so incredibly valuable for us.
Ivy Ross: And when we talk about esthetics, it’s really those things that enliven our senses; smell, taste, vision. And you know the most neuroaesthetic place there is is actually nature, because nature enlivens every sense. It has shape, color, temperature, smell. So when we say esthetic, it isn’t really about beauty as much as it is about enlivening the sensory systems.
Phil Stieg: I have to admit, I was thinking, however, that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. That being said, I think some people find horror movies beautiful, and I’m going, I don’t like that.
Susan Magsamen: Not me.
Phil Stieg: Exactly. Like you said, the same portions of the brain are activated if you are a horror movie lover, and I’m a nature lover, correct?
Susan Magsamen: Yeah. I think this is really important to unpack. When we say art, often we think we have a definition that is very fixed based on what we’ve been told, what we’ve learned. But the reality is that this idea around esthetic experiences and how they shape us is so fundamental to the human species evolving. And so this ability to be able to capture these esthetic experiences and build strong neural pathways that really are the foundation for who we are, how we think, how we move. Art really is for the human species. And we are the only species that really creates and consumes art, if you really think about it. It’s extraordinary.
Phil Stieg: I’d like to focus a little bit on some examples of how art might be beneficial, say, in the most common problems that we face in America right now, which are stress/anxiety and/or depression. Can you give us some examples of how you’ve applied art or you’ve researched art and its role in helping alleviate those emotional problems.
Susan Magsamen: So we have a chapter in the book that’s called Cultivating Wellbeing. And I think we often think that we’re always solving mental health problems, but there’s a lot of practices and prevention that you can activate that helps you create a homeostasis, a way of being that’s really important. So things like humming activate the parasympathetic nervous system. So getting in the shower and singing or humming in the shower. Even something like the water that’s touching your skin, activates the over 4 million touch receptors that activate the thalamus and the somatosensory cortex that instantly calms your body. Or think about the smell of fresh coffee or tea. These are these very small but amazing everyday things that we do. Getting up and literally walking outside, if you can we even know 15 minutes of nature will actually help with cognitive load and lowering cortisol. So there’s a lot of very simple, easy things that you can do to be able to keep that nervous system regulated and healthy.
Ivy Ross: The great thing about art is you don’t have to be good at to gain the benefits. And I think that’s a huge sense of freedom because there’s so many people, I think, that express themselves or played music, made art as children, and then thought, well, I’ll never make a living at this. I’m not good at it, and just put it down. And what we’re finding is that that isn’t… That’s not the important piece of it. It’s that act of doing or expressing yourself, even through writing this book, learning that doodling in meetings, which I always do, is actually better. You will remember more if you’re doodling or coloring during a meeting than if you’re not. So all those things that we were disciplined for in school were actually good for us.
Phil Stieg: Good for you. Didn’t you say in the book, the doodlers actually live longer?
Susan Magsamen: No, we did not. We did say that that’s really, really important because going to a museum really is helpful for cognitive skills. Reading poetry, we know lightens up the same part of the brain as listening to music and stimulates the primary reward circuitry. You made a great point is that I don’t really think exercise is joyful, is fun. I do it. But it is It’s true that these arts experiences, for the most part, are really enjoyable. I think most of us think of arts as entertainment. I think entertainment has gotten short-shifted in the way that we’ve put it into a little teeny box.
Ivy Ross: And for so long since the industrial revolution, we’ve been optimizing for efficiency and productivity as humans, pushing all the sensorial things of life aside, including the arts. And it hasn’t necessarily made us happy as a species.
Phil Stieg: Given the fact that I’m a doctor, I was particularly taken by the segment in the book about making hospitals more emotionally pleasing, more esthetic. Could you go into that a little bit? Hopefully, some other doctors are listening, and they might change the work environment that they’ve created for their patients.
Susan Magsamen: Well, I could just start to say that hospitals are in such dire need of change. Health care has become sick care, and it really should be art care. There’s so much that can happen.
Let’s start with the facility. Just thinking about the way facilities are designed with a sensibility around nature, having artwork in rooms that represent nature reduces hospital stay, people get better, faster. We’re seeing light and sound being used for things like dementia. Dance is helping people with Parkinson’s and stroke and motor-based challenges.
From a burnout point of view at Hopkins, we built something called the Rise Center, which is in essence a “recharge room”. We have places where staff and clinicians can just come and make art. In just 15 minutes, they’re reducing cortisol, but also increasing a sense of gratitude and focus.
Phil Stieg: Let me ask you about pain. I mean, that’s the most common reason patients go to see a doctor, either headache pain or low back pain. Where can art play a role in helping to alleviate pain?
Susan Magsamen: So we talked about that in the book, and these are not intuitive and almost counterintuitive. But interestingly, dance can be very helpful for chronic pain, for helping the circulatory system, the respiratory system, Also, muscular structural systems, as well as thinking about just blood flow.
I was in a surgical recovery space recently at Georgetown, and they had dancers come in, and they had modern dancers dance through the surgical recovery unit. I’d never seen that before, but they’ve been doing some interesting studies looking at movement to really help calm the nervous system, but also address pain. So it wasn’t just being the mover, but watching movement and the mirror neurons associated with that. So it’s pretty extraordinary what we’re learning about the way these experiences can impact us.
Ivy Ross: We’ve heard a story of a young woman whose doctor, after performing the surgery, the next day came and sat on her bedside and played the guitar to her, and they sang together. And she said that was her healing moment.
Phil Stieg: Yeah, I completely agree with that. For you, what was the “aha moment” in the sense of, I never thought art would have helped that. Whatever art form we’re talking about was really beneficial.
Susan Magsamen: I think the one for me is I was invited to a community arts program working with gangs, and they had two gangs there. The project was-
Phil Stieg: And you’re living to tell us about it.
Susan Magsamen: Right. That’s what That’s so amazing. I was nervous about coming into this space because I don’t know about the dynamics of gangs, and we all have perceptions of gangs. And these guys, they were pretty intense-looking, but they were weaving, but they weren’t weaving by themselves. There was one gang member from an opposing gang at one side of a loom and another gang member from the other opposing side, and they had to weave to the center. And then they had to figure out how to finish the piece in the middle. I have the piece here. I have it hanging in my office. And what it showed me is that you can be an individual, but you also can collaborate. And you could see the tension as they started and the almost competitiveness. They were very different.
But then as they got to the center, they had to collaborate and communicate and finish the piece. At the end, I said, God, it’s gorgeous. It’s gorgeous. They said, Well, would you like it? They decided together to share something that they created with another person. And that work continued in different mediums, where they were always working, co-creating and co-creating murals then in the community.
You know art creates culture. Culture creates community, and community creates humanity. And we have ripped culture out of our communities. And so this tribalism is so separate. But when you bring communities together, and that’s really what gangs are. They’re communities that are created to survive. And they started to figure out how they fit together. It was so beautiful. And I think that lack of polarization and understanding the other and making something together is part of the solution for us moving forward in terms of the way the world is moving.
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Narrator: One of Dr Stieg’s former patients learned about the profound connection between art and the brain through firsthand experience. Nancy had been trained as a professional artist, but it wasn’t until she experienced a devastating stroke that she learned that the arts could be good medicine.
Nancy Jarecki: About 15 years ago I was at the Museum of Modern Art here in New York City when I noticed that I was starting to feel like I was going to faint. I ended up fainting. They called the ambulance, it took me to New York Presbyterian – Weill Cornell. It turned out that I had a ruptured aneurysm on my right-hand side of my brain. Dr. Stieg was the one who did surgery, fixed me up and pretty much fixed me up enough to go home.
I was in ICU for a couple of weeks and then in step down. I believe that’s when my art and music journey began. my friends, knowing that some of my brain had been compromised, they would bring in music. They brought in music because I am a very musical person, and I am a huge country music fan. I found it very, very healing.
My friends also brought in copies of different photos. They made a photo wall. I was able to look at the wall, see my friends, and in a way, that was getting me through these intense, serious ICU days. After I was released, I started to realize that I had these moments of euphoria, and they came when I was looking at things.
When I first was released from the hospital and went home and walked into my apartment, immediately, there was such a sensation of euphoria. Looking at my artwork, I noticed that I would re-look at something, process it, and find a higher level of joy.
I’ve walked through that front hallway how many times? And now I’m like, “wow, this is beautiful!” It definitely was looking at my objects that I had already seen several times, but I’m looking at it in a different way. Now, I really think it’s the details that you’re processing as though you’ve never seen them before.
It is a type of wonderment. I absolutely loved it!
Interstitial closing music.
Phil Stieg: I want to touch upon poetry, how poetry interacts with our senses and alters our emotional state.
Susan Magsamen: Ivy, do you want to take that or do you want me to…
Ivy Ross: No, go ahead. You take it.
Susan Magsamen: Okay. If you think about the sensory systems and that they are the input into our bodies, right? So sound moves through you in three milliseconds because we’re so much water that we’re literally vibrating creatures and things are coming through us. We’re so vibratory.
But as those senses come through us in the form of, let’s say, poetry, we are creating synapses and synaptic connections that are creating neural pathways. And the strength of those neural pathways have to do with the saliency of those experiences. So if there’s a poem that really is resonating with you, the lyrical nature of poetry engages the same parts of the brain as music. It also engages the auditory cortex. It also engages the visual cortex because you may be reading it or reading it out loud.
Your brain takes that information and then ultimately processes it through the default mode network. So you start to make patterns and you start to say, I like that. I don’t like that. That’s beautiful. That’s not beautiful. This is what this means to me. This is what is important to me in that work.
Just something as simple as a poem that really resonates with you changes you because it’s engaging multiple sensory systems at the same time. Your whole body is engaged in an art experience. I would argue that there is nothing that does that like a poem or like a song. It’s the closest thing to magic. I’ll say that. It’s the closest thing to magic, however you define that.
Ivy Ross: There’s a great saying by Julie Bolte-Taylor that says, I’m paraphrasing, but we think that we’re thinking beings that feel, and we’re actually feeling beings that have learned to think. And when you absorb that, it just changes your entire lens, or at least it did for me, that we really are feeling beings first. And if we could walk around in the world from that place, I think we’d be a lot better off.
Phil Stieg: One of the other highlights I wanted to bring out is the fact that you emphasize that art is good for neuroplasticity. So could you please define in your mind what neuroplasticity is and then examples of how art enhances your plasticity.
Susan Magsamen: So neuroplasticity is our ability to be able to change our brains. It’s the fundamental system for us to be able to really make these connections between neurons.
You can change your brain by having different stimuli that actually changes those connections – that rewires the brain, literally rewires the brain. I think that’s where arts and esthetics are so important because you can provide different content that starts to really change the brain.
Ivy Ross: This is why some doctors in Canada and London are prescribing patients to go to museums, because putting yourself in front of something new, a piece of sculpture that you have never seen or a painting, is incredibly healthy for neuroplasticity.
Phil Stieg: You have a chapter in the book about how art affects learning and the role that art plays in learning. Can you explain that to us?
Susan Magsamen: So have a friend who is a neuroscientist, Nina Kraus, who we reference in the book. She studies music. And I was saying in a meeting one day, well, the arts transfer into all these other areas of our lives. And she said, no, they don’t. They don’t transfer. I was like, what are you talking And she said, they are already there. It’s whether or not we open them up and we build those skills. And I think that’s a really important message for learning is that they are there. They’re ready for us.
And so when you’re young and you have this ability to create these multiple possible strong neural pathways, they lay the foundation for resiliency, for problem solving, for collaboration. And when you don’t have that in a younger age, you really need to be thinking about how you’re going to remediate and build that moving forward so you have the capacity to be a whole person.
Phil Stieg: I give a lecture, Is the Brain Hardwired for God? And then you and your book talk about, Our brain is hardwired for art. The question I have really is – what evidence do we have that your brain is wired for art?
Susan Magsamen: So we were really fortunate to meet with E. O. Wilson when we were writing the book. He made such a strong argument for this genetic evolutionary imperative for what we now call the arts. And he talked about this idea that when human species first harnessed fire and brought it around the campfire at night and people began to tell stories and began to dance and to begin to create the neurotransmitter bonds that really created community and created the sense of who we are, that was the time where we really started to really look at this encoding of story and sound and music and what we really consider to be these salient arts experiences. We started to draw to express what was happening. We started to create and share these kinds of connections. And so I think, genetically, we are encoded to bring in these experiences. That’s the only way that that can happen. And I think the neuroplasticity is really a part of our genetic DNA. That whole system is in place. And nature-nurture, we’ve seen things where you can epigenetically change someone through these highly immersive autobiographical arts experiences. So I think we’re at the beginning of that. This is a very young field, and we know a lot, but we need to know a lot more.
Ivy Ross: And I think we are wired to use the arts to get rid of our trauma by expressing ourselves. There’s major trauma, and then we all have microtraumas every day. And a good example of this is one woman who has a group called Art to Ashes, where she was teaching reaching frontline firemen coming out of blazing fires to immediately start to paint. Just put paint on canvas before they went home to their loved ones just to get rid of that trauma that they didn’t even realize they were holding in their body. And they’ve had remarkable results. This young fireman that we interviewed, he’s now training other firemen and women about how to release through creative expression immediately what they don’t even realize they’re holding in their bodies. So I think it’s a mechanism that we need to use.
Phil Stieg: I’m not going to say that I’m too old, but it might be a little bit too late for me to get another PhD in neuroaesthetics. But what can I do simply to start incorporating art into my life? How can I make it applicable and exercise and create plasticity within my brain?
Ivy Ross: There is no one way, but just start. People feel very, I think, intimidated. How do I start? And so what we say is, buy a coloring book and just every day for 20 minutes, start to color a few pages. So that would be our goal is see it as important as exercise and just carve out the time and try different art modalities without judgment. I mean, get a pile of clay and just start… Things that use both of your hands is activating both the right and left brain. So working with clay, knitting, I mean, that’s particularly powerful. And just let your hands do the walking. No judgment of what you’re making. It’s just the sheer exercise of making that will be great for your brain.
Phil Stieg: That’s the hardest part I find. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve started a journal, how many times I’ve started doodling, drawing, but it’s part of… I look at it judgmentally, and I just go, that’s crap, and I just stop. So what advice do you have for the listener? About getting over that inhibition?
Ivy Ross: Well, you don’t have to share it with anyone. I’m thinking if I was…
Phil Stieg: I’m my own worst critic.
Ivy Ross: Yeah, no. Look, I think you’re very much like most people. And I think that’s why we avoid doing these things. But if you realize you don’t ever have to, you could write something and then rip it up and throw it in the garbage. And just the act of writing gives you the benefit. Susan?
Susan Magsamen: Yeah, a couple of things. One, And Ivy mentioned the esthetic mindset. And let me just tell you what those four things are, because in some ways, they provide the baseline for how you might move into these things.
The first is curiosity. And a lot of us have forgotten how to be curious. But curiosity is really just being interested in what’s around you with intention. And so a lot of times we get up, we make the coffee, we take our shower, we get to work. But what if you were more curious about what’s happening there and really thinking more around wonder and awe and creating that space for that, which is a gift, a gift to you.
The second is what we call playful exploration. And this is where I think we often fall down. Playful exploration is exploring without an intended outcome, without a finished product, exploring just for the sake of exploring. And this is not like, added to your day. These are things that you can do integrated in your day.
The third is being exposed more to the sensory experiences and knowing, like smelling the coffee. 75 % of our emotional life comes from smell. And you can think about that both ways. You walk by trash on the city and you’re like, oh, my God. And Or you smell roses and you’re like, Oh, something feels your heart opens, right? And so smell is such an amazing thing. So sensory, what’s the color in the room? What’s the temperature in the room? What light? Is the light making you feel depressed? Is the light opening you up?
And the last is making and beholding and making more of a conscious effort when you’re making dinner, when you’re thinking about what you’re going to wear. That’s a creative act. What are you going to wear today? For some people, thinking about the way that you listen to music.
My husband and I have this thing where we dance every Friday night in our living room, and we laugh really hard. Laughter and joy are so critical to relationship and to feeling good and releasing so much stuff.
And so the more you start to take those four elements, those core characteristics of curiosity, playful, exploration, sensory experiences, and “making and beholding”, you start to see the world differently.
Maybe you’re a gardener. Maybe you like to just buy flowers and bring them home. Maybe it’s the way you make a dish. So I think there’s little things that you can do throughout your day that’s just optimizing those moments.
Phil Stieg: Susan and Ivy, thank you so much for spending this time with me. Again, I thoroughly enjoyed my brain on art – or Your Brain on Art. There is a great need for it in our society. Thank you so much for taking the time.
Ivy Ross: Oh, and thank you. It’s people like yourselves acknowledging that that is making a difference in the world.
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