EP. 98: YOUR BRAIN ON ART

Feb 6

WITH SUSAN MAGSAMEN AND IVY ROSS

The Director of the Johns Hopkins International Arts + Mind Lab and Vice President of Hardware Design at Google discusses “neuroaesthetics” and why creative arts are essential to human health and wellbeing.

Listen Now

Episode Summary

There is an increasing body of scientific evidence demonstrating a phenomenon humans across cultures have long known intuitively: we are biologically wired for art. Engaging in the arts transforms our neural circuitry in deep ways that we are only beginning to uncover, and studies are showing how the arts can help us live longer, stave off cognitive decline, reduce our stress hormones, nurture the development of young minds, reduce the impacts of PTSD, and more.

Joining us in this episode are two individuals at the forefront of the movement to translate this groundbreaking research to medicine, public health, education, the workplace, and other real world applications. Susan Magsamen is the director of the International Arts and Mind Lab at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, where her research focuses on how our brains respond to artistic experiences. Ivy Ross is an acclaimed jewelry designer and Vice President of hardware design at Google. Together, they coauthored the 2023 New York Times best seller Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us.

Over the course of our conversation, Susan and Ivy discuss the emerging field of neuroaesthetics, how the arts can make us healthier, smarter and happier, and how we can incorporate more art into our everyday lives.

Susan Magsamen is the founder and executive director of the International Arts + Mind Lab (IAM Lab), Center for Applied Neuroaesthetics, a pioneering initiative from the Pedersen Brain Science Institute at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Her body of work lies at the intersection of brain sciences and the arts — and how our unique response to aesthetic experiences can amplify human potential.
Prior to founding IAM Lab, Magsamen worked in both the private and public sector, developing social impact programs and products addressing all stages of life — from early childhood to the senior years. Magsamen is a Fellow at the Royal Society of the Arts and a strategic advisor to several innovative organizations and initiatives, including the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture, the American Psychological Association, the National Association for the Education of Young Children, Brain Futures, Learning Landscapes, and Creating Healthy Communities: Arts + Public Health in America.
Ivy Ross is the Vice President of Design for hardware product area at Google, where she leads a team that has won over 225 design awards. She is a National Endowment for Arts grant recipient and was ninth on Fast Company’s list of the one hundred Most Creative People in Business in 2019. Ross believes that the intersection of arts and sciences is where the most engaging and creative ideas are found.
In this episode, you will hear about:
• 2:40 - How Susan and Ivy’s paths led them to neuroarts
• 7:46 - What does it mean to be in a “flow state”?
• 15:12 - An introduction to neuroaesthetics and neuroarts
• 18:33 - Surprising impacts the arts have on health
• 25:58 - The health benefits of creating art in community
• 29:51 - What “aesthetics” means in the context of Susan and Ivy’s studies
• 33:53 - The science behind how the arts support healing
• 39:45 - Practical tips for someone who wants to begin engaging with art
• 46:32 - Dispelling the myth of “high art vs low art”
Henry Bair: [00:00:01] Hi, I'm Henry Bair.
Tyler Johnson: [00:00:02] And I'm Tyler Johnson.
Henry Bair: [00:00:04] And you're listening to The Doctor's Art, a podcast that explores meaning in medicine. Throughout our medical training and career, we have pondered what makes medicine meaningful. Can a stronger understanding of this meaning create better doctors? How can we build healthcare institutions that nurture the doctor patient connection? What can we learn about the human condition from accompanying our patients in times of suffering?
Tyler Johnson: [00:00:27] In seeking answers to these questions, we meet with deep thinkers working across healthcare, from doctors and nurses to patients and healthcare executives those who have collected a career's worth of hard earned wisdom probing the moral heart that beats at the core of medicine. We will hear stories that are by turns heartbreaking, amusing, inspiring, challenging, and enlightening. We welcome anyone curious about why doctors do what they do. Join us as we think out loud about what illness and healing can teach us about some of life's biggest questions.
Henry Bair: [00:01:02] There is an increasing body of scientific evidence demonstrating a phenomenon humans across cultures have long known: Intuitively, we are biologically neurologically wired for art. Engaging in the arts transforms our neural circuitry in deep ways we are only beginning to uncover, and studies are showing how the arts can help us live longer, stave off cognitive decline, reduce our stress hormones, nurture the development of young minds, reduce the impacts of PTSD and more.
Henry Bair: [00:01:36] Joining us in this episode are two individuals at the forefront of the movement to translate all this groundbreaking research to real world applications in medicine, public health, education, the workplace, and more. Susan Magsamen is the director of the International Arts and Mind Lab at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, where her research focuses on how our brains respond to artistic experiences. Ivy Ross is an acclaimed jewelry designer and vice president of hardware design at Google. Together, they coauthored the 2023 New York Times best seller Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us.
Henry Bair: [00:02:18] Over the course of our conversation, Susan and Ivy discussed the emerging field of neuroaesthetics how the arts can make us healthier, smarter and happier, and how we can incorporate more art into our everyday lives.
Henry Bair: [00:02:33] Susan and Ivey, thank you so much for joining us and welcome to the show.
Ivy Ross: [00:02:37] It's great to be here. Thank you.
Susan Magsamen: [00:02:38] Thanks for having us.
Henry Bair: [00:02:40] So both of you have such fascinating journeys, and I'd love to explore that with each of you. Perhaps. Let's start with you, Susan. How did you come into this work at the intersection of art, neuroscience and health?
Susan Magsamen: [00:02:54] It's such a great question. You know, I think it's only when you look in the rear view mirror after you've gone a distance, do you kind of know where you've been? For me, I think that I've always been so drawn to nature and to making. I was raised in a family of makers and doers. Um, uh, my mom wrote poetry, my grandmother was a knitter and crocheter, and my grandfather was a cook, and we always had gardens. And one of five girls we used to put on shows. I just always knew that nature, like, healed me and was where I found my greatest solace. I tell the story that when I was 12, my sister, I'm a twin, my sister had a really serious farming accident, almost lost her leg. And if you know anything about twins, twins are really super connected energetically. So like if my stomach hurts, she's probably getting her appendix out kind of thing. Um, and so when she was hurt, she shut down. She was in trauma. And you know, that we didn't we didn't know that word, you know, a million years ago, we just knew that she was like, not herself. But my mom encouraged her to start drawing. And when she started to draw, she was able to create metaphor and symbols about how she was feeling. So early, early, early on, I understood that there were many other ways to communicate besides talking, and that they maybe were even more powerful.
Susan Magsamen: [00:04:20] And then my interest in this really grew into a couple of businesses around arts and learning, arts and health. And then Hopkins invited me to create this program because we had a donor who believed the arts could save us. And I had been in that space forever and believed it, too. But there wasn't really a field. And so over the last 15 years, my work has really been creating a field that's now called neuro arts. And then when Ivy and I connected through, um, I invited Ivy to be part of the Luminary Scholars board at Hopkins because she's a luminary and she's a scholar, and she's done amazing work in the world, in the real world, not in academia at that moment, but in the real world. I think what our energy came together to really ignite and fuel this movement that's been happening. And I think we're just feeling like we're in the right place at the right time, and we're meeting the moment.
Tyler Johnson: [00:05:16] I just have to say parenthetically that when you mention five young girls performing shows for their family, I'm going to see you forever now as one of the March sisters. But anyway, we can keep going.
Susan Magsamen: [00:05:26] Yeah.
Henry Bair: [00:05:27] Yeah. Well, thank you very much. I mean, we're definitely looking forward to exploring this frontier of this new field that both of you have helped create. So, Ivy, turning to you a little bit about yourself. You know, when I, when I pull up your bio online, you know, we see, of course, that you're the vice president of hardware design at Google. But it also says that you draw on your background, ranging from sound therapy to quantum physics to psychology and play. Can you help connect the dots for us?
Ivy Ross: [00:05:55] Sure. Well, I've always been a curious child. I mean, my dad was a designer, worked for Raymond Loewy, and so I was always crawling into his office, using my hands to explore new materials, make new connections, and I started being a metalsmith. My work is in ten museums around the world. In my 20s, I got into museums for new techniques that I invented in metalwork, and so I was always a maker. A creator understood getting in the flow state kind of felt how good that felt. And then I, by accident, got into the corporate world, designing different products, everything from head of design for the girls toys at Mattel to Swatch Watch. I mean everything from fashion to accessories to toys and now technology because I believe, you know, I have to love the output, but it's really about how I'm the I'm really the orchestra conductor with a bunch of creative people holding the vision and knowing my instruments really well.
Ivy Ross: [00:06:58] But simultaneously, alongside of my work in design, I've always been interested in the mysteries of life. I would call it. I studied Jungian psychology, and once I kind of thought I understood what was going on in the head, I played the drums and I wanted to understand what is happening between us, what's the invisible in the negative space? So I studied sound and vibration. And, you know, I've been fortunate enough. I kind of take the money I make in the corporate world, and it enables me to deep dive into where my curiosity brings me to study these other things. And then once in a while, they cross. So it's been a beautiful journey. And certainly the work now with Susan is is a culmination of everything I've learned and believe is true.
Tyler Johnson: [00:07:46] Before we get more to that, I just want one firm that you used briefly that many of our users probably. Have at least heard. And I'm guessing most people have a sense that they know what it means. But because this has to do with what you both think about more deeply, you mentioned that you know and love to be in flow state. What is that? What does that mean? What does that look like, and how does it relate to the things that you both study?
Ivy Ross: [00:08:11] Yeah. Well, Susan could probably tell you the scientific firm, we're a good team because we come from two different places, but yet we're the same. But for me, it is getting out of that cognitive mind and getting almost into the unconscious and into my sensorial nature. Time dissolves when I'm working on a project in the flow state. But what I feel, and Susan can tell me if this is true, is that I'm not in my cognitive thinking mind. It is almost like my senses and my unconscious are taking over, and I'm deep diving into an entirely different place. And it's a beautiful place. But, Susan, what's really happening?
Tyler Johnson: [00:08:51] Susan, can you talk us through from your perspective? What does that look like? Sort of on the neurological side?
Susan Magsamen: [00:08:57] Sure. When we talk about creativity and flow, there are multiple sort of levels of the game. And so, you know, people talk about flow as a kind of a general concept. And I think what Ivy's describing is where temporal space changes where we are in a liminal space, where between the notes, it's this very expansive place without judgment. And the brain does that for us to really be able to take a break and to go in those sort of limitless places, you know, from the back of your brain forward is kind of the way we evolved... The brain evolved. So there's like the brain stem and there's the limbic system. You know, the back of the head is is the occipital lobe and the cerebellum. That's where you walk movement. These are generalizations. Temporal lobe is like sensorial. You know, where the thalamus connects to the somatosensory cortex. The parietal lobe is kind of a processing section. But it's this prefrontal cortex, the front of your brain that allows you to sort of organize time and space. And it's kind of the orchestra leader or the conductor of. And so that is where your brain does two things. And it's it's really extraordinary. And it does a lot of things. But one is it allows you to be a master at something to be if you're a musician, to get really good at something, to be really good at interest to mastery. That part of the prefrontal cortex turns off when you are turning on this part of the brain, in the prefrontal cortex, that allows you to not judge, to just be, to just allow for you to kind of move in those different spaces. And so the ability to be able to learn to create these strong neural pathways that let you move into flow, allow you to do exactly what I've said to lower cognitive load, to get out of that logistical problem solving linear space, and to be in the space where you change your state of mind, literally change your state of mind. And it's a super important practice. And I think we found that, you know, in such a transactional world, we often don't think that we have the time to be timeless, but in fact, that's the way that we really change ourselves and change the world around us.
Tyler Johnson: [00:11:16] Yeah. You know, it's really interesting to me. We this is not a thing that we normally talk about as art per se, but it still strikes a similar chord for me. I remember when I was an intern and I was on my first intensive care unit rotations in the hospital. I think you have to have been through one of these rotations to really get this, but there is just this enormous amount of cognitive processing that you have to do with every single patient, right? Because you're taking you break the body down into its constituent parts. And then for each of those constituent parts, you have to be thinking about what are the, you know, specific vital signs that you have to be thinking about and what's the particular lab information and what does the physical exam look like and all these things anyway. And you have to do that for every one of the body systems. And it is this enormously complicated system to try to learn. And I remember that when I first got to the ICU, I just felt like, you know, those pictures you see of the person who's like, balancing sticks with plates spinning on top of them and trying to, you know, keep 7 or 8 of them in the air. That's kind of how it felt. And it was just everything I could do to make sure that there was not a plate crashing at any given moment. Right.
Tyler Johnson: [00:12:27] What was really remarkable is I remember as a third year resident, so now having been in the ICU many, many times, I remember sitting down to look at one of those same kinds of patients and all of a sudden thinking, oh my gosh, I'm not even like thinking about this anymore. Like, I just know how to process all of this information. I'm not sitting here asking a series of questions I'm not trying to put. Everything into an equation. I can just look at this and understand what's happening. It allowed me to, as you say. I mean, we don't usually think about taking care of an ICU patient as creativity per se, but there actually was a beautiful kind of creativity because I was able to. It was like instead of looking at constituent parts, I was able to have this holistic understanding of how the different parts of the physiology were feeding into each other and informing each other. And because I was able to do that, I was able to make decisions about how to care for the patient in a way that was not just quantitatively, although there was an element of that, too, but qualitatively different from what I had been able to do as a first year when I was just barely, you know, figuring out how the parts fit together.
Ivy Ross: [00:13:41] Yeah. You know, I think we need to zoom out more often than we usually do. We're so focused on zooming in to the details or the parts or the efficiency that we have not spent enough time zooming out, and it's amazing if you can do that, what you learn and see.
Susan Magsamen: [00:13:59] As Ivy says that, I think of breathing, right? Like you have to have deep content. So that's like breathing in, right? But then when you breathe out, you see the big picture. And so, like Ivy and I both are junkies on books and films and people like, we suck it in, right? We bring in so much information like almost to the point where we're like, okay, I'm overloaded. But then when you breathe it out in this way that you're describing for your patients, it comes together. And I think we've taught people how to suck it in, but we haven't taught them how to breathe it out yet. It's a physiological, natural response. And and of course, you know, this the whole default mode network piece, if you never take a break, you can't consolidate your thinking, you can't consolidate your emotions. And so the whole default mode networks thing about is about daydreaming and mind wandering. And it's different part of the brain. It's mostly parietal. And so it's not the same as flow. It's this ability to to know you and to really be able to understand what is all that knowledge meaning in a different way, ties to reward, ties to lived experience and all of those things that make you you. And so I think we we don't give time for stopping either.
Henry Bair: [00:15:12] This gets us kind of closer and closer to the discipline, the field of study that both of you have helped spearhead. Neuroaesthetics is the terms for it, which I had not come across this before, before reading your book, and I think it's pretty foreign to most people for now. Can you share with us what this even means? Like what is this field of study?
Ivy Ross: [00:15:33] So the science is neuroaesthetics. The field is neuro arts, and it's the study of how the brain and body measurably change on arts and esthetic experiences, and how that knowledge can be used in health, well-being, learning, community growth and development. So it's a translational field. It's using all these bodies of knowledge, all these ways of knowing around arts and esthetic experiences. You know, psychology, neuroscience, cognitive science, psychiatry, public health, anthropology, sociology, ways of knowing, ways that lived experience to help us create practical ways to use this work to solve problems and disease in mental health and physical health. It's a really powerful interdisciplinary construct. And in our work in the book, what we I think make a really strong argument for is that this is how we're neurobiologically wired. You know, we we bring the world in through our senses. Those senses create these strong, salient synaptic connections which make neural pathways. So if you buy the argument that the only way we can bring the world in is through our senses, and arts and esthetics are the most powerful experiences, for good or bad, right? Then how do you understand the soup and the mix of that for all of these different diseases and disorders or mental illness in different states? And so, I mean, I could, you know, share a million examples of that.
Ivy Ross: [00:17:02] Yeah. So when we say the arts, we're talking about music, dance, poetry, sculpture, even architecture, because space changes the way we think. And in terms of esthetics, it's interesting because nature is the most esthetic place, neuro static place, because it enlivens all the senses. It has color, shape, temperature, sound. And so that's why nature is so healing. These other arts. Many of us started out singing, dancing, even like, you know, your kids or drawing. And we're told eventually, over time, that's not the way you draw that or you'll never make a living at that. And so people have stopped engaging in the arts, and it's been beautiful to watch. After reading our book, people saying, you've given me permission to make art again, that's been one of the most rewarding things because it is, as Susan says, the way we're wired. And now science is showing that you know the how dance can help Parkinson's, how sound and light can help Alzheimer's, how music can aid in learning. So I think we've been optimizing for productivity and efficiency since the industrial revolution. And we've kind of pushed some of these arts aside thinking they were nice to have. And really, they are critical for our health and well-being. And you don't have to be good at the arts for it to give you the benefits. That's the beautiful thing is you don't have to be good at it.
Tyler Johnson: [00:18:33] You know, it's sort of a funny thing because I think that in the so-called Western developed world, we are so scientistic, you know, you were talking about how you have people who have come to you and said, thank you for giving me permission to engage in the arts. It often feels like as a society, we feel as though science has to give us permission to value or enjoy the things that we often intuitively feel like we should value or enjoy. But somehow it feels, I don't know, soft or squishy or permissive or indulgent or something to allow ourselves to enjoy them. Right? So then we end up in this funny place where it's like we have to sort of work backwards and prove to ourselves that enjoying the things we intuitively enjoyed in the first place is something that we should allow ourselves to enjoy, because it has some kind of so-called scientific backing. But all of that is to say, whether that's a good or bad state of affairs, I think it is often true. So can you maybe talk us through what are some of the maybe more surprising places where you have found scientific backing for things that already seemed intuitively true about the ability of the arts to help, or to heal or to change us?
Susan Magsamen: [00:19:52] Yeah. Well, and I think just to your bigger point, the sociological scientific dogma of if you can't see it, it's not real. You know, if you can't quantify it, you can't reduce it. I think has left us with our hands tied behind our backs. That said, we still can look at the sun and think it's beautiful, and we also can feel the warmth of it and we can harness it for energy. Right. And so that science gave us that. So I think two things can be true at the same time. You can understand the science and it can be miraculous and beautiful and amazing. And I think that's a real argument that we need to make now. It's that it's not one or the other, but it's both and. Humanities and sciences are coming together to sort of say, how can we do this together?
Susan Magsamen: [00:20:37] There's so many great examples of the way that we're learning. A couple that I think are, you know, really interesting. One is that dance changes gait, mood, sleep and cognition for people with Parkinson's disease. We're also seeing that virtual reality and dancing turns out to be really good for headaches, which, you know, who would who would think of that? We know in PTSD and in trauma that making art in a sequence of events actually helps to release some of those stuck emotions. And a good example is with Creative Forces, which is the United States military's arts and health initiative. They now have both vets and active military doing things like mask making. And what they're finding is that when you are able to project your experiences in a symbol or metaphoric way, and then you can add language to that, you're able to then be able to start to unpack the words that you couldn't find.
Susan Magsamen: [00:21:37] You know, the part of the brain and the region breaks, shuts down in trauma and you literally have no words. So by creating art and it can be this is mask making, but sometimes it's visual art, sometimes it's music. We're seeing that people that have significant trauma can start to put words to it and then add a narrative, and in doing that, become unstuck and start to heal from the trauma, which is a huge thing. I mean, there's such a huge opportunity here. And I'll just give you one more and I'll turn it over to Ivy. James Pennebaker, who is a he's now emeritus at University of Texas. Austin, started doing work with expressive writing. And he found that just when you're writing into a journal or in a notepad and you're sharing complex thoughts or things that you've not been able to share with others, it lowers cortisol dramatically and it also lowers cognitive load. So if you can lower cognitive load and this is never sharing with anybody, you could burn it up. You could bury what you wrote. But this idea of being able to lower cortisol is a really important thing for stress management, but also opening up more room to be able to process other things if you're not holding all this information. And so the simple act of writing something in a, in a journal can really change that.
Ivy Ross: [00:22:52] One of the ones I love is doodling actually helps you remember more. And I know all those days our hands were slapped in school for doodling while the teacher was talking. Actually, your brain was able to retain what the teacher was saying even better by doodling.
Henry Bair: [00:23:10] Wow, do we know? I mean, I guess this gets at the essence of what you're studying, which is how art actually changes your brain. But can you share with us like like why that would happen? Like, why is it that doodling, even if it's something that's unrelated to what is being taught? Like how does that subconsciously slash unconsciously help you retain more information?
Susan Magsamen: [00:23:30] So one of the things in the book, we have a double page spread of the brain and it shows different functions, different the four core areas, but the different parts of the brain. And so, you know, I often talk about this work like the elephant in the room. It's ancient, it's powerful, it's old. It's been with us forever. But depending upon where you touch it, you get something very different. So I'll use an example of Parkinson's. And then we talk about doodling. So with Parkinson's Parkinson's is a disease where you lose dopamine. So why would dancing which would activate dopamine make you do all these different things. And what we're learning is that different neurotransmitters are actually coming online to substitute for the dopamine. So you're not making more dopamine. Dancing isn't like making your dopamine work harder. There's more serotonin. There's more adrenaline. There's more oxytocin because you're touching someone. And so you're literally the brain has all these interesting workarounds and backgrounds. So in this case it's activating the cerebellum. It's also activating the cerebral cortex. It's a hack for being able to have these different activations. And so then it's not just in the brain right. It's muscular. It's cardiovascular. It's also pulmonary.
Susan Magsamen: [00:24:50] The other thing that I think in terms of doodling has to do with attention, you know, when you are tending to something and you're attending with something that's very tactile. The theory around doodling is it's actually allowing you to focus on one thing. So if you're looking up and you're trying to watch someone listen to someone observe what they're doing with doodling, you're heads down and you're actually focusing, and you're able to bring that information in and to retain it better. And so, you know, a lot of us, we think that if you're looking ahead, you're paying attention, but maybe nothing but distracted. So doodling is really more about attention and where you're focusing attention. That's a hippocampal thing. So attention leads to capturing memory and then retaining that information and recalling that information because you're very focused on what you're doing. And you know it's counterintuitive because for years we said don't doodle. It's not good for you. But the doodlers in the room are the ones that are really trying to pay attention in the best way they know how. And, you know, I think of neurodivergent thinking as social justice. You know, it's like we don't allow for that. But when we do, the outcomes really change.
Tyler Johnson: [00:25:58] One kind of surprising insight that we talked about. We had doctor Van der Kolk on the podcast, oh, maybe a few months ago. And one of the things that he talked about that they have seen in their work is the ability of certain kinds of artistic expression that are especially powerful when the artistic expression is performed as part of a community to help to heal trauma. So the examples that he gave were, if you are in a group of people who are dancing in unison, or if you are in a choir and the members of the choir are singing together, there's something about that kind of unified or harmonized, whatever it is artistic expression that is powerful in a way that is maybe even a level above or beyond what happens when you're expressing yourself artistically, individually. Could you talk a little bit about what possible neuropsychiatric or neurobiological basis might there be for art performed as part of a community having some unique benefits that can't be found even in individualistic artistic expressions?
Susan Magsamen: [00:27:07] Well, the two that come to mind for me are synchronicity. You know, we're really wired to be in harmony with each other. That is immediately happens when you're dancing together or singing together or doing something in community. And there's some thought that what's happening in those synchronistic, sort of safe communities is that you're actually calming the amygdala, you know, the part of the brain that controls fight and flight or freeze. And so it's very much linked to stress and anxiety. And so you're starting to see that quieting, you know, the amygdala is not just about fear. It's that's a trigger, but it's really that sense of being in connection and in community. And we're seeing a lot of this work with loneliness and isolation. Right. And where you see that when you're starting to quiet the amygdala, cortisol is being lowered. Oxytocin is often released in those in those spaces. You start to get this sense that there is less stress on the immune system and the endocrine system. So the sense of harmony and synchronicity, I think, plays itself through.
Susan Magsamen: [00:28:13] And we're not often in places, you know, Ivy said this earlier, if you don't sing well, you're not in a chorus, right? If you're not a good dancer, you're not on the dance floor. Right? You maybe go to a wedding and you dance, you know, like Elaine on Seinfeld, but you're not out there. And so we don't have these opportunities for that. And so that also creates this, I think, conditions for health or for disease.
Ivy Ross: [00:28:37] And I think when you let go of that fight or flight and you're doing these things together, you have that sense of oneness with each other, something greater than yourselves because you feel that melding. Together. And so all of that fight or flight drops and I think we become more in. The state where craving for which we don't even realize until that happens.
Susan Magsamen: [00:29:00] Which is awe, right? Awe and wonder. And that's and you know, in our chapter on flourishing, we talked a lot about awe and wonder. And there's a study Bolado who who he did some work with Cirque du Soleil on Awe. And what he saw was that people felt more connected when they were even observing these kinds of extraordinary experiences, but they also were willing to take greater risks when they felt that they were in a state of awe. And I always think that humanity has only moved forward because we were always willing to take more risk. Right? Go take that next step, go that next mile. And I think there's something about these kinds of synchronistic, awe inspiring spaces that allow us to actually be brave human beings, and that's essential for helping the world.
Henry Bair: [00:29:51] You know, one of the things I want to explore is and this came up earlier, we've been using the word esthetic quite a bit, and I want to explore what we actually mean by that, because typically when we think of something as esthetic, we kind of think of it as tantamount to something that's beautiful, something that is in some way physically sensorially attractive. What exactly do we mean by engaging in esthetic experiences? Is there an objective criteria to seeing how how how beautiful and pretty something is? Or is this something that's very subjective to the individual experience?
Susan Magsamen: [00:30:21] So it's a great question. Esthetics means something different to everybody. Like art means something different to everybody. And we define arts as creative self-expression, either from a maker or beholder. And so it doesn't matter what the creative expression is. I've mentioned a ton of them, but it's it's creative self-expression. By the way, art experiences don't have to be positive or beautiful. In fact, many of them aren't. But it's a creative self-expression. The same is true for esthetics. Esthetics are those sensorial experiences that are objective, that are happening all the time texture, touch, smell, sound, light, all of those esthetic ingredients that come into creating a space, a place, a moment. And so they're not all beautiful. You know, we talked in the book about Marian Diamond, who did a study with rats in the 60s, and she was talking about enriched environments, and I think so she put in different light sources, different colors, different textures, different temperatures in a space for rats. She also had a status quo space, and she also had a space of impoverished environments. So esthetic experiences that were subpar dark things, sharp things, smells that rats didn't like. And what she found in just two weeks, the cerebral cortex and the enriched environments grew by 6%. The impoverished rats in cortex reduced, got smaller. And so when you think about esthetic experiences, what are those elements of sensorial elements that we bring together that actually can support health and well-being or. Not make anything change or reduce health and well-being. And I think esthetics has kind of been seen as an art form around beauty, and it is defined in different ways. I mean, you know, esthetics are becoming more and more defined as the way I think we're talking about them. But it's sort of a historical definition.
Ivy Ross: [00:32:20] And, you know, E.O. Wilson, when we interviewed him, he reminded us that 99.9% of the time humans have lived on Earth, we have lived in nature. It's only 0.2% of our lives that we've lived in the built environment. And it is our nature to be in nature. And as I said earlier, nature is the most esthetic place because it enlivens all of those sensory systems at once. So it kind of makes sense to us that if that's the place where humans have lived the longest and most, in some ways we were designed to live in nature. And you could say that this experiment has failed in the built environment because we're not necessarily at our happiest and healthiest for a number of reasons. But going back in nature, even during Covid, people flocked to nature and your whole physiology changes. But in part, that's because you are lighting up all of these sensory systems that are designed to be lit up.
Henry Bair: [00:33:20] As an aside, I find it fascinating that when I when I think about art, when I think about creative expression, whether it's storytelling or music making, I think of it as a very fundamentally human process. That's something that's uniquely defines what makes humans, humans, to be able to think about these things, to have imagination to to be able to picture things that don't necessarily exist in the physical realm. And yet you also talk about how these esthetic experiences seem to benefit animal brains, too. I don't know, I just I find that really fascinating.
Tyler Johnson: [00:33:53] I want to change gears for a minute, just because I want to make sure that we address this topic. I think it's important for people, you know, my day job is I'm a medical oncologist. So the doctor who gives chemotherapy to people with cancer. And as a medical oncologist, I feel like a large part of my job in terms of like, if someone is coming to me and bringing a new cancer drug or whatever, you know, like a drug company is, is selling a new cancer drug, I feel like in many ways, my most important function on behalf of my patients is to be skeptical. Right? And it is to say, well, okay, you know, drug company, I understand that you think that your your new drug is the coolest, best thing for this kind of cancer. But I need to see the evidence and then I am. And then I try to really scrutinize the evidence because as you probably are aware, there's a, you know, a whole litany of things, especially in cancer, that were supposed to be the latest, greatest thing and then turned out to be not helpful and in some cases even harmful. On deeper scrutiny. Now, obviously, if I were to go to my patients and say, well, I, you know, I want to encourage you to get involved in the arts and ABC XYZ way as a way of not of curing your cancer, but of helping you to deal with the trauma of having cancer or the emotional exhaustion or the, you know, or even the neuropathy or, you know, from your chemotherapy or whatever that's different than a drug, in that a drug is putting a form of chemical into your body that can have, you know, very deep side effects.
Tyler Johnson: [00:35:20] But nonetheless, if I put that skepticism hat on for a moment, and I recognize that now I'm just recapitulating the frame of mind that I talked about earlier with scientism. But nonetheless, that's part of what I do, right? That's part of my day job. I guess I just want to say, do you both feel like we are getting to a point where the scientific evidence for the ameliorative effects of art, in terms of helping human physiology, is solid enough that we can say now that there is a a solid scientific basis, not just an intuitive sense, but a solid scientific basis that art helps us to heal, or engaging in art helps us to heal and helps us, helps us to flourish.
Susan Magsamen: [00:36:07] 100%.
Tyler Johnson: [00:36:09] And just talk us on a on a broad level. And I know obviously this you know, you have entire books, but I'm just saying on a broad level, talk us through a little bit, sort of what's the your sort of elevator pitch summary for what the science says about that?
Susan Magsamen: [00:36:22] Well, let me back up to say, if you look over the history of humanity, the arts and esthetic experiences were the medicine and are the medicine for every indigenous culture around the world. Right? So it's not like we invented something. It's not like, oh, poof, the arts are this new fangled thing. We just didn't call them the arts because it's how people live their lives. Right. And so I think we are calling back some really ancient neuro evolutionary biology that's really now being studied. And it's only been the last 20 years. We've been able to get inside our brains non-invasively to really understand what's going on. So you don't know why cancer works, right? You don't know how cancer starts. You don't know how. We don't know why somebody necessarily has cardiac problems or has pulmonary issues, or how we don't know how how psychiatric drugs work yet we use them all the time because we see the outcome measures. The arts have not been given the same courtesy. Right? We know they work. Yet there's this high bar of like, bring the ruby slippers, bring the witch's broom. And so I have a biased against the arrogance of medicine when we know that over the millennial, the arts have always worked, but understanding them is really important. Neurobiologically understanding them is super important.
Susan Magsamen: [00:37:42] And so this week, for example, I'm down at NIH for two days. We are capstone ING the last five years of music and sound research, where there now is a toolkit on how to create protocol for the arts, how to look at what are the technologies that are acceptable, biomarkers that are acceptable for highest standard NIH research, and what what a standardized outcome measures are for clinical care. We're also building outcome measures for community health that match up to these clinical care in every single health related discipline. And this is through sound and music. And now we're going to move to the next art form from an NIH point of view. So we're starting to be able to understand the neural mechanisms, the structure and the function of different art forms for different purposes.
Susan Magsamen: [00:38:31] And as I was saying, this idea of the elephant in the room, if you're using music for Alzheimer's, we know that activation around the hippocampus, we know that there's something going on there. Dan Levitin is one of the people that is doing some really great work there. And so are all of the sort of proteges of Oliver Sacks who have been working really closely. On that. A lot of work I mentioned is happening in Parkinson's. A lot of work is happening in neurodegeneration in general related to the arts, but there's also a lot of work happening in child development and upstream care of being able to build resilience through strong neural pathways, through the lens of the arts, and stress and anxiety in areas around rehabilitation.
Ivy Ross: [00:39:14] We're seeing the arts used in early stage stroke recovery, both with virtual reality and also with different kinds of dance and movement therapies. And that's really, really exciting. And there's a lot of fMRI work that's happening there as well. Aarp is also doing a lot of work in looking at the role of the arts for loneliness and isolation and that's, you know, kind of a social construct. But I think that there's some really interesting work happening there. So there's a lot of science that's really basic science, but also qualitative work that's been happening for the last 15 years, and that's being consolidated through something called the Neuroarts blueprint. So next year there'll be a resource center where you can go. Anybody can go and say, I'm looking for research on palliative care in Africa, and you'll be able to pull up research studies and people that are doing it, or looking for music and Alzheimer's, for frontal temporal dementia. And you'll be able to find the research. So we're curating and calibrating all of that work. So it's easy to sort of find what you're looking for.
Tyler Johnson: [00:40:19] So Ivy, I'd love to hear your perspective on that question as well. But I want to pose a different one that I think is equally important. So, you know, I have, again, just speaking from my own vantage point as a cancer doctor, I can imagine many places right where one of my patients might come to me in a place where I might, even as a doctor, feel like, oh, this would be a great place for them to engage in, you know, esthetically in some way that might be helpful to them. But let's say then, that I have a patient who comes to me, and maybe this is a patient who has just finished an arduous journey through cancer care, where it took them a year of radiation and chemotherapy and surgery and recovery and all the rest. And they're trying to sort of, you know, they're kind of emerging from the fog and trying to reengage in life. Or maybe it's a person who has incurable disease and recognizes that they're probably nearing the end of their life and, you know, only having a limited amount of time left, whatever the scenario is.
Tyler Johnson: [00:41:15] But let's have them say that this person comes to me and they say, in effect, Doctor Johnson, I have this sense or I heard, I heard your podcast and on the podcast they talked all about this stuff about the benefits of art and scientific backing and, you know, the whole nine yards. And then but to your point, I think I've you were saying earlier that so many of us are sort of intuitively, artistically inclined when we're little, even if it's just, you know, a box of crayons and a piece of paper. And then somewhere along the line, somebody tells us that we're not artistic. And so then we stop. So now they say, I want to engage in the arts, but, you know, I'm 65 years old and I haven't held a paintbrush in 50 years. Like, I don't even know how to do that anymore. Right? Like, what would that even look like? So somebody who's just now wants practical tips on how to even do that if they're not quote unquote, an artist, what would you tell that person?
Ivy Ross: [00:42:05] Yeah, it's so interesting because we're actually getting notes from people that are creating art date nights where they're trying different, uh, because they're in that same situation like, oh my God, I haven't, I haven't done anything for 25 years where they will, uh, you know, go to dinner with another couple, come back home, and it's the other couple's job to have a lump of clay on the table. And the key is without judgment. And so this is what I would tell your patient, like, try different mediums, you know, one different one a week and just start to no judgment. The whole idea is no judgment. Just let your hands do the walking and just start to play with it. Feel it, see what shapes come up, you know, look at it and go home and then mold it again. I mean, the key is to just no expectations, which is the definition of play, by the way, which is why kids are so creative, like doing something without expectations. And nowadays there's so much instruction available on the internet. If you don't know how to use watercolor, you could probably Google you know how to use watercolor and just get some tips about how how much water you put on the brush. And the important thing is to not be intimidated, but to just try a different medium. Like I said each week. And there's plenty of ways that you could learn online, just even some basic tips. But it's about exploring to see which one brings you joy and lets you, uh, express something that might be inside of you that you can't even articulate, or just the pure joy of discovery. Like this idea of working with clay and seeing what your hands come up with, and even the abstractness of, you know, oh my God, that looks like. And again, this exercises your imagination. This could be a whole city if I kept making other shapes like this. So it's that pure childlike joy of imagination and discovery. But the big thing is just not being intimidated. No judgment and just jumping in.
Susan Magsamen: [00:44:07] The good guideline is just curiosity. You know, being curious, having that beginner's mind. And that's something that we've kind of talked ourselves out of, you know, we're so transactional, but just being curious. And then the second one is really playful exploration. What I be saying is not judging what you're doing, just doing it, just doing it because it's something that might feel good, you know, dance in your living room, sing in the shower, doodle. These don't have to be high art forms in any way. Join a choir or go sing in church, you know? And like a lot of times people sit and they don't. They mouth the words, they don't sing. And just by singing engages the parasympathetic nervous system. So you're already going to feel better just by activating that. And then the third is being more open to the sensory experiences around you. Like we often walk through the world and don't, you know, really literally smell the roses. And then the last is what I was talking about, which is experimenting with making and beholding. So, you know, doing both of those things is really a way to begin to move into how those different experiences make you feel. And it's different than exercise. It's different than good nutrition, and it's different than sleep, right? Those are all things that people tell us to do. This is another lane where we're saying this arts and esthetic experiences are really about meaning and about physical and mental well-being, about community, about connection, about being a better learner. It's something that I think, you know, in five years, people are going to be talking about neuro arts as a whole way of whole health, and we're seeing that everywhere. I mean, it's kind of like if we were a bulb in the Earth, all the nutrients are kind of doing their thing, and we're just coming up out of the ground, right? It's early, but it's very strong and we're rhizome.
Ivy Ross: [00:45:58] And, you know, even, um, art is really one of the highest forms of meditation. So we've all except we know what meditation does for us and for people who can't meditate, who can't really just sit there and do nothing. Um, even Sharon Salzberg, who's one of the big figureheads in the mindfulness movement, says art is the highest form of mind mindfulness. So that's another thing to tell people is this is a way to meditate is by getting into that place and you're actually doing something, but you're still doing good for your health.
Henry Bair: [00:46:32] Um, so we've been talking both about creating arts as well as beholding the arts. Right. And I think when we talk about beholding the arts, there's this one thing that I feel like it is an unavoidable for me to think about. And I suspect for a lot of people, this question will also come to them, which is, are there better kinds of arts than others? And I think many people in the art community have historically contributed to this idea of high versus low art. Right. So from from your observations, personal experiences, conversations, does that exist? Like is Rakhmonov better than the pop hit? Right now on the Billboard 200 charts. Is beholding Titian better than beholding a comic book? Like, how do we think about that distinction, or is there even a distinction?
Susan Magsamen: [00:47:12] Well, I would say no. You think about talk about personalized medicine. Think about personalized art arts based on where we come from, what we know, our lived experiences, our physiology, our sensory systems, our reward mechanisms. Different arts are going to affect us in different ways. Like, you know, there's this great work that was done by Samir Zeki. He's at University College London on beauty. He was the first person that understood where beauty lit up in the brain. And so he put a picture in front of people. And the first quandary was the same part of the brain would light up and people would say, yes, that is beautiful. And then he asked them why it was beautiful, and they had different reasons for why it was beautiful. And so I think, but a comic book may be the kind of thing that, you know, one person loves, and it may be a Vogue magazine for somebody else or, you know, but so it's very personal. Anjan Chatterjee did some work. We all align on landscapes, we all align on faces. We all understand kind of the constructs of that. But in expressions, creative self expression, art, we don't agree and we don't agree because of all those factors that make us who we are. And so you can understand how you could apply that in a medical situation to make sure that people are getting. It may be music, that's the thing, but it may be tango for somebody. It may be the waltz for somebody else. You know, it's going to be very prescriptive, depending upon where we come from and what we need.
Ivy Ross: [00:48:43] Part of the key, right, Susan, is having these salient experiences which are rewiring your brain. And so what might be salient to someone because it's about emotion may not to someone else. So it's really about putting yourself in the place where those new synapses can connect.
Henry Bair: [00:49:02] You know what strikes me here when you frame this is how much interaction there is at levels both conscious and subconscious. You're constantly interacting with the art. You shape it and it shapes you. It really opens my mind to so many new possibilities.
Henry Bair: [00:49:19] And with that, we want to thank you both for coming on the show, for sharing your stories and your work. We are truly so excited to see how this field of Neuroaesthetics continues to evolve.
Ivy Ross: [00:49:32] Thank you so much for having us.
Henry Bair: [00:49:37] Thank you for joining our conversation on this week's episode of The Doctor's Art. You can find program notes and transcripts of all episodes at www.thedoctorsart.com. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe, rate and review our show available for free on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
Tyler Johnson: [00:49:56] We also encourage you to share the podcast with any friends or colleagues who you think might enjoy the program. And if you know of a doctor or patient, or anyone working in healthcare who would love to explore meaning in medicine with us on the show, feel free to leave a suggestion in the comments.
Henry Bair: [00:50:10] I'm Henry Bair,
Tyler Johnson: [00:50:12] and I'm Tyler Johnson. We hope you can join us next time. Until then, be well.