Dhru Purohit Show - The Mind-Blowing Science of How Art (and Nature) Can Transform the Body and Heal the Brain with Susan Magsamen

Episode Date: June 22, 2023

This episode is brought to you by WHOOP, BON CHARGE, and Joovv.  Today on The Dhru Purohit Podcast, Dhru and Susan Magsamen discuss how we can use art to transform our neurocircuitry and help heal our bodies and minds. Susan Magsamen is the founder and director of the International Arts + Mind Lab Center for Applied Neuroaesthetics at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Susan cowrote the book Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us with Ivy Ross. In the book, Magsamen and Ross offer compelling research that shows how engaging in an art project—from painting and dancing to expressive writing, architecture, and more—for as little as 45 minutes reduces the stress hormone cortisol, no matter your skill level, and just one art experience per month can extend your life by 10 years.  In this episode, Dhru and Susan dive into: -How art can radically transform the body and brain (2:01) -How we’re wired to engage with art (4:01) -The connection between art and nature (12:31) -Susan’s story and how she got into the mind-art connection (14:56) -Using art as a way to connect to ourselves, each other, and the external world (21:36) -Rewiring the brain with art (41:06) -Carving out time for art: the minimal viable dose (46:35) -Enriching your environment for inspiration and creativity (50:28) -Establishing new connections in the brain (57:27) -The default mode network: daydreaming and letting your mind wander (1:05:22) -What we’re missing by removing art from school (1:13:05) -Integrating art, science, and culture (1:15:41) -The connection between plant medicine and awe (1:25:47) -How art and creativity can extend our life span and help us flourish (1:33:51) -First steps to bringing art experiences back into your life (1:37:47) -Where to follow Susan’s work (1:49:30) Also mentioned in this episode: -Neuroartsblueprint.org -Artsandmindlab.org -Yourbrainonart.com -Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us For more on Susan Magsamen, follow her on Instagram @susanmagsamen, Facebook @susan.magsamen.9, or through her website, Artsandmindlab.org. WHOOP is a personalized digital fitness tracker and health coaching platform that monitors your physiology 24/7 and provides personalized recommendations based on what your body needs. To get yours, go to join.whoop.com and get your first month free with code DHRU15. BON CHARGE is a holistic wellness brand with a HUGE range of evidence-based products to optimize your life. Right now, my community can go to boncharge.com/DHRU and use coupon code DHRU to save 15%. Enhance your health with red and infrared LED light therapy with Joovv. Right now, Joovv is offering an exclusive offer on your first order. Head over to Joovv.com/dhru and apply my code DHRU. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In healthy aging, things like dancing are so important for the cerebellum, for the motor systems, for this sense of synchronicity and rhythm, and for being able to pay attention. So using those systems, you're really cross-training when you're dancing because there's so much that you have to do. If you're curious about the power of art to truly heal the brain and the body and support your longevity, today's conversation is absolutely for you. Welcome to the Drew Proet podcast. Each week we explore the inner workings of the brain and the body with one of the brightest minds in wellness, medicine, and mindset. This week's guest is Susan MagSammon. Susan MagSammon is the founder and director of the International Arts Mind Lab Center for applied neuroesthetics at the Peterson Brain Science Institute at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, where she's a faculty member in the Department of Neurology. She's also the co-director of the neuro arts blueprint with the Aspen Institute. Susan is also the co-author of the book that we'll be discussing today. Your Brain on Art, How the Arts Transforms Us, with Ivy Ross.

Your Brain on Art is an authoritative guide on how neuroesthetics can help us transform traditional medicine, build healthier communities, and mend an aching planet. The book weaves a tapestry of breakthrough research, insights from multidisciplinary pioneers, and compelling stories from people who are using the arts to enhance their lives. And we're going to break down the book and its key lessons in today's conversation. Stay tuned. Susan, welcome to the podcast. It's a pleasure to have you here.

Today we're talking about art and the power that it has to transform the body and mind in a way that listeners have no idea about. Now, I want to read a quote from your book. The quote is, the arts and aesthetic experiences will improve your health and well-being and enhance your ability to learn and flourish. can you give us a few top line stats or examples of how art can radically transform the body and the brain? Sure. Well, thank you for having me. It's really a pleasure to be here. What's been extraordinary in putting this book together is we've really seen that some of the most pressing issues facing us today in mental health, physical health, child development, and learning are really being addressed through arts and aesthetic experiences. And I'll give you just a couple of examples. And I'll give you just a

couple of examples. One is thinking about the role of dance and improving gait and mood and sleep for people with Parkinson's disease and other motor-based challenges. People who are engaged in the arts also have lower mental distress, better mental functioning, and improved quality of life. We're also seeing, interestingly, that sound vibration is being used to return the body back to homeostasis out of that sort of fight, flight, or freeze reaction. So even something like a tuning fork in C or G can create sound waves to soothe the stress response and elicit relaxation. And we're looking at things like chronic pain where something like virtual reality programs are being used to really help us distract and move us outside of those very acute pain situations. Just one more that I think

is extraordinary. Light and sound are now being used to alter the progression of dementia. And I could literally go on and on. It's so fascinating. And we often think of art as something that's a soft, nice to have thing that's in our life, but it's not needed. And part of the book, and the book is called Your Brain on Art, the link is in the show notes for everybody who wants to check it out. And I highly recommend you do. Part of the book's core premise is that we are wired for art. Our body is wired for art. So can you help us understand how our senses, and we think of them as five, but there's more to the story than that, how our senses are wired to receive art on a daily basis? Sure. So just to step back and think about sort of how

we come into this world. We are born with 100 billion neurons, and those neurons are there to bring in the world through our senses. And so you mentioned we have five senses. Researchers now are thinking that we probably have as many as 50 senses that we're just starting to understand. So when those sensorial experiences are coming through, they're actually igniting synapses that are connecting to other neurons. So we have quadrillions of synaptic connections that create all of these neural pathways. And the neural pathways are what connect to different parts of the brain. So thinking about these arts and aesthetic experiences, simultaneously these neural pathways are connecting to multiple systems at the same time. And the senses are the way in. And I'm increasingly

amazed by how these mechanisms that we call our senses really work. For example, you have have over 4 million touch receptors in your skin that are constantly receiving this information and moving it to the somatosensory cortex by way of the spinal cord and the thalamus. So, you know, your fingers have over 3,000 touch receptors. Your feet have over a couple hundred thousand touch receptors. You know, your lips are the most sensitive receptors that have a hundred times more receptors than even your fingertips. And, you know, we could go right through all of the olfactory system, the taste system, the way that our hearing works that are finely tuned to be able to bring the world into us. And of course, with so much information coming in, we couldn't

possibly process all of that information or even understand the feelings and emotions that impact our bodies. And so our brains also have this really amazing network called the saliency network. So we bring in information that is salient to us, which means important to us, either practically or emotionally. And we're able to somehow disregard the irrelevant information that we don't need. And so we're filtering all the time, all of this information, and then making meaning and making sense of it through other parts of our brain. This episode is brought to you by Bond Charge. Getting good quality sleep is fundamental for optimal health.

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Head on over to join.wop.com slash drew to get your first month free, first month free on whoop. That's join.wop.wop.com slash dh-R-U for your first month free of whoop. If art is so crucial to our body, can you give us the example of where you think in our life, whether it's our chronic disease epidemic, the rate of explosion of mental health challenges? Can you give us some examples of what happens to us, to our brain, to our body, when we don't regularly have exposure to meaningful art in our lives? Yeah. You know, we are right now, I think, in an epidemic where we have become so transactional that this idea of using arts and aesthetic experiences as a way of transformation, of understanding our world, whether we're the maker and we have this ability to be able to reflect

on what we're feeling has been eradicated from our day to day, or whether we are beholding and really bringing in other people's expressions. So the ability to have compassion, to empathize, to perspective take. These are just some of the few ways that the arts and aesthetics really help us have more meaning making and more a grounded sense of who we are and what's important to us in the world. And this is really just on a psychosocial level, on a physiological level, When our cortisol levels are so high and we're operating in this fight, flight, or freeze mode, we're never giving our bodies any kind of rest. And so we're seeing that people are burning out, stressing out, stress, anxiety, depression are at an epidemic proportion.

And in large part, we're not taking that time to really be able to process and regroup. And something as simple as working with clay, yarn, having your hands in the soil, stimulates skin and nerve endings that ignite the body's internal sensory receptors that actually help us instantly feel attentive and focused. So imagine we're never renewing. We're never actually working to bring those systems online. And Ivy and I make the case in the book that we are wired for this. This is our evolutionary birthright. So we're actually putting on the sideline so much of what actually helps us regulate. So like exercise, nutrition, sleep, we think the arts and aesthetic experiences are equally important, not just for luxury or

nice to have, but literally for our very survival. You know, one example that we'll break down a lot later on in the podcast, but just I want to tease on right now is that art is also the perception and recognition of nature. Can you talk about that, the connection between art and nature, and nature is increasingly something that people are not getting much of. We wake up in our houses, we get into our cars, we drive to work, we're constantly in a box, we don't get a lot of sunlight. How is that, in a way, cutting us off from receiving art in our lives? Well, you know, when you think about human history and the evolution of our species, we were in nature, 99.8% of human history. And so, you know, now we are, as you said, in cars, in boxes in these

human-built environments that often close us off to natural light, to air, to smell, to the complexities of all the different landscapes and plant life and animal life that exists in the world. And so it really is like taking us out of our original enriched environment. And while sometimes space is built with more recognition and intention about the need for us to have certain colors, certain materiality, texture, temperature, our natural world really was the natural world. So when we talk about nature, we really think of it as the most aesthetic experience. And there's a lot of really wonderful studies that are showing that just 15 minutes in nature

brings you back to homeostasis, lowers cortisol, biostasis. lowers cortisol by as much as 25%. We start to think more clearly. We ground ourselves, all of those really great sort of terms that are about how do we come back into ourselves, and that's by being in nature. And yet at the same time, we're seeing greenways being eliminated in cities, less opportunity to really be in clean air, which is also really important for pulmonary health and respiratory health. And so it really starts to wear us down by not being in nature. So there's these core concepts that outline the table of contents of the book. And the first one that's there is around neuroplasticity. Now, before we break that down and help people understand how the role

of neuroplasticity is deeply connected to art and how that's deeply connected to rejuvenating our brains and bodies, I want to talk a little bit origin story. Can you talk a little bit about your your background and how you came to wanting to highlight the story of how essential art is in our lives. Yeah, so I come from a family of makers. My mother and my grandmothers were kniters, crochets, embroiderers, menders, quilters, you know, they cooked. My mother wrote poetry. And we were always making in a utility sense. And that was really the way we lived. And so very much a part of being in nature. We've gardened.

We grew a lot of our own vegetables and flowers. And so I was really brought up in this way of being. We didn't talk about it as art. We really talked about it as a way of being, of doing. And, you know, that's in many ways how our ancestors lived. They didn't have a word for art because everything was art. The way of being was art. So I was really indoctrinated into that in a very organic, natural way.

But I'm a twin, and when I was 12 years old, my twin sister, Sandra, had a very serious farming accident and almost lost her leg. And if you know anything about twins, you know that we finish each other's sentences. We feel each other physiologically. We know each other super well. So like when I have a stomach ache, she's getting her appendix out, right? You know, it's very intimate. We're born in relationship. But at 12, she had this accident and she shut down.

Her literally shut down in trauma. And I couldn't understand her. I couldn't feel her. And she couldn't feel me or the rest of the world. And we know that in trauma, the broca region of the brain shuts down. And that's the language area where you can't say how you feel because you're stuck. This energy of extreme trauma is physiologically, energetically, stuck inside of you. And so my mom, in her wisdom, said to my sister, why don't you start drawing,

painting, doing some watercolor, you know, my sister was bored. She was also scared. And she started to paint. And very soon she was able to put in visual, symbolic, metaphoric terms, what she couldn't say. And then she started to put narrative to it. And she started to explain how she felt locked in, how she felt like she couldn't bloom, how she felt about these very scary things. And she started to open up. And what I learned at 12 was that there are many ways of knowing and there are many ways to express yourself. And so all of that came forward for me as I grew. And I actually, my first job was at a nursing home for retired teaching nuns, lots of humanities. And so I was sort of second schooled in the classics. And I was, was, was learned all about Yates and

and Hemingway and all of the major literature that, that were being shared by these nurses and that were in, that were part of this, this retirement community. And so the arts were always just a part of my life, but I never really thought of them as anything more than just how we understood the world. I went to college, got a started, my undergraduate work was in creative arts therapy and recreation therapy, and then ultimately went to Hopkins. I started a couple companies along the way. One was called Curiosity kits, which were hands-on learning materials and arts, sciences, and world culture. Worked with Harvard's Kurt Fisher, who was brilliant about understanding the mind, brain, and learning, and really understood that we learned through doing. We

learn through experience and we also learn in relationship. And so that brought me ultimately to Hopkins and I was invited to develop this program that I now run called the International Arts and Mind Lab. And that came out of a donor's vision who believed that the arts could save us. She believed that they affected our health, our mental health, our physical health, our well-being. But at that time, now almost early 2020, so almost 20 years ago, she really had an understanding that was not yet sort of integrated into academia. So we went to work building this lab that I run at Hopkins that's really now become an interdisciplinary translational lab that looks at all the ways that the arts and aesthetic experiences change our brain and body and how that can be translated into

practice in health, well-being, learning, community development, public health, et cetera. And so it's really been an amazing journey to really put more knowledge around these things that I think we intuitively know because it's how we have been wired for. You know, I have a few threads that I want to pull on. The first one is about your sister. I'm very sorry to hear about that accident that happened to her when she was young. might I ask how she's doing today? Is she?

She's fantastic. She's fantastic. She actually became an artist, a professional artist. So, you know, some people make art and they don't become artists. But in my sister's case, she became a creative arts therapist, and then she became a ceramicist, and then she became an author, illustrator. And her name is Sandra Magammon, and it's very easy to find her work. She writes a lot of books for children.

about, it's so amazing how things come full circle. A lot of her work is about creating these containers to feel safe and secure when you're young. And that was really what was so important for her when she was young. And that's what was really created. So one small tangent as a follow-up that I want to go on. It's just so fascinating to me. You mentioned that as a twin, that there's this deep bond and connection, finishing each other's sentences, this idea of feeling.

each other's pain. Did you have those core experiences when you were a kid? And as you have progress in your career and you're starting to dabble and intersect and connect with different researchers and neuroscientists, what have you thought of is the best way to explain how two separate beings, but that are deeply connected in some way? What is that sort of mechanism that allows their bodies to deeply feel each other, even when they're not in physical proximity. You know, as a twin, okay, I'm going to tell you two things. As a twin, I think that there is a energy that is created between you that really calibrates. And I think it's a vibration, it's a frequency that transcends space and time. And I think that's also true.

for each of us, if we open up those portals for the sensitivity to feel each other and to know where each other are. And there's many examples of that kind of parapsychological connection where, you know, we can all spread a sense of energy or goodwill and, you know, good things happen, right? And that happens in healing. You know, some people call that spontaneous healing. But there's lots of things that I think are phenomena that happen with this kind of incredible energy. We do know things like stress and pheromones or fear. If you're in a situation where you are feeling so much fear, that is contagious. So is the sense of joy and hope and curiosity and connection.

They're also curious. So, you know, I think of those things as creating these very rich nurturing, enriched environments. The other story I want to tell you is that my great-grandfather invented the Ouija board. Oh, wow. And yeah, I haven't thought about this in a while. I will pull this back, I promise. No, no, no. Listen, by the way, this is what our audience wants to hear. They want to hear these beautiful tangents and stories from somebody that's in your position. So please continue. Your grandfather, you said? Yeah, my great-grandfather. So I mean, so I was really born into, you know, this world of mystical understandings and science. So intuition and science. So my great-grandfather and his brother

invented the Ouija board. Now the Ouija board is not, it's a talking board. And if you've ever done it, you know, you ask a question and then there's this ability for your body to kind of tap into something and to be able to give you some insight. And interestingly, the Ouija board sells best in times of uncertainty, in wars, in natural disasters, in economic downturns, where we all don't like liminal spaces. We don't like unpredictability. We don't like uncertainty. And so we're in a time right now where we're in so much uncertainty, and it makes us all

really, really uncomfortable. But my great-grandfather believed that you had the answers inside of you. and his brother believed in this energy that would come from the universe. And it could be a spirit, but it could spirits or, but it could just be this universal collective that was sort of coming in. So they really married this idea of external knowledge and energy and internal wisdom. And that's really what the Ouija board represented. And that's a very old technology.

It is something that Egyptian cultures use. They call it talking boards. And you can find it in many older cultures throughout time where we wanted to connect heaven and earth. We wanted to connect the visible and the invisible. And I think in some ways that's really what the arts and aesthetic experiences help us do, is connect to ourselves and to the external world to make a better sense of meaning. And, you know, again, this is so. sort of at the, I'll call it the spiritual level.

But what we know is that there's a physiological baseline for how that happens through neuroplasticity and the neural pathways and neurotransmitters that really connect all of these sensorial experiences together and how we make sense of them through the default network and other systems that are physiological systems within our bodies. You know, so many people, including myself, have felt this deep sense of intuition or guidance or even sometimes connection with other people or family members that they may not be able to explain, but that they truly feel and know is there. Do you think that science, just as you were talking about, we thought of typically five senses, but in your work and in your book, you're talking about how there could be up to 50 or more senses that are there. do you feel like these things are real, we just might not have fully connected the dots in science to be able to explain them, whether that's the quantum field, whether that's this energy source,

whether it's something else, that we just are not exactly there. We have some previews, but we just are not fully there to be able to explain it, but that doesn't mean that it's not explainable. Exactly. I think that's exactly true. And, you know, what I talk about sometimes is, like, you know, we used to look at the sun and we thought it was beautiful. It gave us warmth. We didn't know how it worked.

But once we started to understand how the sun worked and how we could harness solar energy for our own uses, we took something that was so extraordinary. And we made more utility out of it for humanity. And I think that's true of human nature. I think we, there's so many things about human nature that are so beautiful and mysterious and unexplainable. And I think the more we can understand them in service of humanity and enjoy them, I think that's really exciting. And science, you know, when I think about science or I think about research, I often talk

about ways of knowing because there are many ways of knowing. And I don't think necessarily just understanding cell structure or neurotranspore. is going to get us there. I think it's this beautiful alchemy of multiple disciplines and lived experience coming together sort of this idea of, you know, voice to be able to understand complexity and use that to solve some of the really intractable issues that we face. And so I think we're only beginning. And it's that frame of what Ivy and I call an aesthetic mindset. So how do you, how are you curious? How do you use playful, How do you really engage your sensorial life to feel these things?

You know, a lot of times we just walk through the world. We don't know if it's hot or cold. We don't know, you know, we don't even know that it's raining or not raining because we're not focused on that. We're paying attention to something very transactional. And then as a maker or a beholder, if you're never really doing that, you can't have the fullest extent of your humanity. And so shifting to this idea of more of an aesthetic mindset as the way you move through life can help us really start to take advantage of those moments day by day, sometimes minute by minute, hour by hour.

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Again, that's J-O-O-V-V-com forward slash D-H-R-U. that's true to pick up a juve today. Some exclusions do apply. So in a way, if I'm hearing you correctly, and please correct me if I'm wrong, because I often do get it wrong, it's this core idea that if we are devoid or if we are living our life on such autopilot that we de-prioritize art, which also includes our connection to nature and recognizing the beauty of nature, which we inherently were always doing. It's just that now we have to seek it out because of how we live. That has all sorts of implications.

And one of those implications is you're going to notice that your sensitivity to your own intuition might be lowered because you're not actually activating your senses with the reception and the pleasure that comes with seeing and enjoying art. Is that one way to think about things? Yeah, yeah. I think that's a really interesting way to come at it. You know, this idea of embodied cognition, so connecting your physiology to your cognition is really important. And a couple years ago, Ivy and I did an experiment exhibition in Milan where we developed three different rooms.

And we use neurostatic principles to create kind of living room, dining room spaces. and we developed a biomarker or wristband that looked at variable heart rate, respiration, and body temperature. And we asked people that each room had a different vibe. And one was called essential, one was called vital, and one was called transcendent. And we just said to people, put your phones in your pockets, no talking, just be. It was called a space for being. Just come in and experience the space.

We had created a scent, a piece of me. music for each room. We curated highly tactile materials for each of the spaces that were very different. And people wandered, they touched, they could touch the walls. There was different lighting, some uplighting, some downlighting, different hues, different palettes. And we just asked people to just experience the rooms. And at the end, we gave them a printout of how they experienced each room. It was this really beautiful data visualization that looked like a watercolor from 12 o'clock to 12 o'clock, like a circle. And where you were activated, there was this first of watercolor.

And the idea was to ask a question about the experience. And we could have asked any question because we had collected data that would help us get there. But we asked, what room were you most at ease in? Where did you feel most comfortable, most sort of relaxed? And 58% of the people that we talked with got it wrong. The room that they physiologically felt most at ease in was not the room that they thought they felt most at ease. And so the cognitive brain was basically telling them what they thought they should feel, but they weren't really tapped into their bodies. And it was really a revolution. What they

realized was they we often walk around and we we we like things that people tell us to like we we think we should like this we overthink it but our bodies are telling us something very different but we're not connected to them and when we are we make different decisions and we make I would argue better decisions and so we define the arts in a very broad way that I think serves humanity in a very directed way, which is the arts are creative self-expression. And if you think about that for a minute, if you just sit on that, that could be visual arts, that could be interior design, that could be gardening, that could be cooking, that could be humming, it could be doodling, it could be dancing, it could be visual arts, it could be immersive arts,

It could be any kind of thing where you are creatively expressing yourself. And one of the things that we're seeing with technology is that there are new art forms being created with technology, but that art, the act of making art is really about creative self-expression. The art of beholding is bringing in others expressive arts, expressive expression. And so that is a very broad canvas. And it's sort of lower cases the A for us where, you know, if the arts are really things that we do, like I mentioned when I was a child, and we're doing these things we're being, they're a part of how we're being, you start to lower the bar on being excellent at it or being a professional. And it isn't to say that being great at an art form isn't wonderful, but it's not required to have. significant impact and outcomes in your life. And so I think it starts to sort of say, it's okay to

just do these things. And if you do them more and you master them, you're going to get better at them. And you may be really talented. But that's not the only purpose. It's sort of one outcome, but not the same as bringing these things into your life. So we say, you know, even just 20 minutes a day will actually enhance the quality of your life. So in my instance, I think of there's an art that I try to bring to my approach to podcasting and interviews. And that art is pattern recognition. And I run businesses.

I have a quote unquote day job where I'm the CEO of a group of companies and a clinic and everything. But I find that I am most activated internally. and that my brain is also active in a beautiful way and it's also very meditative. When I get a chance to allow my mind to rest and sort of deeply listen to a guest, it's nice to do it through Zoom, but it's also more fun to do it in person. But I let my mind rest and I step into this deep place of pattern recognition to try to weave the pieces of the puzzle to ask hopefully, and I don't always do this, but hopefully to ask really interesting questions that I'm interested in, but also that would be beneficial to my audience.

So if I'm understanding you, that could be part of my artistic expression, but we don't want to use that or I don't want to use it as an excuse, not to invite in the other art forms into my life that would also activate other senses that are there. Is that correct? Yeah. I mean, even like right now, I think you and I are in an improv, right? I don't know what you're going to say. You don't know what I'm going to say. You're listening for patterns, rhythms, tones. You're responding to what I'm saying.

You're riffing off of something. You know, we are in and of ourselves in a kind of duet. And the more enjoyable it is for the both of us is when we're not just trying to push stuff into each other, but we're really trying to metabolize and appreciate and savor and contribute to the relationship, right, the connection that we're making. So you walk away and I walk away and I say, wow, I'm a different person because I brought something in that was new for me that's changed me, right and and and and and I think the quality of that the caliber of that is so important and yeah I mean what you do in terms of pattern making and then you know figuring out that creative co-creating because

you've learned who your community is and what they need and you're satisfying that and also you're you're figuring out how to bring in this new colors into this into their world I think is totally a form of art. And yes, you don't want to, the more experiences you have that are, to think about a cross-training. You know, if you're, if this is one way that you exercise your creative muscle, that's great. But, you know, maybe you also are out in nature. Maybe you also like to garden. Maybe you also like to cook.

Maybe you try singing because even though you don't think of yourself as a good singer, it actually feels really good. And that's a new sensation for you in a way that you haven't experienced before. And, you know, the more new experiences we have, the stronger these neural pathways are. And the more salient they are, my husband and I dance almost every Friday night. And we're not dancers. You know, we don't know, we've never taken a dance class or anything like that. But we really love to dance. And it just, it's fun. It feels really good. good and it's we just look forward to it and you know i know a lot of people that have sort of rituals and traditions that are um around movement or singing or work singing in a chorus or or reading

reading poetry where you are extending that kind of um neurobiological expansion and it changes you yeah do you guys ever throw in a little bit of wigi board every so often to bust out the Ouija board and do that? I'm scared of the Ouija board. I know it's power, right? I have respect. I have total respect for the. I have one around here that my sister made. It's like I have all the old, old stencils and we have a lot of old Ouija boards. But my sister made one, this really cool one out of ceramics. That's really beautiful. But yeah, yeah, I don't, yeah, I don't know. Well, usually people do it. They try to elicit a little bit of fear. And that's like the fun part. do it during a thunderstorm and it's lightning outside and it's kind of a fun thing to do when

you're a kid. You know, this takes us really to like, again, this core concept number one of neuroplasticity. I'm going to share a quote with you in the audience from your book. And the quote is, so arts and aesthetics can quite literally rewire your brain. They are the secret sauce that helps build new synaptic connections. When I read this quote and in the context of this interview, as you were saying, that if you just went to the gym and worked on one muscle and you only did biceps and that's all of which you did ever, you're not going to get the full benefit of working out. You might have a big

bicep, but then your back is going to start to hurt. There's going to be other challenges. And a few years ago, there was this Sudoku craze. Everybody was doing Sudoku. And a big part of that was people would say, oh, Sudoku is the way to activate neuroplasticity. But neuroplasticity, as people started to really understand the true meaning of it was so much more than just doing one thing again and again in Sudoku. It was really about activating this full array as you were chatting about. So what do you want to share here about neuroplasticity and how art activates that? And why, as a refresher for those, again, that are not as familiar about the concept of neuroplasticity, why that general idea is so important, especially as we age in our lives?

Yeah. Well, you know, I think it's fair to say that arts and aesthetics alter of complex physiological network of interconnected systems. So it's certainly this neuroplasticity connects neural networks, but also other physiological systems like the immune system and the endocrine system, our circulatory systems, our respiratory systems, and then, of course, these higher order systems that are cognitive or affective reward systems, motor systems. So when you're little and you are connecting up all of these interconnected systems, you're laying down the capacity for resilience later in life. So we know that young children who are

really making these very strong neural connections through arts and aesthetic experiences are actually changing brain structure. We've seen some beautiful studies that the cerebral cortex, the outer part of the brain actually get larger. We see myelination, which is that coating around neural pathways become healthier and stronger. And you want that because, you know, information that's going through, electrical information is going through these neural pathways. It'll go faster and much more efficiently if there's the coding so that they're not slowing down. And so you want that. You want these different parts of the brain to be interconnected. So when you're little, it's really important. But as you're older, some of these systems begin to wear. And so you want to be able to have

this constant building of neural pathways to continue to keep you healthy and strong and cognitively sharp. And we even know that in healthy aging, things like dancing are so important for the cerebellum, for the motor systems, for this sense of synchronicity and rhythm and for being able to pay attention. So using those systems, you're really cross-training when you're dancing because there's so much that you have to do. This is one example as being able to do that. Reading poetry is another great example. Reading poetry out loud actually engages the same part of the brain as listening to music. And that makes a lot of sense because of most often poetry is rhythmic, but it actually keeps that part of the brain.

brain really active. So it's really true, you know, neurons that wire together, fire together. And also use it or lose it. So it's really important that you continue to use it. There's some great work also around Alzheimer's. And when you have listened to music as a young person and there's this very strong personalized or autobiographical music, initially that kind of content gets stored and consolidated in the hippocampus. But then it distributes in other parts of the brain in terms of emotion or affect in auditory cortex. And so it gets distributed in multiple parts of the brain when you're bringing in that kind of information. And when the hippocampus is starting to be damaged by plaque from Alzheimer's, and we sing with someone, we're still able to call back that very

salient autobiographical music because it's been distributed in parts of the brain that are still functioning. And so the brain has these backup systems that are just amazing. And to your earlier point, we don't know how all of this works. We're just starting. And sadly, you know, we know a lot about sensory systems. We're just starting to be able to invest in, at a National Institute of Health level, at a public investment into the arts in a serious way so that we're understanding the neurobiology of all of this

work. That's really going to help us think about prevention, intervention, and protection using the arts in concert with other kinds of ways that we heal. So I think it's a yes end. With the information that we know right now is there, and there might be different ones for different ways of experiencing art, but have you come across what? what the minimum viable dose might be for people who are looking. And I asked that from a standpoint of we used to, as you mentioned, we used to live around art all the time. And we didn't think of ourselves as creating art in society.

It was just being. It was how our lives were designed in villages and communities that was a regular part of community especially. And now we obviously live a little bit differently. So now people have to actively fight. They have to actively fight to make time in their calendar to make sure that their priorities are protected. And that could be working out. That could be cooking at home. If people have the luxury for that, that could be a lot of things that we try to do exercise and movement. So is there a minimum viable

dose that you've come across when it has come to different aspects of art to start to really reap the rewards from it? Yeah, that's a great question. You know, I think the way that we've become more transactional and we've kind of, it's kind of a dimmer, right? We didn't turn off the switch. We've just dimmed all of these ways of being in arts and aesthetics down. And it's like the frog in the water, right? When the water starts to boil, the frog will stay in there because it's slow, so slow. And eventually the frog dies.

And I feel like that's kind of what we've done with the arts. Yet a lot of the things that you just mentioned, you know, cooking or taking a walk in nature or even how do you prepare for bedtime or taking a shower in the morning. I think one of the things about these arts experiences at a very hyper-local personal level is you're doing all of these things anyway. The question is, can you change your lens on how you do these things day-to-day? So there's a lot of, I think, things that you can do right now that are just going to enhance your day-to-day experiences.

So your question about what's dose and dosage, there are some things that we do. do know about dose and dosage. For example, with Parkinson's, we know that people that are dancing on Zoom and dancing more often extend their improvements in gait, are able to have greater cognition, greater sleep, greater mood. We're seeing with light and sound, I mentioned with the progression of dementia, 40 hertz of light and sound, an hour a day, is literally slowing the progression of dementia. And so we're starting to see dose and dosage. some of these things are immediate and accessible, like using virtual reality for chronic pain, that's an instant pain relief that ultimately reduces the need for opioids and other kinds of

things. Moms are using dance and singing and humming for postpartum depression. And with, I think it's a four-week course, they're finding that depression is significantly reduced and they're also not having to rely on antidepressants. And so for a young mom, that's really important with, you know, the bonding that happens with a new baby. And so dose and dosage is something that we're seeing in a medical sense. And we're starting to get a much more clarity, more than ever clarity on how this can be administrated from a more medical perspective and then how it can be used in socializing in public health and other kinds of things.

So there's active ways to do it and medicine will continue to identify them and prescribe them. But what you're really also trying to help people understand is there's passive things, things that you're already experiencing that just by putting a little of attention there, you could reap the rewards. And one of them that was very fascinating to me, and I think is underappreciative for a lot of people, is this idea of enriched environments. Can you chat a little bit about what those are and how we can think about that on our day, even in the rooms that we're all in right now.

Yeah, yeah. In the 60s, there was a study by a woman named Marion Diamond. And she was the first person to really see structural changes in the brain with rats. So she created three environments. One was highly enriched, which meant sensory stimulation, novelty, surprise, frequent changes, light sources that were natural light for rats. So think of it as sort of like an optimal space. The second space she created was an impoverished environment. So no toys, nothing changed. It's very predictable, not, you know, well suited. And then she did, then she created a third space that was kind of like your average

rat cage, not, you know, like the Goldilocks, you know, just not too much, not too little. Just average space. In two weeks, she looked at the brains of these rats and she found that the rats that had been in the enriched environment increased brain mass by 6%. The rats that were in the sort of everyday kind of same as sort of stayed the same. The rats that that were in impoverished space lost brain mass in just two weeks. And so, um, That was really the first time that we really saw neuroplasticity. We really had a great example of what neuroplasticity looked like in terms of creating neural pathways and changes, real structural changes in the brain.

Some of that work has been done now using EEG and other mobile brain devices to look at spaces for people. And we see the same thing. We see very similar results. And so enriched environments take into account all of these materiality, light, texture, temperature, usage. So what is the space for and what are you trying to achieve from the space color is another really powerful enriched environment space? How do you think about the space and how are you use it? We see in schools, spaces that are designed with these elements in mind with specific outcomes,

outcome measures are better. We see in retirement communities and spaces where older people are, where there are these changes in environments, where they're changing out symbols and activities, they have greater capacity and greater cognition. We see in homes where people are really consciously thinking about what is a space for more achievement, usually in restoration and relaxation in homes. And so it's something that you don't have to spend a lot of money for in order to really think deeply about what spaces are you coming into. How does it feel? What's the temperature? And what's the goal of the space? That's another piece that I think it's really important. And hospitals are a great example of that. You know, hospitals are mostly designed for efficiency.

And workplaces have often been designed for efficiency, not for innovation, not for creativity, not for healing. There's a great study that was done not that long ago. By just putting paintings in hospital rooms and or windows that you could see outside, patients recovered faster and better and left the hospital in much shorter time. I think it was two days faster than people who didn't have that kind of art or access to nature in their spaces. That's powerful. Yeah, it makes me think of the work of also researchers like Dr. Suchin Panda, who's down in San Diego, and he's most known for his work in circadian biology.

And somebody who read his material that was at a hospital in Mexico City that was working in the the Nick You found that when just following the natural cycles of the sun and making sure that hospitals, which again, you mentioned, are set up for efficiency, they're so, right at night and you have these premature infants that are being exposed to this artificial light, they saw by protecting those infants, these premature infants, and not exposing them to this artificial light at night, which they wouldn't get if they weren't in a hospital. They shortened the stay at the NICU from 15 days to 10 days. And that had all sorts of implications on other health outcomes later on in the life. The longer you are in the NICU, the more likely you are to devise.

develop allergies, be underweight, et cetera, et cetera. So anything that can be done to, again, bring us back to, in this case, it's obviously circadian biology and nature can have profound effects for all of us. I know for myself here in my studio, we're recording this remotely, but just even having fake plants up just dramatically, you know, sure, would I like a real plant? But there's plenty of times we're not here and nobody can come and water it. but even a fake plant and bringing in some sense of nature just brings a little bit more peace to the folks that are, you know, recording inside of here.

So all these tiny things, they add up and they make a difference. They make a huge difference. You know, during COVID, Mount Sinai, there's a fabulous researcher there named David Petrino. And he worked with a group called Studio Elsewhere to build these recharge rooms for physicians and staff nurses who were just so overwhelmed. They weren't leaving the hospital and they were beyond exhaustion. And they created these rooms and in a hospital they had to use plastic plants, but they created a big video screen and nature sounds, light source that was really soothing.

And people would come in for 15 minutes to listen to nature, to look at nature, to be surrounded by nature and sort of a soft, light. And what they saw was that cortisol lowered dramatically. And they did a kind of a pre-imposed really quick, like a couple-minute survey. And what they saw was that people had more gratitude for being in a space for just 15 minutes. So, you know, and this was such an acute situation. So I think we really undervalue these moments, 15 minutes, 10 minutes of appreciation in the the mundane that can really change your mood, your attitude, and what happens for you for the rest of the day. Can you talk about this idea of our brain and our neurons pruning and how that

concept works? I thought it was so fascinating. It's part of your neuroplasticity section in the book. And it helps even people who have some base understanding of how the brain works. It really kind of takes it a little bit further with showing how art can help our brain develop these deep roots in a similar way that like high quality produce or grapes might, you know, develop. So yeah, explain pruning a little bit. Yeah, yeah. This is Ivy Ross's favorite. She loves this. And it, you know, it's really is sort of extraordinary. The way that we explain it in the book is, so my husband's the chair of neuroscience at Johns Hopkins. His name's Rick Hugeneer.

And this is our second marriage. And so when we met the first night, he kissed me. And, you know, like a little kiss, not a big kiss, but a little kiss. And he said that his neural pathways went crazy, went off, you know, like just, and he knew that I was the one, like he was going to marry me. And at the same time, he also, all those other kisses of all those other women that he kissed before faded away. They became less important because this neural pathway was the one that was really sort of connecting all of the different parts of his brain. And so the more, you know, kisses, the stronger and deeper those neural pathways. And the ones

that were there before that had a similar cadence become less important. They prune. They prune away because they're not needed. And so, you know, with arts and aesthetic experiences, and I'll argue that kissing is an art. Or at least that's the hope. Wouldn't we all? You know, when you think about that, he's going to die when he hears this. Please air this part of the show. Absolutely. But it's really true. He actually drew a picture for me of his neuropath. is getting stronger in kissing and the other ones fading away, which we have framed in our house. But I think it's really true that these things that you don't no longer are using get weaker and weaker and weaker and the ones that you are building on.

And so let's just say that, you know, I'm going to take this metaphor way further than I should. But there are certain experiences in life that you don't want to re-ignite. You want to replace them with better, more meaningful, more important experiences. So in this realm of kissing, you know, that's a great thing to be able to have these other experiences sort of become less potent. They're not being charged by other synapses. And so I think of it in terms of things like, trauma or anxiety or depression, if you're replacing these things that, you know, enriched environments, if you're creating an enriched environment where you're building neural pathways that are

that are changing the way a room feels for you and you're starting to feel joy or focus or a sense of attention or meaning. And what had been created in that space before might have been exhaustion or fear or, you know, just apathy, that's a great thing. And so the more you build these strong neural pathways that are really resonating and salient for you and, and I think, you know, positive, these other ones sort of begin to be less important and to fade away. Is it similar to the idea that in the space of neurobiology, and we've had different experts come on this podcast to talk about it, Dan Siegel, and others, you know, trauma, we've all gone through various versions of maybe big T traumas or

little T traumas, but trauma isn't just what happens to you. It's the sense of what you make the meaning out of the situation. And if we think about things like the Aces score and the Aces study, advanced childhood experiences, traumatic experiences that are there, a big part of who score, who scores high on that versus the people that might be thinking that they score a little bit lower is the meaning that they've made out of the trauma and the healing that's come from that. So is it a far reach to say that art can be part of that healing process and is part of that healing process of creating new meaning and letting go of some of the things that happened to in the past? Is that one way to think about it?

Yeah. You know, there's a fabulous program called Creative Forces, which was developed by the Veterans Administration, National Endowment for the Arts, and the Department of Defense. And the program was set up for active military and veterans who have had these huge traumatic experiences. And the other part of trauma is that energy gets stored in the body, gets trapped in the body, and it can't release it. So every time, and there is a framing, a perception that happens that, of how you feel about that story, that thing that happened that gets repeated over and over and

over again. And there's these triggers that bring that back up and it's repeated over and over again. And one of the ways that art is being used in creative forces is these folks are developing, in the case I'm thinking about masks. So they're literally creating masks as symbols of their experience. And sometimes they're highly patriotic. Sometimes they look like cartoon or comic characters, you know, from Marvel or other, you know, other stories. Sometimes they have symbols of what happened to them, like an injury. But they're able to get the symbolic representation of what happened to them in the mask. And then they come back and they work with a creative arts therapist to start to create a narrative and a new narrative about how they're feeling and what that has meant to them

and how they can move forward. And by releasing that body's energy, they start to be able to change that perspective and that perception. And sometimes it's shame, stigma, grief, loss, betrayal, either to another or to the self, embarrassment. You know, there's all these feelings that are so held inside. And by getting them out in this kind of artistic form, they're able to start to be able to process that and change the narrative. And, you know, I think we all do that thing inside of our heads where we tell ourselves a story.

And sometimes that story just gets deeper and deeper entrenched. And by being able to bring it out as an act of bravery to be able to share that experience and to be able to work safely, in this case, with someone. in a psychosocial process to be able to put words to it. It's really quite extraordinary. On the topic of stories and how we become entrenched in them, can you talk about the default mode network and its relationship in the context of this conversation? Sure. And I was going to talk about it earlier when you were talking about your pattern making.

So the default mode network is seen as being kind of connected to the, the saliency network. It's a part of the brain that really goes to work when you aren't actively taking in the world where you're, you've hit pause. And, you know, when we're bringing in so much information, we've got to process that. We've got to bring that into a sense of feeling and emotion. We're bringing it in. We're bringing it in. But the default mode network is, some people call it the seat of self. It's that place where you daydream and mind wander. you make patterns, you make these connections, you make decisions about what you think is beautiful, what you like and you don't like. It's kind of how you create your mental model of the world,

and it's how you create your perceptions of the world. And so if those are created, as you were just talking about with trauma, in a very negative and traumatic view, those are the things that are going to really permeate how you bring, how you make sense of the, of the world. So changing that sort of process is really important. And that default mode network can be certainly influenced by your childhood experiences, by life experiences, by your genetics. But it's really important that we give each other and ourselves time to process all of the things that are coming in so that, you know, you know yourself, you have the sense of identity and personality because you are creating that when you're really allowing your default mode network to do its job.

So our default mode network is highly influenced, especially by our early childhood experiences. Is that fair to say? And is that a big influence on our default mode network that people kind of grow up with is a lot of their early childhood experiences, kind of like their brain getting settled in the early years. Is that your understanding of it? It is, but I don't think that it's fixed. Yes. And I think we, and that's really important is that, that's, you know, comes full circle back to neuroplasticity.

There may be things that are harder to shift. And that's another place where I think the arts can be really helpful as a maker or a beholder in being able to help to sort of reevaluate what you might hold to be a truth for you that can be changed based on new information. Yeah, that's exactly what I wanted to get to is that we have these early childhood experiences that shape who we are. And so even on a very simple level, somebody might notice that they complain a lot, a lot meaning more than they would like to. And they could be working with a therapist and the therapist talks about, what was your like growing up? Who are the people that were caretaking of you? Did you see them complaining a lot? It's like,

oh, you know, you really looked up to your mom or your dad. And yeah, okay, they complained a little bit more than normal for a lot of reasons that they ended up into, maybe about how they were raised. So let's say you want to change that about yourself or you won't want to do it as much as just one example. I've seen people who have tapped into not just general awareness, but using activation tools like music and singing and breath. and other things to help them sort of rewire that default mode network to the place that they don't think of themselves as being that complaining person as much anymore. So I guess the dots that I was trying to connect there for you, which you shared,

is that arts are the vehicle, which is the broader context of how you're talking about art. Art is the vehicle that helps us evolve that default mode network if there are patterns or repeated behaviors that are no longer serving us and we want to shift them in a different direction. Yeah, I've been thinking a lot about habits lately, like, you know, how you create a habit and then how do you change a habit? And, you know, I've seen the light go out of children's eyes who have started off by having some kind of learning difference or intellectual disability where, you know, they just try so

hard and at a certain point they can't figure it out or the world says you know you're not the same you can't do this or you start to get labeled or there's stigma and you start to see these habits that are created around coping and narratives and sort of how you see yourself in that as not good enough. And I think we're seeing a lot of that in the world now where there's a sense of lack of self-esteem and hopelessness in children, but I think also in adults. And it made me start to think about habits and habits like how do you bring music or art into your life to start to activate those kinds of triggers. How do you, how do you, how do you, how do you, start to transition from not feeling good enough to being successful and part of a group through

the entry of something like just doing a drumming circle or, you know, showing up for, you know, a pottery experience or working in a community garden. I mean, you know, keeping it really simple, coming to a dinner where you're helping to make that dinner and reshaping that sense of accomplishment and connectivity. I think sometimes we can get so far away from others because we've pulled back. And I think this is where redefining your default mode network, I don't think, you know, we're conscious of about 5% of what's happening with us, right? So all this unconscious work is also happening underneath of that. So how do you raise that forward and how do you bring that to another level so that you can really look at intentional change for wanting to, you know,

address a behavior. I don't know if we, we haven't talked about the aesthetic triad yet. So, John Chatterjee is a neurologist. He's now at Penn. And he runs a neuroesthetics program there. and he and some colleagues began to think about this as a theoretical model, looking at trying to explain how we each perceive the world from a different perch. And he has a triad that has three components. The first is called knowledge and meaning, which includes kind of where you come from and what you know. And then the second is sensory motor or your physiological systems that are engaged

when you're active in an experience, an aesthetic experience. And then the third is your emotional evaluation or how you feel about something. And I think that ties into the default mode network. But at the center of that are these intersecting circles where your unique experience or moments are achieved. And the more salient or important those experiences are, the greater your aesthetic experience. So change any one of those and you change that experience or change the input and you have the opportunity to change that experience, which ultimately,

changes you at a neurobiological level. That's powerful. You know, you were talking about school a little bit earlier. I'd love to talk about the subject. When I was reading your book, a big idea that I walked away from is we often talk about the idea that arts continue to get deprioritized in school. Art funding continues to get deprioritized. And that, of course, is a sad situation that includes music and different arts.

But the larger idea that I had was that, Even the idea of bringing art into other subjects has really been removed from school. The artistic approach to thinking about history, to thinking about mathematics, to thinking about different things, just the artful way, the creative thinking approach, which actually in this economy today is more valued than ever. This is not the economy of remembering statistics, remembering facts. we have things like chat GPT and calculators and we can look anything up at the touch of our hands on the internet. But I was really feeling the sense of we're missing the art approach to everything in school.

It reminded me of a story that I read a few years ago about an industrialist from Brazil whose name is Ricardo Semler. And he's written a few different books. One of them is called Maverick. And after he took over his father's company, which had a big bunch of conglomerates in different areas and industry, one of the things that he did with his employees that they had asked for is they designed a school from scratch. And they said that if we're going to think about history and we're going to think about math and we're going to think about all these different subjects, especially for what the economy needs today, instead of thinking about these as all isolated subjects, we're going to instead pick a project because the human mind works great with people. projects and that's how we've typically had to learn, not by just memorizing facts. So we'll take the idea of putting a bicycle together. Well, we're going to study the history of bicycles. Well, we're going to think about math as it relates to putting a bicycle together and how the gears

and the tires and everything work. We're going to think about how bicycles have transformed cities. We're going to take this project and we're going to deconstruct it and look at it from all different angles. And I thought, wow, first of all, I wish I went to a school like that or had access to that for my future kids one day, but that really felt like an artful way to bring in education as a whole. So I don't know if I have an exact question, but more a sense of I'd love to toss it over to you to talk about the current state of schools and what you're seeing beyond just this idea that the core central art classes are being defunded, which they are, and that's a very sad thing, but it feels like it's a little bit of a bigger issue that we're missing out on as well.

Oh, totally. I mean, don't get. me started. I'm getting you started. Please go. Well, okay. So, you know, I came up on my first company was called Curiosity Kits, which was hands-on learning on how to learn about the arts and sciences and culture. And it came out of creating a camp at a children's museum where I literally saw the lights come on in kids who had been sitting, filling in the bubbles all day long because the school systems went from being these places of genuine inquiry and discovery to places where you check the boxes. And it was in the 70s in this country when Sputnik happened and for all the right reasons we did all the wrong things. We thought, oh, now it's got to be math, engineering, and science.

And we've got to take the arts out because they're not important. And what we did was gut the education system. We took the most important curiosity, exploration, hands-on learning, project-based learning, arts integration, out. And we said, okay, you just got to like memorize all these facts and hold them in your head. And yet we know that you can't even hold facts in your head longer than, you know, weeks and sometimes months that we don't retain information that way. It's not, wrote memory is totally not the most efficient way to retain information or, recall information. And there's some people that are good at it. We sadly call them geniuses or have high IQs. That's the equivalent of what it means to have a high IQ is that you can retain and

recall information. But that's not the game. That's not the way we make innovations in humanity. That's not the way we change the world. And so we now, you know, 50 years later, are seeing the results of what we did in systematically gutting the schools to these very, very pedestrian, sit in a chair, listen to someone, give you information. Why wouldn't you be bored? Why wouldn't you fall asleep? Why wouldn't you have bad behavior? I mean, those are the people that you are really the innovators. They're the ones, you know, we're not allowed to doodling class yet. We know dutling, you're more analytical. You retain information better. You're more focused. But no, you can't doodle. If you're not good at art, you shouldn't be doing it. So all this mythology.

around art happened. And so you look at corporations now and you see what corporations are asking for is creative problem solvers, people that can collaborate, people that can think out of the box. Yet the pipeline is not bringing those folks forward. And even the technologists, you know, as you said, you know, some of the technology innovations are doing a lot of the work that can be done by machines. And so what is it that humans do? We feel, we create, we collaborate, we have this sensorial.

I mean, there are sensors in technology, but humans have senses. And so using those senses, using the sensorial to think about how do we work together, how do we optimize our human potential? And so I think right now we're in a really interesting place where this knowledge of what the arts are and how we learn. It's really starting to come back and that's why we've created the chapter on learning was to show that education is a system. Learning is a biological function and we learn best when we're doing all of these things that are intrinsically what we call arts. So in reading music and playing music together is one of those things that also increases the cerebral cortex, also increases mollination.

we know that when people are painting and having these or doing visual arts and having these introspection and reflections about process, executive function, self-regulation, they're happening in that context, but then they're transferring into other areas of our lives and transfer is sort of the holy grail in learning. You want to be able to take a skill you learn here and use it here and here and here. and you want that in the business sector, or you want it in the military. You want to be able to have these proficiencies and these capabilities to be able to really be agile and to shift all of those things of which learning through these enriched arts experiences happen. So in a week

or two, I'm going out to the Getty with Ivy and we are having a conversation with 300 school superintendents. There's something called Proposition 28 that has moved through California that brings a billion dollars a year into the schools for arts education. And the way it's set up is that every school is going to have at least one arts educator, but there's so much more, right? So it's not just having the art teacher. It's how do you integrate the arts through all these other areas. how do you think about it for social emotional learning? How do you think about it for executive function? How do you think about it for creating identity and character and navigating through all the twists and turns from pre-K through high school? And one of the things we know from epidemiology studies is that

kids that do art make better decisions, stay in school longer, and actually have better outcomes. And so there's really great research that isn't just speculative, but actually shows that over, you know, 50 years, kids that have done these kinds of experiences are really thriving. They don't take drugs for the most part. They have later life pregnancies. All the sort of outcome measures that we know are really important for creating the structure for adulting. And I think it's really going to be interesting to see what happens in California.

And other states are watching it. But there's a lot of learning that has to happen at the legislative level. at the leadership level in schools, and also for parents and caring, loving adults in a life of a child who really don't know how the arts fit because they've been so radically devalued. And so I think we have a lot to learn, but I think it's a really good time to be seeing something like this happen in California. I couldn't agree more. I'm skipping ahead a little bit, but a section in the book that I really found fascinating was this idea of how brain development is connected to this idea of states of awe.

Can you chat a little bit about that? Yeah, so that's the work of Dacker Keltner. And Dacker is at University of California, Berkeley. He's been studying awe for a very long time. And the chapter you're referring to is the flourishing chapter. So, you know, we don't just want to survive. We really want to thrive and flourish. And a lot of times I think we're only just getting by, we're just making it. But this idea of capacity and human potential, like what could we do as a species if we were really optimizing our potential? So

that chapter really honors that thinking. And there's a number of attributes of flourishing that really lay, build the muscle, if you will, for how you flourish. One is curiosity. One is wonder. Another is ritual and tradition. And another is awe. And so awe is the state of being that we all experience where we feel like we're part of something bigger, that we are allowed to work together to make the world a better place, that we are really inspired to do more and to be more. And it's really kind of another one of those very important survival skills. You felt it like when you've gotten goosebumps or your heart starts to race or you start to perspire because you're just, you just are so amazed. In the book, we share a study by a researcher, neuroscientist named Bo Lato. He's an

England and he studied a Cirque de Soleil. And if you've ever been to Cirque de Soleil show, it's extraordinary. I mean, people are, the music's amazing, the light, the way people come in and out. The storytelling is awe-inspiring. Like, you find yourself sitting up straighter and kind of like being transported to another place. And Bo found that people who have had these all experiences together are more hopeful. And they're also willing to take more risk, which is really interesting because if you're really going to change your life and change the world, we have to get outside of our comfort zone. So we have to take more risk. So I think all actually is a very interesting driver. You know, like why did we go on the other side of the hill?

Why did we go around the corner? You know, what is those all inspiring things where we want to know more. Why did we want to know how the sun shines? These are these all inspiring experiences that make us want to do and to know more and to take risk. So it's really sort of an extraordinary human trait. Related to the idea of awe, have you been following any of the work and research? You know, you mentioned your husband being at Johns Hopkins. We've had Dr. Roland Griffiths on this podcast, and he's talked about the work and research that his team has been involved in in psilocybin. Have you followed at all the connection in the research of awe and plant medicine and its potential therapeutic effects? Is that been something that you've been paying attention to at all?

Yeah, I have. So our lab is highly interdisciplinary, and we do a lot of work with Roland's group of consciousness and psychedelics, the center there. And we've been focusing on set and setting, not unlike enriched environments. And we've been focusing right now with another researcher there named Fred Barrett. And Fred is very interested. He's a psychologist and a cognitive neuroscientist. And he's very interested in looking at the role of music for psychedelic experiences. So how do you think about how music or sound can create the environment

for a successful psychedelic experience and how you can help use music to integrate that experience. And so we're right now doing a study where we're looking at five or six different types of music or sound experiences. One is autobiographical music. The other is sort of a traditional playlist that has been used for a very long time. Another is using nature sounds. Another is using indigenous sounds. that are primarily using old instruments that they can be string, but a lot of times they're

wind instruments. And then looking at a couple of other variables to see what's happening neurobiologically without the psychedelic at play, so without psilocybin, and then we're coming back and using those same variables to look at what happens with music and the psychedelic. And we have a hypothesis that we think that music and the right music at the right time can open up some of those same critical windows for self-discovery that psilocybin can do and then what can happen together. So we're really interested in that. There's some other people looking at the role of meditation and music. We also want to look at space, the physical space, when you're entering into that set and setting.

And so we're in a five-year research study looking at that. And I think psilocybin or plant-based medicine is really important. And I think it's becoming better understood. This idea of set in setting or these environments has not been well studied. And they're really critical to having a successful experience and a successful integration. So we're ultimately going to be working with guides to share some of the research that can help to inform some of that practice. But I think there's lots of ways to get there. I don't think plant medicine is the only way to get there.

And we think that some of these arts and aesthetic experiences may offer other opportunities to be able to do that. I don't know if you've ever done a sound bath, the sort of vibrational, highly resonating experiences that, literally impact you at a cellular level. You know, there's some really great work happening there as well. First of all, that's fascinating. I didn't know that your lab was involved in that work. That's super amazing. I'm very happy to hear that and we'll continue to follow it. I can just speak from an anecdotal basis on my side is that I took my parents, my wife, and a few other my family members, my brother-in-law, a few friends to an assisted psilocybin experience earlier this year. and it was one of the most transformative experiences that we've all experienced.

And besides the fact that we were doing it all together, it was guided. We had a great group that was guiding us. But I think when I talked about it afterwards with my friends who had also had different experiences with psilocybin. As I've shared before, it's not for everyone. We've done many episodes on this topic. You can refer back to it if you want to hear from the experts in this field. But just this is my anecdotal experience, the group that we were with, which was in

Hawaii had brought in two musicians who were playing from all these sacred songs of different traditions around the world, including from my own background, which would be the Vedic and Hindu tradition in India. And their use of songs to deepen the journey for us, I feel personally, was one of the main reasons that our group had felt the extreme shift. And as they would typically call maybe the heightened sense of downloaded information that they were feeling these messages, wherever these messages are come from, or even if it's just, you know, our default neural network quieting down and our brain sort of really opening up and listening to things that were already there inside of us. But the use of music to deepen that experience compared to friends that we would talk to that didn't really have that set in setting, as you were mentioning, what was profoundly different. And so I'm very excited to hear that your lab is working on that because there feels like so much potential in that space when those two things could be brought together for the right reasons in the right context.

Yeah. And culture, I think and context is really important. You know, there are people that have had experiences where there are pieces of music that are extremely upsetting and evoke. very strong responses. And there's some real ethical questions. You know, does it make sense to continue with those kinds of text when someone is really upset and really not finding transcendence, but they're really pushing back? Or is that, you know, something that you move through? And I know one experience that was shared with me is that this was an experimental small pilot where someone agreed to, if it was a piece of music that was uncomfortable, that they would agree to not stopping that piece of music, but to continue on. And then after the integration, they discussed it. And this person would have been happier and felt that it was not

therapeutically beneficial to continue with a piece of music. They knew how to breathe. They were able to work through it, but that it actually was detrimental to their experience. And so I think some of this is really important. This is why we're looking at music, is what agency should you have in that and where is novelty and surprise and bringing in a text that may be something that you didn't expect helpful and transcendent? And so there's a lot of really important questions there. You know, it's interesting that some of the music from your culture and your community were very powerful to you. And I think we have to really understand more at a, there's a particular level, but there's also a universal level. And what are the best practices that can help to guide some of that?

And I think that's going to be really important. Yeah. I can just say that my dad felt that he was in heaven dancing and singing with angels when he had heard a lot of the music that was coming. from our tradition and that was a big activator of his experience. Maybe I'll bring him on the podcast one day to talk about it. I love that. Yeah. Yeah, it was very profound. You know, I want to return back to because I skipped ahead a little bit to the section about flourishing and awe states because it felt right in the context of the conversation. But I want to return back to as we're winding down here with our time together, this idea of well-being, which is a whole section inside of the book. And we

opened up the podcast conversation today talking about all these high-level. concepts of how art truly is being used to activate and heal the brain, heal the body, and also help us flourish. You know, one topic that is very hot right now is the topic of longevity. It seems that there's multiple bestsellers that are on the list right now as we have the baby boomer generation or the adjacent generation thinking and having a lot of disposable income and thinking about longevity and their health, which, you know, largely I think is a good thing. Help us understand a little bit more about art and its role in the context of longevity. Anything there that people should be paying attention to. So AARP is actually doing some really interesting work there and thinking

about this idea of creative aging. And the bottom line is the more you engage in these activities, the stronger your brain health is going to be. And so along with things like nutrition, sleep, exercise, engaging in these aesthetic experiences, are actually building capacity and resilience. And so, you know, and you can understand because the, as I mentioned earlier, these experiences affect neural pathways, and that's really important, but they also affect cardiologists, cardiology health, pulmonary health, you know, endocrine system, immune system, regulation of neurotransmitters. And so the more we're actively engaged in these experiences, the healthier we are.

And that just, you know, it seems so obvious. Yet a lot of us start to sort of make our worlds so much smaller. And, you know, it could be going to the theater or going to the museum. You know, loneliness and isolation are one of the largest reasons why people get physically ill. They literally are so lonely that they become physically ill. And the sense of belonging is also something that's inherent when you are in a chorus or when you're going out and working, doing a, you know, we see this in quilting circles or knitting circles or other community gardening where people are coming together in some form

using some kind of self-expression again. And so the ability to do that is really helping to build capacity and to really diminish some of these aging issues to help us live better longer. And you know, there's a great piece of data from the epidemiologist Daisy Fancourt at University of College London. One or more art experience a month can extend your life by 10 years. So that's good enough for me right there. I'm on it. You know, you talked about community. There's a lot of folks that are listening today that are now feeling sold about the idea

that they want to incorporate more art into their lives. And if we look at our ancestors generally around the world, art was something that was always, or typically, the majority was experienced in community. It was in community with other people, dancing in a group, singing in a group, making art, weaving in a group. and it was also baked into sort of the essential aspect of survival and reciprocity, which so much of that is connected to community. In our world today, art is not only been removed in so many instances in society,

but also that community context. So if there's somebody listening today that's now excited about wanting to bring more of that in, of course, you've given plenty of examples of things they can do on their own, but let's say they want to start doing it with other people. just run through a list of things that they could potentially do, invite in, start, join. That could be a way of them almost killing two birds with one stone. Now they have a little bit of more of a community in their life, but they're also activating and bringing in art into their brain and body.

Yeah. Well, you know, it's interesting, you know, a lot of times, just as you described it, we talk about, you know, in indigenous cultures or in ancient times, art was something that people used and did, you know, in their daily lives. And I think what I've learned by talking with some of the folks in the book, E.O. Wilson, the evolutionary biologist, is someone that we were really fortunate to talk with, is that when fire came to humans, when we harnessed fire, and we brought it to light the night. You know, we changed the way that we started to come together in a circle, right?

We had this glow of the light. We told stories that reinforced danger and practical things, but also that brought our values and morals and ethics together. We modeled behavior. We told stories that we couldn't forget, and storytelling is such an amazing. amazing opportunity for translating what's happening in our world. We danced, we mourned, we drew, we really created around this circle, this ability to build the human brain and to build community, you know, to build true community. And I think if you kind of take a page

from where we came from, it's easier to get there, right? And so, you know, We have theaters now where you can go and hear storytelling. You can listen to stories. You can go to your local library. Libraries are like, to me, one of the most undervalued community resources. You know, they are a place where anyone is welcome. It's free to go. There's always something happening.

There's always somebody reading a book. There's always some kind of activity. And more and more, they're even using different kinds of visual arts and music. and other kinds of things, you can go to your local library. On a personal level, you can hum, you can sing in the shower, you can listen to the radio, you can begin to start to activate yourself by connecting, even if it's virtually. And I think that's really, really important. But I think, you know, I would start from where you are.

It may be as simple as knocking on your neighbor's door next, in the apartment next door, and saying, let's do a pot luck together. You know, breaking bread is seen to be one of the ways to help people feel least alone, less competitive, more willing to collaborate and to cooperate and to build empathy. So something is simple as just having a meal together or a couple of coffee together where you're beginning to really see the other. So I think baby steps here is really a good way to go. I mentioned knitting circles earlier, you know, depending upon what community you're in, we see colleagues. students starting knitting circles or coming together to address anxiety and stress. We're seeing first responders doing things together like welding or sculpture building or

even painting in their spaces in their in their at the firehouses in between calls to go out on a call. We see nurses and doctors doing things like these recharge rooms. And so I think acknowledging and building awareness around the need for this is the first step and really being curious about it taking you know there's all kinds of walking groups and communities um volunteering to go and um do you know there's so many groups that need volunteers um in our community we have makerspaces where you can go and work with people with intellectual disability they need you you know, going to the SBCA and holding kittens and puppies is touch. And, you know, it's so important for those aesthetic experiences.

So I think we also feel good when we're giving. And so that's an easy way to enter is to offer your time and your talents to have those sensorial experiences. And going to a museum, you know, and most museums are now low cost or no cost. and just experiencing the expressive work there, there's always doses that want to take you through and talk you through. So there's a lot of opportunity to connect.

And I think when you change your intention, you change your life. That's powerful. Susan, is there anything else here, concepts that you feel are really important to share with the audience? And if not, are there some final words that you want to leave us with

that are really guiding principles of helping us remind ourselves how important art is in our potential of especially self-actualization. I think there's a lot of people that are listening today that have something that they want to work on, something that they want to do. It could be that they want to start a nonprofit one day. It could be that they want to get more involved in their kids' school. They might have a book in mind that they want to work on. They might have a business that they want to get started.

And we often think of these goals in isolation. We don't often think about how other adjacent things like tapping into art could be something that could help us achieve those goals, especially if these goals are higher self-actualization goals, tapping into the real reason that we're here. So I'll turn it over to you to sort of share anything that you want to share in the last few questions that we have here. So I think one thing I'd like to talk a little bit about is this field of neuro arts. So, you know, we're talking at a lot of different levels today. But I think what I've been seeing over the last five years and maybe COVID sort of really tapped a vein, but there is such enormous energy to really bring the arts and aesthetic experiences back into our lives at a granular level, at an individual level, at a societal level. And I would say at a global level, this future of neuro arts,

is so clear. And I think the path has never seemed so reachable to make this sustainable and to really have this work from clinic to community, from community to homes, to schools, to health care. And so this field of neural arts is really growing. So like bioethics or women's health or even neuroscience. You know, neuroscience is maybe 100 years old. These, this is an emerging field where the science and the arts are coming together to help really translate knowledge into practical solutions that we can use anywhere, anytime, to really help us in all of these areas of our lives, mental health, physical health, thinking about rehabilitation, neurodegeneration, all the things that we've sort of touched on today. So there is a field

and there is a plan. And so the neuro arts blueprint is something that, I have worked on with the Aspen Institute, but it's thousands of people all over the world who are really actively building a field. And I think looking out for that for your listeners to really actively understand that this is not kind of an idea that is a bright, shiny object, but a movement and a revolution that's really moving towards sustainability where we pay creative of arts therapists. We pay psychologists and social workers to use this work when it's in an acute or clinical setting, and we bring it into our lives as a way to make our lives better. So it's kind of a very broad spectrum. So that's one thing. I think a couple of takeaways that would

maybe be important. One is that we have the proof that this is not kind of a theoretical, empirical idea that, oh, wouldn't it be nice to use the arts? I think we need the arts. We know now that we are physiologically, neurobiologically wired for the arts. And there's a lot of research and there needs to be more research, but that the research is there. And we really are using it and building upon it. And that's really important. Secondly, I like to say there's an art for that. Whatever you're trying to address, whether that's at a personal level, a psychological level, a physical health level, a learning level, there is an art for that. And, you know, something even as simple as using expressive writing, we know that can help you frame your ideas,

can help you understand yourself, to see yourself. Any of the folks that are listening that are writers know that sometimes the best way you know yourself is to begin to put something down and then have it reflect back so that you see what you're saying, what you're feeling that you couldn't maybe put into words until you began to write it out. There's a guy named James Panabaker who at University of Texas in Austin who's done a lot of work in expressive writing and stress and trauma. And what he sees is just the simple act of putting a secret or something that you've been holding in writing. Even if you rip it up, burn it, throw it away, reduces cortisol, but also reduces cognitive load.

So, you know, we all carry so much. And cognitive load is so important for being able to get through your day and to lighten your load, literally. So I think there literally is an art for that. The other one I talk about is anytime, anywhere, anyone. This is accessible to all of us, regardless of race, gender, age. it's really always accessible to us at any moment. And so that's really important.

I think technology is really going to be helpful in sustainability and dissemination of this work. Maybe the last one is if you change your lens, you change your life. So just opening up the idea that this is important for your sense of beauty and joy and meaning in your life in all those ways that we just talked about changing your lens will change your life and these are incremental shifts so this is not you know running a 25 mile marathon these are those small moments where you change just a little bit and you start to see your life gets better and better beautiful thank you for those those were all very special the book is out it's called your brain on art how

the arts transform us. It's a powerful read and I hope everybody gets a chance to pick it up. Susan, if people want to keep in touch with you, what's the best place to be able to do that, to not only learn about your work and your continued efforts, but also to pay attention to this emerging field and all the different ways that they could potentially be involved in it. Sure. So just to be involved and learn more about the neural arts blueprint, you can go to Neuroartsblueprint.org. And there's fabulous information there, and that work is growing and growing. By the end of this year, there'll be a resource center that you can come and ask any

question about this field and get research, practice, funding, policy, all of the things that we've been talking about today. My lab's website is arts and mind lab at jh.u. edu. And then the book has a website called Your Brain on Art.com. And any of those

platforms, you can find an email for me. And I'd love to hear from you. I'd love to hear what you're making and what art has really influenced your life. Because I think that

we all share this commonality. And I'd love to hear more. And we try to share stories on social media and wherever else we can. But I really would love to hear your stories. That's beautiful. We're not recording this in person, but in the future

we'll do a round two. You can come to our studio over here, and I have a bunch of little special pieces of art that have meant a little something to me that I've collected and kind of posted up in the studio, including more recently as the digital art space has grown, there's this art project called Chromy Squiggles. It's a digital digital generative art and it plays on the screen in the background over here in our studio and it always makes me happy to see it. So that's my little connection here to having more art inside of the office. You know, there's a great place in Venice, California, called Chromasonics. That's a experience where you see sound and hear color. And I think that's another thing that we're going to see more and

more of in the future. Like you're seeing it on a screen, this is an immersive experience where you really are taken over by sound and light. And I think we're going to see that showing up in cities all over the country. And so I think this technology piece that you're seeing the swiggles and you're seeing these spaces that are really just so immersive. And I think they're recharging. I think they're really helping to also rewire our brains. Absolutely.

Susan MagSam and thank you again for coming on the podcast. We'll link to all the things that you mentioned in the show notes below. Super appreciate you. And very thankful for the work. that you, Ivy, and your lab are all doing together. Well, I appreciate you, so thank you so much. And I'm going to go get a Ouija board now. I got to bring it back.

You should. Awesome. Thank you again. Thank you. Hi, everyone. Drew here. Two quick things. Number one, thank you so much for listening to this podcast.

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