Passion Struck with John R. Miles - Susan Magsamen on the How the Arts Transform Your Life EP 273

Episode Date: March 30, 2023

On Passion Struck, I am joined by Susan Magsamen, the founder of the International Arts + Mind Lab and co-founder of NeuroArts BluePrint. Our conversation revolves around her recently published book, “Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us,” which explores the latest scientific research that highlights the inherent human capacity to create and appreciate art and how it has the potential to bring about transformative changes in our lives. In This Episode, Susan Magsamen And I Discuss Her Book "Your Brain on Art" On the podcast, Susan Magsamen argues that although the arts are often seen as a luxury or entertainment, activities like painting, dancing, and architecture are essential to our well-being. They believe that we are at the cusp of a cultural shift where the arts can offer powerful and accessible solutions to improve the lives of everyone. We go through the changer world of neuroaesthetics and why they must be viewed as a have-to-have. Full show notes and resources can be found here: https://passionstruck.com/susan-magsamen-how-the-arts-transform-us/  Brought to you by Green Chef. Use code passionstruck60 to get $60 off, plus free shipping!” Brought to you by Indeed. Head to https://www.indeed.com/passionstruck, where you can receive a $75 credit to attract, interview, and hire in one place. --► For information about advertisers and promo codes, go to: https://passionstruck.com/deals/  Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter or Instagram handle so we can thank you personally! --► Prefer to watch this interview: https://youtu.be/mpeXW51AezU  --► Subscribe to Our YouTube Channel Here: https://www.youtube.com/c/JohnRMiles Want to find your purpose in life? I provide my six simple steps to achieving it - passionstruck.com/5-simple-steps-to-find-your-passion-in-life/ Want to hear my best interviews from 2022? Check out episode 233 on intentional greatness and episode 234 on intentional behavior change. ===== FOLLOW ON THE SOCIALS ===== * Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/passion_struck_podcast * Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/johnrmiles.c0m  Learn more about John: https://johnrmiles.com/ 

Coming up next on the Passion Struct Podcast. Right now, I think the mental health issues that are happening all over the world, especially with young people, the arts offer an opportunity for rebuilding mental resiliency, but also for stronger social and emotional connections. And that's super important right now. Welcome to Passion Struct. Hi, I'm your host, John Armeils. And on the show, we decipher the secrets, tips, and guidance

of the world's most inspiring people and turn their wisdom into practical advice for you and those around you. Our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the best version of yourself. If you're new to the show, I offer advice and answer listener questions on Fridays. We have long form interviews,

the rest of the week with guest-ranging from astronauts to authors, CEOs, creators, innovators, scientists, military leaders, visionaries, and athletes. Now, let's go out there and become PassionStruck. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to episode 273 of PassionStruck, recently ranked by Interview Valet as the third best podcast for mindset. And thank you to each and every one of you to come back weekly, to listen and learn, to live better, be better, and impact the world.

If you're new to the show, thank you so much for being here. Or you simply want to introduce this to friends or family members, we now have episode starter packs which are collections of our fans, favorite episodes that we organize in convenient topics that give any new listener a great way to get acclimated to everything we do here on the show. Just go to either Spotify or PassionStruck.com slash starter packs to get started. In case you missed it, earlier this week I interviewed the one and only Arthur Brooks, the William Henry Bloomberg professor of the practice

of public leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School and professor of management practice at the Harvard Business School, where he teaches courses on leadership and happiness. He is also a columnist at the Atlantic, where he writes the popular How to Build a Life column. Brooks is the author of 12 books, including the number one New York Times bestseller from Strength to Strength, finding success, happiness, and deep purpose in the second half of life. I also wanted to say thank you so much for your

continued support of the show. Your ratings and reviews go such a long way in bringing more people into the passion start community where we can bring them weekly doses of hope, inspiration, and meaning. I also know our guests love to hear from you, and they love to see reviews about the shows. Now let's talk about today's episode. The arts are often perceived as just a form of entertainment, a luxury item. However, according to today's guest, Susan Meg Sammon, the arts play a very crucial role in our lives. We are at the forefront of a change in cultural attitudes where the arts can provide powerful, accessible, and scientifically proven solutions for our overall well-being. Susan and I discuss research that demonstrates

how participating in an arts activity for just 45 minutes can reduce cortisol levels, regardless of one's artistic abilities. Furthermore, engaging in just one art experience a month can extend one's life by a decade. We dive into how playing music develops cognitive abilities and improves learning. How the vibrations from attuning for great sound waves to combat stress. how virtual reality can provide innovative therapeutic solutions, and how interactive exhibitions blur the lines between art and viewer, engaging all our senses and boosting memory. Doctors are even prescribing visits to museums as a means of addressing loneliness and various other physical and mental health issues. Susan Mann-Sagman is the founder and the director

of the International Arts and Mind Lab or applied Neuroesthetics at the Peterson Brain Health Institute at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine where she is a faculty member in the School of Neurology. She is also the co-director of the Neuro Arts Blueprint with the Aspen Institute. She is the co-authorctor of the Neural Arts Blueprint with the Aspen Institute. She is the co-author with Ivy Ross of the brand new book which we discussed today, Your Brain on Art. Thank you for choosing PassionStruck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life.

Now, let that journey begin. I am so excited today to welcome Susan McSelman to the Passion Struck Podcast. Welcome, Susan. Thank you for having me. It's really a pleasure. Well, it's our honor to have you on the show. And we're going to talk about your great book. But before we do, I understand that you grew up in the countryside outside of Baltimore, and I actually grew up not too far from you in York, Pennsylvania.

And as a kid similar to you, my family moved every three years prior to moving to York. And I wanted to ask you, how did your childhood help you to become highly adaptive to change? And how has it helped you on the path that you've chosen? That's a great question. Where I currently live, I'm about a stones throw from York, Pennsylvania. Just so you'll know that I live on 83 right off of 83. So not far at all. Growing up in the country, I think was really important because I was in nature all the time. And I love nature. It's really my go-to place. I think it's probably the most aesthetic place. And I think it's where I really was

able to hear myself think and really feel. And I'd lay in the grass looking at up at the clouds, like all kids do. I now study that. It's called Paradolia. When I was 12, my twin sister had a serious accident and almost lost her leg. And during that period, we went our separate ways. She had to stay home, and I had to go out into the world. But I was able to bring the world back to her, and she was able to create artwork to express her trauma of a really serious injury. And I also think that was very informative for me and seeing that sometimes words are not enough that you can't find words to express deep feelings. And sometimes those feelings are loss and grief and trauma.

And sometimes those feelings are really joyful. And I was able to see, for her and visual arts that really away for her to really express her feelings and that was extremely important as I moved forward. And then I just hold this story this week and I'll tell you this again. I was a nurses aid at the La Maria notch clef which was a place for retired nuns. These were teaching nuns and one day I was working with a woman named Sister Teresa Cunningham and she asked me if I knew Elliot and I said, I don't think I know anybody named Elliot. She said, dear, I'm talking about T.S. Elliot. And as it turned out, she was an English scholar. She had been an English teacher. And for the next

three or four years, every time I had an opportunity to visit her, she would read and recite poetry to me. And I think that also was very formative in my understanding the power of language and poetry and fiction to really help us see ourselves and see the world and really understand a world that I hadn't yet been exposed to. Yeah, I think some of those things really with me today. Well, that experience that you had with your sister, I think her name is Sandra, really has led you to becoming an emphatic advocate for the arts as tools of healing, which we're going to get into today. But I did want to congratulate you on your book, which releases this week, your brain on art, how art transforms us.

Congratulations. Thank you. Thank you. It's like giving birth to a very big baby. Well, I think before we can really dive into the book, it's important for the audience to understand a concept that you talk about throughout it, which is neuro-estetics or neuro-arts.

What is the backstory for how it was developed and along those lines, what exactly is it? Sure. Really up until about 20 years ago, advances in technology didn't allow us to get inside our heads to really study mechanisms and structure of the brain in any really comprehensive ways. And around the turn of 1999, 2000, researchers that were studying the brain started to be able to come back to some of those age-old questions. Like, what is beauty? How do we change on these arts and aesthetic experiences? We've always known, and artists have always known that we are transformed through arts in physical ways,

in mental ways, in flourishing and learning ways, the way we bring our communities together, but we really didn't understand the why and the how of that. And so when we started to be able to really study this from a neurobiological perspective, we started to be able to gain some insights about what was happening. And I think the caveat is that there's been so many studies over the last 20 years that are now beginning to create a picture and a narrative about the complexity of the way the arts work on us. And in fact, we really are

wired for art and the arts and aesthetics are in our DNA. And it makes sense because we bring the world in through our senses. And our senses is these extraordinary mechanisms that are so adept at smell and touch and sound. And all of those ways that we really know the world that we wouldn't be able to otherwise bring forward. So neuroesthetic or what I and I call neuro arts is really simply the study of how the arts and aesthetic experiences measurably change the body and brain and behavior. And the second part of that is how that knowledge can be translated into specific practices that advance health while being learning that really advance humanity. Well, maybe since you just brought her up, we'll give a shout out to your co-author Ivy,

and maybe you could just tell the audience a little bit about her and why you decided to write the book together. Sure. Ivy Ross is the vice president of Hardware Design at Google. And she is a magnificent artist. When she started her career, she was a jewelry maker and has pieces in museums all over the world. She's also very interested in sound and vibration and architecture and how those things really translate into whole health. So about five years or more ago, my lab had been

building out what we call our luminary advisory board. And this is a board at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and the International Arts and Mind Lab that is interested in having people that are doing extraordinary things in the arts and all the art forms and also researchers that are doing extraordinary things in the arts and all the art forms and also researchers that are doing really cutting edge research to lift up this area of neuro aesthetics. So I wrote Ivy blindly and said, look, I can follow in your career for a long time. You worked at Mattel. I developed curiosity kids, which were hands-on learning materials for kids and arts, sciences and moral cultures. And I feel like this might be something you're interested in. And within 10 minutes she wrote back and she said, I am very interested in this. As an artist, I've always known, but I'm fascinated to understand the science of this. So we just scheduled a call for 30 minutes and it ended up being a two plus hour call where we instantly connected and by the

end of the call, we were finishing each other's sentences. And she asked if my husband and I would like to come out to meet her and her husband in Mill Valley when we were in San Francisco. So we did and we planned together a salon at her home to bring together researchers and artists to talk about this idea of the arts for health and well-being. About the same time, I was beginning a project called the Neural Arts Blueprint, which is a five-year plan to really build this field of Neural Arts globally. I was partnering with the Aspen Institute to be a thought partner in how to think about what does it mean to build a field and how do you do

that in all the different levels in research practice policy funding. And Ivy said let's do something at my house to bring people together to just start to kind of kick the tires on how we would approach something like this. So we wanted to do an icebreaker or some way, these people didn't know each other. And so we asked the question, have the arts ever impacted your life in some way? And I shared the story of my sister. And hours later, people were still telling extraordinary stories about themselves, about their children, about their parents,

who might have had Alzheimer's, about homes that they'd built that really changed their lives. And so it was really profound. So as we were cleaning up, I said, I mean, I've been wanting to write a book, a general public book, where we can start to share this information because it's not freely known academia usually produces papers and we'll go to conferences, but this is accessible. This is immediate. It's everywhere. It's humming in the shower. It's doodling. It's all these things that we can do today that are not about

proficiency, but about process. And she's like, I said, would you like to do this with me? And she said, this is the book I've been waiting for. So that really launched our journey. And it's been over four years that we've been working on this and have interviewed now over a hundred people in the book to really try to tell this very big, gorgeous story. Well, I love that you bring up some of the things that you can do that people don't think might be art forms because I think when people think of the arts, they think of two-dimensional or three-dimensional arts like painting, pottery, or sculpting.

But there's so many different types. I know for me, for a long time, I didn't think I was artistic or creative at all. But I play percussion, so that's an art form. I do a lot of creative writing, and obviously that is an art form too. I think podcasting is an art of self-expression and allowing others to express themselves. But for the listener who might not understand all the ways

that they could incorporate art into their life, what are some surprising examples of aesthetic experiences that many people have access to? It might not even realize it. So that's such a great question. I think that we sometimes become so transactional, that we forget that there's so much aesthetic life all around us. And one of the things that we talk about in the book is just imagine a day where you opened up to the possibilities of your sensorial systems bringing the world in. And there's research done by a woman named Dr. Garisha Kamal at Drexel University, where she was able to show, and this is one of my favorite pieces of research,

and it's myth-busting, is that you don't have to be good at an art form, you don't have to be talented for it to have significant impact. And I love that because I think it frees us to just dance in our living rooms, to be able to sing at the top of our voices in the car, to be able, as I mentioned, home in the shower, to be able to draw without feeling that you're not quote-unquote talented. I'm a collager and I also write really bad poetry and I sing really off-key and I do it

often really daily and I get such enormous pleasure. And it's not only pleasure in terms of reward and dopamine, it's really insight. So when I collage, I'm able to understand how I'm feeling because sometimes words don't come and because you're not ready, your feelings are not ready for words. You haven't been able to process that. And so I'll collage and then I can look at something and I can understand what I'm feeling, for example, or when you think about poetry and metaphor and symbol.

Poetry turns out you actually activates a very similar part of the brain that listening to music does. And that makes sense to me because of rhythm and rhyme and many types of poetry. You can tie back these very simple things that you can do every day. You probably know folks that are knitters or crocheters or using hand crafts. It turns out that hand crafting lowers cortisol and reduces the stress hormone cortisol and also lowers anxiety and these kinds of using our hands to be able to kind of knit our

lives together. Those are just some examples of some of the very easy things that you can do. And I should also add taking a walk in nature. We also know that just 15 minutes in nature also moves us into equilibrium and balances our nervous system. So nature is totally a very easy way to begin to think about an aesthetic experience. Yes, and that absolutely reduces your stress levels. I do it all the time and I can't tell you how many behavioral scientists I've had come on the show in medical doctors who talk about the advantages of doing something as simple as that. Just thinking about there's a couple of really interesting programs happening right now that are starting to scale globally, studying how moms with postpartum

depression are using singing and humming to build the bonds between themselves and their babies with oxytocin, but really also addressing depression. And when you think about all those moments in our lives where it may be a twist in turn that's a mom who was suffering from postpartum depression or someone who has Alzheimer's who's not been able to open up to the world and singing helps them there or someone with Parkinson's who is now dancing and enhancing their gate and their mood and their sleep patterns, addressing things like chronic pain through dance, for example. But there's also this connection to physical and mental health where the issues may be more significant, but arts still offer opportunities to relieve symptoms and

to help increase quality of life, which I think is just an amazing term. quality of life, which I think is just an amazing term. Yeah, well, you were also a mother and I wanted to segue into what you were just talking about because when I was raising my kids, I'm huge into music. So one of the things I tried to introduce them to at a young age was music. And I remember always playing for them songs like Baby Beluga, which you're probably familiar with, et cetera. We would sing to them and as they grow older, they would sing and other things. But one of the other things we did was we exposed them very early on playing musical instruments

and both started playing piano at a young age around four or four years old now. Both of them are accomplished musicians. And what I wanted to ask is for the audience, can you discuss how these early aesthetic experiences and putting your kids in enriched environments help not only shape their identity, but maybe go into why we should incorporate the arts

into our parenting? Sure, it's a great question. Both of my boys are musicians and they started playing from the time they were very little. And that has been something that's followed through their lives. So I totally appreciate your parenting story. You pull back a little bit and you think about the fact that we are born with a hundred billion neurons that we are wired to make connections of those neurons.

And so when creating synapses and creating infinite trillion numbers of synapses and neural pathways, all of that lays the neurobiological framework for our ability to learn and create and manifest throughout our life. And that starts from the time we're born. So it only makes infinite sense that we would want to create environments for our children that are sensorial, that are novel, that offer surprise, that offer the opportunity for safety,

but also for the space to be able to test and learn and try out new things. And so there's folks that talk a lot about childhood trauma So for the space to be able to test and learn and try out new things. And so there's folks that talk a lot about childhood trauma and neglect and abuse. When you are in a situation where you don't feel safe, you're not able to learn because you're neurobiologically, you're really in a fight or flight or hold freeze mode and aim these environments that are safe and enriched and where children can explore and learn and certainly tactile experiences like painting or drawing movement where you're

really looking at kinetic growth and synaptic and we know that dance is actually incredibly powerful for building neuroplasticity. Interestingly playing music we know now increases synapses and gray matter to support cognitive skills, arts support emotional resilience in children and adolescents, performing arts, whether you're the maker or the beholder, increases perspective taking. It's also vital for what's called executive function, which is kind of the conductor in the brain, how do you organize things and how do you put them together. One of the things I love about this book is that we debunk some mythology around how we

think about art. So for kids, often we think, oh, that child is an artist, but they're not very organized. Well, it turns out that artists are among some of the most highly skilled people with executive function because they have to understand process what comes first, what comes second, how long do you have to wait? It's really true for young children. Right now, I think the mental health issues that are happening all over the world, especially with young people, the arts offer an opportunity for rebuilding mentioned resiliency, but also for stronger social and emotional connections.

And that's super important right now. Yeah, I'm glad you brought that up because I've done a number of episodes this year. One notable one was with Chris Palmer, who is a psychologist at Harvard. And in our discussion, we talked about how much depression and anxiety and pretty much every disorder of the mind, but especially those are on the rise. And when you start looking at it, the largest groups that they're on the rise in are adolescents. And so to provide coping mechanisms and ways to help with that, as we get more immersed into this digital world around us, which I think is leading to a lot of these behaviors

and increases, I think is extremely important. And speaking of parenting in kids, I know curiosity is one of the most important skills that we should instill in our kids. And when you mentioned Ivy, you brought up curiosity as one of the major driving forces for writing this book. However, curiosity, I find as I was growing up and I think I saw it also with my kids get numbed out of people.

And I think shame, I'm a big, Renee Brown fan and when I think of her, I think of the topic of shame. And shame becomes a big part of it. Why is it so important to encourage the space for growth in kids, adolescents, young adults, and engage curiosity? Yeah, just thinking about what you were saying about youth mental health.

Right now, our lab is starting a project with the World Health Organization. We're actually talking to youth 14 to 24 about what is it that they need to feel healthy, to, 13, 14, even a little younger now, sometimes that gets stomped out. And I'm also a very big perne Brown fan. And I think that she's put her finger on it when she talks about this idea of shame. In third grade, we start telling kids in all the ways that society puts on them is that

curiosity and creativity are not important. What's important is filling the bubble in on the test. And that if you do that well, you're going to succeed. Yet you go out 10, 15 years when young people are entering the workforce. And what the workforce is looking for is a total disconnect because what they're looking for is innovation, creativity, the ability to collaborate, the ability to communicate, the ability to think outside of the box, but yet in these younger years what we've said to you is, don't be yourself, don't share yourself, get along, go along, sit in. And so we've really done a huge disservice. The fact that arts have been taken out of the schools,

and they were taken out of the schools as when they were enrichment, which I think is such a misnomer, because the arts are really how we learn, the arts are how we create community, they're how we grow. I think we are at a precipice right now where the more we understand that the arts are not

a nice to have, but a half to have, because they are essential for humans' survival and human growth, especially for our young people. It's interesting that you, what you mentioned about, we've really thought a lot about that in the book. And one of the things I think about with neural arts is that in an interesting way, neural arts is really the marriage of the arts,

health and science, and technology. And technology in terms of technology literacy, technology has actually been a catalyst for the way that research has gone. So we wouldn't have the information we have now without technology. We wouldn't have some of the interventions that we have, like virtual reality for ADHD, to be able to use gaming mechanisms to change behavior, to look at cognitive load, and to be able to really think about how you help children use these different techniques to build

different kinds of capacity. There's some really cool glasses right now for autistic kids that take your face and turn it into a caricature but amplify the emotion so an autistic child understands the social connection that that they are missing because of the way that their brains are wired. And then the third piece is really dissemination and scaling. And we saw that in with the pandemic where something like Parkinson's folks could dance all over the world more times a day, more days a week, and as a result, we're now able to study dosing dosage of

what makes a difference? What's the tipping point for different types of people at different stages with Parkinson's for those kinds of things? All that said, as I think technology really needs to be balanced and I think when it's not balanced, when it's not really used as part of the way kids see the world and engage with the world, I like the idea when you can put it away and really be in relationship.

Many other things happen. I think about technology as a balance and in many places we are out of balance, but how do you start to really lift that out and have a conversation about it? That's meaningful. Yeah, well, I'm glad you brought this up because as we talked about before we got on the show, I mentioned a term to you called the Creative Amplifier and it's a term that I have in my own upcoming book. But when I define it, I lay out that it's really this cross between being artistic, the science that goes into a technology, but it's also how we show

up in the way that we're responding to the world and world problems, because I think, given these major issues, which are all systemic today that we have to solve, whether it be climate change or hunger or a lack of water scarcity throughout the world, changing energy levels. We're going to have to look at how we're producing energy. They all take creativity and curiosity to solve, but they also mean that we need to move away from being focused on self to being focused on the world. And I think the combination of art, science, and technology play a huge

part in that. I was hoping you could go just a little bit deeper on why they complement each other so well. To outline some of the really intractable problems that are facing the world, they can't be solved by an individual. They really require a huge interdisciplinary collaborative approach, and I think that's another opportunity where technology can be helpful in bringing and bringing us together and this idea of creativity and curiosity and the World Health defines mental health and mental well-being as our ability to cope with stressors in life or to ultimately realize our abilities and to be able to learn to work well and contribute to our communities. But I think that one of the tensions that society is facing

right now is that we don't just want to cope. We want to thrive. We want to flourish. And in order to do that, we need to understand what capacities we need to bring to the world to address some of these really difficult issues. And this is where I think building a flourishing muscle and building a capacity for flourishing, not just surviving, but building a capacity to really grow and learn and to go beyond some of

these issues is really where that triad of arts and health and technology can be really valuable. And lifting up the ability. When you think about an individual versus a collective, all is one of those human phenomena, all and wonder, where we start to see that we're a piece in a much bigger universe. So the ability to be able to bring all to the world to really hold together is another opportunity where I think the arts can be super valuable. Yeah, well now you're bringing up self-transcendent experiences. And I think when people experience

these, the most common one is the form of awe because it's the one that can most regularly happen in our lives, whether it's seeing nature looking at a great piece of artwork that we see that has that overwhelming feeling about us. But I think science is now teaching us a lot more how you enter these states of self-transcendence. And this is one of the things that Johns Hopkins is at the forefront in their laboratories where they're even looking at

how psychedelics impact how you get into the states of altered sense of meaning. And I know they're also studying at Columbia University and many others. How do you think arts and neuro-arts in particular can help you experience more in your life because I think there's so many benefits from that experience.

So you mentioned the Johns Hopkins Center for Consciousness and Psychedelics, and our lab is actually doing a really interesting project with them right now. So there's a concept called set and setting. It really is how you prepare for a psychedelic experience and in a psychedelic experience, what is that setting? Tony, you integrate all of the feelings and emotions that arose. And so we're partnering with those folks right now with a researcher named Fred Barrett to initially to look at music and playlists and are the types of music in certain cadence that work most effectively for people who are having the psychedelic experiences in a clinical setting

and we're looking at multiple ways of experiencing those playlists. And one of the things that we think is that music may actually activate some of the similar neural pathways that psychedelics do, and it might also trigger you to come back into that psychedelic insight state without the use of psychedelics after you've had that experience. Also, what are the textures in a room? What's the cultural significance of a set and setting space? We are cultural beings and not all spaces feel the same to each of us. I think that's another thing that we've really seen lift up with the arts is that individual preferences, life experiences, childhood experiences, even genetics make a huge difference in the kind of arts that are most effective for you. So we're looking at that in the set and setting work as well.

But set and setting happens everywhere, right? Your home is a set and setting. Your workplace is a set and setting. Your community is a set and setting. Art creates culture and culture creates community, then community creates humanity. So all of those things that we bring to those spaces really make a difference. And the set and setting is kind of a tidy way to think about enriched environments wherever you are and how you create those spaces. Well, I should ask you this much earlier in the interview because you brought up your lab several times now, but can you discuss us Johns Hopkins International Arts and Mind Lab known as IAM and how your work is helping create and nurture that space for collaboration and engage curiosity that we talked about earlier. So we're all about collaboration and interdisciplinary thinking.

Our lab is housed in the Peterson Brain Science Institute in the School of Medicine, which you might think is a really crazy place to talk about arts and aesthetic experiences. But we had a donor in the early 2000s who said, I think that the arts can save the world. And I happened to agree with her. And so I was invited to help build this program. And what has been extraordinary is,

when we first started out, there are arts and health programs around the country, there's some wonderful programs. But there hadn't been a way to really pull back and say, how do you translate research into practice, and how do you then take that practice and be able to move it into the community and understand how and why it's effective,

and then how do you scale that and disseminate it. And so over the last 15 years, that's really what our lab has been focused on is that we developed something called the impact thinking model, which is a process to create interdisciplinary work around an art form and where agnostic to the art form and where agnostic to the problem that we're trying to solve for, but it's a process to be able to understand how to use different types of research methodologies to understand an art form within the context of a problem set and setting is just one that we're doing, I mentioned the Youth Mental Health Project, we're working on that. We're also doing a really big project right now on intentional spaces. So how do you design these enriched environments, whether that's in healthcare or education, and the Neuroart's Blueprint project came out of the work that we're doing in the lab and thinking, the time is right to really try to coalesce a field.

You might think of biologics or climate change or women's health as relatively new fields. Neural arts or neuroesthetics is a new field. And we're really trying to lay down the underpinnings of what are the foundational pieces that you need to have in place in research, in practice, in education, and policy, and funding to have the arts be a mainstay in medicine and in public health. So that's kind of stuff that we work on and it's a really fun lab and I always say it's a small and mighty team. Where I see the growth of this field is and the growth of our lab is in young people. There's so much interested in the integration. I mean, young people come to the so naturally

integrating all of these different fields and health and arts and technology, and they do it so naturally. I think they were born into it, and that's super exciting for me. Well, I love a ton of what you just brought up. Given that this show is all about how you create an intentional life, I created passion struck

because as I thought about this topic, I think about Disney and Disney is trying to create the happiest place on earth and I wanted to create the most intentional place on earth. And so I love that you bring up this concept of intentional spaces, which is really something I wanted to create the most intentional place on Earth. And so I love that you bring up this concept of intentional spaces, which is really something I haven't thought about, but your environment plays

such a huge role in with the decisions that you make and why you make them. So I'm gonna steal that one from you. Well, I also wanna go into impact thinking a bit more because one of the reasons I got into this podcast is I am a huge listener of Impact Theory with Tom Billio. And I love how he has incorporated this whole top of, of Impact Theory and expounds upon it.

But you just brought up Impact Thinking and I was hoping that you could elaborate on, what does it mean and how does it work because a listener might not fully understand its importance. Sure. So impact thinking is a scientific framework or model for how to study the arts. And you think about the scientific method that researchers use in basic science. Think about this as the form of scientific method to study the arts in a very generative way. And that has not really been something

that's been well articulated. Different fields, so public health have approaches of methodology. Basic science has its own scientific methods, cognitive science, or education learning models exist. But there has not been a way to really think about a framework to study the arts and to think about research on the arts, but then how do you bring that into practice? How do you apply that and scale

it? And so the impact thinking model is a nine step process, and it includes being able to clearly articulate what problem are you solving for. And it includes being able to clearly articulate what problem are you solving for. And as I mentioned, we're agnostic to the problem. It could be an education, it could be in healthcare, it could be in public health, it could be at an individual level. But the key is to really be able to identify what problem we're solving for through the lens of the arts.

And to do that, we put together a highly interdisciplinary team, including people with lived experience, including people that are going to be recipients or partners in the delivery of whatever that problem-solving experience might be. Then we look really carefully at what do we know about this field and these art forms? And I call that collaborative discovery. And in collaborative discovery, it's broad and wide. It may be interviews, it may be a literature review, it may be a survey, it may be going out and doing a field test, but blowing out this idea

of how do you understand from different fields, potentially what use cases you might be able to bring into understanding what you're trying to solve for. And that's a very iterative process and highly collaborative. I'll just say that a lot of times we talk about collaboration we throw that word around. True collaboration is really hard to do. And so we've really focused on trying to understand and create the environment, the intentional environment for letting every voice at the table be equal and not have it be hierarchical. And then the third step is a hypothesis. What do we think is going to happen here and what do we think we can do. Then we design a research model and it can be multiple ways of knowing, maybe qualitative and quantitative.

It may pull in work that is causal or maybe something that we are really just trying to understand in a laboratory setting or, you know, physical setting. And then we do the research. We evaluate the research. We may redo the research, which is step seven, because we've learned something and now we want to go back and we want to understand something a little bit more. And then step eight is dissemination and scaling. We talk about dissemination and scaling or not only talking about a researcher having a paper in a peer-reviewed journal and speaking about it at a conference. We're talking about how do you really disseminate and how do you really scale this to the community that you're in. And then the

last step is evaluating it and really looking at impact. Is this intervention? Is this practice, is this approach really working? And then how do we iterate that and how then we'd go back to the same spiral? The impact thinking model is actually a spiral because you're always learning, right? You can always go back and think about how to come through those steps again with the new knowledge that you gained in the initial stages of understanding it. It's a really beautiful process that shares language, that is also welcoming of all the different fields, taxonomy and languages, and its really goal is to have change,

behavioral change, physiological change, quality of life change, whatever that core goal is, the model is set up to have the arts in service of addressing and sometimes solving some of those problems. Well, I love the way you just explain that because for over 20 years, I've been using something myself both professionally and in my personal life called the deliberate action process. And it starts and ends with the first step which I often refer to as being a mission angler, meaning you have to understand the problem that you in a personal setting are uniquely qualified to solve, which typically is some version of your previous self that you have worked through, that you

can help others get through. But as you just went through the impact model, the last and most important step in the deliberate action process, and one that many people forget is the measurement, because if you're not measuring what you're doing throughout that process, you're not going to go into the next iteration of it with the learnings to make the adjustments into how you have to adjust your approach. So I think there are a lot of similarities between the two. Yeah, and you wanna leave off the table of this idea

that the joy and beauty and just extraordinary nature of the arts don't always have to be measured, but in context of in service to health and well-being, that's where I think there is an opportunity for that. So like I'm a humanities person, I love the arts and I'm an avid reader and I think that there pieces of music that just make me cry. And I never want to calibrate that. But when I'm looking to walk better because I've had a stroke, or I'm looking to feel better because of my mental health and mental health issue, I want to understand that

at a more measurable way that can help me move forward and love your model. I think it makes so much sense. So thank you for sharing that too. I'm glad you just brought those other things up as well. I moved to St. Petersburg, Florida, where I live now from Austin. And one of the things that I saw happen in Austin, I think it's happening in a lot of cities throughout the United States possibly the world is that I remember the tagline for Austin used to be keep Austin weird and the reason people loved it was because of the art-siness that was rampant throughout the downtown area. But over the decade and a half that I was around the city,

you started to see that get pushed further and further out so that it's no longer permeating the core. And when I moved here to St. Petersburg, which is becoming more and more known for the arts, we have a great festival here called Shine. We probably have more murals. And I can think of, probably comparable to San Francisco or New York, given our size. I got very involved in, was on the board of an organization called the Warehouse Arts District.

And it's called Where the Art is Made. It's not where the artists have their galleries, et cetera. It's actually where the art is made. And we wanted to provide a hub so that not only artist would be subsidized in the spaces therein so that they could always afford it, but we wanted to provide a community center so that we could expose it to underprivileged youth

so that we could bring in military veterans where it could help them, like myself, deal with post-traumatic stress disorder. One of the most important things I have found as a community that we have here, where one of our last blowing art shops allows for a Sunday morning where veterans who have experienced post-traumatic stress disorder, or really any ailments, can come in and do glass blowing as a therapy. And I just worries that we're in communities, we're not realizing, as you brought up in schools who are taking the funding out, the importance of how much neuro arts impacts health and well-being. I've just talked a lot about different things there, but I was hoping maybe you can pull that all together

and talk about why it's so important and why listeners should really be concerned about this and their own communities. No, I love St. Petersburg. It's one of my favorite towns. Hopkins has the children's hospital there. I do a lot of work with the Stras, with a wonderful gentleman named Fred Johnson,

who is singer and he's a community outreach person with the Stras, with a wonderful gentleman named Fred Johnson, who is singer, and he's a community outreach person for the Stras, he actually sang with Miles Davis, and he's just an amazing guy, and is a veteran, and has done a lot of work in the community with under-approved children, and also with veterans, and veterans first responders that are in under-resourced communities, many of them are not post-traumatic stress.

They are in traumatic stress, and they're living it every day. And in cities all across the country and all around the world, we're living right now in Syria and Turkey and the disaster there with the earthquake, but in different places in different ways, we're seeing that everywhere.

And I think the arts in community is probably one of the most accessible, immediate responses, emergency responses that we can have, and also lays the groundwork for developing lifelong practices. So I've seen some of the glass glowing work that's being done or the woodworking done or the metal working done that's being done by returning vets. There's a fantastic program called creative forces that the veterans administration, NIH and the national endowments for the arts started. communities around the country that is housed at veterans hospitals initially where veterans are

and sometimes active military come to address PTSD and trauma using the arts. The families are also part of the experience and then when these military folks are able to leave, they move into the community and now the communities are starting to create a circle around these veterans and their families, or active military and their families, where there are art experiences that are not medicalized, but are seen as healthy practices. In Virginia, we talk about this in the book, the fire department is actually using these parts practices to help first responders,

firefighters, process their trauma or their experiences. They're highly charged experiences, going into a fire, going to a car accident, and using things like doodling, using drawing, using some of these other multi-sensory experiences to be able to move that energy that gets stored in the body that ultimately can turn into disease out. And trauma is not something that is fixed or fluid, it can move. And so the more you're able to get that, I'll also add expressive writing, it turns out to be an amazing tool for just getting those emotions and feelings out of you that are stored in the body into another form and that changes the cognitive load. It also lowers cortisol and there's a wonderful

researcher named James Pennebaker who has spent the last 40 years understanding expressive writing. And one of the things he was able to identify is that people that share a secret in writing, not necessarily to somebody else, but get that secret. So it could be trauma, it could be shame, it could be grief or guilt, or just a sense of loss or despair,

feel better when they're able to bring that held information out in some way. And sometimes they choose to share it and sometimes they don't. But I think that's a form of art that's accessible to all of us. It is. And the next time you're down here, I have to introduce you to Nicole Stott

if you haven't already met her. Nicole is a retired astronaut, but she was the first astronaut to paint in space. She did a watercolor, but she started the Space for Art Foundation, and what she does is she collects art from kids now in every single country on the planet, and then she assembles it into sometimes its spacesuit, sometimes its other things, but she then goes and works with sick kids. She does it at the Johns Hopkins All Children's Hospital here in St. Pete that you brought up, but she also does it throughout the country and tries to introduce

art as a way of healing for the sick kids. So I think it would be a great partnership for you as well to look into. I love to meet her. There are an army of artists that are so generative and so passionate and so willing and able and are already bringing this work into the communities like weaving it throughout communities.

Often they're not compensated at a level to make their it's sustainable for them, but there are so many things happening. And that was another thing that I mean, I saw I'm putting the book together. I mentioned we interviewed a hundred people, researchers, practitioners, artists, people with lived experience. And we were just scratching the surface. We tried to show exemplars of some of the ways that our bodies and brains change on these experience in those moments that matter in our lives. But it is so ubiquitous and so beautiful. And yet I think we've left it on the table in so many ways because

it arts have not been valued as a have to have by policy makers and funders for sometimes civic leaders that they're seen as kind of enhancements or things that you do when you have time as opposed to integrating the arts at every moment within your life. Well, Susan, I'm going to just bring up a couple of these because we're starting to run out of time, but I wanted the audience to understand how art is being used to address health disorders illnesses and mental health. So I'm going to just give a few if I miss some, maybe you can help me out, but sound is being used to look at how vibration and frequencies optimize creativity and cognition.

We talked about intentional spaces, how the environment that your NFX, how you think, feel and perform. Visual arts, as we just talked about earlier. It's looking at how those are helping alleviate PTSD and existing trauma that people are facing. We talked about going on nature walks earlier and how accessing the natural world relief stress and anxiety we've talked about dancing earlier and how it's now helping people with improved movement, but also a victims of Parkinson's disease and stroke. And then we also talked about music, and it can have a profound impact on your memory, and I've read, help with the onset of

dementia and Alzheimer's and other things. I miss anything that I should have brought up. Well done, first of all. I'll just add that there's some interesting work happening with light and sound related to literally trying to cure Alzheimer's. We're using virtual reality for pain, which I think is extraordinary. And immersive experiences are starting to show up

to really impact all of our sensorial experiences that really start to help us to move into other worlds that are affecting mental health and well-being in new ways that we have never really seen before. So, and I think the future of the integration of the arts for our health and well-being is very exciting. Well, I'm going to bring back a question I have and asked in quite a while, which is a fan favorite, but since I brought up on Nicole's dot,

I'm gonna ask you, if you were all of a sudden, given the opportunity to be on the crew that was going to Mars, and the powers that be given that you were one of the first people to set foot on the planet, would allow you to establish a law or an edict or a precipice for establishing the colony there. What would your main thing be that you would bring to Mars? If I were the queen of Mars, I would make a rule that you was mandated that you

had to do some form of self-expression every day and that you had to have a community gathering where everyone in the community had the opportunity to share what it was they were thinking and feeling. That's beautiful and I always like to ask this question especially of new authors if a listener were to pick up the book and read it, what would be one of the main things that you hope they took away from it? I think I'll say two things. One is that there's an art for that, there's an art for what you need, and two, there is science behind it to really prove how it works and why it works.

is science behind it to really prove how it works and why it works. Okay, and I know, we talked before we got on the show that you and Ivy have a website coming out. Where can the listener find out more information about the both of you and your book? Super easy, it's your brainonart.com. Okay, well great. Well, Susan, thank you so much for giving us the honor to help put your book into the world. I think it's going to impact so many people and thank you for all the work that

you're doing in your lab and also that Google is doing to help look at technology and art and how the two can help human flourishing. I really appreciate you being here. Thank you. It's really been a pleasure. Really wonderful. Thank you. I thoroughly enjoyed that interview with Susan McSaman. And I wanted to thank Susan, Penguin Random House, and Hannah Clark for giving us the honor and privilege of having her on the show. Links to all thanks Susan will be in the show notes and passionstruck.com. Please use our website links in the show notes if you purchase any of the books from the guests that we feature on the show. All proceeds go to supporting the show.

Videos are on YouTube, both at John R. Miles and Passionstruck Clips. Avertise your deals and discount codes and one convenient place at passionstruck.com slash deals. I'm on LinkedIn and you can also find me at John Rmiles on Twitter and Instagram where I post daily bits of inspiration. Please go and check it out if you want hope, meaning, connection, and other tidbits of advice. You're about to hear a preview of the Passion Start Podcast interview that I did with Gaya Bernstein, who is a law professor, co-director of the Institute of Privacy Protection, and co-director for the Gibbons Institute of Law Science and Technology at Seton Hall University School of Law,

we discuss her brand new book Unwired, Gaining Control of our addictive technologies. The main thing is, there seems to be an impending public health crisis for children, what I call the science wars. Research is coming up and investigating and coming up with data and showing the harm. And then the company is saying no and also subsidizing their own research. These

science wars have been going on for too long. I think at a certain point, if you want to move on to long policy, you have to declare what's going on here. And from history, we can see that when medical professional organizations or governmental organizations say this is a harmful impact on people's health, things start changing. We don't have that. The fee for the show is that you share it with family or friends when you find something

insightful or inspiring. If you know someone who wants to get more into the arts and discover what it can do for them in their lives, then please definitely share today's episode with them. The greatest compliment that you can give us is when you share our show with those who you love and care about. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear in the show so that you can live what you listen. And until next time, live life, Ash and care about. In the meantime, be your best with why we'll you here in the show so that you can live with you listen. And until next time, live life, Ash and Strut.

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