Wondery plus subscribers can listen to 10% happier early and add free right now. Join Wondery plus in the Wondery app or on Apple podcasts. This is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris.
Hello, my fellow suffering beings. Welcome to the show. When the idea for this particular episode was pitched to me, I'll be honest, I was not enthusiastic. One of our producers, shout out to Lauren Smith, wanted me to interview the authors of a book called Your Brain on Art. And I immediately assumed that these people were going to try to get me to go to museums more often. And I don't want to go to fucking museums. I know, I know, I know that disliking museums makes me a Philistine or whatever.
It's my truth. What can I say? However, one of the things I've been really trying to work on in recent years is being less dismissive. So I endeavored to keep an open mind as Lauren made her case in one of our recent pitch meetings. We have these pitch meetings where the whole staff gets together and discusses ideas for the show. And I'm glad that I kept an open mind because the book is actually making a fascinating argument.
The first thing to know is that the authors define art very, very broadly. The way they use the word, it's basically interchangeable with beauty. So it can encompass not only a death march through a huge museum, but also music, dance, books, plays, movies, TV, food, architecture, gardening, humming in the shower, and being in nature.
The second thing to know is that the benefits are quite compelling. Art or beauty, whatever word you want to use here can help us get better at learning, regulating our emotions and exercising empathy. It can help treat disease and relieve stress. Here are some other research findings. Just 20 minutes of art a day is as beneficial as exercise and mindfulness. Working on an art project for 45 minutes can reduce the stress hormone cortisol and participating in one art experience per month can extend your life by 10 years.
And the third thing to know is that you don't have to be an artist per se to benefit you can be either a maker or a beholder to use the terminology of my guests.
Speaking of my guests, they are Ivy Ross, who is the Vice President of Design for Hardware Products at Google, and an artist herself with work in over 10 international museums, and Susan Magsammon, the Founder and Director of the International Arts and Mind Labs Center for Applied Neuro-Aesthetics at the Peterson Brain Science Institute of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, where she's also a faculty member in the Department of Neurology.
Final thing to say here is that not only did I listen to my producer Lauren and agree to bring Susan and Ivy on the show, but I also ended up liking this interview so much that we are today launching a whole series about how tuning into the seemingly small things in your life can have outsized benefits.
This is another thing aside from dismissiveness that I am personally working on. Even after so many years of meditation, I really cannot hate admitting this. I really can't find myself rushing through the day, frantically ticking items off of my to-do list. So this is something I'm quite interested in. We're calling this series Mundane Glory.
little phrase that I like. Of course, I like it because I came up with it. Anyway, we're going to be following up this episode with interviews about micro dosing awe and how to arrange your personal and professional spaces to boost your happiness and productivity. Hope you enjoy it. Hit me up on Twitter or threads or Instagram or wherever or via the 10% happier website, 10% calm to let us know what you think.
Before we get started, I want to remind you of all the good stuff we're doing over at DanHarris.com these days. You've probably heard me announce that we've started a new community through sub-stack, which includes all kinds of perks for subscribers, such as the ability to chat with me and sometimes our guests.
about each of the new podcast episodes. Video, ask me anything sessions, even live meditation sessions with me. Plus you'll get a cheat sheet, which includes full transcript and key takeaways from every episode. Recently we had my friend, Sebene Selassie and Jeff Warren in the chat. And we've got plenty of other podcast guests who are gonna be hopping into the chat in the coming weeks. So stay tuned for that. We're having a lot of fun. We'd love you to join us. It's eight bucks a month or 80 bucks a year.
or free for anybody who can't afford it. No questions asked. Just head over to DanHarris.com. We'll see you there. Meanwhile, I want to give you an update on what's happening over on the Happier app. As you know, I used to be involved with that app. I'm not anymore, but I'm going to continue to update you on their doings. They are very excited to announce something very cool. They have teamed up with two of the world's most renowned meditation centers, the Insight Meditation Society and Spirit Rock for an exclusive retreat giveaway.
Two winners will receive a $1,500 credit to go on a retreat, a $600 travel credit, and a complimentary four-year membership to the Happier app. The giveaway is from October 1st to October 14th. Enter now at HappierApp.com slash retreat giveaway. That's HappierApp.com forward slash retreat giveaway.
Wondering new podcasts, even the royals, pulls back the curtain on the darker side of royal families past and present from all over the world, where status comes at the expense of your freedom, your privacy, and sometimes even your head. New episodes come out every week. Listen to even the royals early and ad-free on Wondery Plus. Ivy Ross and Susan Meg Sammon, welcome to the show. Thank you. Great to be here. Thank you for having us.
pleasure. That was Ivy who spoke first and Susan who spoke second just for those of you who want to track who's speaking when. I have to say just to get this off my chest at the start here, I was quite skeptical when my colleague Lauren who's the producer of this episode hitched this as a subject for us. I am not. Well, I heard the terms
art and the brain. And I love the brain, but I'm not particularly interested in art, at least narrowly defined. I'm not artsy, crafty. I don't go to museums, which I'm embarrassed to admit. So I was a little, as I said, skeptical, but then in reading the 11 page document that Lauren put together for me to prep for this interview, I'm completely, I'm flip-flopping here. And I really, you know,
When I give talks, I often talk about the pantheon of no brainers when it comes to human flourishing. And I include things like sleep and exercise and meditation and therapy and medication if you need it and access to nature and perhaps most importantly relationships. But I'm now thinking I should probably be including art as you define it broadly on this list. So having said way too much at the beginning of this ostensible interview, what do you think of all the foregoing IVL start with you?
Well, first of all, we love converts because I'm sure there's many people that feel the same way, but then after reading the book, have a different perspective. And just like the reason we exercise in sleep is because science has it drilled into our heads and has proven that that's
Good for us. And the great thing about the projects Susan and I worked on is now that science can get into your heads. We're able to prove the same thing about art. And when we say art, we talk about the arts. So it's visual, it's singing, it's dancing, it's theater, it's either making or beholding art. So it's very inclusive. It's the things that allow us to self-express.
So I'll let Susan chime in on some of her thinking here, but I am thrilled and I definitely think you should add it to the repertoire.
Oh, yes, I totally agree. I think that you should add art and aesthetic experiences to your repertoire. And you already have one of them, which is nature. We think of nature as sort of the ultimate, highest form of art. It's really where we come from being in nature. There's so many great studies about how just 15 minutes of nature lowers cortisol, helps you reach homeostasis, really helps you clear your brain and have much more cut of clarity and insight.
But Ivy sort of began to talk about this. You know, we see art as a definition of looking at creative self-expression. And we do that in so many ways. And I think when we limit it to sort of the strict kind of dogma of
painting, dancing, you know, performing arts, we limit ourselves. So things as simple as humming in the shower, gardening, which someone recently said to us is the slowest art form, but thinking about these very everyday things that we do that are really ways of being and using the arts.
One other thought is that indigenous cultures, and there's still 5,000 indigenous cultures around the world, didn't have a word for art because it's how they live. And it's what they do every day in the everyday moments that make up our lives, the rituals, the traditions, the ways we use food, clothing, dance, storytelling, drawing. And I think in some ways, we can take a page from where we were to really think about where we're going.
Yeah, the great thing is you don't have to be good at any of these arts because many people have done some of these art works when they were kids and then stop doing it because they decided it wasn't going to be their profession. They don't think they were good at it. But the great thing here is that you don't even have to be good.
I have so many questions I want to talk about. The evidence that you referenced at the top that this is good for you, but you've kind of taken me in a few other directions that I do want to pursue first. Let's stay on a definitional tip for a minute here. What is in and what is out of the art or arts?
bucket from your point of view. We're in an era that has been described as the golden age of television, for example, although with all the streaming woes, we might be exiting that era. But is watching succession? Does that qualify as beholding of art? I'm writing a book. It's a nonfiction book, and I pretty much hate every minute of it, but is my day filled with art by your definition?
So interestingly, the research on this has been increasing. What we're learning is that being in a live situation, live music, live performances, theater has a slightly greater benefit from a neurobiological perspective, but things like television, streaming, video,
has a very strong impact and would certainly qualify as some kind of an art form that can be beneficial as a beholder. You know, there's certainly lots of really good examples where you're listening to the radio or you're using digital tools that really bring those different types of art forms in. Writing a book, writing a nonfiction book is certainly a creative act. And so it may not be pleasurable all the time, but it's definitely a makers act.
Yeah, and you know, we learned that even writing down a secret and then burning the piece of paper lowers the cognitive load. Like it doesn't even have to be writing that then you share with anyone, but a lot of these arts is the act of doing versus the sharing.
Yeah, I was thinking about this difference between makers and beholders. And we're makers and beholders all the time, just by nature, that's what we do. Like right now, we're in an improvisational conversation with you. You don't know what we're gonna say. We don't know what you're gonna say. I don't know what Ivy's gonna say. Ivy doesn't know what I'm gonna say. And so I think we also are listeners. We are bringing in this information as a beholder.
And as a beholder, there's a couple of things that I think are different than being a maker. Two that stand out for me. One is that we have this ability as beholders to be perspective taking. So I can explore without risk different types of emotional ranges or different ideas or different thoughts from a storyteller who's sharing information in whatever art form they're choosing.
I also have the ability to really empathize and to understand something through my own lens. As a maker, no one can tell you what to make. It's such an act of freedom and of self-expression, of individuality.
And that's something that gives you both an introspection, but also an opportunity to share yourself with the world in exactly the way you want to. And as Ivy said, good or bad isn't part of the conversation. It's not the paradigm. It's really what is it that you're trying to express and what's the best form for you that allows you to do that?
You both were quite keen to start this interview, and I guess I didn't do what you were hoping I would do, but I'm going to put it up pretty high here. To start this interview, or at least get to this early, with the notion that our, again, broadly understood is part of our evolutionary DNA, what do you mean by that?
So we had an opportunity to meet with E.O. Wilson, the evolutionary biologist who spent a lot of time thinking about this when we were researching the book. And he talked about the fact that we share an interesting phenomenon called use social with termites, ants, and bees. And that basically means that we are highly social.
we need each other to survive, to flourish as a species. And why it doesn't always seem that way, that procluity to be together and to work together meant that from the very beginning of humanity, we had to find ways to express ourselves, to creatively express ourselves. And so dancing, singing, storytelling, circling around the fire, creating spaces where people lived that felt safe. So
you know, using spaces where behind you were curved spaces that helps you to look out onto a horizon, for example. And so we know that the evolutionary biology is quite compelling, but then there's also the physiology. To give you an example, you're
born with 100 billion neurons. And those neurons are really there for you to connect, to create these neural pathways that become how you think, how you feel, how you move, how you collaborate, communicate, all the things that we humans do, how we connect different physiological systems, all happen because those neural pathways are connected with multiple systems simultaneously.
And it turns out that the arts and aesthetic experiences that we bring in through our senses offer the most salient types of material for creating very strong neural pathways. So the songs of your youth.
think about the way that even music might affect you today. We know that there are these cascades of neural pathways that are created through strong aesthetic experiences like nature, but also through all of these different art forms. And if you understand that at a very basic neurobiological level, that lays the groundwork for how this work can be employed in physical health, mental health, learning,
flourishing community building, all the things that we do to be our most human and most powerful selves. And as Susan mentioned, we did this during tribal days. And then I think what's happened is we started optimizing for productivity since the Industrial Revolution, and we pushed the arts aside.
thinking that productivity would make us happy. And it's clear as a society, we're not happy for the most part. Mental health is a high versus physical health. There's a quote that we have in the book from Jill Bolty Taylor. And she says, we think we're thinking beings that feel, but we're actually feeling beings that think.
And when you think about that, it turns everything upside down or inside out in that our sensory systems are what make us human and that we are first and foremost feeling beings that an evolution have recently been able to think.
But we think that we're thinking beings. We kind of really cherish the cognitive mind. We're taking this position that it is critical that we understand how the arts and aesthetic experience ignite our sensory systems, which are core to being a human and a happy human.
And foundational, I think really foundational for these areas of our lives, like physical health and disease states, like mental health and all the various ways that that manifests from stress to serious mental illness, from really being a better learner. And learning is something that I think we talk a lot about, but we really usually relegate learning to education systems, which aren't the same thing.
Just as a signal to the listener here, Ivy and Susan have mentioned a lot of things that I'm sure have peaked your curiosity and I'm making notes of them and I will follow these threads throughout this conversation, including their mentions of learning and their repeated mentions of the scientific evidence which will dive into coming up, but just staying with the threat of the conversation at least.
thread as it's flowing in my own mind. One of the things that I heard there was you sociality, that's you sociality, meaning good sociality, and it seems to tie back to something in my pantheon of no brainers. I usually end the list with this and the list expands and contracts depending on what I'm talking to.
I usually say that the most important lever according to the data I've seen for a human being to pull when it comes to their own happiness is the quality of their relationships and it seems like arts fit very firmly into that or very strongly related to that wired right into our DNA.
That's a great point. I love your idea of the pantheon of no brainers. People say to us when they've read the book or when we've talked about some of the content in the book that it really sort of makes what they have felt visible. And so it's interesting. I think that this sort of ties into that, that it sort of makes a lot of sense that the arts would be incredibly important for this idea of socializing and relationship and connectivity.
I want to tell you a story that maybe will illustrate this a little bit. I'm a twin. And when I was 12 years old, my sister had a very serious accident. She almost lost her leg. And she was so traumatized that she couldn't talk about what happened. And if you know anything about twins, you know that we finish each other sentences. My stomach hurts. She's getting her appendix out, right? You're very, very close.
But when this trauma happened to her, I couldn't feel her. I didn't know where she was and she couldn't share where she was. So she started to draw and she started creating these illustrations and ways of bringing out
what was really stuck deep inside of her. And I was then able to see what she was feeling through her artwork. And she was able to get back in touch with herself. And so at a very intimate level, something as simple as a child's drawing really allowed me and my sister to be able to have a connection that was so important for our lifeblood.
you know, we were born in a relationship and when you can't be in a relationship with someone like that, it's really hard. I think that's true for all of us though. You know, we want to understand the other. We want to share what we're feeling and art, whether it's visual arts, singing, dancing, you know, synchronicity is something that we're also wired for. So you see it in marching bands or you see it in gospel choirs or in choruses where
we synchronize with each other. You know, it makes me think of the birds, the starlings that move in emergence with each other. Humans also have that capacity and that desire to be in relationship to move with each other. And so the arts are sort of a natural evolutionary way that that happens. And as Ivy said, I think somehow we have left that on the sideline.
We've optimized out of it. We thought it was a luxury that we'd come back to it if we had time. But it's actually our essence. And it's part of what makes us most whole and most healthy. And I agree with the relationship at the end of the day is all there is to each other, to ourselves, to the natural world, 100%. And as Susan says, even when there are no words for things, the arts allow you to make that connection with the other.
And with yourself, by the way, I mean, the arts are a great way of mirroring back to yourself how you're feeling when you don't even know. And you know, Susan talked about the trauma of her sister and the damage to her leg, but we have micro traumas every day, like little micro traumas, one on top of the other that we just suppress and a certain point that gets too much.
And the arts, if we can do a little bit each day, is a way of time releasing those traumas so it never gets to a place where it has to explode or create depression.
It does get me thinking, though, about some of the more solitary artistic beholding experiences, like watching TV or maybe playing video games, although some video games do have a community aspect to them. My son, who's eight, plays a lot of Roblox, and there's a lot of chatting in that. But nonetheless, he's on his own. And so I wonder, is that less powerful than being in a chorus or anything else that would be truly in community versions of art?
We talk about something called the aesthetic mindset that sort of frames this idea of an aesthetic diet or sort of aesthetic literacy, if you will. And I'm just going to briefly say what those four things are and then kind of come into what you're sharing with your son's activities or other kinds of more solitary activities.
The first thing in an aesthetic mindset is this idea of curiosity, bringing yourself into a beginner's mind where you're open to new experiences and wanting to know what's on the other side of the hill and being really, really interested and wondering about things. So that's a mindset. The second is playful exploration, being able to do things without an intended outcome and without judgment or criticism. The third is this idea of sensorial stimulation
and being really aware of your senses around you, all of them. And then the last is moving in and out of being a maker and a beholder. So when you're playing video games and you are in a strong narrative with a very visual
view you're being immersed into that experience. That's a certain kind of aesthetic mindset and aesthetic growth that can give you introspection. It can also give you distraction. It can give you a sense of agency. But I think the most important thing to remember is the diet of those things. So if you're only doing that, you're only really expanding your capacity in one way, where if you're doing some video games, you're doing some
reading, you're doing some, maybe it's working in nature or maybe you're doing some kind of a physical motor experience like dancing, you're kind of creating different types of arts-based habits that become your life. And so I think it's everything in moderation, maybe is what I'm trying to say, is that you want to make sure that you're experiencing lots of different things because the ways that you're bringing in the world are changing those neural pathways and creating new neural pathways and pruning neural pathways that are already there.
So it's really using those aesthetic mindsets to think about how you move throughout your day and ultimately throughout your life. Maybe Susan, what you're saying is it's a kind of cross training. Like when we exercise, we do lots of kinds of exercise. When I meditate, I do lots of kinds of meditation. Arts are really important, but if knitting is the only thing you ever do and you're not going to the theater or you're never, I don't know, joining a chorus or whatever, then you are kind of limiting yourself.
Yeah, there's a range of emotional experiences and physiologically experiences that really make up the human diaspora. And so you want to make sure that you're experiencing all of those things. And I was talking about Dear Evan Hansen recently. I don't know if you saw that play.
versus La La Land. Same guy, Benj Pasek wrote the lyrics for both of those. They're hugely different experiences. And so the range of human emotions are so huge. You want to offer those to yourself to be able to experience those.
And you want to try new experiences because as Susan says with neuroplasticity, you're constantly making new synapse connections and pruning out the old. So you want to keep having these new experiences so that your brain will prune out the old, making room for new connections.
Coming up, Susan Magsaman and Ivy Ross talk about the importance of infusing play and not being judgmental when you're making art, how art can be a form of meditation and mindfulness, and how artistic experiences can extend your life, help treat disease and relieve stress.
What's up, guys? It's your girl Kiki, and my podcast is back with a new season, and let me tell you, it's so good. And I'm diving into the brains of entertainment's best and brightest, okay? Every episode, I bring on a friend and have a real conversation. And I don't mean just friends. I mean the likes of Amy Poehler, Kel Mitchell, Vivica Fox. The list goes on. So follow, watch, and listen to baby. This is Kiki Palmer on The Wondery App, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Being a part of a royal family might seem enticing, but more often than not, it comes at the expense of everything, like your freedom, your privacy, and sometimes even your head. Even the Royals is a podcast from Wondery that pulls back the curtain on royal families past and present from all over the world to show you the darker side of what it means to be royalty, like the true stories behind the six wives of Henry VIII whose lives were so much more than just divorce beheaded, died, divorce beheaded, survived.
Or Esther of Burundi, a princess who fled her home country to become France's first black supermodel. There's also Queen Christina of Sweden, an icon who traded in dresses for pants, had an affair with her lady in waiting, and eventually gave up her crown because she refused to get married. Throw in her involvement in a murder and an attempt to become Queen of Poland, and you have one of the most unforgettable legacies in royal history.
Follow even the royals on the Wonder E app or wherever you get your podcasts. You can binge even the royals ad free right now on Wonder E plus. Ivy, let me stay with you for a second because you said something that I think is extremely.
important or resonant to me at least, that we post the Industrial Revolution. Culturally, there is this major emphasis on productivity optimization. I feel that has only accelerated of late, and I feel it in my own mind really prominently. This desire to maximize, optimize every moment. Am I doing something that checks some sort of box? And I'm wondering, is there a way to co-opt this wiring?
because it's there and it's a very powerful habit pattern in many of our minds. Is it possible to co-opt that in service of getting people to either behold or make more often? In other words, if I can think to myself, oh yeah, every day I do my exercise, I try to get enough sleep, I do X amount of meditation, I need my, again, broadly defined arts time. Could we co-opt that mental trend to a positive outcome here?
That's absolutely what we have to do because, to your point, we've been so outcome driven because of productivity. We're literally digging those neural pathways deeper and deeper. And the deeper they are, it's true, the harder they are to get rid of. And so you have to actively make the decision that says, I'm going to do, this is really good for me, 20 minutes a day of taking a lump of clay,
no expectations because by the way the opposite of play people think is work and it's not it's depression because your brain needs to do things where there's no preconceived expectation and so that's what a lot of these arts do without judgment. I'm going to take a paintbrush and just start slapping paint on it. I don't know what it's going to look like. I don't care what it looks like.
But to dig ourselves out of where we've gotten to as a society and dug those neural pathways all about checking the list, optimization, productivity, everything has a reason for doing, we must start playing. And we must start playing with different art forms. You're absolutely right. And that's why we're excited and wanted to write this book for the masses.
to explain that and to absolutely put it on the list of the things that you do. You know, Sharon Salzburg, who is big in the meditation movement, we interviewed her, we interviewed about 100 people for the book, and she says that art is the best form of meditation.
And when you think about it, it is getting yourself in that state of mind down the rabbit hole out of your cognitive mind and just focusing on something else entirely. How is that watercolor dripping on the page? How is that lump of clay? What form am I making? So it's a great form of meditation, actually art. So you might want to, if you're short of time, combine those two on your checklist.
Well, interestingly, it's counterintuitive. The irony is that when you are in these other states of mind, when you are in flow states, when you are, you know, lowering your cortisol, when you're doodling in that distracted state, it turns out that you actually are ultimately more creative. You are more relaxed. You are more innovative. And so it turns out that when you have these experiences, the
ROI on it is significantly greater. And there's been some really wonderful studies to look at that. And if that's not enough, what we've seen in some of the epidemiology studies is that one or more art experiences a month can extend your life by 10 years. So if you really need a reason, I think that does it.
Just to shout out a couple of former guests who have talked about this stuff a lot, Alex Sujung Kim-Pang, who wrote a book called Rest that had a huge impression on me. We'll put a link to his interview in the show notes and also Catherine Price, who's a good friend of mine and wrote a book about play and also gave a great TED Talk about play. We'll put links to her episodes and also to her TED Talk in the show notes if people want to go deeper on this. But back to productivity, I can imagine
I've sometimes joked that I have this mystical ability to channel the thoughts of my listeners, which is only partially bullshit.
But I can imagine some listeners thinking, okay, I get it. You've only given me tidbits of the evidence, but it's very compelling. And also I can interpolate back into my life and see how I've been running on these to-do lists instead of actually enjoying what limited time I have on the planet and through art, et cetera, et cetera. But it does kind of feel like another thing on my to-do list now, like, oh, shit, how am I going to find time to get this gardening done?
I think it's about perspective. In no way are we asking people to do more, but it's to be more intentional with the things that they are doing. And I'll just give you a couple of simple examples. You wake up in the morning, you make coffee, right? Or you make tea or whatever you're making. Really, you know, smell in forms about 75% of your emotions. So what are you bringing in when you're getting up in the morning? What are those sensorial experiences of the light? Is it the temperature? Is it the smell?
You get in the shower, you turn on this really warm water. The 4 million nerve endings in your skin totally light up. Your vagus nerve is engaged if you're humming or singing in the shower. It engages your parasympathetic nervous system.
And so you're gonna take a shower and have coffee one way or another, right? But how do you really intentionally bring that into your life to really change the way you feel? So those are just two really simple examples of that. A lot of us already garden, a lot of us are already taking walks, but we're doing them in transactional ways. And I think what Ivy and I are saying is that these are transformative opportunities that you can begin to start to really use
We may have mentioned doodling for a moment. We know that, you know, sitting and doodling in a business meeting actually makes you more attentive. You pay attention better. You actually can retain information and recall information better just by the act of doodling. So there are certain things that I think we've believed are true about the things that we think we want to do that are just not true.
Just that point about doodling. I can't resist dunking on proponents of Zoom. We're on Zoom right now. Zoom is a great technology, but I sometimes get beat up for not wanting to be on video calls, but I listen so much better if I can be outside in nature, not in the panopticon of technology where everybody's looking at me and I can doodle or whatever it is. I take it in so much better.
Right, right. I'm doing it right now. Look, because I'm like listening to you and I'm thinking, yeah, that's interesting. And, you know, I'm like working my way. We all have been so penalized for that. And I think shamed in some way too that, oh, we're not doing it right. And that makes it really hard to want to enter into it. And I think this lack of judgment on ourselves and really just opening up the space. We as somebody's tell us recently that they were doing
Ivy, you have the name Art Date Night.
Yeah, we never expected this quite frankly. I mean, we wrote this book because we had information that we thought was important to share. But we're getting emails and LinkedIn with stories about, oh my God, I started after reading your book. We now do a date night that's art focused, once a week. And they're sending us pictures of what they do together. And someone yesterday actually talked about what 100 days of art, he set himself up for a challenge, an hour a day, 100 days,
of doing this. And so it's been fantastic to see people taking it on as a challenge and having fun with it. And by calling it Art Date Night, they're experimenting with different things. Let's go to the theater. Let's go buy watercolor paints and just start watercoloring together. I mean, it's been really fun to hear these stories.
People are picking stuff up that they did 50 years ago. I have had a woman that sent me love beads. She started beating and she's like, you know, I used to bead when I was younger and I loved the motor activity and it settled my mind. And so she started beating again and people are doing all kinds of things. So I think the way we enter it is we start from where we are and we're not prescribing. You have to do these particular things, but sort of oftentimes you can go back to when you were a kid.
and reconnect to some of those aesthetic arts experiences that really touched you. And that can often be a kind of a place to begin if you think, well, I don't know where to start. I don't know what to do. And that can be really helpful.
Yeah, picking up on that. I have a kid, as you know, because he showed up on the Zoom call up before we started rolling. And he and I play the drums together. And I played the drums when I was a kid. And so now he has this drum set in his room that I play all the time. I might play it more than he does, frankly. And that is one of the few things in my life that I do with no agenda. There is no productivity aspect to it. It's just because I enjoy it.
That's fantastic. And you know, I was a drummer too. I can't believe I had a Roger set of drums. I played in an all boys band. And I actually started to realize that the drumming would get my heart in resonance with the beat. And so it was almost my form of meditation. But now I play African drums. And so I think that's a perfect example.
of an art form just going in there and banging on those drums every so often would be incredible. And there's been some studies about the difference and maybe Susan, you could talk about that in playing music in an improv way versus reading music. I mean, both are great for you, but now that we can get inside the brain, you can see different parts of the brain light up.
The drumming conversation is really interesting. So there's a researcher named Charles Lim, who's at University of California, San Francisco. And he studies creativity. And so he has done some really interesting work with jazz musicians, putting them in an fMRI machine. And first they play a piece that's rehearsed. And then they play a piece that's improved. And what he's found is that in the prefrontal cortex, there's a part of the brain that shuts down when you're improving. And there's a part of the brain that lights up.
when you are controlling for perfection, you know, for getting it right. And I think what it's showing us really beautifully is that, you know, there are times when we need to go from interest to mastery and we're very conscious of that. And there are other times where that just gets turned off so that you really move into what would be considered a flow state. He's also now done that same study with lots of different kinds of improv versus technical abilities. He's done it with
poetry and slam. He's done it with caricatures where people draw these like very fast sort of improv caricatures versus portraiture. And it's the same part of the brain that consistently is showing those kinds of variations. But even drumming is a great example. You guys drum and you kind of move into a flow state and you feel better. You feel good. You feel in harmony and sync.
We see drumming in drumming circles in communities where it's really building a sense of that synchronicity and that connectedness. Drumming's also being used for Parkinson's patients, where Parkinson's patients have a problem with gait or motor movement, cognition. They also tend to have problems with sleep and sometimes with mood.
drumming and other kinds of musical instruments, as well as dance for Parkinson's patients, turns out to be incredibly helpful in minimizing symptoms and in looking at things like dose and dosage, the more they do it, the longer they do it, they have better outcomes. And so we're seeing how using this physiological, neurobiological truth around how something as simple as drumming can have such reverberations in so many different ways.
Just to go back to something you said earlier, you invoked Sharon Salzberg, who's a frequent flyer on the show. She's been on here many, many times. She's a very close friend of mine, and we talk a lot about meditation on the show, so people will be familiar with her, and at the very least, familiar with meditation. I would love to have you hang a lantern on or amplify the point you were making about
The fact that they're throughout our day, many aspects of the arts that show up and you were using the term in a sort of transactional way. We're taking walks. We're making coffee. But if we can use the power of mindfulness that we all have, whether we meditate or not, to tune into the senses,
the sensation of walking while you're walking, the being in nature, even if you're in a city, there are trees. There's the awe that can be produced by the architecture around you, the feeling of the air on your skin. There's so many ways to tune in to the arts broadly defined that we may be missing. Am I on the right track with all of this?
No, you're absolutely right. It's like a sense of radical presence. You know, if you can tune into these things and just notice, notice the colors, notice the smell, notice what is around you. That in itself will be fantastic for you and is an amazing way of getting the art or aesthetic dosage.
I want to share with you on that note, in 2018, Susan and I did at the Milan Design Fair, an exhibition along with Google's support, where we showed the public for the first time they experienced this idea of neuro-esthetics, which I'll explain in terms of how these
sensorial things, some of which you touched on, is affecting our body all the time. And our mind might not be aware of it. So what we did is we collaborated with Succi Reddy in an architect, and we created three rooms. It was the same living room, dining room, set up. But each one had a different set of colors, textures, artwork, scent.
Lighting. Every aesthetic aspect was different. When people came to the experience, we gave them a band that they wore on their hand that Susan's Arts and Mind Lab and Google worked out an algorithm that would take in the physiology of the person's body
and work toward determining in which room is your body, not your mind, more at ease or less stressed. And we asked people to spend, it was called the space for being, just be in each room for five minutes. It was only 10 people at a time, no talking, no photos, just be. Touch the texture of the couch. You could even touch the art. Notice the music. Take in the scent.
After the three rooms, people gave their band to a band tender, not a bartender, who took the data off of the band. And of course, we deleted it right after we shared it. And we asked the person, which room did you like the best? And they said, oh, room number two or room number three. And then we showed them through the algorithm and the data, the fact that their body liked a different room, potentially. And Susan and I thought,
OK, this is going to be a problem if at least over 50% of the people didn't have that disconnect. But luckily, I think it was 58% had a difference between what their cognitive mind liked and what their body actually felt the most comfortable or at ease in. And people would go, wow, how could that be? Why is that? And we had to explain. And there was a great exercise to tell people our body is feeling all the time.
sensing, taking in information. But we are so in our cognitive minds and not embodied often, that we're not getting that information from how our body is feeling. So I know some of the journalists were like, oh, is Google going to make a band that people wear to tell them how they're feeling? I said, I don't want to be in a world where you have to do that. This was just an exercise to bring awareness that our body is feeling all the time. And it's time we start making that connection.
which is what you were saying earlier, Dan, about being aware and we have agency over what we surround ourselves with and how we tune into it and the benefit that that could have by being aware. Certainly from an N of one perspective, I can tell you that my perceived ability to listen to my body or if you put it in the type of language that I don't particularly feel drawn to, you might say, listen to your heart, that has improved via meditation.
That's I think super interesting. Researchers are starting to see this idea of embodied cognition, of feeling that sense, those sensory systems is really another true sense. And we may have as many as 50 senses, not five. We only are conscious of about 5% of what is really happening to us. Sharon Salzberg, I'm a big fan of hers too. And I just finished real life. I don't know if you've had a chance to read that yet.
It's fabulous. It's really a fabulous book. And she talks a lot about this idea of the unconscious and how things like mandalas, for me, it's collage. I find that when I put pieces scraps together on a piece of paper, I can then come back to those symbols and metaphors and understand what I'm feeling. And that's another great example of something as simple as
a mandala or collaging or coloring, even stick figures help you really tap into your psyche in a way that you can't sometimes do without that kind of visual representation. That also at the same time lowers anxiety levels in an almost immediate way. And I think so many people are experiencing so much stress and anxiety. Something as simple as drawing can do that.
Coming up, Susan and Ivy talk about how the arts affect the way we learn, the emerging field of neuro arts and neuro aesthetics, how food fits into the arts category, simple ways to integrate the arts into your daily life, technologies relationship to the arts, and the importance of architecture and your physical space as a form of art.
Let's go hard at the scientific evidence. We've kind of kissed it a few times throughout the conversation. Can you say more about like what art does to our brains and the rest of our bodies?
So we do know that arts and aesthetic experiences alter complex physiological networks of interconnected systems. So when I say that, what I mean is neuronal systems, we've talked a little bit about that, but also psychological systems, arts affect our immune and integrin system, circulatory systems, respiratory systems, and also interestingly, higher brain systems like cognition, reward and motor systems.
And we know that at a very sort of operational level, the neurobiology of different arts for different reasons affect emotional learning. You probably have talked before on your show about executive function, but also increasing synapses and even increasing brain mass. So there's a great study, several, but one study that comes to mind is a study that was done with music and children. And these are children who are just reading music and playing music. So it's not necessarily
proficient or have mastery. But this is a work that was done with an FMRI study, a five-year longitudinal study, University of Southern California. And what they have found is that brain structure actually changes and synaptic connection increases. So these studies are pretty definitive in showing that the arts, in this case, it's music, but it's also been seen in other art forms, are literally changing
how fast the brain is working, how synapses are really increasing connections, but also how the shape and size of the brain is changing. And this speaks to learning. We were talking about learning earlier. You want to have experiences where you're having those kinds of substantive changes.
I'll just tick off a few other bullet points that I found interesting. Some of these may have already been mentioned. Just 20 minutes of art a day is as beneficial as exercise and mindfulness. Working on an art project for 45 minutes can reduce the stress hormone cortisol to extend your life by 10 years, as mentioned earlier, participate in one art experience per month. So it's quite compelling stuff.
And you know, I sometimes explain this field as the elephant in the room, where depending upon where you touch it, so you're touching it for Parkinson's, there's a certain art form and research. You're looking at Alzheimer's and singing. There's a lot of work that's being done with both EEG, FMRI, looking at autobiographical music and what's happening in the brain, where the brain has actually distributed this highly salient autobiographical experience.
outside of the hippocampus into the auditory cortex, into the limbic system, into other parts of the brain where someone who has lost their hippocampus, the ability to use that memory holder can still pull up a song, can still become very present.
So depending upon what you're looking at, once you understand this core neurobiological foundation of how the arts are wired through neuroplasticity, you can start to look at any number of outcomes, whether it's physical health, mental health, learning, etc.
And I think that's where it really becomes interesting. And there's a whole new field emerging called neuro arts, which is using this neuro aesthetic research and expanding it NIH has been funding something called the sound health network.
which is funding research and right now music and sound and really developing very strong protocols and research tools and outcome measures. So we're seeing it in the United States, but in other countries, there's a lot more prescribing of the arts.
for many, many different purposes where public health is actually paying for doctors to write a prescription for people to go to a museum to be able to work with cognition or stroke recovery or prescribing dance. And so we're seeing this show up literally all over the world.
One of the most fascinating studies that in writing this book we came upon was a woman, and Susan could probably tell you more about her, at MIT, who is using sound and light, which are art forms, specifically 40 hertz of sound with a combination of light.
to help in dementia and Alzheimer's in terms of actually the combination of that sound and light sequence will literally clean the brain or activate something that cleans the brain of some of its plaque. And they're having amazing results. Where does food fit in all of this? I never do this, but I've been quite rudely eating some oatmeal and berries while we're doing this conversation because my day has gotten out of my control a little bit. Where does food fit into the arts, if at all?
Oh, totally, totally. I had this big debate with a colleague about whether food was an art form. And she was like, it's just not an art form. It's just, it's something that you have to have for survival. And I said, exactly. Exactly. Food is an art form that you need for survival. I mean, taste art.
our taste buds turn over every 30 to 60 days, right? And it's also taste is one of the last senses that really leads us towards the end of our lives, which is also really fascinating sugar in particular. The sweet taste of life is one of the last things that we have towards the end of our life. We know that when people eat together,
they tend to be more agreeable, they tend to be able to collaborate better. So this idea of breaking bread, there's been some really wonderful studies looking at that, also that the different ways that food reinforces culture. So one of the things Ivy and I talk about is food falls in this category is art creates culture, culture creates community and community creates humanity.
And food is so important for developing rituals and traditions. And because regionally and culturally food is so unique to who we are for our identity. It's really fundamental for how we think about that and all the things that we do throughout the day in the book in the community chapter.
We talked about corn and the many, many ways that corn is used in the Hopi tribe, whether that's for birth, for death rituals, for subsidence, for sacred ceremonies, and that corn became and is such an important life-sustaining symbol, but also life-sustaining food. So yeah, totally. And I think it's really important.
Yeah, cooking itself is absolutely an art form. I think of it sometimes making a soup is like making a painting, right? You decide. You have agency over what you put in it. So both the act of cooking and the act of, as Susan said, eating together is an art form.
What if I'm just mindful as I eat my strawberry? That's fantastic as well. I have a little video. I have a grandson who's one year old and my daughter made a video of him tasting a strawberry for the first time.
And that video is extraordinary. He's like the poster child for neuro-esthetics because you watch his face, every muscle in his face change as he just starts to taste the strawberry, then he pulls it out, kind of looks at it, like what is this thing? Squishes in it, you know, so it's touch, taste, he smells it. And so sometimes if I'm ever bored in a corporate meeting at work, I have this video I watch of him eating a strawberry under my desk.
And I immediately get fully present. That video sounds amazing. We touched on this a little bit, but let's just really hit it again before we run out of time. For people who are compelled, and I suspect that's most, if not all of us, what are some simple ways to integrate all that you've learned into our lives on a daily basis?
Well, I have to say right now, I'm salivating over your strawberry. So I think it's really about appreciating the things that are in your life right now, starting with where you are and in bringing these acts of art into your everyday life. And that's thinking about things as simple as the sensory things that are around you. So I mentioned how you hum in the shower.
how you might sing in your car. My husband and I dance every Friday night almost without fail. And we laugh. It's just so much fun making meals together, thinking about the way different herbs or ingredients smell how they come together.
You know, scent is one of those unbelievably emotive sensory systems. So it pulls back memory so amazingly. And so really thinking about that, we know that moms with postpartum depression are singing and humming and feeling better.
People are doodling. We talked about doodling, coloring, collaging, all those things that you can do every day, getting out in nature, even just looking up in the sky and just appreciating cloud watching. There's this great term I love called pareidolia, which is the way that you make images out of things that aren't really there. So seeing faces in the electric socket or
images and clouds, all of those ways that you can really tap into the world around you are really easy to do. And you're moving through your day anyway. So how do you make it feel more alive and enriched? And I think these are some of the very simple ways to do that.
So, and then I want to say and or be intentional about carving out that 20 minutes or 30 minutes a day to experiment with either pick up some art form that you used to do as a kid or as an adult and stopped
because you were told you were not good at it. Sir Ken Robinson said he would go into nursery schools. Who's an artist? Everyone's hand would go up. By the time he got to third or fourth grade, no one's hand would go up. And so because someone judged what we were doing, and so we just put it aside. So pick up something that you used to do.
or do what some of our readers are doing, create an art date night, be intentional about carving out, as you mentioned earlier, Dan, just like we do exercise, et cetera, and say, I'm gonna have some fun with this, no expectations, and buy a coloring book, listen to music, get some clay, try to paint. You could move through these different art forms, and as long as you have no judgment, it becomes play. It becomes total play and fun.
You reminded me, Ivy, that we talked about this in the book, but reading poetry lights up some of the same parts of the brain as listening to music. And it also stimulates the brain's primary reward circuitry, clay, yarn, soil. All these things where your hands are stimulating your skin and nerve endings, they ignite an entire internal sensory receptors that are part of the somatic sensory system.
and they actually help you become more attentive and focused. And so the benefits of these kinds of activities have a very strong physiological and psychological outcome response. And so I think sort of feeling your way through that is also really interesting.
And I want to say I'm not here to talk about technology, but I do want to say as technology moves more into our lives, I think some of the things we're talking about are so important for us to amplify those sensory systems that we humans have and this ability to creatively express is going to become more and more important as the world changes.
And that brings you back to what Dan, you were talking about with one of your no brainers, which is relationship. How we build strong, creative, innovative, spontaneous relationships with each other, I think is such an important part of this work as well.
You said you weren't here to talk about technology, Ivy, but that is kind of where I want to end this, which is your argument that we're on the verge of a shift where these benefits of the arts of neuroesthetics become more widely available. And I would imagine technology as part of that.
Well, it is in some ways in the sense that dissemination and scaling technology provides that way beyond anything we've ever known. Also, in the interventions, some of these medical interventions and mental health interventions and even learning interventions are using virtual reality.
and other kinds of bio metrics and biomarkers for the actual intervention themselves. And that's pretty great. And then on the diagnostic side and the research side, technology is actually allowing us to get inside our heads, but also the biomarkers that we can use to help understand what some of these aesthetic and arts experiences are doing and how we can
think about things like dose and dosage. And so technology in service to humanity is really what we're talking about. And I think there's many ways that that's allowing us to expand this work with technology.
Because technology is a tool. I mean, it's a tool for us to work with. And it has done some amazing things, even in terms of us being able to, if you want to try to watercolor, you could, on the internet, find a class that you could take on watercolor. Everything from that to, as Susan said, actually helping in mental and physical interventions.
And maybe Ivy, you're so good at this. These immersive experiences that are being developed, highly sensorial immersive experiences that are incorporating arts and aesthetics and technology are popping up all over the world. And you've probably saw the Van Gogh work where you walked into a Van Gogh painting. But that's accelerating. And I think that's also helping to amplify some of our sensorial experiences. Ivy, you might want to talk about some of that.
Yeah, I think it's no accident that this new art form of immersive art is happening, where you do walk into a painting instead of looking at it, or we've had some experiences lately where you'll come into a space
and you see sound and hear color for 15 minutes, an eyes open experience. And you walk out of there and you are radically present because by being in these sensorial experiences that we've never had before, we are forced to get out of our cognitive mind. And I think we're searching as a species for these ways
to have those experiences. Some people are doing that through psychedelics, but there are plenty of other ways through these experiences that we're talking about, these immersive art experiences where you can light up similar places in the brain and walk out with a different, fresh perspective on life. So I think we have a chapter at the end of the book called The Art of the Future, and we talk a little bit about this, but I think we're gonna see more of these physical,
I'm not talking about AR-VR, but physical in the real world experiences. And a lot of museums are now very much showing these immersive exhibits. Before I let you go, I just want to get to the two questions I habitually ask. One is, is there something I should have asked but didn't?
Well, I was going to raise that we have a chapter in the book about flourishing. And I think it's worth spending a moment on that. We've talked about mental health. We talked about physical health. We've talked about learning. But I think that at the core of what Ivy and I are sharing is that
we want more than to cope, right? We want more than to survive as a species we want to flourish. And I think that there are attributes to flourishing, like curiosity and wonder, building the muscle for awe and for enriched environments, creativity, novelty and surprise and ritual. Coming out of COVID, I think we all sort of felt like we weren't sure, and maybe we all still feel this way, that we weren't really sure
what the future was going to hold. But I think we all can agree that we want to flourish not just to survive. And a lot of this work comes back to that.
And I would say the one thing that we didn't mention and I would love to mention is architecture and designing space is an art form. And it's one of the places where, again, we've kind of gone a little awry, designing our spaces for efficiency versus designing them. Because you know, you change the space and you change the way you think and you change the way you feel.
And I think we have to get back to the place in ancient times. Architects used to be doctors and philosophers because they had to understand how the decisions that were being made. How tall is the ceiling? Do I have light or windows? How that's going to affect the people they're inside. So it's just something I wanted to bring up because we as E.O. Wilson pointed out to us 99.8% of the time we've been on the planet as humans.
We have been in nature. It's only like 0.1 or 2% of our time here that we've lived in the built environment. And we need to get more conscious about the spaces that we are creating, both for the individual and for our communities in terms of schools, public housing, from more of a neuro-aesthetic perspective.
That means translating research with practice practitioners so that we understand how to bring that together. And that field of translational research where you're bringing highly interdisciplinary teams together to work together is happening with space. So thinking about green space, nature, but also physical built environments and all those different locations. And that's where the action is, is bringing all of these fields together to solve intractable problems.
I mean, this issue of how you can organize your space so that your mental health is improved. It's a big and rich one. And just to say, we're going to pair this episode with an interview with Ingrid Fatelli who wrote a book about just this. So more to come on this particular aspect. Before I let you both go, can you please shamelessly plug your book and anything else you've put out into the world that you want people to know about?
Sure, well, the book is called Your Brain on Art, How the Arts Transform Us. And we have a website, www.yourbrainonart.com, which we post and share stories. And we have a place where we'd love to hear your stories. We also are on Instagram. It's your Brain on Art book on Instagram.
But we are really interested in making this a dialogue. As Susan said, this is a new field. The science is neuro-esthetics. The field is neuro-arts. And the field is taking all kind of action in terms of both gathering research, funding, working all around the world to build community.
I would just add that we think that we are standing on the verge of a cultural shift where the arts are delivering potent accessible and proven health and well-being solutions to billions of people. And Ivy mentioned neural arts. I would say if people are interested in the field, they can go to neuralartsblueprint.org. And they can learn a lot more about this blueprint that is really a five-year plan to create the tent poles to really lift this field up
And it's very exciting. It's a really exciting time to be an artist, an arts practitioner, a researcher interested in this work. And people with lived experiences who are all coming together to make this happen. Or just a human that wants to be more human, a more happy human. Well said. Great to spend time with you both. Thank you for your work. And thanks for coming on this show. Thank you for having us. Thank you.
Thanks again to Susan Meg Sammon and Ivy Ross. Thanks to you for listening. 10% Happier is produced by Lauren Smith. By the way, Lauren Smith is the one who pitched this episode. Shout out again to Lauren. Our compadres also include Gabrielle Zuckerman, Justine, Davey, and Tara Anderson. DJ Cashmere is our senior producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior editor. And Kimmy Regler is our executive producer. Scoring and mixing by Peter Bonaventure of Ultraviolet Audio. And we get our theme music from Nick Thorburn,
of the Great Band Islands. We'll see you all on Wednesday for part two of our Monday and Glory series. We're going to talk to Ingrid Fatelli, who's a designer and author who's got a whole book about the hidden influence of our surroundings and our happiness.
If you like 10% happier, I hope you do. You can listen early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at Wondery.com slash survey.
