Ivy Ross and Susan Magsamen reveal the power of Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us

Hi, I'm Ivy. And I'm Susan. And we are really excited to be here. So, we are standing on the verge of a cultural shift in which the arts can deliver potent, accessible, and proven health and well-being solutions to billions of people. We have a lot to share, so let's get started.

I believe we've been optimizing for productivity since the Industrial Revolution, and we've pushed all the arts to the side thinking that they were a luxury, thinking that productivity would make us happy and healthy. And it's clear that that has not been the case. So science is now proving what us artists have already known: that we're wired for art. Here are just a few of the findings that have come out in the last few years, including the crazy fact that one or more art experiences a month can extend your life by 10 years.

Advances in technology have created non-invasive ways to get inside of your head. A new field called neuroaesthetics, or neural arts, has emerged. And neural arts is really simply the study of how the arts and aesthetic experiences change your brain, body, and behavior, and how this knowledge can be translated into health and well-being practices.

As Ivy said, we're wired for art. The arts alter a complex physiological network of interconnected systems, including neurological and biological systems. And these systems are connected through the process of neuroplasticity. You're born with a hundred billion neurons that connect at synaptic levels, and over your lifetime you'll make quadrillions of synaptic connections that create endless neural pathways. These pathways underlie your body movements, emotions, memory — basically everything that you do. When you're learning or making a memory, some of these connections grow stronger and some grow weaker through the experiences that you have that are highly salient. Even as we're sitting here right now, you're sculpting new pathways that have never been there before.

I want to talk a little bit about the default mode network. I don't know how many of you know the default mode network. Great, great — there's a couple here. This is an area of the brain that's only been recently explored, in large part by a neuroscientist named Ed Vessel. What we know about the default mode network is it's seen or believed to be the neurobiological basis of the self. I think that's pretty cool. It processes your incoming sensory information when you're quiet, so it's the place between the notes where you're still. It's also the meaning-making place where you connect the dots and make sense of the world. It's this place where you daydream, where you mind-wander, and where you think to yourself. It's also the place where you know what you like and don't like and what you think is beautiful and not. So in other words, you really are what you experience.

To take it one step further, I wanted to talk a little bit about Anjan Chatterjee. Anjan developed a theoretical model about 10 years ago called the Aesthetic Triad, and it explains how and why we perceive the world from our unique perch. The Triad has three components: the first is where you come from and what you know, the second is your physiological responses, and the third is your feelings and your emotions. And at the center of these intersecting circles is your unique aesthetic experience. It's where you have the most peak experiences that are really altered by the saliency of the things that you do.

One great example of neuroplasticity in action happens in the places that we inhabit. In the '60s, neuroscientist Marian Diamond designed an experiment using rats where she created three different physical spaces. The first was called enriched environments, using wheels and color and novel design. The second was a less sensorial space that lacked any engagement. And the third was a standard rat cage. After just two weeks, she analyzed the rats' brains and found that the cerebral cortex, or the outer layer of the brain, from the enriched environment had increased in thickness by six percent compared to those in the other areas. The less sensorial areas actually decreased in brain mass. This was the first time that anyone had ever seen a structural change in an animal's brain using different types of environmental experiences. Since then, studies have been done with humans using non-invasive technology, and we believe that the implications for this type of environmental change are profound.

So your entire body, not just your brain, takes in the outside world, yet much of it sits outside your actual awareness. Cognitive scientists believe that we're only conscious of about five percent of our mental activity. The rest of your experience — physically, emotionally, sensorially — lies below what you're actually thinking.

And so, in the spring of 2019, the two of us had the opportunity to put neuroaesthetic principles into action in real time, to illustrate the effects of sensory perceptions on our bodies, in an exhibit called "A Space for Being" at the Milan Design Fair. It's an example of enriched environments, default mode network, and the Aesthetic Triad that Susan talked about, bringing them to life through the collaboration between Google, Susan's lab at Hopkins, and architect Suchi Reddy.

So participants walked into the space and they were fitted with a custom band containing sensors that were continually taking in biological information. The participants were invited to touch, smell, listen, and explore in each of these three different rooms for five minutes, with no talking, no photos, and no devices. Each of the three rooms were designed with a different set of neuroaesthetic principles that affected the choice of colors, textures, lighting, materials, and shapes. We had custom scents for each room. Everything matters.

At the end of the experience, the guests gave their bands to a band tender who removed them, and their data was downloaded for them only, of course. Each visitor then received a personalized data visualization of which space their body felt the most at ease or most relaxed. This conclusion was based on real-time biological feedback that was fed into an algorithm that we had developed. And in over 50 percent of the people, the room they liked best in their cognitive mind was not the one in which their body felt the most at ease — which is what we were hoping to prove. Otherwise it would have been a disaster.

[laughter]

So the experiment was a success. We were able to show that what we think is not necessarily what we feel, and the truth is that we're feeling all the time through our senses. I remember after this, some journalists said to me, "Oh, is Google going to make a band that you walk around with to know how you feel?" And I was like, "I do not want to be part of that world." I said, "This is about showing people that, first of all, we are embodied and we are feeling all the time, and it may be very different from what our cognitive mind thinks."

But the place we all feel better, and we know it, is nature. It's the most neuroaesthetic place there is, because it has color, sound, texture, temperature, shape, smell — all the things that are alive in our senses. Nature has a huge effect on the parasympathetic nervous system, immediately reducing adrenaline, blood pressure, and heart rate. And we now know that spending at least 20 minutes in nature significantly lowers the level of the stress hormone cortisol.

So we are both compelled to go outside in nature as well as bring nature inside. Not sure if any of you have been to Little Island, that extends into the Hudson River — it's a great place within busy New York City. The "nature pill," the kind that many healthcare professionals are actually now prescribing for mental well-being. Or maybe we should all just return to the office in a transparent teardrop tent. These workspaces are a great antidote to the nature deficit disorder that I think many of us are now suffering from.

But if you cannot have your office in the woods, you must bring the woods into the office. I mean, studies are now showing that biophilic spaces yield increased cognition and productivity while lowering stress and anxiety. Hydroponics, custom scents, immersive soundscapes — these are some of the neuroaesthetic elements showing up in offices these days. Even hospitals are starting to be designed to resemble parks and museums, because we now know that gazing at a garden can shorten recovery time from surgeries. Aromatherapy is being used to stop nausea, and singing and music have been brought into surgical suites to reduce agitation in patients, doctors, and nurses.

Making art and the creative process it involves helps patients heal in quantifiable ways and demonstrates significant decreases in symptoms including pain, fatigue, depression, and anxiety. Space absolutely changes the way we think and feel.

And there have been many neuroaesthetic studies on curves over the years that have shown how our universal affinity for these rounded shapes is more than just cultural or personal preference — it's biologically driven by our sensory-motor systems, informed by the brain's earliest days in nature, whose shapes are characterized by smooth curves versus sharp angles. You know, we've spent 99.9 percent of history in nature and only 0.01 percent in the modern world, so we are still geared toward nature. The emphasis on curves in architecture and design that you see more and more frequently now — we now understand why we're finding it so pleasing.

This is the oldest known piece of human art, found by geologist David Zhang in Tibet. It's believed to be 225,000 years old — actually an artistic representation of our hands and feet. We have been both the maker and the beholder of art since the beginning of time. And the arts, in all of their forms, have always been used for survival and for flourishing.

Judy De Walte Stiwa painted these images as part of what she calls her continuing paintings. She was carrying a lifetime of emotional pain from parents who escaped from the Holocaust and an abusive marriage. If we hold trauma and heartbreak in our bodies, it can get stuck and we can become very ill. To heal, she started to paint images over and over on a single canvas, releasing the backlog of emotions that had gotten stuck inside of her. Visual arts can help us process complex emotions. Often we have no words for emotions because they're pre-verbal. During traumatic events, the Broca region, which is the language-processing area of the brain, can shut down, making it impossible to express our feelings in words.

Somewhere around the third grade, you most likely received the message that if you weren't good at art, you weren't talented, you couldn't be an artist. And you probably also figured out that creativity was not going to get you anywhere and it wasn't as important as getting the answers correct on the endless bubble test.

This is Nick Wilton. He's a painter, teacher, and founder of Art2Life. Nick has made it his mission to connect you to your creativity. Nick sometimes refers to paintings as visual poetry, and he wants students to examine what it is they want to say. By experimenting with color, marks, and different techniques, his students reclaim their voices and feel more alive in their lives. Researchers are also discovering that finding your voice transfers to almost every other area of your life.

So one of the most extraordinary myth-busters in neuroaesthetics research is that you don't have to be talented, gifted, or good at the arts to have a significant impact. Doodling actually activates the prefrontal cortex, the area of the brain that helps you focus. Doodling, coloring, even simple drawing like stick figures increases blood flow and triggers feelings of pleasure and reward. Turns out — this is a really fun fact — doodlers are more analytical. They retain information better and are actually better focused than their non-doodling colleagues. So school had it all wrong when they slapped our hands and told us to stop doodling. They did. They did, for sure.

Even before you were born, you moved to the rhythms of your mother's heartbeat. Through rhyming songs, you most likely learned language. Singing and humming activates the vagus nerve, and playing music at any age increases synapses and gray matter that supports cognitive skills, social-emotional development, and even learning.

Thanks to the work of Charles Limb at UCSF, we are now beginning to understand how our brains turn off portions of the prefrontal cortex to achieve non-judgmental flow states during improvisational music-making, quieting your inner critic.

Poetry is the oldest form of written language, dating back almost 5,000 years. And to me, poetry is music on the written page. Reading poetry also lights up some of the same parts of the brain as listening to music, engaging the reward and default mode networks. And in an interview with Krista Tippett, poet Mary Oliver explained the power of this art form by simply saying, "I got saved by poetry." Poetry can save us.

And so can expressive writing. We are made of stories, and they define us. Social psychologist James Pennebaker studies how we express our stories, and he found that keeping a secret about upsetting events can actually cause health issues downstream. He discovered that the act of putting words to feelings can help you contextualize those events and positively impact neurological processing. So letting go and sharing a story frees up limited cognitive resources and also increases cognitive load. There are lots of transformational benefits when you rewrite your stories, reframe, and create an intentional future.

If I could write one art prescription, it would be for the world to dance. Studies show that dancing — yeah, right? Yeah, you guys know how to do that — dance often and move often. Studies show that dancing for just 15 minutes reduces stress, anxiety, and depression and increases happy-making hormones. And dancing is highly effective in creating new neural connections for people with Parkinson's disease, stroke, and other motor-based challenges. Dance is a superpower, improving gait, cognition, sleep, and mood.

[applause]

So towards the end of the pandemic lockdown, everyone was feeling lonely and isolated. But David Byrne had a really amazing idea. He thought, "What if we could bring people together to just dance?" So he created something called the Social Distance Dance Club and invited people to come to the Armory in New York. What David observed was the pure joy of coming together in movement. He told us that community was instantly created by moving in sync and triggering our social brain to connect and bond. Our propensity for synchronicity is something that we are innately part of as human beings.

And finally, the ability to create rich, immersive stories through VR and AR also has tremendous potential to solve intractable problems. Recently, two arts-based digital programs received FDA approval as breakthrough medical devices. The first, from neuroscientist Adam Gazzaley, who launched Neuroscape to build what he calls closed-loop digital systems in the form of a virtual game — he created the first non-drug treatment for ADHD. And the second is MedRhythms. This project attaches sensors to your shoes and offers real-time feedback as an algorithm adjusts to the rhythm of music for the wearer, creating better movements for people with motor-based rehabilitation.

It may seem surprising at first to learn that sound is one of the most effective aesthetic experiences to create and alleviate stress, but once you understand how it works in the body, it makes perfect sense. The sounds you hear are caused by the motion in your eardrums, which in turn cause fluid in your inner ear to move. The fluid inside the ear bends hairs on the cells, which then convert to nerve impulses that go right to your brain. These impulses move through the brain via neural networks that evoke strong emotions and memories, altering moods and behaviors instantly.

Sound becomes an excellent tool to regulate stress in that it can work on an unconscious level. The frequency immediately taps into what lies underneath conscious recognition, literally changing the vibrations in your body. Sound vibration has the capacity to return the body to homeostasis and out of that fight-or-flight reaction. I've been known in meetings at Google to take out tuning forks in the middle of a meeting to tap into a co-worker's physiology and disrupt their stress cycle.

[laughter]

Emotions are energy in motion, and each has its own frequency. There's a scientific study now about how sound frequency increases our body's natural production of nitric oxide, which would explain how sound alleviates stress. Nitric oxide enhances cell vitality and vascular flow and may account for the relaxation effect in the body. Several small studies have now shown that sound frequencies from things like tuning forks and even humming can cause nitric oxide to be released in our cells.

There's a science called cymatics, which is making sound visible, that dates back to the '50s. This clip I'm about to show you is sound being put through something called a CymaScope, a new type of scientific instrument that John Reid developed in 2002, which imprints sonic vibration on the surface of ultra-pure water while a camera films the patterns from above. And, you know, we are about 60 percent water by body weight, so while you watch this clip — which is just sound being pumped through water, which we are 60 percent of — I mean, think about the variety of sounds and voices that you encounter in a day.

[music]

What's amazing is this is a print of Susan's and my voice, individually, through water. So what he does is he literally takes your voice or music and puts it through speakers and you watch the patterns they make in the water, and then he films it from above. And so this is Susan and I — our voices are as unique as our fingerprints. And we believe that cymatics will change the medical world — and it already has.

This is fascinating. This quilt is made up of a series of photos taken of human heart cells under a microscope in a lab at Stanford University. A cardiologist there named Sean Wu wanted to generate heart tissue in the lab in order to create models that would help explain certain cardiac diseases. Now, heart cells are incredibly complex and challenging to create because they are densely packed, which allows them to work in tandem and beat. But if they're designed too far apart, they won't sync. Too close together, they could smother and die.

So an acoustical bioengineer at Stanford had the idea to move the cells with sound to create patterns that were structurally sound — no pun intended. And there's a growing number of biomedical researchers that are tapping into aesthetics like sound waves to design cellular structures, because you could change the frequency and the amplitude of the cells and they'll move into a different spot right in front of your eyes, suggesting different structural patterns. So this really begs the question, in my mind: is life becoming art?

Speaking of art, we think we will evolve to not just look at art but walk into it, because the best way to stimulate neuroplasticity is through immersive experiences. All stimuli that we encounter — visual, auditory, olfactory, and others — change the structure and function of the cells within our brain and body. They do so in fundamental ways, including altering cell cycles, proliferation, viability, and binding of hormones. So when you make those aesthetic inputs multi-dimensional, we blow open the door for healing to occur. And these immersive and enriched environments are engaging our senses and creating strong emotional reactions, also heightened learning and memory — as science has proven, we learn faster and retain information better in sensory-rich environments.

Now, when technology and art are used together, it can give us new experiences. One of the leaders in this field is Refik Anadol. He's a mixed-media artist who's creating monumental, dream-like environments using AI and algorithms. This is his largest piece. This is real — this is not Photoshop. This is 33 feet by 33 feet, outside in a frame. And he did this by working in collaboration with neuroscientists at a place called MindMaze. This piece is taking scientific brain data from EEGs and fMRIs recorded in clinical settings, and then using AI as his collaborator, he's turning that data into art that has a positive mental effect on all, as it inspires awe and wonder.

This is an exhibit that just opened in L.A. called Sensory Field, by a group called Chromosonic. It's a hyper-immersive matrix of spaces in which sound frequencies are generating light in real time, continuously morphing as you wander through the structures or choose to pause in them. So just as sound waves move those heart cells that we saw, light and sound are changing brain oscillations to support healing.

Li-Huei Tsai, who's a neuroscientist, is currently doing trials using sound and light to help re-synchronize neurons, reducing Alzheimer's pathology and improving cognition in patients. I mean, so maybe that movie — was it Close Encounters? — had it right when the ship landed. It was a series of sounds and lights. Do you remember? I think they were trying to explain to us that that's the future of medicine.

So, you know, ritual and routine are important, but the human brain also craves novelty and surprise to flourish. So this was created by Universal Everything, a digital art collective. It's a film called Infinity that features a parade of extravagant characters, each slightly different from the other, marching, skipping, or darting across the screen. The film will go on forever. The characters are never, ever repeated twice, because the film is composed through generative design. In this case, the computer is used to simulate human movement. So with far-reaching implications from gaming to healthcare, Infinity is a way to visualize variations of the human condition that can't be described by words alone — a type of infinite storytelling, as you will always be surprised and delighted by the characters because they are never repeated, and there are an infinite number.

And there are an infinite number of low-tech arts that offer instant high-tech results. Studies show that those of you who are engaged in making things have lower levels of mental distress and also experience higher levels of mental functioning and life satisfaction. I'm going to share just a couple of quick examples. First responders and active military are doing woodworking and welding to address symptoms of PTSD and traumatic brain injury. College students are forming knitting circles, resulting in stronger social connections, better focus, and reduction in anxiety and stress. Working with clay is the only art form where both of your hands have the same level of dexterity. So making something with clay, breaking it down, and starting again builds flexibility, problem-solving, and brain agility. And the tactile quality of clay also helps you focus, reduce negative emotions and anxiety, and even lifts your spirit.

We want to end our time together to talk about the arts and community. These are the women of Gee's Bend, Alabama. They quilt for practical purposes and also for community. The World Bank says that without strong, diverse communities where the arts and culture are at their core, economies can't grow, inner healing, health and well-being suffers, and opportunities are lost.

One of our favorite examples of community is Sweetwater Foundation. It's built on 10 abandoned city lots on the South Side of Chicago, and their tagline is "There Grows the Neighborhood." I love that. Emmanuel Pratt, who is an urban planner and architect, has worked to co-create this flourishing community, including urban gardens, woodworking shops, music and dancing centers, and so much more. Emmanuel says that for communities to thrive, you have to have safe environments that are not only the absence of threat but the presence of possibilities. And he also says that you have to have hope, which is the highest form of art.

Art is our one true global language. It speaks to our need to reveal, heal, and transform. It transcends our ordinary lives and lets us imagine what is possible.

So over the last two years, Susan and I traveled virtually around the world, from research labs to hospital rooms, museums, theaters, art studios, community centers, kitchen tables, to learn how the arts and aesthetics transform us, interviewing over a hundred people along the way. And now all of this is coming to your neighborhood soon, on March 21st, 2023, in the form of a book that we've co-authored as a labor of love.

So we just briefly touched on a fraction of the information in the book here, that weaves together the stories of people in the arts with the neuroscience to explain why the arts are imperative for both our individual and collective health. So if we've at all piqued your interest, we think you'll enjoy a deep dive into the book.

But you don't have to wait. You can go and make art right now, or sing, or dance. You guys know how to do that, right? Yeah.

[applause]

Thank you very much. Thank you.