Susan Magsamen | Your Brain on Art

Srini: .

Susan, welcome to the Unmistakable Creative. Thanks so much for taking the time to join

Susan Magsamen: . Thank you for having me. I'm very excited to be here.

Srini: It is my pleasure to have you here. So you have this amazing new book out called Your Brain on Art, which as I mentioned before we hit record immediately went into my top 10 book list for the year cuz it was one of my absolute favorite books.

And I've read every book on creativity under the sun. But to look at it from a neuroscience perspective I thought was just absolutely brilliant. But before we get into the content of the book, I wanted to start asking you, what did your parents do for work and how did that end up shaping what you've ended up doing with your life and career?

Susan Magsamen: So my mom was stay-at-home mom. She had her first baby when she was 18 years old, and then she had four more children in five years. So she was a very busy working mom. My dad first started working in nurseries, meaning flower nurseries, landscaping nurseries, and really was very self-made.

Didn't go to college. Neither one of my parents went to college. And he really wanted more out of life and so he was told somebody told him about. This job where he could sell insurance, where he could sell car insurance and life insurance. And he got his first job with Allstate Insurance and he worked his way up through that job to be an agent and an executive and and every time he did better, when we were little, we moved to a different house.

I think interestingly what I think I learned from my mother was this ability to manage a household, manage, manage the books right, and manage all of these moving parts. And from my dad was this incredible work ethic. At one point he had three jobs but he was always For more. And to do better, to do more.

And, but I think it was the workhorse part of him that I really

Srini: inherited. Yeah. So you were then in a family of five totals to children? Five girls. Wow. Okay so many questions come from that. Cause one thing I've always been curious about when it comes to people and big families is what do you learn about navigating sort of social dynamics and human behavior from being in such a big family?

And then when it came to advice in terms of how to make your way in the world. Did that advice change from child to child? Because I, I feel like in an immigrant family, like I always joke that the first kid is the experiment because your parents don't have a clue what they're doing and they're in a new country and then they fix everything.

They screwed up on the first kid with the second one. So really curious, like how did that advice change and then, what did you learn about navigating social dynamics?

Susan Magsamen: So my older sister is four years older. Three and a half years older than me and my twin sister. And then I have a sister that's 18 months younger.

So as a twin I was really born in relationship. I was conceived in relationship and born in relationship and so I, I think that really influenced my view of being in a family. Cuz I always had someone who was I was in conversation with that I. Was always able to relate to my sister's, really my twin sister, her name's Sandra.

She's a really, very much an extrovert, and I'm pretty much an introvert, and so my older sister totally was just like, oh. The experiment, she was incredibly and still is incredibly adventurous and risk taker. And my parents were just like no, you gotta toe the line. There was always this tension of upsets there.

And of course, a grandmother a fraternal grandmother basically took my older sister and was like, you're the princess. They're the pulper, right? And so there's that dynamic. And then, But in, there was always so many people in our home because that was the way it was done in the late fifties and early sixties.

And so aunts and uncles, my grandparents moved in with us. There was. Dinnertime was, everybody helped prepare, everybody cleared, everybody did dishes. There was never like many hands make light work was the way our family managed family. And and we never knew who was coming to dinner, who was there, who wasn't there.

So many activities, so much navigation, lot of executive function. And I think I learned how to be incredibly productive in chaos. How to Not get swept away in all of that, enjoy it. But then to say, okay, I have to self-regulate, right? I have to pull myself out if I'm gonna accomplish what I need to accomplish on my own passions and my own drive.

And I think we all all of us learned that we all had to work by the time, from the time we were 14, we all had jobs and and, but there was always a lot of family. Dynamic up upheaval and and I found myself being the one who was like watching human behavior, figuring out how to resolve conflicts, putting people together to work their stuff out and to understand how to do things.

There's also a lot of joy in our home. We sang, danced. All of the, everybody in our family were makers, meaning we either made puzzles, we crocheted, we knitted, we put on shows we all did something. My mom wrote poetry and not be, we had piano, but not because we were great at it. My grandmother was really great at it, knitting and stuff, but more because we just were doers.

And I think that doing is something that's also been a real mainstay in my life.

Srini: So how did it go from that to taking a neuroscientific approach to creativity? Like how, what put you on this path of all things?

Susan Magsamen: From the time I was very little, I was always seen as the most curious of kids and I always wanted to understand how people.

Why they did what they did, what motivated them, like what was happening in their heads when they were making decisions. Like my mother used to say to me, why is not the only question. And and when I was 12, my twin sister had a very serious accident and almost farming accident and almost lost her leg and.

She was so traumatized by the accident that she had virtually no ability to put words to, to what she was feeling. And that now I know is a physiological reaction to trauma. But at the time, it was petrifying. This is the person who was my whole inner world and outer world, and I couldn't get to her inner world.

And she started to draw and it was when she started to draw that I was able to understand in another language of humanity, what was going on with her and what she was feeling, which were feelings we'd never had before, around death and about loss and about, anger and all these things.

And that, I think was the first time that I really started to tap into the arts and. And the way we express ourselves. And when I think about art, I just think about, I don't think of, all the different, like music, dancing, da. What I think about is that all art forms are around creative human expression.

And whether you're the maker and you're putting something out to understand it for yourself or for others, or whether you're beholding what someone else is needing to say it's all of that. And and I think that really was very formative for me later in my life when I started a company called Curiosity Kits, which were hands-on learning materials for kids in art sciences and world cultures.

I was so fascinated by what motivated them and I and what made kids. Love making as opposed to listening and I started to work with Howard Gardner's work and Kurt Fisher at Harvard who are explaining to me the cognitive science and psychology of all of that. And then I watched family members, I used to say one loving adult work with a kid and the social dynamics of.

Reward and recognition and witnessing. All started to come online, started to see the kids that made things remembered better. And so I just kept going deeper and deeper into the neuroscience of and the cognitive science psychology, and. What was happening when we were making art and it was just a such a natural thing that we did at home.

It, felt so good or we felt so much insight or reflection or sued us in painful si situations. And then at around 2002 or three Johns Hopkins had a donor. Who was very interested in giving a large sum of money to Hopkins. But one of the stipulations was they wanted someone to study the science of the arts.

And early on there weren't a lot of people doing that, and certainly not at Hopkins. And I had said, they'd asked me if Id be interested in, taking this on. And I said I know a lot about the arts and I know a lot about. Sort of the way developmentally, the arts have been so important and learning, and I've always thought the health and wellbeing and learning really what is a triad.

So I was. And really start to think more deeply about it. And that allowed me to survey the field and see what was really in existence from a neuroaesthetics perspective, the study of how the arts and aesthetics measurably change your brain and body. But I was also interested in the application of it.

So studying it is really important. There's not a lot of money in the pipeline to study the arts from a yeah, from an or whatever. I just became incredibly. A student of understanding it and understanding it from a translational point of view. Yeah.

Srini: I wanna start somewhat outta order in terms of approaching the book because you're an educator, and this is something that I always ask educators.

One of the things that you say in the book is that students with access to arts education are five times less likely to drop out of school and four times more likely to be recognized for high achievement. They score higher on the s a t and on proficiency tests of literacy, writing and English skills.

They're also less likely to have disciplinary infractions. And when arts education is equitable so that all kids have equal access, the learning gap between low and high income students begins to shrink. Now, obviously, one of the first things to go when you start to run into educational funding issues is funding for the arts.

As a student of the arts and as somebody who was really fortunate to have this incredible music teacher who's lessons still influenced me to this day. I personally think that's tragic. As an educator at somebody who was in an academic institution with, what you've just written there in mind, if you were tasked with redesigning the entire education system from the ground up, what would you change about it?

Which I realize is a massive question.

Susan Magsamen: It's actually interesting. It's a question that I am being asked right now by a number of states and even countries who are really looking at low test scores, higher rates of depression, significantly higher rates of generalized mental illness and serious mental illness.

Low residency in classes, businesses saying that they don't have the workers coming out of high school or college that are really ready for the workforce. So I'm hearing a lot about what's not working and thinking about the solutions. What I think is so amazing is I think we made decisions.

About taking the arts outta school for all the right reasons, that they were the wrong decisions. We thought that we could help our kids, get down to business. We thought that we could, make them smarter. We thought that we could, achieve these goals of greater workforce.

But I think what we didn't know, and what we forgot was that we are literally wired for the arts. They're how we learn or how we grow or how we heal. Taking the arts outta schools was exactly the wrong decision, and I think if you move 30 and 40 years forward, You can we really understand more about why we also see the consequences of what's happened.

We are, literally hardwired for the arts. And that doesn't mean for arts appreciation or for arts as a luxury, but we're wired for arts from a neurobiological perspective. You're born with a hundred billion neurons. Like they're just, you're, you come into the world and it's the way you bring the world in, connects those neurons to each other to create really strong neural pathways.

And so think about it this way, sound, music, dance, creative, writing, all of those things are highly sensorial and highly salient experiences. And what saliency means is that these are the things that move you. Emotionally or practically. And so you couldn't possibly take in all the sensorial things that are around you.

But it's those things, the noise and signal, right? There's a lot of noise, but the salient experience is the signal. And oftentimes the most salient and experiences are the ones that are highly tactile, they're highly visual that are, really amazing. Speech and sounds that resonate inside of you.

And we know that by bringing those, that kind of information into our bodies, we create these strong neural pathways, these neural pathways basically. Connect everything you do. It's how you move. It's how you think, it's the way you process emotion. It's the way you learn. It's the way you retain information and also recall information and create informational changes in new and interesting ways.

It's the way you move the flow. It's everything you do. And so we've really forgotten that the arts are the vehicles for that. So if I were going to Design a school. What I would say is that, Arts integration needs to be in every classroom, and that we need to have sensorial literacy, where we understand how our bodies and brains work and how that, those aesthetic and arts experiences actually really help us bring on our default mode network, self-regulate, help us build executive.

So we start to teach our children and parents what those mechanisms are and how they work. Which means very active environments where. There's, I think studios in the schools are really a really interesting way to think about that, where every educator isn't just learning content, but learning how to have kids understand content through these highly multisensory sensory experiences.

Also, from a mental health point of view, I think it's gonna be really important to have Children creating art for identity, for character, for collaboration, and for building community, for building these very strong communities. Just two more points. One is that Maria Rosario Jackson, who is the head of the National Endowments for the Arts talks about something called culture kitchens and in communities and these, and communities happen everywhere, right?

Community. You have a community at home, you have a community. Your, in your classroom, you have a community, you, your neighborhood, you have a community at work. But in, in many communities that have been highly marginalized, and these are often underrepresented communities sometimes these communities have had their culture eradicated.

They're so far away from where they come from and what they have known that they have to rebuild community and culture. And Ivy Ross, my co-author, and I say, art creates culture. Culture creates community, and community creates humanity. And I think that's a really important paradigm. And so we need to build strong.

Communities where we have these rituals and traditions and ways that we come together to solve problems. And then the other last other thing I was gonna say is that when you work with young children using these highly aesthetic arts experiences, you build these neural pathways and those neural pathways provide the capacity.

For addressing some of the twists and turns that we all are gonna experience downstream. So if you are better prepared because you have creative problem solving, you know how to self-regulate, you know how to use executive function, you know how to collaborate. You're gonna have resilience, you've gotta be able to move through things, and I think that's absolutely essential.

And then because neuroplasticity, the great giveaway here is that we continue to learn throughout our lifespan. So I'm really a huge proponent of being curious makers and Beholders across our lifespan because it keeps us healthy and well. And that's really what we want, is we live throughout our lives.

Yeah.

Srini: One thing that you say at the beginning is the arts, as you'll read throughout this book, trigger the release of neurochemicals hormones and endorphins that offers you an emotional release. When you experience virtual reality. Read poetry or fiction, see a film, or listen to a piece of music or move your body to dance to name a few of many of the

,

arts or biologically changed.

Like with everything you're saying that the thought that was occurring to me describing all the sort benefits art is, in the sort of, social media driven world where everybody has this sort of mindset of, okay, this isn't worth doing unless a million people find out about it.

Or, it leads to fame, wealth, or, it's not worth starting a blog unless it leads to a book deal. How do you resolve that? Cause I feel like, cuz I even wrote a book about this exact topic called Audience of one, about the benefits of creativity for its own sake. And to this day I remember, my, my sister calling in the middle of the book launch, she was like a week ago.

She's like, how's it going? I was like, yeah, how's it sold as many copies as I, I helped it. Which she was like, you're an idiot. She was like, that means you don't believe what you wrote. She's that's the entire point of the book. But it I realized like, what a tough pill that is. For people to swallow because we're like, okay, if, I'm not gonna get an audience for this thing that isn't worth doing.

So talk to me about it from that perspective first. And then I want to go into the actual sort of, executive function changes and sort of brain changes that come about from engagement with the arts.

Susan Magsamen: Yeah it's a really great point. We are so conditioned to believe that only things that we make that are a good.

Or talented or that other people see and acknowledge are valuable. Otherwise it's a waste of time. And that indoctrination of that kind of mindset has taken so much of our agency and our capacity for our own growth off the table. And I think it's it's really. Kind of one of those truths in humanity that is just getting more and more amplified as social media really becomes the commerce.

And that's something that is really, I think it's ex, it's incredibly sad and really dangerous. The count, the counter to that is that we actually do know that by using these arts forms and these forms of creative expression, they're really incredibly helpful for understanding how you feel like being embodied, understanding your physiology and what that's saying to you, and then how that gets translated into either thoughts.

Or actions. And so by, by knowing yourself and knowing how you feel and developing that strength of character and identity, you're gonna be more able to move in the world to, to share the things that you think are important to share. Not because you wanna get feedback, necessarily, but because it's your, I think your Your birthright to be able to have a voice that adds to the communal conversation.

And whether it's liked or not isn't really the point. It's that you have a, you have something that you wanna say, like you had something to say with your book and breaking through. To have people hear your voice, I think gets harder when there's so much noise. But it's critically important for us to know who we are.

And I think part of the mental health issues are around this idea that we are so externally focused that we're not able to really calm ourselves. Have that sense of wellbeing, know how we feel about something. We're just told what we should like, and we move and we just chase that and that takes us to feeling very isolated, very lonely, and also very lost.

Srini: Yeah. Let's talk about this from a sort of cognitive function standpoint, because one of the things you say about learning is that creating something is at the core of learning, generating new synaptic connections in the brain is quite literally how we create knowledge. The brain doesn't care about filling bubbles in on standardized tests or heated debates about circulars.

Curricular assessments are being structured to build new connections and to constantly evolve. And how we learn is not the same as a societal education system. Too often built around memorization of rote data and recall. So talk to me about how just engaging in the arts amplifies your ability to learn and improves cognitive functions.

Susan Magsamen: So there's some really interesting neurophysiology work that I think illustrates that nicely. One is that Playing music and for young children in particular been some studies that have been done, you can literally see a child's cerebral cortex get larger. So the very brain structure has increased sometimes as much as 6%.

We also can see in the same kinds of studies, and these are performing arts, so think about it as performing arts. You also can see that there's more synaptic connection, more activity and what that allows for is. More neural path, neural pathways to grow and for, and neural pathways to get stronger.

We're also seeing that myelination happens in these art experiences in the brain. And myelination is the covering the coating around these neural pathways. So think of it like a sheath. That goes over top of the neural pathway. And if you've got a sheet that's over this neural pathway, the information is gonna go faster and it's gonna be more protected because it doesn't have, can't break down as easily.

So you're actually pro protect, creating a protective. Coating on these nerves. We're also seeing that with places like enriched environments where you're creating these various aesthetic spaces where we're actually seeing growth in the cerebral cortex. And on the other side of it, when these.

These are things like novelty, surprise, those kinds of experiences. On the other side of it, we also see that when you don't have those kinds of aesthetic experiences, brain mass can get smaller. So I think there's some really profound as you play that out in lots of ways to see that you can have some very positive and very negative effects by not having these kinds of enriched environments.

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Find More Balance with Better help. Visit better help.com/unmistakable today to get 10% off your first month. Again, that's better. Help h e p.com/unmistakable. I know you talked about the fact that nature is like one of the most enriched environments of all. Yeah. It's funny cuz I was just surfing this morning and surfing has always been this thing that has just been core to my life, even though I've been outta the water the past few years.

And like after reading your book, I'd suddenly made sense to why. Yeah. The water was such a powerful source of all my creative ideas.

Susan Magsamen: Oh yeah. I know. I love, I, it's so funny in writing the book I have so thought about water so much more. Like we're 60% water, right? And so think about that, just the, we have 4 million nerve endings in our skin.

Just 3000 nerve endings on tip of one finger. So when you think about the way Materiality, water, air impact your body. It's extraordinary the subtle and at the same time, Incredible resonance and vibration of something like water and temperature. And there's two things I think that are happening.

When you know, like you're in the shower and all of a sudden you get a great idea. One of those things is that you're daydreaming and mind wandering, right? You're allowing your body to not eat in constant sensorial overload, and that's part of the default mode network. And we have two systems.

One sort of a central network where you're bringing in all this information and the other is the default mode network. And that's where in between the times that you're bringing all this information, that you're able to process it. So it's where you daydream, mind, wander, think about what you think is beautiful or not beautiful, what you like and not like.

And that's the space where I think you start to come up with these ideas that You've literally taken a break in terms of processing all of that information. Also think the resonance of words and people's vibrations really make a difference. If we're 60% water and I'm resonating a very negative sort of vibe, you're gonna pick that up, right?

So things have vibration. Everything has a vibration. Because of this whole idea around fluid and water. And so being more mindful for me of, what am I resonating and what's resonating back to me? And how do those things create greater, sometimes synchronicity, which is such a, an amazing connection.

When we dance, we synchronize, right? And so I think there's just a lot of really wonderful things around these biological truths that when you hone into them, you can amplify them.

Srini: Yeah. I wanna ask you a question that I asked a previous podcast. Yes. Who was a neuroscientist, and I remember asking her this.

I said, I always wish that I could do a brain scan of what my brain was like before I started the unmistakable creative and what it would look like. What has happened, to the pathways in my brain after a thousand interviews and a thousand books. And her answer was actually very flattering, but also it was interesting.

She said yours is the kind of brain we're gonna wanna have access to when we can upload our consciousness to the internet. Which I found funny, but I'm curious like from your research, what would, what would that show about what has happened to the neural networks in my brain?

Susan Magsamen: I think one of the things that is so fascinating about you're an, we, you and I are an improv right now, right? I would argue that you're an improver, right? You're, you don't know what you're gonna get out. You don't know what you're gonna say. What? Yeah. I

Srini: never plan any questions in advance.

I know how I start and I know I'm gonna end, but I never plan any questions in

Susan Magsamen: advance. So that's an art. That's an art, right? That's an art form in and of itself. And so I would arguably say that your prefrontal cortex is very happy because it's in that flow state where you're moving in and out.

Whoops. And And I think that you're not critiquing yourself. You're really just in the flow and I think there's probably incredible joy. So I would think that your dopamine and serotonin neurotransmitters are quite happy with you. I also think you're, you've, you're creating a reservoir of knowledge.

To pull on. To be able to retrieve. And to be able to use in different ways. And I think that's also what really served you well. And this idea of use it or lose it, you're using it all the time, so you're building really strong neural pathways and probably also purging and pruning the ones that are no longer useful for you.

And I think that's also super, super important. Yeah. This you also strike me as someone who is very interested in playful exploration. You're very interested in, you're a very curious person. All of those things are very helpful in keeping your mind strong. So you start to think about things like Alzheimer's and dementia, certainly genetic com connection to those things, but not, but there's also lifestyle connection.

So I think you're keeping yourself healthy longer.

Srini: Yeah. It's funny because you mentioned having access to all this knowledge and now with ai being able to upload all the transcripts into an AI and be able to sift through them and get answers to damn near anything.

It's pretty mind boggling. Like what I've been able to do, I'm just like, oh my God And I realized one of the huge advantages that I have in using even AI tools like TE BT, is that I have a massive existing base of knowledge to apply to it. So I'll give you an example. I wanted to revise a blog post and I thought, you know what?

I'm like, I read Jonah Berger's book Contagious, which is all about making blog posts go viral, contact go viral. And I literally told it. I was like, take the principles for Jonah Berger's book about, contagious and revise my blog post based on those principles. And what I realized was, The only way I would've even thought to do that was if I had interviewed Jonah Berger and I had read his book.

Susan Magsamen: That's true. That's totally true. But you wouldn't have known, I guess turning that around, the AI experience I think is I think it's only as good as. What your curiosity is putting in there too, right? Like you're just you're deciding what you wanna know, how deep you wanna know it, how you want it to come back to you.

Those are creative choices, right? And yeah, I think there, there's something too to really think about. You're not asking AI to tell you what you think you're asking I Exactly. And so I think it's how you're using it makes it a creative act.

Srini: I think that's, I just self published a book called The Artificially Intelligent Creative and that was like one of the core ideas was that you don't want to use it to, replace yourself, but to leverage it to compliment your abilities.

And I think that's when you really can see a lot of the power of it, because I think, with the just sheer lar volume of content we've created over the past 13 years, I thought. This is like a moment we've been waiting for forever because it just gives us the power to do things at a speed that we never could before and at a scale we never

Susan Magsamen: could before.

And that's, that to me is in service of humanity. And that's the difference. Speed and scale. Yeah. And I think, but still having your own sort of, Creative input and to really drive that. Somebody actually did something recently that I thought was interesting. They read the book, they loved the book, and they told AI how much they love the book and said, can you make a picture to show how much I love this book?

And what came out was this very beautiful brain colored brain. And he posted it and people were like, Yeah, I don't feel it. I don't feel the love, I don't feel the humanity in this. I feel like it's a flat version of your feelings. And I thought that was really interesting. I don't, there's no I don't have an end line about it other than yeah, it, somebody did ask me in an interview recently, will we be able to tell the difference between something that a person has made and something that AI has made.

And I, like a piece of pottery versus that's made out of a 3D machine where it said, make this look like, a four year old made it as opposed to something that a four year old made. And I don't know the answer. I wanna believe that the human touch, the human experience is always, You're always gonna feel that. Kinda like we were talking about water, the resonance of something, you're always gonna feel it. Yeah. But these are, we're, I think we're a very big crossroad. Yeah,

Srini: I mean there are times when I, I'll have a revision done and I will tell it. I was like, no, don't take that part up.

Put it back in. Because it's like the part of, that I was like, wait a minute, that's like my personal story.

,

Don't remove that. Yeah, the parts that make it human it's really interesting cuz I, I think there's also like a bias against it for some people and it's like some people are just, anti-technology.

Whereas, like I said, for me this was like the ability to just take learning to another level that I'd never been able to before. Let's talk about the physical health benefits. Cause I know you read a lot about that. I remember you specifically saying that the arts literally help you live longer, like they increased longevity.

Cause I know you talked about the mental health benefits, but what about the physical health benefits?

Susan Magsamen: Yeah. The way the book gets organized we wanted to touch on So many of the ways that the arts can influence our day-to-day lives in all the twists I turns, whether that was mental health or physical health learning, flourishing even thinking about community and what community really looks like and, so in the healing the body chapter, talking about physical health.

We talked about some of those basic sort of chronic things that we all have, like headaches and we're able to talk with a number of people who were using some, what I thought were counterintuitive ways to use the arts for those types of things like dancing for Headache. We learned that it turns out that.

Actually increasing oxygen flow to the vascular system in headaches will help to reduce headache pain. That's been counter, that's counterintuitive to anything most people would ever have thought. Also virtual reality for chronic pain is being used. We shut with spike blood in something called Snow World.

Where burn victims are using this virtual reality program that's snow and looks cold and there's snowmen and penguins and that the belief system is that by distracting someone to another. Space that provides a whole different frame of reference. You can actually divert them to being feeling the pain that's happening and the anxiety that's happening and changing something like a pa pain bandage.

And we also saw is that when those things happen the need for opioids decreases dramatically, and there's a whole cascade of things there. We also saw some really beautiful, interesting work by a woman named Leeway Sai at m i t, who's using light and sound, 40 hertz of life and sound to actually alter the progression of dementia.

And that's really fascinating work. And that's not looking at symptom relief or quality of life that's going right at trying to cure dementia. And we saw some interesting things in that space. Also looking at end of life care and palliative care and looking at those kinds of experiences where, Different arts for the person who's having the for the patient or for the person at the end of their life, but also for their caregivers and for their families, and using art for different purposes.

Sometimes for pain relief, but sometimes for legacy, sometimes for emotional support, and also for quality of life. Parkinson's patients and dancing. We lifted that up to show that gait, cognition, sleep, and mood, all are enhanced with dancing. And during Covid Mark Morris has a group called dance for pd and they took their program to Zoom.

So instead of thousands of people dancing around the country, millions of people were dancing around the world and they were able to get a much better understanding of. How many times somebody dances a week and what those changes were. In medical terminology that's called docent dosage.

So starting to get a handle, a greater handle on like a drug. What are the docent dosages that you need in these different art forms to help you stay at a steady state or maybe even to improve cognition or gait or sleep over time.

Srini: One of the things you talk about also is storytelling.

You say stories born in the imagination of the teller are capable of transporting the listener to another place in time. They provide critical information and meaning. We literally feel a story as our brains release a cascade of chemicals that encode them in our hippocampus. We now understand that stronger the emotional content, stronger the memory is of a story.

The ability to completely fabricate stories outta the human mind in order to convey important feelings, ideas, emotions, and shared knowledge is about one of the capacities we developed in order to make sense of the world. In a shared and aesthetic way. And I think that the reason that struck me and is because of the fact that I have always saw what I do here as being a storyteller.

I think that's part of the reason I don't start by asking questions about your book.

Susan Magsamen: Yeah, I, I am totally fascinated with storytelling and. We tell stories all the time. We tell them to ourselves. We tell 'em to our children's. We tell 'em to our, colleagues. I had the opportunity to talk with EO Wilson the evolutionary biologist at Harvard right before he passed away.

And he really believes that this capacity for humanity to have harnessed fire. And to bring that into a circle where we had the opportunity to begin to be able to share our stories, our individual stories, but then ultimately our collective stories. And to do that in a very salient way, right? So dancing, props stories that were, had beginnings and middles and end and mystery and intrigue and trauma.

But those mythologies and those stories that we tell ourselves and each other really become our rituals. They become our values, they become our moral code. They become how we connect to each other and we remember them because they're so deeply embedded in our Hep Hipp in our campus, and they're all actually intergenerational, right?

These are the things that come back over and over again. So when I was saying to you earlier, what. Culture has had their stories, their community eradicated. How do you rebuild those stories and how do you bring them back? And in Baltimore, I'll give you an interesting example. We had an area called the Black Arts District, and it was legendary of red Skeleton, who was a comedian, had a comic comedy club there.

Billie Holiday, had a club there. Any black performer who was on the East coast coming through. Coming down the eastern seaboard had to stop in Baltimore because it was the place. Now this was like in the thirties and forties. That all changed. Certainly in the sixties when there were all the riots.

This part of Baltimore was really just burned to the ground. People that came after that didn't know that any of this existed. And so there were no stories. There were no memories, there were no visual cues about what had happened there. And so the community decided that they would start to create banners.

So on different street corners, they would say Billy Holiday lived here. This was where Red Skeleton's Club was. This was where the drumming, the drummers Jean Krupa and others came and played music here. And they had this whole Nat King Cole played here, and they'd have. Lo local people perform Billie Holiday, do red skeleton jokes, have a neighborhood fireside chat where they do conversations about what happened here.

I. The community is slowly but absolutely coming back into an arts district because it's remembering what was there and it's honoring what was there. So the stories are starting to emerge, and now more stories are coming and people are saying, I remember this. My grandmother told me this, and it's alivening to be able to bring that back.

I think. Dance is storytelling too. Songs are almost always storytelling. So you start to think about story shows up in so many parts of our lives.

Srini: Yeah. The other thing that really stood out to me, and I remember sending this quote to my cousin because they have, like for Indians, I joke that our primary recreational activity is eating.

Huh. Like you said, the studies show that breaking bread literally has an effect on our emotions and behavior. Eating is built a practical lead and a cultural one. The aesthetics of food, the beauty of presentation, how it registers on our census and is an aesthetic experience is being studied. At the insular cortex, the primary area for our sense of taste also contributes to our visceral and emotional experiences.

When we eat food together, it tastes more flavorful. And if you grow up in an Indian family, like to me, I was like, yeah, of course. Cuz literally all we do when we get together is eat.

Susan Magsamen: Yeah. It's so funny. I it some of the, that particular piece in the book I have had so many people say to me, I love that you included that and.

I wish we could have included more about food because food is a great connector. We all know it. But the physiological aspects of food, what's happening neurobiologically, when we come together and we eat together, I think it's more than hunger, right? It's more than physical hunger.

It's this need to be together to to, to share, literally break bread. And I think the neurobiology of it really bears that out. I had the opportunity to talk to the folks that run the world ca the world World Kitchen who goes to all these different disaster areas with food. And what they see is two things.

One is people need food because they're in could be a war, could be a natural disaster. They definitely need food for su for substances. They need it to survive. But what they've also found is that it's the connections, it's the connective tissue with each other that has, is. Really fortifying them and also the volunteers that are bringing the food feel more part of really satisfying what's happening in the community.

And I think seeing that. The power of food. We don't really, we don't, less and less do we come together to celebrate or to warn with food or to bring our, each of our own dishes together to say, here's what's my culture. Here's, this whole idea of a potluck neighborhoods used to do that all the time, and these kinds of simple but powerful ways to connect to each other.

I think we've left on the sidelines and th this idea of food, I think just lifts that up. We have lab meetings in the summer and I always have our lab. Everybody brings a dish and it's so extraordinary to see this play out, just to see the physiology play out where. Everybody tells a story about who made it, where the recipe came from.

Can't buy anything from a story. You have to make something. It's even funny to see who doesn't cook, right? So I think this just, this idea of food as more than physical substance is really powerful. Yeah.

Srini: I wanna finish with one sort of idea that I've been thinking a lot about based on your book and that is the sort of the benefits when it comes to whether we create or whether we consume.

Like obviously I'm a big promo proponent of creating more than you consume, given what I do. But do you reap the same benefits that you're talking about just from, engaging the arts as a consumer or, are they different when you're somebody who's a creator? Yeah

Susan Magsamen: I think that there are Differences between being a maker and a beholder.

And there are also some similarities. Lemme start by talking about as the beholder, I think that there's three major things that you get as a beholder. One is empathy. You have the ability to be able to understand the other. A second is perspective taking. You can take in a new way of seeing the world.

And three is safe risk taking. And by that I mean you can try something on and you can experiment with it without the risk of doing it yourself. And that can often happen when you're reading fiction or you're in a play and you're seeing something happen and you're like what if I did that?

What would that feel like? What, oh, this is a potential outcome that could happen, but you're not, but your risks are lower. As a maker, you're able to have agency over exactly what you make. Nobody can tell you what medium to work in, what topic area to work on, how long it's gonna take, what process you're gonna need to use.

You have total agency over creating. It also, I think, gives you an opportunity to be able to make something that is not, has not yet been ready for Language and any kind of language. So it's some prenot ring. I'm a collage for example, and a lot of times I'm having a very strong emotion, but I don't know what my emotion is and I don't even know really what it's about.

But, something's happening inside of me. I have a box of scra. I call 'em scraps and I'll start to put something together and when I make something, I can then look at it and go, Oh, that's what it is, because symbol and metaphor come out. That's also true of poetry, right? Poetry is really a metaphoric language.

And so it's not to be, it's not usually literal. But you're able to find the metaphor and symbol in that. So as a maker you're able to, to first of all create anything you want in any way you want. You are also able to then transfer. Those making skills that it could be music, it can be whatever the arts form is into other domains of your life, and we know that.

The arts skills processes, no matter the art form, transfer to other areas of your life. And transfer is a holy grail of learning. You can learn something like, in one domain that never is gonna transfer to another domain, but when you can actually transfer this skills create creative problem solving self-regulation, collaboration.

All of those things into, say, community building or into other kinds of mental health issues. That's amazing. And so I think those are just two simple ways that making and beholding are different. And we do both all the time. Even if you're not aware of it, you're making dinner. You're figuring out what you're gonna wear to go to work.

That's a expression, that's a creative self-expression. You're probably listening to the radio. You might be singing and listening to the radio. You we're always making, and we're always be holding, I think. Thing that I'm advocating for is how do you lift that up so you're more intentional and conscious of it so you can really bring it in a more selling it and I think satisfying way.

Wow.

Srini: This has been amazing near just basically a goldmine of all sorts of really interesting insights about creativity in the brain. So I have one final question for you, which is how we finish all of our unmistakable creative, what do you think it's, that makes somebody or something unmistakable

Susan Magsamen: being your pure essence.

Srini: Beautiful. I can't thank you enough for taking the time to join us and share your story, your wisdom and your success with the listeners. Where can people find out more about you to book your work and every single that you're up to

Susan Magsamen: so you can go to your brain on art? Com and there's lots of great information about the book, but also about neuroaesthetics.

Neural arts blueprint.org also will give you lots of information about what people are doing all over the world to really build this field. And then my lab is Arts and Mind lab@jhu.edu. And and you can write me in any of those places and I'm happy to share more.

Srini: Amazing. And for everybody listening, we will wrap the show with that.

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