Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us
“’The world, and its beauty, are there waiting for you,’ write Magsamen and Ross, a fitting last line in a book proving the science, the joy, and the power of experiencing life enmeshed in the arts.”
Your Brain on Art is a happy marriage of science and art, too long seen as separated, even divorced, domains. Authors Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross convincingly show that making and experiencing art is a full body, full brain necessity for a health-filled, rewarding life, and not optional embellishment to a busy day.
As Magsamen and Ross put it, “the arts and aesthetics change us and, as a result, they can transform our lives.”
Your Brain on Art opens with a layperson-friendly yet comprehensive overview of how we perceived the world through our senses, and then understand those perceptions and make meaning through different regions of the brain on down to the structure of an individual neuron and how it combines with other neurons to create and maintain neural pathways.
“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 the many arts, you are biologically changed,” write Magsamen and Ross.
This lays the foundation for understanding such core concepts as neuroplasticity (how our brains have evolved to promote lifelong learning), the importance of enriched (novelty-filled) environments, our individual “aesthetic triads” (how our individual physiology combines with cognition and meaning making to form an experience that is at once unique and yet capable of being shared with others), and our personal “default mode network,” our idiosyncratic way of deciphering “what you think is beautiful or not, memorable or not, meaningful or not . . . what makes the arts and aesthetics a very personal experience for each of us . . .”
While written for lay audiences, Your Brain on Art, with its comprehensive bibliography, is unarguably a literature review of studies exploring the impact of the arts on medicine, physical or psychological therapy, architecture, and design, and many more domains. Nonetheless, Your Brain on Art carefully grounds each new topic in interviews with scientists, artists, and lay participants.
This combination of scientific and personal story show how the arts help us heal and flourish as individuals and build stronger communities for all of us. Whether it’s gardening as a force for community building, music as treatment for schizophrenia, art making to restore emotional balance for those experiencing post-traumatic stress disorder, singing to reduce post-partum depression and promote mother-infant bonding, there are few if any ways that the arts don’t make us wiser, more resilient people.
“The world, and its beauty, are there waiting for you,” write Magsamen and Ross, a fitting last line in a book proving the science, the joy, and the power of experiencing life enmeshed in the arts.