Your Brain on Art is a perfect book for those who love a good digression. It is full of fascinating asides about how our brains work and what might have an influence on our emotions. Just from a scan of the chapter headings – Cultivating Well Being, Restoring Mental Health, Healing the Body, Amplifying Learning, and Flourishing – you can see where the book aims its scholarship.
Featuring conversations with artists such as David Byrne, soprano Renée Fleming and evolutionary biologist EO Wilson, the book begins with Anatomy of the Arts. Just before that is a short survey that invites the reader to answer 14 questions to establish their aesthetic appreciation, intense aesthetic experience and creative behaviour. How you respond and how you engage.
Potential readers should note that “art” has a broad definition – not simply drawing and painting but words and music, dance and movement, involving a wide range of sensory perceptions. For instance, an investigation into poetry found that, by using MRI scanning machines, the part of our brain that lit up when listening to poetry was the same as that stimulated by music.
Also activated were those areas connected to making meaning and the interpretation of reality. Poetry can help us make sense of the world. It may sound obvious when put that simply, but the science is fascinating.
Our smell, taste, vision, hearing and touch produce biological reactions at staggering speeds, say Susan Magsamen, who is on the faculty at the Centre for Applied Neuroaesthetics at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, and Ivy Ross, who is vice president of design for hardware at Google.
Hearing is registered in about three milliseconds. Touch can register in the brain within 50 milliseconds. Our entire body, not just our brain, takes in the world, yet much of this is outside our awareness. Cognitive neuroscientists believe we’re conscious of only about 5% of our mental activity. The rest of our experience – physically, emotionally, sensorially – lives below what we are actually thinking. Our brain is processing stimuli constantly, like a sponge, absorbing millions of sensory signals.
“When you walk into a room, you likely don’t appreciate all that your body is reacting to: the cast of light from a lamp, the colour on the walls, the temperature, the smell, the textures. You may think of yourself as a body moving independently through the world, but you are interconnected with and part of everything around you. You and your environment are inseparable. Your senses lay the foundation for how and why the arts and aesthetics offer the perfect path to amplify your health and wellbeing.”
Salience is a word that occurs often in the book. We cannot possibly pay attention to all the stimuli coming into our body, or the many emotions and thoughts that emerge as a result. So our brain is expert at filtering the inputs it thinks are important, the salient ones. Things that create saliency induce the release of neurotransmitters, like dopamine and norepinephrine, activating our synapses and increasing synaptic plasticity. This regulates memory formation. The stronger the salient experience, the stronger the circuit formed and so the longer lasting the memory. Throughout the book, arts and aesthetic experiences emerge as major conduits for greater saliency. They are literally rewiring our brains.
A publisher’s blurb in the book says that engaging in an art project – from painting and dancing to expressive writing and architecture – for as little as 45 minutes reduces the stress hormone cortisol, and that one art experience a month can expand your life by 10 years. While these may be laudable goals, the claim is not readily backed up in the book by evidence.
Curiosity has also been baked into the human brain as an evolutionary need. It is part of our threat-detection system. When we see something that speaks to us, we want to know more. The simple act of observing art becomes a vehicle for curiosity.
This is the perfect book for the non-scientist who wants to know more about why they think and feel the way they do about any artistic experience. It combines the latest scientific thinking with examples of education and arts experiments from around the world.
Your Brain on Art by Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross (Canongate, $45)
