Art and Flow: The Neuroaesthetics Revolution

Just give yourself 20 minutes to pick up a crayon, pick up a pencil, dance around the house, sing. I don't care what it is, but that's what we want to ingrain in people. 20 minutes and you'll live a happier, better life.

Hello, good people. I'm Dr. Michael Mannino. I'm the Chief Science Officer at Flow Research Collective, and I'd like to welcome you to another episode of Flow Radio, where we dive into the applied neuroscience of human performance. I'm joined by my co-host, Flow Research Collective Executive Director and bestselling author Stephen Kotler. So today we explore the power of flow, creativity, and art, and how preparing your brain to thrive in the 21st century begins with embracing the transformative power of the arts. So our guests are the brilliant co-authors of a book called Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us, Susan Maggsman and Ivy Ross. So Susan is the Executive Director of the International Arts Mind Lab at Johns Hopkins University and a pioneer in a field called neuroaesthetics. It's a field at the intersection of art and the brain. Susan studies how arts and aesthetic experiences can measurably change the brain, body, and behavior, and how these insights are revolutionizing well-being, learning, health, and healing. She co-leads the NeuroArts Blueprint, shaping the future of arts and well-being. And Ivy Ross is a vice president of design for hardware at Google, where her team has earned over 240 design awards. A renowned artist and designer, Ivy's work sits at the intersection of arts and science, with her innovative approach shaping not only products but the future of creative industries. And together they've written this compelling book on how art can enhance our brains unlock creativity, promote healing, and turbo boost our ability to get into flow. So welcome to the show, Susan and Ivy. Thank you for being here.

Thank you for having us.

I'm going to turn it over to Steven. I think you have a very interesting first question to kick us off.

Yeah, let me kick you off. Think of this as the speed round because we could literally spend the next 3 hours answering this question, but we're gonna try to do it in 2 minutes for each of you. Both of you do absolutely fascinating work. So my first question is, How did you become you? What was the voyage of discovery? What were the series of questions that led you to the work that you do today?

Ivy, let me go first. It's all pain and suffering. It's all pain.

What is that road?

So, you know what? I have to say, I'll just say this really quickly, is, you know, when I was a kid and everybody was doing drugs, My mother would say, you're the designated driver. And I'd be like, okay. And she'd say, because you're high on life. And I have to say, I think there's something about joy and wonder and awe and nature that really has been a catalyst for me in that it's just infinite. And I was born in a family of makers who were, you know, utilitarian makers. They weren't high art. They were crocheters, knitters, cook— you know, people that, you know, cooked all the time, gardened all the time. And I think when you're born into a culture where it's not art, it's life, it just never seemed like a differentiator for me.

That's an amazingly good answer.

That's why I wanted to go first.

Okay, sorry. Yeah, I mean, what do you have to say?

Yourself. So I think it's basically curiosity and staying a child of wonder. My dad was a designer, worked for Raymond Loewy, the famous designer in the '50s. And I think he wanted a son and he got a daughter, and it didn't stop him from pointing out hubcaps on cars and teaching me actually what I now know to be the flow state. I was a little girl, he'd say, Ivy, Go deep. Look at how that hubcap is constructed. What else can you learn from the way it's constructed? How can you apply it? So he taught me how to see things beyond what they appear to be by extrapolating information from everything in the world. He'd say, look at that leaf. Look up at that light bulb. What other things can be attached that way? So I became indoctrinated. I didn't know any different. To walking around being curious and inspired and then figuring out how I take that and apply it to everything in life. So I'm very grateful.

That's another great answer. And I like— what an amazing man. Like, somebody would tell you to like go deep into hubcaps is just what a— like what a— just a cool lesson. What a way— great. You were taught how to think critically. Absolutely.

And how did they get into the flow state when I was young? Yeah, little.

That's amazing. Susan, we were talking earlier, I did my grad work at Hopkins, albeit in creative writing and not in neuroscience, but tell us a little bit about the International Arts and Minds Lab.

Sure.

What do you guys focus on there?

Well, we launched in 2007 when we had a donor that came to the School of Medicine that wanted to give quite a bit of money, $100 million. And, but she said that she really needed the program to study the arts and the way the arts changed our brains and bodies because she believed that the arts could save us. And so that was the catalyst. And, you know, it's very— in the history of the way things happen, I think you always need an innovator and somebody who's thinking way beyond where other people are. And that, that was Marilyn Peterson. And she basically was committed to the way that the arts changed us. And at the time, this field was really at its infancy. It had only been 5 years before that that Semir Zeki had done an fMRI identifying where beauty was housed in the brain. And, and so, you know, that was sort of the first time that we really saw sort of structure around this area. But beauty wasn't being translated into practice in any way. It was really just trying to understand a little bit of neurophysiology. And so she really put in, made an investment into figuring out what did it mean to study the arts? How did you think about translation? And so that work we did a lot over the years, including developing a model called the Impact Thinking Model, which is how you study the arts and aesthetic experiences. And I always call it solution science because it starts with the problem and then works to how might you study that from a multiple perspective many ways of knowing, meaning neuroscience, cognitive science, could be psychology, public health, people with lived experience. And then how do you move that knowledge into the world, whether that's in healthcare, in education, in public health, in, in community building? And so we worked on that for a while and have really honed in on, I think, 3 main areas. One is field building. So You know, we built with the Aspen Institute the NeuroArts Blueprint, and maybe we'll talk about that later. We also work in intentional spaces because we're in a space all the time, whether that's a virtual space, a physical space, some kind of way, you know, so brings in all of the sensory experiences, all the different art forms in space. And then we work in mental health, and we both work in youth mental health, and we also work with mental health across the lifespan. And that can be disease models, but it can also be well-being and thriving and flourishing. So those are kind of our, our main categories. We are launching our first upper-level neuroscience course using the book Your Brain on Art this year in a couple weeks, and we're super excited about it. The course sold out the first day, and we have a waiting list for—

can we audit online? Sorry to interrupt.

Maybe, I don't know. But the idea is that there is no academic discipline to build the field of neuroaesthetics. And that's something that we think is really, really important to look at career pathways, whether you're a researcher or a practitioner or a policymaker and/or communicator. How do you bring this work forward to really make it sustainable?

And, you know, it's funny you asked that. Could you do— could you monitor it online? We are talking about finding a home to offer a course to the public. That comes out. Yeah.

Awesome. Awesome. So Ivy, I want to ask you about this from an evolutionary perspective. So we're wired for art. And can you walk us through maybe a little bit of the evolutionary biology and maybe even evolutionary psychology of that hardwiring? How did the brain evolve, and why did the brain evolve to produce art, to have aesthetic experience, to experience awe?

Well, I can let Susan explain maybe the inner workings of the brain, but I can tell you, you know, we went back and thought about, first of all, when did the word art even come into play? And we recognize that in ancient civilizations and indigenous tribes, of which there's still 500, they don't even have a word for art because that was the way they lived their life, right? Art being storytelling, singing, dancing, cave paintings. They didn't have to call it art. It was life. And, you know, really, we spoke to E.O. Wilson before he passed away, and he really— it was amazing. It was like 2 weeks before he died, and we had this great conversation where he was talking about how really this all started around the campfire, fire, and people sitting around and sharing stories, and that our brain was wired to actually make neural connections from these various activities. That is the way we were designed. And then he also reminded us that 99.9% of the time humans have been on this planet, we have lived in nature. It's only 0.1% that we've lived in the built environment. And one could say, you know, this has been an experiment, and you could say it's failed somewhat, you know, because you look at some of our architecture and some of our buildings without windows and schools without windows, and that's a whole other subject. But I think it began around the campfire. It began around the way we connect, the way the way we would use our sensory systems to gain information. But I'll let Susan add more.

Yeah, I mean, I, as Ivy said, you know, the, the conversations that we were able to have with EO Wilson, I think, brought home this idea of curiosity also, and just the nature of us being curious. So, you know, we were able to harness fire and bring that around the campfire. And this circle, you know, in the daytime we had tasks and, and, and, you know, things that we needed to accomplish. But at night was where, you know, in a circle, we were, we were able to create story and narrative and context. You know, that was really the first time where we started to figure out what had value to a culture, to a community. And, you know, the, the bonding and the physiological neurochemicals that you create in those connective tissues include things like oxytocin, right? Dancing, serotonin, dopamine, you know, really connecting to your tribe, literally to your tribe. And so, you know, we know that we're born with 100 billion neurons, more or less, and that the only way those neurons get connected is through synaptic transmission. And synaptic transmission happens by bringing the world in from the outside through these sensory systems. And so think about the smell of a campfire, the movement, the sounds, the energy, you know, of the space, you know, creating those synaptic connections and ultimately those neural pathways that connect all the different parts of the brains. Memory, movement, emotion, feeling, right? These, you know, initially we feel and then we have an emotion and then we have a thought, right? It happens very quickly, but you have to feel what's happening. And those feelings create amazing neural pathways within you, but also connect us. So the synchronicity between each other is so amazing. And that really lays the groundwork for what it means to be human, what it means to have this creative expression, which is how we define art. In terms of how you find and you share your voice and you also, you know, react and respond in that sort of serve and return between the maker of something and the beholder. And, you know, you're always back and forth in that dyad every day, every moment.

So oddly off of that, empathy did not exist as a term until the 18th century. It was originally meant to describe how does emotion transmit through art, right? How do I make a piece of art, you look at it, and you get the same emotion, you feel the same emotion I felt while making it? They had to coin the term empathy to figure that out. And then it became— Rilke actually turned it into what we think of as today. But off of the evolutionary stuff, and this is, I guess, an open question for either of you. It's one of my favorite things you did in this book is, and it really sort of highlights, I think, that deep evolutionary connection that we have to art is you really focus on creativity and art as medicine. And its healing power. And I was hoping you could elaborate a little bit on that.

Well, you know, creativity is an interesting word.

Either of you, should we pick on one or the other?

We're thinking it's a big question because that's the book, right? So we're thinking, okay, Susan, why are you starting? I'll add on.

Okay. Yeah. I mean, I'm going to turn it to you because You know, I know you're going to edit this, but Ivy, start by talking about how we've denigrated creativity because you talk a lot about that with Sir Ken Robinson and third grade. Because I think creativity is something—

Yeah, no, you know, we know it all when we come in as little beings, right? And then I think we get shut down by society. Sir Ken Robinson would go, I'm sure you've heard this story, right, into kindergarten, first grade, who's an artist? Everyone's hand goes up. And by the time you get to third grade, no one's hand goes up because judgment came in, in terms of judging. No, that's not the way you draw a tree. That's not the way. And it totally shuts down that need to creatively express without judgment. And it's really interesting because one of the things we've gotten so much gratitude for this book, but one of the things is people writing us notes saying, "You've given me permission to make art again or be creative." And it's like, wow, they were waiting. We can't believe there's people that just, you know, because it wasn't going to be their profession. It wasn't going to— they didn't think they were good at it. And the fact that what we're talking about is you don't have to be good. At these skills. You just have to do them. Engage. The benefit comes from engaging, from releasing. You know, what we're finding is some people have big traumas, then there's micro traumas that happen every day, little ones on top of each other, more and more and more. And we suppress this because we've been taught not to express creatively. And, you know, It's left for creative people, quote unquote. But we are wired and designed to need to get that information out there, out of ourselves, even back to ourselves without any audience, just as a reflection to keep us in homeostasis. So I think we come in being creative. I know often— I was on the board of the Institute Institute for Play. I'm a big believer in play. And he taught us that, and I did this with some of my employees, if you're trying to figure out are you doing the right thing in your life now, think about when you played as a kid between 0 and 5. What were you doing? And fast forward, is there any essence of what you were doing then to what you're doing now? Because that's what your little soul you came in to do. So I did that exercise, and I was doing puppet shows, teaching people very big concepts like electricity, but teaching it to them through puppets, through color and shape. And I realized, oh my God, that is so what I'm doing today on a different scale. But it shows that that innate creativity that we have, we know who we are. Little souls. And then it kind of gets sucked out of us, and we're— and we, we just stop. And so we've been optimizing for efficiency and productivity and put this piece of ourselves aside, this super important piece of ourselves that is imperative to our health and well-being.

That was an incredibly eloquent answer, I just have to say. It was great.

Yeah, yeah. And that's why I wanted you to go first. The, the— and you, when you really dig into creativity, you know. No, no, but when you really dig into it, if you— as Ivy said, you don't have to be proficient. And when you're judged at 3 or 7 or 8 and then you're shamed, you know that you're not going to get rewards for what you don't do well, right? So you start to figure out how to meet the needs of others, which automatically means that you're not investing in yourself. And I think the thing that happens is that you don't practice, you don't get better at sharing your voice because it's not to your advantage. And then when things happen, you don't know how to share your voice. We think that talking, you know, in our culture, talking is so valued. If you're a good orator, if you're a good presenter. But the truth of the matter is the way that you really share yourself is from the unconscious. We're only conscious of about 5% of what happens to us and what's happening with us. And so art allows us to bring meaningful, purposeful things forward. And if we haven't been practicing to do that and we don't know how to do that, we don't allow for that luminous liminal space to come forward, we're not deeply connected. We're connected at a surface level. And then something happens, as Ivy says, you know, as it will, you know, you have trauma, big and small, and all those emotions get stuck inside of you. I mean, there's a part of the brain called the Broca region that when something traumatic happens, it literally shuts down. The Broca region is the part of the brain that helps you to speak. And so you're holding this information inside. And what studies are now showing is that when you draw or paint or sculpt or creative write, not trying to talk, explain what happened, but just bring that forward. It often comes forward in symbol, in metaphor, in a different language that then allows you to come back and put words to it. So when you think about and make sense of it and reframe it and work with it, because then you've gotten it out of you. But, you know, you know, disease is out of ease, right? It's out of comfort. And I think we've forgotten that this creative expression, going all the way back to E.O. Wilson, is essential. That's how we're wired. Yet we've minimized it, we've marginalized it. We've said, oh no, if you're depressed, you need medication. And that's— you may, but if you are able to, you know, release what's been repressed, there's a lot that happens there when that sort of opens up in safe spaces. And sometimes it's, you know, creative arts therapists, sometimes it's community artists, sometimes it's learning artists, that you can work with. You can learn these practices. So your message, your question about creativity to medicine, I think happens through this ability to have this creative voice. And different art forms are very helpful for different things. Like dance is great for Parkinson's. We know singing is really helpful for people with neurodegenerative decline. And other Parkinson's patients also use fine motor work. But we don't just want to cope and feel fine. We want to thrive and we want to flourish. And so, you know, we are very barely touching flourishing and flow and all the things that we need to create the future, imagine the future we want. So that continuum, you know, at first might not make sense, but it's kind of the, the through line to really being whole people and, and finding that purpose and meaning and being healthy, truly physically healthy.

And, you know, I will say I am, and it's all I want to say about AI, but right now specifically, there is no better time. You know, I think we've been operating as if we are machines, and now the machines are going to take some rational things off our plate. So it should give us time to focus on using our imagination and creativity and exercising that muscle and over-amping what it means to be human. You know, machines can have sensors, but they don't have sensory systems. And so I think it's a call to action now more than ever, not only this great information because we can get inside your brain without having to operate to see what's going on when you're doing— playing music or dancing, but also I think there's I think it's no accident that this information is coming through as we humans need to exercise our imaginations more to be able to then co-create back with these machines.

Great answers. Amazing. All right. So we do have maybe a question on AI a bit later, but let's move on to this idea of flow. And you both mentioned flow state previously and even during this call. And Ivy, you actually mentioned something a little bit earlier about not having to be good at the skill. And you've heard this phrase, you know, we find beauty in things that are done well. So in flow, we have this idea of the challenge-skills balance. And the challenge has to be a little bit greater than the skill set at hand that you're bringing to this, bringing to the task that you're engaging in. So 4%, for example. And Steven, you can speak to this a little bit more, but this idea of being skilled at what you're doing and beauty coming from that. And I want to get into this whole idea of flow and creativity, right? Creativity often involves entering a state of flow. So from your your research, both of your research, how do, how do the arts keep, uh, how do the arts actually help people tap into flow states more easily? And what role do you think flow plays in the creative process as a whole?

Well, I think when you're in that flow creative zone, you are out of your cognitive mind. I mean, I don't know, Susan, if you can explain the science, but you are literally in a different place in your brain that gets rid of all of those, the— what your cognitive mind does, and allows you to go deep into something that is pulling you. I mean, I know when I— my work got in 12 museums, I was an artist around the world, I went— run— won a lot of design competitions. It was because I was relentless about and loved the feeling of blocking everything out and being so determined to solve a problem or see an end result. I was working with niobium metal. When you electrocute it, it rearranges the molecules so it reflects different colors. And I would just ask myself my own questions. You know, Susan and I found out that from working together, the scientist and the artist are very similar. We're both about asking questions and then relentlessly being devoted to the answer. The artist through the creative exploration. But, and we both use creativity to do it, but it was fascinating. So I think that it's very hard in companies today to get into that flow state because it is having to give yourself permission to get out of your cognitive mind.

Why we have jobs.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And by the way, when I think you don't have to be good When I said you don't have to be good at things, believe me, I love being great at things or good at things. The thing is, when it comes to people being intimidated by not even wanting to pick up a lump of clay and just play with it, which is great for both halves of your brain to get it going, because they think they're not going to be, you know, an incredible sculptor. So there's a time and place for everything. But I do agree that the idea of getting into the flow state is to go so deep in a place where, like Susan said, your subconscious, where all this information and energy is without having to worry about the cognitive mind in order to create greatness, for sure.

Well, and maybe I'll come at it slightly different. I think, first of all, what Ivy's alluding to with our subconscious minds is that, you know, junk in, junk out, right? And so having a lot of lived experiences, having, you know, lots of raw material that you've brought into your brain is really important. So, you know, there's some interesting studies for children in under-resourced communities where in the summer they don't have vacations, they don't go to Europe, they don't go to camp. So these kids don't have all these new kind of fodder to bring back to school the next year. And what happens is not only do they lose ground from the year before, it becomes cumulative. And so, you know, when you think about things like flow, it's— you want that rich loom of information and content that's unprocessed, but that it's there because What happens with flow is the prefrontal cortex is the area of the brain that's responsible for these higher cognitive functions. You know, it's the newest part of the brain. You know, the, the primal part of the brain does all this stuff that you don't have to think about, but, you know, and the different cortexes that bring information in, they're pretty old. But, you know, the, the conductor of the brain is really in the front of the brain, and it's sort of that self-reflective— it's where you have your self-conscious. There's sort of temporal integration in the front of the brain, working memories in the front of the brain, the prefrontal cortex. And, and so it's very explicit, if you will. But when you're moving into a state, that part of the brain temporarily downregulates. And so it's— and it does it in order to inactivate the area of the prefrontal cortex that triggers the ability to be able to lose a sense of self-consciousness, to lose a sense of time, to not have an inner critic. And the work of Charles Lim has actually shown that the regulation of the, of the prefrontal cortex that makes you think about mastery and perfection and judgment is right next to the part of the brain that you, you turn on or off if you're moving into flow. And you can get better at it the more you practice moving into flow, moving yourself into flow state. So it's not a —muscle, but it is like that where you can create the conditions for moving into flow. But when you don't have that inhibition and you're moving into that timeless kind of free state, different parts of the brain are allowed to be able to be amplified. And so you may be tall if you're calling on the auditory cortex, or you may be pulling in part of the motor cortex because But that's happening because you've allowed the part of the brain that regulates that to stop regulating that. And there's also a lot of dopamine that gets released through the whole system because it feels good. So you want to do it, you want to do more of it. And I think, you know, we don't teach flow states in K-12. We don't teach this understanding that flow is really important, especially in a very fast-paced society. And maybe just adding one more piece to this puzzle is that when you've gone through a flow state and you've— your, your default mode network has already activated, like, what's important to you, what patterns are there, you're pulling on all of that information. But all that also helps to move towards self-actualization, where you know, like, how to manifest something new. And that's also important for child development, but it's also important for adults, right? So if you go into what's called a brainstorming session and someone always is critiquing what your brainstorm is, you learn not to do that. And I think that's a real challenge for us as we start to think about how do we allow for these really big flow states that bring information forward in a way that we haven't had before.

Susan, I'm so glad you brought up Charles Lim's work. I'm a huge fan of all of his studies, though I will say from the flow science perspective, I don't know if you know this or not, he really argues that self-referential thinking is in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and that's what deactivates during transient hypofrontality, the temporary deactivation. Prefrontal cortex. Most of the other flow field disagrees with him on the activity of that structure. A bunch of other brain imaging shows the same transient hypofrontality, a lot of stuff shut down, but they show the exact inverse, that most of the shutdown occurs in the default mode network and not in the lateral sides of the brain. And so, we've gone back and forth. I really like I really like his studies. I know he also didn't set out to study flow. He set out to study what happens in the brain during conditions of extreme improvisation and then stumbled upon flow. But one of the things that we've been talking a lot about is clearly creativity spikes in flow. We ran studies on creativity and flow and found the same thing that they found at the University of Sydney. It's like a 400 to 700% spike above baseline. It's huge. It's really big. But it's a weird puzzle from a neurobiological, like, what's shutting down? What's active? Does it— we, you know, we've— our work is— and Richard Husky's work, who we do a lot of work with, really thinks it's task-specific on what's shutting down and what's going on. But the really neat questions that we're being able to, like, really probe, questions of how to maximize flow to maximize creativity, how to maximize creativity, to maximize flow. And it seems to be a really positive feedback loop there. So that was a long preface, my way of asking in this whole sort of on the neuro side of this whole field and this whole puzzle, what's— what are your— what's your thinking? What's— what line of research is really firing you up the most?

Yeah, well, I like what you said, you know, Charles, has done some interesting work in different art forms. And I think that is really also interesting because he's getting similar results in, in every art form related to improvisation, which equals flow equals, you know, creativity in a, in a way. I think what I, I want to say about the research is, you know, this is a nascent field. It's a new field, and we're pulling on science, cognitive science, psychology, psychiatry, public health, you know, and I think it's really important to think about this field as a generative field, to think about the neurophysiology, systems, structures, function, behavior, and also outcomes. Because, you know, we don't know a lot about how different drugs work on the brain necessarily, right? Yet they're prescribed. And I think we have to really keep thinking about— there's no money in neuroaesthetics research from the federal government. There's— or mostly it's been fueled by philanthropy. And so I think we've made enormous strides since the early days, but I think we need to continue to invest in understanding what really is our birthright and what we know drives us. I mean, can you think of a drug besides potentially some kind of plant-based medicine that arguably would increase creativity and flow. I mean, I think it's a natural phenomenon that we have, right? And so how do we really invest in understanding that? So that's one of the things I think is really important right now is turning up the resources to be able to really study this, to affect business, to affect the kinds of changes we need in the future to help with child development. Because, you know, I think it's always great in science where one person agrees and one doesn't, because all it means is that you're going to push harder to move forward. So I love that. And the brain, we don't know that in science at large, right? It would be foolish to say we definitively know everything about the brain. We don't, right? It's such an amazing phenomenon. So I'm excited about more studies for sure.

And I'm excited that some of these things are coming to the public in that I saw two proof points of this. One was a— I have to find out what concert it was. It was classical music where all of the musicians were wearing skull caps and the conductor, and they had a big screen that the audience could literally see what was happening. As in the beginning, it was different as the musicians started playing. And they started to get coherent together, their heart rates, their brain waves changed. And you were seeing this on a screen. So the fact that— and people were in the audience. This wasn't a science experiment. This was showing real time what happens when you get into those flow states as a group. And I've seen this and I've done experiments with it when I run creative departments. Where I found the fundamental frequency at which 12 people resonated and fed it back to themselves so that through entrainment, we could all get to that place of ultimate creativity. But the fact that we're now doing that in concerts, and the other day I saw a posting, they're doing it with dancers now, 2 dancers dancing together to show what's happening individually and collective. So I think that the fact that we're bringing it forward to the public, work like that is huge.

I think coming one step off of that, you write about sort of on the practical side of things, and this question is for either of you. You write about Roger Beattie, where he's director of neuroscience at Penn or cognitive neuroscience at Penn. And he had just a really— it was a really cool tip, which was in between tasks, Use mind wandering as a tool to amplify creativity. And I just thought it was just a neat, like, you know, hey, here's a 30-second thing that you can do that seems really counterintuitive, but it actually is going to make a difference. It's the kind of practical thing that I really like. And they, you know, get me excited. What are your other favorite practical tips along the way? The book's packed with them, but I was wondering if Ivy, what do you use most in your life? Susan, what do you use most in life? What are the tools you guys lean on?

3 things. One is, um, um, I love to dance and I dance almost every day. And Friday nights, my husband and I have a dance thing. And dance to me is like movement just changes your body. And so, um, like anytime I can dance or move, I do. Um, the second thing is I collage. And, um, I always have— I call them scraps. And I have scraps and I put stuff together, especially when I'm trying to figure something out that I don't know. And that's also very valuable for me. And then, you know, I think living by this aesthetic mindset work that Ivy and I talk about is really important where, you know, my mantra in terms of entering the day is around curiosity, about playful exploration, around using our sensory systems And then also just remembering to be engaged as a maker or beholder. And those things just— then the experience, what you meet, everything changes when you're in that mode. And I think it's a mindset so that you're not— this work is not more, add more to your day. To me, it's how do you recast your day so you're living an artful life and you're experiencing this all the time, whether you're making a meal or you're setting up your space or you're sort of working on something. Um, and maybe I'll just add one more, which is nature. I think nature is the most aesthetic art form. And just going outside in the morning when you get up and, you know, being able to start to activate your day, and then going out at the end of the day where you start to move into, you know, activating melatonin— we're so out of sync with nature that remembering how to become in rhythm with nature is such a natural thing. And I think we're really out of sync.

Yeah. And I think, what is it, Susan? 45 minutes of art a month. I mean, we'll live 10 years longer. I mean, there's some incredible statistics of just doing any art activity. But for me, I use sound. I've been studying sound and vibration for 40 years now, and I sometimes carry tuning forks with me. And so when I get into that— not— I love music, but not music, but just pure sound. I can travel to unexpected places, and I get some of my best ideas by just— I think for me, it just clinking sometimes two tuning forks and rotating them around my ears to put me in that zone where the sound— I get carried away. I also, for me, nature is the most neuroaesthetic place because it enlivens all of our senses and makes us feel alive. It has shape, color, temperature, sound, everything in one dose. So I have a house by the ocean that's 10 miles of track along the ocean. And I do my most creative thinking actually when I'm in that environment, either a sound capsule or that environment. Those are the two things I do for myself. The other one would say I am. I mean, Susan and I created this creative mindset, aesthetic mindset by talking about how we are in the world. And I know I always pay attention to what gets my attention. And then go into the flow state around that, right? So I think I'm very intuitive around what will get my attention, and then I go deep because it has something to teach me when it usually gets my attention. So I would say I live by that as well. That's the third thing I do for myself. It's very nurturing.

Great. Thank you both for that answer. Yeah, yeah, good answers. All right, all right.

So Ivy, here's the AI question, which I may or may not be able to answer, but try me. Uh, this is for both of you.

We, by the way, we're— we've got a dedicated humans in flow cooperating with AI research program because we're— I'm a big believer that that's the future. Oh, cool. Yeah, so we've, we've been— we've had a sort of Michael, uh, Michael runs a big AI department as well. And so, we've been focused on the intersection of flow and AI and how to— I'm not a big believer that the neural— we're going to be able to hook our brains up to the web, I think, anytime soon. And I think in the interim, in the gap, it's got to be humans and AI. AI isn't good at lateral thinking, humans, right? So, we can do the lateral thinking, the AI does the pattern recognition. And if we're doing flow, That's, to me, that's the secret sauce. And so we've been trying to figure out how do you optimize for that for a while now. Right.

It's not either or, it's not either or, it's both and. Yeah, it's both and, of course, totally. And what does that look like? And I think we're just beginning to, and we have to play, I think, talk about playful exploration. I think that's exactly what this field needs right now without going crazy. And we don't know, right? We don't know. We need to get into playful exploration. Sorry, Michael, go ahead. No, no, that's it.

We're moving into this world where AI is being creative or maybe will be creative, right? And it's being used to generate art in ways that we couldn't have imagined a decade ago. We're gonna see new art forms and at the intersection of technology and creativity. So how do you think AI-generated art fits into this broader conversation about neuroscience aesthetics, and in particular the human brain's response to art?

Yeah, well, you know, there is some proof, right, Susan, that in general things digitally— there's no substitution, first of all, for seeing real art or touching it in 3D. But absolutely, because people would ask us, viewing art online, it absolutely is super healthy for your brain. It's, you know, one may be a little bit more effective than the other. I know that's not what you're asking, but I just wanted to declare that up front. In terms of, you know, I know a lot of artist friends are in a panic about AI-generated art, and I think that's why we need to do this playful exploration. We— it's a tool just like any other technical tool was, where like everyone was panicked over digital photography because it was going to take away from photography. But then the creativity that digital photography allowed photographers together brought photography to another level. So I think the same thing is going to happen. Like, you know, I think people are playing with this generative AI art. Some of it I like, some of it I don't like. It's not about judging it. I think it's about early days to see. I believe we're both here to together bring— we don't, we can't even imagine what that new form is yet, and that's the scary thing for people because it hasn't yet been created. So I would say that I think we will create new forms of art because of this, and we just don't know what it is yet or see it yet. So right now I think some people are afraid of it because it's— I don't think its use is to just copy what we've done. I think it will have further implications and make us more imaginative and creative, which as a society we need to solve the problems of today and tomorrow. So I think it's going to, but we have to engage and do the playful exploration to see where it's going to take us because it can, it can, it's such a great tool. It can do certain things that we shouldn't have to do, and then we could utilize— and this is why it's important that we understand our humanness together— of what we have to give, like you say.

And there probably are— like bioethics is a great field because there are definitely ethical implications for AI that need to be really understood. I'll give you one example of an AI intervention that I think is brilliant, and, and I don't know if you— I don't know how you context this, but there are many people who have had serious mental illness issues over their lifetimes, and they feel very isolated and disconnected to family and friends because— you use the word empathy— these difficulties are so deep and so held that others can't empathize because they haven't had those kinds of experiences deep depression. Could be bipolar, could be schizophrenia, it could be any number of things. Huge trauma loss that you just— you can acknowledge and witness, but you can't feel. And what they've done is worked with AI to create art that expresses how they feel. They pick an artist, say it's a Mondrian or a Monet. They describe, 'I feel like I'm in a cage. I can't breathe. I'm I'm all alone in this vast universe. And the AI creates an image for that person. And I've seen this where these images have then been shared with family and friends. They instantly feel it. They instantly get it. And it's like this amazing connection. And I would imagine you could do that with music. You could probably do it with other art forms. But what I've seen is in visual art, And it's pretty extraordinary. It's almost as if you're giving a blind person sight, right? You're able to help to show something that you could not see any way you tried. And I find that to be an extraordinary gift.

Yeah, so in that way, the AI is expressing through vision what the person had no capability to express and therefore communicating to loved ones. Pretty profound.

Let me, let me, let me, uh, take us out with some, some maybe big takeaways, and then I want to ask you both one last question of what you want people to walk away with. So I think some of the biggest takeaways of this— an amazing conversation— I think, I think some of the biggest takeaways, um, that I heard were, um, art equals life, or art should equal life in, in many ways, like it does when we're when we're children. That was one. Second thing is I think you both sort of said directly, but also implied that art is necessary for wellbeing. It's a necessary requirement for our flourishing. Susan, you talked about that as well. I love the idea of aesthetic mindset. I think that's super important and necessary for moving into this world of AI, human AI collaboration. But what do you both want people to walk away with? And in general, why does neuroaesthetics matter for the everyday person?

In 1 minute or less? Okay. I mean, I'll start.

We want people to walk away with an understanding that just like it took us many years, but we now understand we need 8 hours of sleep. We need 20 minutes of exercise. We want people to take away that you need 20 minutes of an art practice. Just give yourself 20 minutes to pick up a crayon, pick up a pencil, dance around the house, sing. I don't care what it is, but that's what we want to ingrain in people. 20 minutes and you'll live a happier, better life.

I mean, yeah, I mean, I think we have an art for that. We have proof anytime, anywhere, any art, anybody. I think it's, you know, the equity issues around arts and aesthetic experiences are maybe more implicit than explicit, but anybody can do this and at any age. And I think that's really, really important. And I also think the marriage of arts, science, and technology is really important because it is a triad. And so they're not against each other. I think they really need to work with each other. And when you change your lens about this, you do change your life, as Ivy's saying. And I think that's really critically important. And, and the world is hungry for something to bring us back together at an individual level and a collective level. And, and as I said earlier, the arts are our birthright, and so we have forgotten that, and I think we're less human because of it.

Great. Ivy, Susan, thank you both so much for writing the book, doing this work, bringing this important science to all of us and showing the importance of it. Thank you both so much for being on our podcast. It was a great, great conversation. Very practical. And thank you. Thank you.

That was a pleasure. Really a pleasure.