Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross (Canongate)
THE first essay I wrote was about how much I hated my yellow bedroom. The walls were yellow. The blinds were yellow. Even the white furniture reflected the nauseating colour at me like a disco ball. My 11-year-old self described it as “a pee-coloured prison”.
I bring this up because it exemplifies the big idea behind Your Brain on Art: How the arts transform us – that aesthetic experiences have a profound impact on our well-being. In the case of my bedroom, it was for the worse, but it can also be greatly to our advantage, argue Susan Magsamen, a researcher at Johns Hopkins University in Maryland, and Ivy Ross, Google’s vice-president of hardware design. For them, leveraging this can boost not only mood, but also physical health.
Advertisement
Your Brain on Art is fascinating and frustrating. It is packed with interesting insights, but lacks the scientific rigour needed to elevate the book from good to great.
The authors, who come from largely creative backgrounds, start out by laying a scientific foundation for discussing how the arts affect our bodies. They unpack key concepts such as neuroplasticity – the ability of our brains to change and rewire as they respond to learning and experience – and the default mode network, a system of interacting brain regions that kicks in when we aren’t focused on the external world, such as when we daydream or our minds wander.
One particularly interesting idea they describe is the aesthetic triad, a model developed by Oshin Vartanian at the University of Toronto and Anjan Chatterjee at the University of Pennsylvania. This suggests that the brain’s sensory, reward and meaning-making systems coordinate to perceive aesthetically pleasing experiences. Differences in the components may even explain liking or loathing yellow.
Unfortunately, this level of scientific analysis and detail falters further on, with some claims lacking concrete evidence. Magsamen and Ross suggest, for example, that people can access their unconscious by making circular, geometric shapes called mandalas, using unsubstantiated phrases such as “bringing buried emotions into meta-awareness”.
Even when the authors do cite research, details are sometimes missing. At one point, they describe findings from a study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in which mice with an Alzheimer’s-like disease were treated with sound therapy. After a week, the mice showed “vastly improved cognition”, but we don’t discover if “vastly” means an improvement of 5 or 50 per cent.
Magsamen and Ross needed to frame their evidence more carefully, especially by discussing limitations or introducing caveats. Despite this, there are plenty of interesting titbits highlighting the potential of the arts to heal bodies and minds. Take the virtual reality software, . Developed at the University of Washington, Seattle, it has been used for pain relief during the dressing of burns injuries, a process crucial to recovery. Patients reported feeling between 35 and 50 per cent less pain using the headset than with typical pain relief.
Other led by Janneke van Leeuwen at University College London shows that viewing art activates some brain regions involved in socialising. This may be because immersing ourselves in, say, a painting means engaging with the artist’s thoughts, beliefs, emotions and ideas – and helps us connect with each other.
While Your Brain on Art needed to spend more time on the science, it does succeed handsomely at driving home the message that aesthetic engagement (no matter how small) can improve your life. This can be as simple as doodling away, or penning a manifesto to convince your parents to repaint your bedroom.
