Wellbeing Series 2024 | Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us

Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us featuring Susan Magsamen
Learn more about the Wellbeing Series. z.umn.edu/WellbeingSeries
We’re on the verge of a cultural shift in which the arts can deliver potent, accessible, and proven solutions for the wellbeing of everyone. The science of neuroaesthetics offers proof of how our brains and bodies are transformed when we participate in the arts and aesthetic experience. This knowledge can improve our physical and mental health, help us learn and flourish, amplify innovation and build stronger communities. Over the last twenty years advances in technology have enabled researchers to non-invasively get inside our heads. We now know the arts alter a complex neurological network of interconnected processes including higher-order cognition such as executive function, reward, creativity, and our biological systems including immune, circulatory, and respiratory. The arts are not only our birthright--science is discovering that we are evolutionarily and physiologically wired for them.
This webinar will overview the field of neuroaesthetics, the study of how the arts and aesthetic experiences measurably change the body, brain, and behavior and how this knowledge is translated into specific practices that advance health and wellbeing. It will provide learners with foundational underpinnings and theories of the field including the neurobiology and evolutionary basis of the arts, as well as take a deeper dive into the research through case studies from around the world.
Susan Magsamen is the founder and executive director of the International Arts + Mind Lab (IAM Lab), Center for Applied Neuroaesthetics, a pioneering neuroaesthetics initiative from the Pedersen Brain Science Institute at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Susan’s work focuses on how the arts and aesthetic experiences measurably change the brain, body and behavior and how this knowledge can be translated to inform health, wellbeing and learning programs in medicine, public health and education. She is also the author of the Impact Thinking, an interdisciplinary translational research model to enhance human potential through the use of arts and aesthetics. In addition to her role at IAM Lab, she is the co-director of the NeuroArts Blueprint project in partnership with the Aspen Institute. The Blueprint aims to create the field of Neuroarts where arts and aesthetics are mainstream in medicine and public health. Magsamen is also the co-author of the New York Times Bestseller, Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us written for the general public.