In their incisive book, Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross make an argument for the arts — from a receptive standpoint, and especially as a practice — as essential for personal renewal and growth. While the importance of creativity for personal well-being may be intuitive, this book offers scientific insights into how it all works, by construing the whole of human experience through neuroaesthetics.
As a biological framework, neuroaesthetics measures how the aesthetic inputs we receive — music, visual arts, architecture, dance, poetry — trigger changes in our brain waves, neurotransmitters, and synaptic plasticity. This study offers a roadmap and a set of practices for how to discover and cultivate our “aesthetic brain” in order to flourish in all areas of our lives.
Three questions the book illuminates
1Why does the experience of what we deem “beautiful” remain resolutely personal and idiosyncratic?
While we receive sensory inputs in similar ways, our brain’s emotional reward system, together with our meaning network — personal associations, memories, cultural background — makes for distinct aesthetic profiles.
2What are emotions, and how do they differ from feelings?
Drawing on neuroanatomist Jill Taylor’s claim that we are feeling beings who think, the authors correct the bias for hyper-rationality by underscoring how art triggers emotions — energies in motion — in our bodies. They support the need to develop emotional granularity, a term coined by psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett: the practice of building a vocabulary around our own emotions and their causes, which in turn makes us more empathetic toward the same in others. Feelings, by contrast, are the cognitive interpretations of emotions. And art is a propitious arena in which to test, categorize, and better understand what touches or unsettles us.
3How are we connected — and better off for it — to Earth?
A subtle thread in the book concerns our attunement to our primary aesthetic environment. From the Overview Effect — the cognitive shift reported by astronauts seeing Earth from orbit, which produces feelings of awe, interconnectedness, and a desire to protect our shared habitat — to our sensory grounding in nature and our hardwiring to the planet’s electromagnetic frequency, the authors highlight unsuspected resources for managing stress and restoring internal harmony.
Aesthetic experiences hijack our routines, telling the brain to pay attention to what is surprising or emotionally meaningful — and to change.
A profusion of examples drawn from research on learning, trauma, and clinical cases, among others, demonstrates how art alters the brain and the body by bypassing our conscious defenses.
Ultimately, Magsamen and Ross make a compelling case for cultivating an attunement to our emotions through art — one that can help us process complex states, better care for ourselves and others, and adapt to our changing environments as more resilient and, why not, joyful human beings. ■
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