Your Brain on Art
How the Arts Transform Us
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- £9.99
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- £9.99
Publisher Description
THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
A WATERSTONES BEST BOOK OF 2023
BARNES & NOBLE'S BEST SCIENCE & NATURE BOOKS OF 2023
We’re on the verge of a cultural shift in which the arts can deliver potent, accessible and proven solutions for the well-being of everyone. Magsamen and Ross offer compelling research that shows how engaging in an art project — from painting and dancing to expressive writing, architecture and more — for as little as forty-five minutes reduces the stress hormone cortisol, no matter your skill level, and just one art experience per month can extend your life by ten years.
Your Brain on Art is an authoritative guide to how neuroaesthetics can help us transform traditional medicine, build healthier communities and mend an aching planet. The book weaves a tapestry of breakthrough research, insights from multidisciplinary pioneers and compelling stories from people who are using the arts to enhance their lives.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Art will heal what ails you, according to this scattershot treatise on aesthetics and well-being. Johns Hopkins neurologist Magsamen (Family Stories) and Ross, Google's vice president of hardware design, draw on scientific studies to explain how making and appreciating art, music, dance, theater, and writing affect the brain and promote health. Some of the applications the authors highlight intrigue, such as the success of dance classes in helping Parkinson's patients improve movement and singing classes in hastening new mothers' recovery from postpartum depression. Other benefits are more modest and unsurprising: adult coloring books reduce stress and anxiety, and group dancing fosters social bonding. There's disappointingly sparse insight on neuroscience, as well. For instance, when the authors note that "poetry activates brain areas such as the posterior cingulate cortex and medial temporal lobes," which "intensify emotions," the unsurprising takeaway is that poetry elicits an emotional response. Elsewhere, the scientific discussions sometimes edge toward new age mysticism, as when the authors write that the "notes C and G... resonate with the Earth's core frequency and are known to be soothing vibrations." This somewhat obvious brief comes up short. Photos.
Customer Reviews
Interesting, but quite frustrating
The book consists of lots of scattered descriptions of individual art/science projects that they show to have some impact on the brain or human physiology, which is enough to make the case that art is important, but not much else.
It spends so much time describing these little fragmented projects (and quite gratingly spends lots of time on the CVs of the people running them), and rather less time trying to build them all into a coherent framework or set of ideas, nor does it attach any scientific rigour to most of the conclusions. A very very common pattern in the book is to say “doing A results in extra activation in Brain Region B, Brain Region B is also responsible for C” and therefore suggesting that doing A will necessarily result in improvements in C. This is quite weak, there was very little rigorous research presented.
The title is also highly misleading, because most of the book is not about art it is about sensory experiences more broadly, spending time in nature counts as a sensory experience, as does participation in activities that aren’t really about self expression, and VR simulations where people see images and play little games. I understand why, because the actual effect of each artistic activity varies wildly depending on what the activity is, but that does mean that as a whole the book doesn’t have much connecting it together.
It could have been a great source of advice if they spent more time talking about how you can improve your ability to appreciate, relate to, and extract benefits from, art in your own life (beyond just ‘having more’ art) and it could have been interesting from a scientific perspective if it tried to seriously examine why those benefits occur, and to try and understand which benefits come from which types of art and why, and the overlap or not with other activities. (when you describe an adult colouring in book as ‘participation in art’ which reduces stress, is that actually meaningfully about art any more or is it really just equivalent to doing a sudoku, which has no aesthetic component but also relieves stress and is similarly used by people). What actually matters? Attention to something simple? Aesethetic stimulation? Self-expression? An actual scientific analysis would have been interesting.
It also delves into psudo-sciency nonsense at times. It describes the usage of a tuning fork to produce a nice sound and reduce stress (sound therapy). They say the reason this works is because “The notes C and G, … resonate with the Earth’s core frequency and are known to be soothing vibrations”. This is nonsense. The reason it works is that C and G are a 5th apart and therefore their overtones overlap and produce a stable, predictable pattern. They likewise describe colour therapy as working because “colours transmits at different frequencies and vibrations and practitioners are able to use a colours specific properties to shift the energy - and frequency of our bodies”. Nonsense like this shouldn’t be present in something that describes itself as a science book.
There is space for a great book with this title, tackling this theme, but I don’t think this book was it.
If you are interested in reading about lots of art projects, or cannot see any value at all in art to start with, then maybe this book would be interesting to you.