Centre for Applied Neuroscience
The full transcript of questions on neuroscience, creativity, and art with Dr. Mandy Wintink. This appeared in the October issue of The Dream Room newsletter.
1. What is your background?
I got a PhD in Psychology and Neuroscience. I have always been deeply fascinated by and curious about why people (and other animals) do the things that they do. Neuroscience, psychology, mindfulness, yoga, experience, working in retail, talking with others, sharing experiences, debating... these are all different ways that I think about us beings.
2. How have you applied this knowledge in your work (the businesses you’ve built and so on)?
For me, the "why" is my guiding question. This lends itself very well to the work that I do and how I started my company, the Centre for Applied Neuroscience Inc. Neuroscience (and psychology) had always been a tool for self-reflection throughout my education and then I realized that this was a valuable tool for others to make sense of themselves, including why they were the way they were (e.g., satisfied or not, depressed, longing, indecisive, stressed, etc.) and also how to grow into the essence of what they wanted to be, which ultimately is happy. At CAN, we (myself and my 9 staff) use neuroscience as a lens for life coaching people one-on-one and also in our training course for people to become a life coach. More recently, we have also launched several other programs that use neuroscience for self-reflection, personal growth, happiness, and wellness, including a Neuropsychiodiology Course, which is based on the term I coined and published that is defined as self-study of one's own mind, behaviour, and brain. Ultimately, what all of this is doing is supporting individuals to witness their own story, make sense of it, and then confidently communicate who and why they are the way they are! I also hold a faculty position at the University of Guelph-Humber.
3. When we encounter a piece of art - a song, story, movie, etc - that connects to us, what is happening to our brain?
Ultimately, when we connect with a piece of art, we are having an emotional, visceral reaction. By that, I mean we feel it in our core. The neuroscience of our core can be thought of as the sympathetic nervous system (the fight or flight, quick-acting arousal system), the parasympathetic (rest & digest, slowing down system), the enteric nervous system (which is the gut-feeling), and a visceral system (felt sense of the internal organs like the heart), and the interoceptive system (the awareness of the internal bodily experiences). If we think of all of these like cords of a harp, we can imagine that the exact ways in which they are activated can give rise to very different, yet oddly similar, experiences, which is probably why we sometimes feel art as painfully deep or intense love.
The brain is a massive organizer of information. There are many general principles of the brain that connect with distinct elements of art. For example, parts of the temporal lobes process musical rhythm whereas other parts process lyrics and words. The visual cortex at the back of our brain processes vision by organizing all the different elements of what our eyes detect and then passes on through various subcortical regions of the brain. Sometimes meaning is superimposed upon those visuals and other times meaning is extracted from those visuals. Our arousal system (which is essentially a stress system involveing the fight or flight responses) is often engaged during powerful songs, stories, or movies, particularly when we process this from an empathy perspective. Empathy is a powerful human experience where we feel what others feel and neuroscientists are starting to understanding this from a neural perspective, particularly after detecting mirror neurons in the monkey motor system where cells responded to the monkey's own arm movements and when the monkey watched another monkey's arm moved. That system is not well understood yet, but it very clear that our brains are processing what others are experiencing, which happens quite provocatively during art. The other thing to know is that there is a significant amount of individual differences among the brains, which explains where some people resonate more with, say, visual art and others with songs and others with movies. I think it's fair to say that art is so vastly different across the media, and that's true too of the ways in which our different brains resonate with media and elements of the media in unique ways. That uniqueness is what I would call, neuropsychoidiology!
When I think about myself, I know that I prefer show series to movies because I find the emotional investment in characters important and only worth doing for a series when I know I can continue with them. This parallels how I go through life, preferring to invest in deeper, long-term connections than short-term conversations. This might also be related to my balance of novelty. Novelty is great for the brain, but at moderate doses. Too much and it becomes a stressor. I tend to provoke my brain with many novel ideas and projects. I have a lot of newness in my work. We can (and should) balance novelty with routine to soothe ourself with familiarity. Movies don't offer that to my brain. My temporal lobe (which is really captivated by words, cadence, and rhythm) is probably more active than my visual cortex because I don't think visually, when I read or listen. I think in language, and words, and in particularly through emotions.
We all have different brains and to really understand how our brain engages with art should probably start with our feeling and sense of how we engage with art.
4. Where can people find out more about your work - online, social media, upcoming projects, etc?
You can read excerpts of my upcoming book at www.mandyland.ca (http://www.mandyland.ca/blog) or listen to my podcast there too. Or head to my company to sign up for an upcoming course or program: https://www.knowyourbrain.ca/events. If you're really interested and don't know where to start, just send me an email and we can chat!