Your Brain on Art

arts and aesthetics can quite literally rewire your brain. They are a secret sauce that helps build new synaptic connections.

Your experiences with the arts and aesthetics are so singular because your brain-connectivity patterns are distinctive.

the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture with the goal of applying the latest in neuro and cognitive sciences to the betterment of our built environment.

I'd come to think our brains needed help transforming from trash compactors into microscopes, and that's where art comes in: a way to fight our instincts to truncate and elide, and, in so doing, to notice more, appreciate more, empathize more. Which is all to say, to experience more. If our lives are the set of experiences that we collect, then art

Perhaps the best demonstration of the importance of interdisciplinarity is the largely unappreciated connection between art and science. Indeed, science is often used as a vehicle to excel in art, and vice versa. The creativity resulting from the art–science intersection has been evident throughout history. Leonardo used mathematics to achieve geom

Like our own imagination, art can wander off, seeking out the edges, the borderlands, the mysteries. Indeed, this autonomy is art’s power and part of its emotional appeal. But this very ability to separate from everyday material life may also make art impotent in trying to shape the world from which it has escaped. At most it can be a nudge or a su

Art, as Bloch said, is a laboratory of possibilities. Indeed, other worlds become possible as and insofar as we curiously reformulate the networks in our heads—and in our hearts.

That’s your brain pruning synapses that aren’t engaged in salient experiences. These synaptic connections atrophy from a lack of stimulation and then permanently disconnect.