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You Need to Act, Now: Thalia Goldstein · Incredible Mind

• speaker-0: What? You were made for creativity, learning, problem solving, and of course, action. On the Incredible Mind Podcast, you'll hear from neuroscientists, psychologists, doctors, artists, and others, whose work expands our understanding of how the brain works, where things can go wrong, and what simple everyday steps you can take to make the most of the unique intelligence you were born with. The Incredible Mind I'm talking about is yours. On today's episode You need to act now. We continue our creativity journey with a spotlight on theater and acting. My guest Talia Goldstein is one of the few researchers studying acting from a cognitive and psychological perspective. While she shares her work, she introduces several important psychological concepts. There's lots to learn here, and you may just leave excited to bring a little drama, the stage kind, into your life. Let's get started. Hello and welcome back to Incredible Mind. I'm your host, Michelle Cross-Smith. Today we're speaking with Dr. Talia Goldstein. Dr. Goldstein is an associate professor and the director of applied developmental psychology at George Mason University. Talia is here to share her knowledge on a less studied but very fascinating area of psychology and the arts, theater and acting. Now, if you're not a theater person, don't run away just yet. Acting is one of the most dynamic and powerful ways we can use play in our lives to improve our emotional intelligence, along with developing many other excellent cognitive skills and even physical skills. If you are a theater person or theater lover, you're probably already on board. All right, Talia, welcome. Tell us about your work and how you ended up focusing your study of psychology on acting. speaker-1: Yeah, thank you. So I was, like many people, a drama kid growing up, and I loved theater, and I loved pretend play and imagination and singing and dancing and all of those different things, and loved it through elementary school, middle school, high school. And I was lucky enough to go to schools that had really rich theater programs and drama classes all through my primary education. Then I went to college and double-majored in psychology and theater. My parents Sort of said I couldn't just major in theater, and so psychology seemed a sort of close approximation as a second major. Psychology and theater really are trying to answer the same question, which is why do people do the things that they do? How do you have a relationship with somebody else? What are emotions and how do they work? I was really drawn to the psychology piece of it and the research piece of it, and then also continued to do theater all through college. Then I actually moved to New York City and worked as a professional actor. And dancer for a couple of years. And it was one of those, you know, if you don't do it now when you're 21, when are you ever gonna do it? Right? So I took that risk for a little bit, went out on tour, came back again. I'm in the background of a movie, that kind of thing. But after a few years, I sort of wanted to get back into scholarly life and intellectual life. I missed Reading, I missed thinking, I missed that sort of scholarly approach to the world. So I applied to basically any place that would let me get a PhD where I could study creativity, imagination, or play from a psychological perspective. And I was lucky enough to end up with Ellen Winner at Boston College, who had been studying children's engagement in the visual arts and creativity and play for a really long time, for 25 years already. I was really surprised at the end of my first year of my PhD that nobody had ever really written about. acting and theater from a psychological perspective, using the methods of science, scientific inquiry, systematic analysis. And so that kind of started me on this research trajectory. And 20 years later I'm still here. speaker-0: For those of you who don't know Talia, she's written a book called Why Theater Education Matters. In that book, you do a really great job of encapsulating all the work that you've done and making a really solid case for why we need to have more theater in our lives, especially for kids and youth, but also for adults too. Absolutely. One of the things that you talk about that I found really interesting was what you call the acting habits of mind. Can you First start off by explaining what are the habits of mind? What does that mean? speaker-1: Of mind are a concept that comes from general education and curriculum studies. And it's been around for a while now, since the mid 90s. What we often talk about when we talk about psychological skills are these very narrow skills and abilities like empathy, which is the understanding and feeling of another person's emotions. Or we talk about something like emotion knowledge, which is just what do you understand about how emotions work and Causes and consequences. What a habit of mind is, is something slightly different than that, which is that it's a set of skills. I think of them as constellations of skills that can be used as a mindset or approach to solve a task. So thinking about something like you're being asked to solve a problem where you need to. In an acting class, portray an ice cream cone, right? To take a classic example from Chorus Line. You need to pretend to be an ice cream cone. Well, that is sort of a task or problem that's set before you. And you can't use a singular psychological skill to solve that problem. You can't just pretend because what is it that you're pretending? How are you thinking about the pretend? You can't just think about empathy, of course, because we're not really having empathy for the ice cream cone. So instead what a habit of mind does and allows you to do is to use for yourself a set of skills that you have that can be applied to this problem. So you can think about something like I'm going to approach this problem with my body using body awareness and control. And I'm gonna think about well, how would the physical shape of an ice cream cone take place? Or you could approach a problem like thinking you're an ice cream cone from a consider others' perspectives. What do other people think about when they think about ice cream cones? Okay, well, they think about coldness and they think about roundness, and so maybe I can think about coldness and roundness if I approach this problem. So It's a strategy or a mindset for creative problem solving. speaker-0: So habits of mind it's the toolkit that we use in our brains. ⁓ speaker-1: set of skills and strategies, or it's a set of abilities that you have that you can then apply flexibly to different problems. And everybody has their own set of habits of mind based on how they've learned and been taught over time, and then also the kinds of problems that they've had to solve. Like any tool, the more you use it, the better you get at using it. speaker-0: What would be another type of habits of mind that people might think, ⁓ I do that. speaker-1: So, a habit of mind that's often seen across science and math and actually the visual arts is persist. So, the goal, the way that you are going to approach this problem is if you just keep working at it from lots of different angles, then you will likely be able to solve it. So persist. Can be the approach that you take to any problem that's in front of you. Sometimes people approach problems with, okay, I'm just gonna solve it and get out of the way. And then other times people approach problems with, ⁓ this one's gonna take a while and I'm gonna persist because I know eventually I'll get there if I just keep trying lots of different possibilities for how to get through it. speaker-0: It is a mindset, a determination almost. I'm gonna persist through challenges. speaker-1: That's exactly right. And ironically, persist is not one of the ones that we find in acting because it's not required for many of the different tasks that are used in an acting classroom, but it is one that's found in the scientific habits of mind as well as the visual arts habits of mind. speaker-0: Thank you for explaining that. I've heard about the concept, but it's really great hearing it from an expert. So let's talk about the acting habits of mind and also how did you get there to find these? speaker-1: Over about the first 12 years of my research career, while I was a graduate student, a postdoc, and then in my first few years as a faculty member, I had been running studies where I had been testing the effects of theater on, and then an outcome. That was a standard outcome in psychology. So the effects of theater on empathy, the effects of theater on self-concept, the effects of theater on emotion regulation. We were getting some interesting findings and publishing papers, but I was sort of Dissatisfied because it often felt like I would find positive effects of theater in older kids but not younger kids, or in kids who had started with lower levels of the skill, but not those who were on a higher level of trajectory, or I would find it when we studied improvisational theater, but not when we studied scripted theater. And I was sort of getting dissatisfied with this idea that theater as a singular object of activity existed at all. And that it would cause a singular outcome in every group of people. And so the reason I thought that the Habits of Mind would be a good approach was because it would allow me to sort of go back to the foundation. And that's what I did to discover the acting habits of mind. I received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts to travel around the United States and go to five different school districts to study their acting classes. And what I did was really stand in the corner. with a video camera and a microphone and follow the teacher as the teacher taught their class. It was just what do you do in this classroom on this day no matter what? We worked with urban school districts, rural school districts and suburban. We worked with ⁓ high-income kids and low-income kids. We worked with schools that were majority white, we worked with schools that were majority kids of color, and then we also worked with schools that were conservatory, meaning that the kids had to audition to get into the school. And we worked with general education schools, where this may be the only acting class that these students ever take. We then took those films into the lab and looked at. What was it that the teachers were offering the students? What were they asking the students to learn? What kind of skills and abilities were they getting the students to practice, use, integrate, engage with as they went through the tasks of an acting class? And so I started to develop over time the eight acting habits of mind. And then once I developed that first list, I went to every acting teacher I knew. I went back to the teachers that I had worked with before. There were 14 different teachers that I had worked with over the course of these five school districts. And then I went to professional actors that I have become friends with over the years, acting teachers, professors of acting theory, professors of theater education. And I sort of went, is anything missing? Is there anything that you think I should combine? Is there anything that needs to be renamed? Does this make sense to you? And after about a year of that. I had my set of eight acting habits of mind. And I'm really pleased because even though the data I collected were with students between the ages of 14 and 18, so these were high schools where I did all of my data collection in the United States, basically everyone I've talked to who teaches all the way down to creative dramatics for three year olds and four year olds through professional training programs, Broadway level actors, and in many different countries around the world. Everybody sort of recognizes that, yeah, these eight acting habits of mind seem to be what theater education uses, what theater education teaches, what theater education requires of its students. And so that has been a sort of super gratifying thing. To me, the acting habits of mind are lovely because they are really based in the foundations of what an acting class is on the ground and are applicable across lots of different theatrical contexts. speaker-0: Talia, I am really interested in hearing about each of the acting habits of mind and kind of what's going on in a person's brain when they are using that specific acting habit of mind. speaker-1: Yeah, absolutely. So the first one is body awareness and control. So this is when students are asked to be aware of and acknowledge how their body is working in space and time. So how their physical sense is interacting with other people's bodies on stage and how they are controlling their bodies and how they can position their bodies to best be understood by an audience, depending on what it is that they need to portray. And you can think of this as engaging a variety of different psychological skills, including things like interoception, which is the ability to sense what is happening in your body, things like fullness cues, or when you feel a little sick or a little off, or when you haven't slept enough. Those are all interoceptive senses. And those are all related to also emotion regulation, which is a very embodied process. Because emotions are. Embodied actions, right? They are feelings of changes in the body. So body awareness and control, I think, is really related to these other psychological skills. The second ⁓ acting habit of mind is release inhibitions and be playful. So acting really asks students to do things that they would never do in the school cafeteria or during a math class, right? It's sort of A bunch of unusual behaviors or silly games. You have to release your sense of self, any kind of like fear you have of being judged, and really just let yourself go in that moment. And we know that that is also being playful and having fun and having a good time is really related to cognitive well-being and a sense of well-being, right? That things are going well in your life, as well as being really related to self-concept. If you try out things that you wouldn't have otherwise tried, but you say, ⁓ actually, I can come up with a lot of ideas really quickly, or it feels really good to let my body go and be silly with a bunch of friends, that's related, can be related, to a sense of self and a sense of identity development. Who am I? What do I like? What works for me? Another one of these habits of mind is be flexible. So students are constantly being asked to come up with lots of different responses to a prompt. This works both in improv games. So when you take an improv class or go to an improv performance, you have to come up with lots of ideas quickly. But also when you're reading a script and need to figure out how you're gonna act out a character, you have to think about lots of different ways that you could act out that character in order to figure out which one is gonna work best for you. And of course, flexibility and thinking flexibly is creative thought. It's the brainstorming part of creativity or the divergent thinking, as it's called in the psychological literature, divergent thinking part of the creative process. Creativity, of course, doesn't happen all at once, it's a process, right? You have to figure out what it is you're trying to do, and then you have to come up with lots of different ideas. And people who come up with lots of different ideas are more likely to have the best idea at the end of that creative process. Because of what comes next, which is commit to choices. So commit to choices is another acting habit of mine that we saw all the time. Our teachers were constantly asking students to make a brave choice, make a singular choice, portray that choice on stage. Even if it's wrong, I want you to take the risk and I want you to go for it. And then if it's right or if it's wrong, we move on to something else. But if you try to portray a character who's both scared and confused, if you're not a Talented actor, it can be really hard for the audience to read those things. Actors, while they're learning how to act, are really taught to make singular choices, singular objectives, and really go for them strongly. And cognitively, this requires the same kind of thing as decision-making, that you have to be able to make a decision, think about what it means, and go for it. And really commit fully to making that decision. Not hedge your bets, not try one thing, but you're not really sure about it. Making that decision, being able to come to a decision out of all of the different options you've come up with for yourself for divergent thinking is the next step in the creative process. The creative process requires lots of different options, and then you converge on one solution. And that's the be flexible habit of mind, commit to choices habit. speaker-0: You've gotta own it once you've made the decision. And that's true in so many things in life. speaker-1: It's true in so many things in life. And the next one, the next acting habit of mind is reflect and think metacognitively. And that's what happens after you commit to a choice. You have to think about did this work? Did it do what I wanted it to do? Did the audience understand what I was trying to do here? Did I get the laugh? Did I get the silence when everyone's really locked in and paying attention? And that sort of reflect and think metacognitively is key to all kinds of learning. Because if you can't reflect on your learning process, you don't know where to go next. You have to always, when you're learning something new, have a sense of: am I where I want to be? Have I sort of made the progress? Is this a normative backslide, or have I ended in the wrong direction? And being able to think metacognitively about your own learning process helps you transfer that learning process from The context that you're learning something in into outside contexts. And this is well known in the education field that giving students a sort of exit ticket or a metacognitive, what did I learn today and why can I apply it to my life makes them much more likely to then use those skills out of the classroom. speaker-0: Metacognition is thinking about thinking. Reflection, of course, is looking back on what you did and deciding if it worked. But metacognitively is how did I get there? speaker-1: Exactly. Exactly. That's exactly right. And so in an acting class, students are constantly being asked to learn how to critique each other and how to critique themselves. So they're being explicitly taught this skill of reflection and thinking metacognitively. speaker-0: that's great. And I feel that is something unique and it can be intimidating in the arts because you have to learn how to give and receive feedback on on what you're doing. And a lot of times artistic expression is very personal. So it's hard not to take it personally, but it's a skill to to give and receive. speaker-1: Absolutely. Absolutely. And this is actually one of the things where I was really lucky to work with some extraordinary acting teachers, but actually, I think that most acting teachers that are anywhere decent at their jobs know how to do this, which is they taught the students how to give and receive that feedback. I have data from the beginning of the school year and data from the end of the school year. And there is real progression and growth in the students' reflection and metacognitive feedback that they give and receive. Over the course of the year. At the beginning of the year, the teachers really set up the students to just give feedback on what they saw, not what they think about it, not what they think it means, but just what they saw. I saw that when you said that line, you were standing very far away from this person. And then I saw that you moved closer to them over the course of the scene. I saw that you were spending a lot of time looking at the ceiling while you were talking, and not a lot of time looking at your fellow actor. Now either of those things out of context could be good or could be bad, but all the teacher wanted them to do was name what they saw. And then as they got more and more feeling close to one another, which I'm gonna talk about in a minute, there's several acting habits of mind that bring ensembles together. ⁓ but as they felt more comfortable with one another and knowing that the critiques that they were giving was positive, right? It's always about improvement. It's never about tearing somebody down or making them feel bad. It's always about making a better performance, a better product, a better creative engagement with the material. Over the course of the year, then the critiques started to be starting with the observation and then moving into judgment. I saw that you started really far away from them and you moved closer and closer. That gave the scene a sense of dread that maybe you didn't want it to have. So maybe you should start closer and then you can go away and come back. But I would argue that you should probably start closer rather than farther away. Or I saw that you were looking at the ceiling while you were giving the monologue, which sometimes seemed like you were making it up. Which I really, really liked. But I do think you need to spend more time looking at your scene partner to make sure that the audience still knows that this conversation is happening between the two of you. Those more pointed critiques got more and more complex over the course of the year because the students got better at the skill of reflect and think metacognitively. So it is a teachable skill both to give and then also to receive. speaker-0: It is so applicable way beyond way beyond theater. I have been a manager and had to learn how to provide feedback. And people can be varying levels of sensitive towards that kind of feedback. And also, of course, if you've had any job or any situation where you work with someone who is in a position of power over you, you get to experience their approach to feedback. And it sounds like the way that the acting teachers are doing it is probably a way we should train more. Broadly this in this area. speaker-1: Really great because there's sort of two things happening in those acting classrooms simultaneously that they're being taught the cognitive skill of paying attention. And then they're also being taught to consider other people's mindsets and consider where they're coming from and the choices that they made and why, from a collaborative perspective. That we are all one team. We're not here to be better than or worse than. We are here to create a product together. And those are two other acting habits of mind. Mind, consider others and collaborate. So consider others when you ask most people about acting. Hey, if you could think of anything that acting trains people to do besides act, what is it? The number one answer, and I actually have published research on this, is empathy. People talk about empathy. They say, ⁓ it's empathy, it's empathy. That's what acting teaches. But it's actually more complex than that. What I found is that the teachers are not teaching the students. Empathy in that they're not teaching them to feel the feelings of their character or to feel sad or sorry or sympathy for others. Instead, they're asking their students to think about the whys behind the behaviors and the words. So why does she say this? Why is their relationship on the rocks? Why does he burst into song? What are the intentions, emotions? Feelings, behaviors, subtext behind what's being performed in the classroom. Why are they doing it? What is the mental state that the other person has that leads them to behave in this way? And the students are being asked to do that both for the other actors, but also for their characters and for the audience. What is the audience thinking in this moment if you behave this way? These types of ways of thinking are definitely the sort of cognitive underpinnings of something like Empathy, because you can't feel empathy for someone else if you don't know what they're feeling. But they're not asking the students to emotionally engage, which we know from professional actors can be kind of draining and not really something that you want to ask professional actors to do over and over again, right? If you are imagining your deceased mother on stage every night, eight nights a week, it is emotionally taxing and it's not sustainable. But instead, you figure out how to physicalize what you know about what the character is experiencing in that moment. And so that's that consider others, then tied up with some body awareness and control. speaker-0: It also sounds like theory of mind. Right. Which it's in the group with empathy, but it's different. It's almost it's perspective taking but it's getting into someone's thinking. Right. Why why are they responding in that way? speaker-1: Exactly right. Exactly. And that's why I didn't call it just theory of mind or just perspective taping or just empathy or just mentalizing, right? All of these are different terms that psychological scientists use to describe this interpersonal interaction that happens when I'm paying attention to you and you're paying attention to me, and we are able to have a conversation because we understand what's going on with the other person. And so that requires you to think about other people, right? And to think about their mental and emotional and knowledge states. That's why I chose consider others as the label for that habit of mind, because it is considering others' perspectives, beliefs, desires, intentions, emotions, personality, all of the different pieces. Not just theory of mind is very much a cognitive understanding of knowledge, belief, desire, and intention. Cognitive empathy is this understanding of someone else's emotions. Emotional empathy is this feeling of someone else's emotions. And so each of them tend to occupy a sort of different niche within psychology. And there's lots of arguments in the psychological science literature about how overlapping neurologically versus separable neurologically all of these things are. The jury's still out, actually. There's We have the default social network ⁓ in the brain, which is just anytime you're thinking about other people, it's active. But then we also have singular substrates like the right temporal parietal junction that seems to be implicated in just theory of mind, but not in these other skills. So for the purposes of acting, I like to think of it a little more broadly, which is just considerable. Other people. What are they thinking, feeling, needing? What perspectives are they taking? What are their personalities? Is that guy just been beat up? And so he's also in pain, in addition to having all this other stuff going on, right? All of those. And then in partnership with that is the acting habits of mind of collaborate. Theater is a collaborative act, and creating theater is a collaborative act. Even if you're giving a monologue, your monologue is backed by a playwright or a director or a lighting designer or a prop designer or a stage hand. Very, very, very rarely is it a single person without anybody else involved. And at the very least, you need an audience, right? You are collaborating with the audience to create whatever it is you're creating in the world of the theater. And so students were asked a lot. To communicate with each other, to wait and let other people take their turns, to figure out whether something was working for everybody in the group, and to create an ensemble where everybody's voice mattered. And this Collaboration obviously is a key 21st century skill for all of us to be able to create a better world for each other, as well as to be able to make things that are bigger than ourselves and live in community. And so that really was interesting. Again, something that the teachers scaffolded, something that the teachers started collaboration in a very simple way at the beginning of the year. Simple games like keeping a balloon in the air for a hundred tosses without ever moving your feet. That builds a sense of collaboration. All the way to really complex works of art that required serious conversations about societal issues like racial profiling by police. And if you don't have a sense of we are all in this together on the same team collaborating, it's really hard to have an honest conversation about the students in that room who have been racially profiled by the police versus the students in that room who didn't even know that such a thing existed because no one in their family has ever experienced it. You don't get to that place where you're having those really hard conversations with a high sense of trust if you don't start with tossing a balloon in the air a hundred times. Exactly. And that's the genius of an acting class, right? The genius of an acting class is you're doing these things that feel like silly games. Like, why are we all doing a hundred jumping jabs? Why are we shaking our tongues out for five minutes? It's so that when you get to the difficult work of an improv scene that requires speaker-0: You gotta work your way. speaker-1: intimacy or you get to the difficult work of a play that talks about societal issues that we don't really talk about often, you have that sense of trust and collaboration and understanding of others so that you can engage with the people who are around you. speaker-0: That is so interesting. Thank you. The one thing that makes me a little worried in some ways is that it is become more and more common that things are done virtually. Yeah. And while you can definitely collaborate virtually, we're doing it right now. Mm-hmm. You you can do it. There are certain aspects of collaboration that get lost in a more strictly digital world. There are wonderful people talking on social media and talking about great stuff. Their collaboration tends to happen after. speaker-1: Asynchronously. speaker-0: Yeah, it's async. And so of course that gives you time to think and reflect, but there is a skill there in collaborating in real time. speaker-1: Right. And some of that skill is self-regulation. When you have time to sit and reflect, you have time to work through your own regulatory processes. If you are emotionally activated or you're hungry or you're tired or something has made you think about, ⁓ that time that made me really angry, and now you need to process that before you can do the work. All of that is perfectly valid and an advantage to having that kind of asynchronous back and forth. But when you're in the moment, you have to learn how to regulate. And work with the responses that come up, the sort of pre-potent responses that come up for you when you're interacting with somebody else. And particularly because theater deals with emotions and because theater deals with heightened situations, students are learning where themselves and their own inhibitory processes have to be, and then also how to portray what a character is going through in that moment. And my response to a lot of the digital stuff is that from an evolutionary sense, Our brains have not evolved as fast as our technology has. I mean, technology is different now than when I was a child. This idea of a synchronous virtual conversation was not even thought of until about 10 years ago, 15 years ago. And so I think about the differences between my son, who has grown up with video conferencing. He would Skype and FaceTime and all the other video conferences with grandma and grandpa when he was a little kid. But Evolutionarily, we have not evolved yet to be able to mediate things through screens. There are different kinds of interactions that happen virtually, right? There's synchronous ones and asynchronous ones, there are pre-recorded ones, and then there are only text-based ones. And I think what we lose out on when we try to collaborate only online is we miss out on. Sort of casual side conversations that happen between people in a larger room before or after the activities of the day have begun. And then we also have lost out on that body-to-body interaction. We are meant to be embodied physically with other people, embodied physically. We we have not evolved past needing a body and needing bodies to interact with one another. One of the things that theater is is this metacognition and reflection on bodies. speaker-0: God. Right? speaker-1: A body telling a story on a stage, and how do I physically respond to you as an audience member? And how do you physically respond to me as a performer? We have all these psychological findings on things like automatic emotional responses to others, where you pick up on other people's emotional responses before you get in there. It's called emotion contagion. So if you've ever walked into a room and you're like, what's going on in here? Something bad just happened. That is an embodied awareness. of the emotional state of the room before anybody has told you anything. My favorite thing to do actually is when I'm in a city that I've never been to before and I'm just trying to find a place to go to dinner, I will walk into a restaurant and I will just stand and close my eyes for a second. And if I get a feeling, a sense that people in the restaurant are happy, there's happy plates clinking and people are laughing, I'm like, okay, or my guess is the food is pretty good and it's not taking too long to come out of the kitchen. But if you walk into a restaurant and it's a full restaurant and you don't hear that laughter, or there's not lots of plates clinking or something, you're like, ⁓ I don't know if this is the the vibe that I'm going for right now. That is that embodied knowledge that we have evolved to have that you can pick up on whether a situation is dangerous or safe, happy or unhappy, and theater plays with it because it puts bodies into those positions in a scripted way in the liminal space of the proscenium arch for you to watch. That's a sort of a a side topic. Let me see if I've gotten through all of my all of my acting habits of mind yet. That one you haven't done yet. speaker-0: Imagine and envision speaker-1: It's so funny because if I'm going to forget one, somehow it's always Imagine Envision, which makes no sense at all that that would be the one I forget, but okay. Even hyper-realistic film still involves a camera in your face and sound equipment and something else to record it. So Imagine and Envision is this way in which acting teachers ask students to think beyond their perceptual reality. And to think beyond what they can see in the moment. Now, when you're on a regular stage, obviously the audience is standing there, there's no fourth wall. So you have to at the very least imagine and envision that. But you also have to imagine and envision it's raining or it's cold. You have to imagine if you have a limp or envision what it would feel like if this person you hadn't seen in six months was the person that you loved more than anybody else in the world. So all of that requires imagine and envision. And of course, We use imagination and envision in all sorts of ways in our daily lives. So we use a lot of what's called pragmatic imagination in our daily lives. Things like counterfactual thinking. Okay, if I go to the grocery store now, I can probably get enough ingredients that I can make dinner tonight. But if I don't go to the grocery store in the next two hours, I'm just not gonna have time and we're gonna have to order takeout. So imagine and envision is the way in which we co-create a future, and that skill. Of learning how to imagine what's not directly in front of you and think through all of the steps of where that would lead you, I think that is what's trained in an acting class as well. speaker-0: It's such a fundamental skill. I've read studies about mice imagining different paths through the maze. Absolutely. And and they can actually see the brain activity. Yeah. Tracking. Planning is a form of imagination in a lot. speaker-1: Absolutely. Basically, anything that's not current mindfulness is imagination. Thinking about the past, remembering is an imagination. Thinking about how you got to where you are, right? Cause and effect, that is an imagination process. And then thinking about literally anything that's not taking place in this current moment is an imagination. Kids have this naturally. All sorts of kids across all sorts of neurotypes have this ability to engage imaginatively. And the question of how fantastical versus how realistic it is is where we see differences by culture and by child. But all children engage in pretend play, that is, and not the active perception of the moment. But if you grow up in a spearfishing culture, you're going to pretend play spearfishing. And if you grow up in a go to the dentist culture, you practice and pretend play go to the dentist. And it's a way to learn your culture and learn about the normalcy of different kinds of activities and It's linked to inhibitory control and negotiation and emotion regulation, which we've also found some of that for acting classes. speaker-0: Everything you're describing, it's so easy to see how it applies. Absolutely to all of us in our in our daily lives. Obviously, with children, acting is such a great way to work on your social skills and even on your creativity and imagination skills in a an embodied way, which is part of what makes it so special. What about us adults? I grew up doing theater as a kid. I loved it. I even spent a short stint at theater school, but then booked it for other adventures. How could the rest of us use something like the acting habits of mind to kind of develop our own creative and thinking skills? speaker-1: Yeah, I mean it's such a great question and one that I have maybe more hypotheses about than necessarily firm research data behind. But I think there's two ways to think about it. The first is to just realize that when you have any activity in your life or any problem that you're trying to solve, you can always use different habits of mind to try and solve it. You can explicitly say to yourself, I'm going to approach this problem from a flexible perspective. And I'm gonna just try and list out all of the different ways that I could think about. This problem. Or I'm going to approach this problem from a commit to choices perspective. And I'm just gonna make a choice, reflect and think metacognitively about that choice and go all the way out to the end of what that might look like. Or I'm gonna think collaboratively about this problem. What would my sister do in this case? Or how might my friend down the street solve this problem, or an engineer solve this problem, versus a super creative visual artist and play in your own roles and in your own sense of self. That can be sort of a theatrical way of approaching everyday life. The other thing, though, that I'm really interested in are everyday possibilities and everyday contexts where adults get to do this kind of theatrical play or theatrical acting. So there's lots of different activities that actually ask adults to pretend play. Things like going to renaissance fairs or cosplay conventions, things like taking an improv class or participating in a religious pageant. All of those that ask you to maybe put on a costume and then engage in another role or another way of approaching the world. We have things like escape rooms where you can take on a role in order to engage in that escape room. Mock trials, mock UN, mock patients, all of those ask you and sometimes even pay you to take on a role so that doctors can practice on somebody who's not actually sick, but is just pretending to be sick and has all of those classifications of someone with an illness. So, all of these are ways that you can do sort of grown up pretend play or everyday acting. And we know from other fields like everyday visual arts making, crafting, everyday music making, like playing your violin at home just for yourself, is really associated with a sense of well being and thriving. Human flourishing really comes from that everyday creative practice. And so if you have a creative practice that involves Playing lots of roles or trying on new personas in that sort of fun, cordoned off way, then you can think about this as trying out all these different acting habits of mind, seeing which ones work for you, and then also that sort of everyday sense of well being and creativity. ⁓ speaker-0: Love all these ideas. One thing that can be very difficult for adults is releasing inhibitions and being playful. So when you think release your inhibition, we think of like some crazy party where people are consuming chemicals of some kind or foods or whatever. But in the day-to-day life, someone who maybe is sort of interested in well, how could I bring theater into my life to think, but I'll look so dumb, I'll seem so silly. How can an adult get past that? speaker-1: response is is really sign up in your local improv studio. speaker-0: Okay. speaker-1: Of different sort of improv classes available all over the place, actually. I think you'd be surprised at how often there's an improv group in in big towns and small towns where you can take improv classes. And improv classes in particular force you to be silly, but also have it be a safe space where it doesn't really matter whether you mess up. There is no good and bad. There's only trying. And so if someone is really inhibited, I often recommend get a professional to guide you. Try that in a classroom. If it's been a long time since you've gone to the theater regularly, go check out your local community theater. Go check out your local high school productions. Most communities have high school productions that are very affordable, and those students are working their lives up there on stage. And once you go see a lot of theater, it starts to demystify it for you. You start to go, this is just people trying things. And that can be a fun way to think about it. And 1.5 million people do community In the United States every year. And they can be wonderful opportunities to just try something new and let go. The other thing that I think is really interesting is how much people use social media to make little skits. There's a lot of social media that's people acting out different roles in very goofy ways. And so looking at some of that kind of lower the bar. You know, it may seem silly when I do it, but if you actually look at how many people are out there doing this kind of thing, it feels very normal. speaker-0: The amount of social media skits where someone's pretending to be their mother. Yes. For example, that is a great way to introduce yourself to just releasing your inhibitions and just playing around with other personas. Because in in that exploration, in being willing to step outside of ourselves and be some someone who we're not is often a way to find ourselves. Absolutely. This has been so, so fun. One thing that I think is important and it it's so true in acting as it is true in life, is that to imagine requires memory and requires experience to build from. So this is just me making a plug for getting out there and learning and living and experiencing things. You could think about a coconut tree, maybe you've seen a picture of it, but if you're lucky enough if you're from a cold place like I was growing up. To get to see a coconut tree in person, that physical experience and sensory experience of being there is something then imprinted in your mind that you can come back to and access. speaker-1: Yeah, and I think this is one of the really interesting things about theater experiences as well that we don't have good evidence for yet. And I'm really interested to find out, which is when you are learning how to act, you get a chance to play a wide range of characters that come from a wide range of backgrounds, have a wide range of experiences, right? Every time you do a scene study of a different scene from a different play, you learn a little bit about that time period, about the people that lived there, about their backgrounds, and that gives you ⁓ physical. Physicalized memory that you wouldn't otherwise get to have of speaking a word from the perspective of a person who is unlike you. And I think that is some of the mechanism for how we see changes as a result of acting. speaker-0: And and you can tr time travel. Eat too. There's so you're right. You're right. So all right, people, get out there and start acting. speaker-1: Exactly. I'm all for it. speaker-0: ⁓ thank you so much, Talia. This was great. Yeah. This episode is dedicated to my friend Michelle Vishnevsky, who's taught theater and tech in the San Antonio school system for the last nineteen years. Talya's insights show the value of your work. Incredible Mind Podcast is written, produced and edited by me, Michelle Cross Smith. Peter Aronson is consulting producer. Angela Ferrero designed the cover art and the music was created by Alex Grohl. If you're enjoying this content, please Please like and subscribe to Incredible Mind Podcast wherever you're listening. Extra credit if you submit a review. For more information, including a look at our course, your electric brain, visit incredible dash mind dot org.