Latest / Incredible Mind / Experiencing Art: Katherine Cotter
Transcript
- Michelle Cross Smith: Boom boom. 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. We're continuing our series of conversations about creativity and the mind. In this episode, Experiencing Art, my guest Katherine Cotter, explains positive psychology, what happens in our brains when we look at art, and how experiencing art can contribute to our sense of well-being. Let's get started. Hello and welcome back to Incredible Mind. I'm your host, Michelle Cross-Smith. Our topic today is your brain and art. We're speaking with Dr. Catherine Cotter, Director of Research with the Humanities and Human Flourishing Project Team in the Positive Psychology Center at University of Pennsylvania. Welcome, Catherine. Thank you so much for having me, Michelle. So, first off, this concept of a positive psychology center is a little new to me. So can you give us a little high-level overview of what's being done? Here and in your humanities and human flourishing team. Sure. Yeah. So positive psychology was introduced about 25 years ago by Martin Seligman, who's actually still in the psychology department and is the director of the Positive Psychology Center at Penn. So still still around, still doing the work. Kind of as a response to trying to expand the notion of how we think about health and well being within psychology, which has historically really focused. on psychiatric disorders and how can we diagnose and treat people. But without a full recognition of that's not all there is to life, it's just not being mentally ill or not having a condition. But to truly flourish and thrive, we also have to think about what fills out our lives, what gives it meaning. How do we truly thrive, not just not be negative. And so hence positive psychology. So focusing on what goes right in people's lives and what supports flourishing. And so within the center, there's a number of research teams, a number of educational programs at a bachelor's and master's level focused on the topic of positive psychology, as well as teams doing applied work, such as doing resilience trainings and things along those lines. And so our work situated in the positive psychology center focuses particularly on the arts, humanities, and cultural institutions and how they support. Are broader flourishing. What what got you interested in this field? Are you an artist yourself? How did this all come together? So I kind of grew up going to all the arts things. My mom was a hobbyist painter. Growing up, we had replicas of Van Gogh's and everything that she painted in the house. She actually made me a starry night for my house as a gift a few years ago, which is really lovely. So I grew up going to art museums, going to concerts, going to the theater. And so the arts were always just there. And for me in particular, I started doing band, choir, theater, not so much visual art, actually, funnily enough, through school, and actually started as a music therapy major in college, recognizing the therapeutic and flourishing potential of the arts, but then learned as an undergrad that there was this whole thing called research where you can ask questions and find answers. And that was a little bit more appealing to me than actually doing the clinical work itself. And so I pivoted toward wanting to understand how people engage with the arts, with their creative processes, and how it impacts us. Then continued into graduate school to study these topics further. So cool. And what were some of the things that surprised you in the research? Maybe something that disrupted a preconceived notion that you might have had going into it? it was actually around The different ways that we conceptualize and think about creativity. Because going into it, and a lot of people have this same kind of notion of when they think about creativity, it means you have to be an artist and you have to be good at art, whether that's visual art, music, theater, something, or maybe you're an inventor or something along those lines and an innovator. and you have to be good and you have to be doing this at a high level to claim that you are creative. But I think it was in a Senior level seminar I had in my undergraduate education taught by Jean Pratt dealing with creativity and intelligence. We read a paper outlining that creativity is on a spectrum. It's not in specific fields like the arts or innovation. It's sprinkled through our day-to-day lives. When you're learning something for the first time and you are not good at it, you're still being creative because creativity at its core is just something. novel, something new that's happening, and makes sense for that context or is appropriate or useful in some particular type of way. So when you're like learning something new and you're playing around with ideas and something clicks, that's a creative moment. When you have a small child relative telling you a knock knock joke you've heard a million times, but they came up with their own little twist on it, that also counts as creativity. So it's not just these high professional levels that's really sprinkled into the everyday really nice way of reframing how people can engage, how people can recognize that in themselves. And so I've done some work on everyday creativity in addition to the arts topics, but I think that was probably the moment where it clicked a little bit more for me that these are things for everybody and not just if you're inclined towards those topics in a particular way. I like that. It's the democratization. Yes, exactly. Creativity. It's not just for The chosen few who are exhibiting at an art gallery or on Broadway. It's just for everyday people. You can exhibit on your fridge. Yes, exhibit on my fridge. Dance, dance in the room when no one's watching or when they are watching. Singing in the shower. All of it. Okay. This is great. When I looked at your research, it was quite multifaceted, but I did see more recently this real focus on. The experience of art, specifically visual art, whether it's in an art museum or out in public. So my first question is about our brain and art. What is going on in our brain when we not necessarily make art, but experience visual art? So there's a lot of things that are happening. Some of it is just Good old vision. When you're looking at anything, whether it's art, whether it's me looking at the screen and you, we have our visual cortex engage, our visual processes and those neural systems that are just telling us we're looking at something. But then as we continue to engage, we start breeding more into it. We start recognizing what it is that we're seeing, we start inferring meaning, or start trying to interpret and understand. When we think about art versus when we're just looking at things in our everyday lives, when we're walking around, we're like, that's a car, it's driving, I should not cross the street right now. So it's it's pretty straightforward, oftentimes, or pretty linear, going from visual stimulus to some sort of meaning or interpretation. Art often has a lot more ambiguity or hidden meaning or symbolism into it, which opens up a lot more opportunity for that idiosyncratic interpretation. Bringing yourself to the process and your own personality, your background, your life experiences, because what art draws you in might be different from what art draws me in. Or if we both like the same painting, it might be for totally different reasons. Because maybe it's a picture of a family with a cat and I have two cats, and so I'm really into the cat. And maybe you're thinking more about the family part. But we both really love it. So we start recognizing what's the story happening and we start Inferring things. And that's influenced by what we're bringing to the table, maybe what knowledge we have about the painter, about the style, about the period. But you don't need that knowledge to do that. Anybody can walk up to a painting and start interpreting and trying to understand a little bit more. And then it starts also impacting us through this process. So our emotions will become engaged and we'll start making appraisals of the art, whether we like it or find it beautiful or interesting. And so we start engaging emotionally and cognitively a bit more. And sometimes it's really brief and we move on. And other times we might sit with it a little bit longer and go a little more deep into those processes. Now we both live in the Philadelphia area. Lucky us, because we have lots of art museums here, but not everyone goes to them. Right. So how are most people experiencing art today? A lot of people on social media are experiencing art. A number of years ago, I conducted a project with some colleagues from the University of Vienna where we asked people to describe the most impactful art experience they've had, not just visual art, but art in general. And the number of people that said I was scrolling through Instagram and I saw this photo or I was on Facebook or A lot more of these sometimes called everyday aesthetic experiences where we happen upon something like a mural because there's a bajillion and a half murals in Philly. Maybe you're not planning to engage with art, but you happen upon something. But also maybe being struck by a doodle that somebody did on the corner of their homework or something along those lines. So a lot of people are engaging in those ways, but there's also so much digital art now. Particularly during the COVID pandemic, a lot of museums pivoted and put a lot more offerings online, virtual gallery tours or more images of their collection and things along those lines. So the digital realm has also been a way for people to engage with arts institutions to appreciate the art that maybe they are not geographically able to access or for other reasons not able to access. But a lot of it's happening digitally for sure. That makes so much sense. It really does. And I have definitely seen and been introduced to artists on social media that I loved and I would not have known of otherwise. So there's definitely something there. And you don't have to leave your house. So if you're not able to, that's fantastic. What would make the experience different by being in a museum? Could you make a case for people to start going to museums like Philadelphia Museum of Art is free on the first Sundays of the? Month or pay what you wish. So there is an attempt to make our art institutions more accessible. Yeah. So there's this thing called the museum effect. There's a whole book called This, if folks are interested in learning more by a great scholar, Jeff Smith, about the roles that museums, but also other cultural institutions, play in giving us opportunity to step away from the everyday a little bit when we go into the museum. Obviously, architecturally, they're often designed with these large ceilings and beautiful open spaces and really invitational and in the architectural way. But also when we go into the museum, we're going there with an intention. We're going there to look at art, whether we happen to be just walking by the museum and make a sudden decision to go versus planning for weeks and weeks. There's an intention, and that intention starts taking us out of our everyday thinking processes and helps us think more expansively, think more socially oriented. And some of the research looking at the museum effect, they stopped people at the Met in New York at the beginning of the visit, where they're just walking in in the middle of a visit, where they're still planning to explore and when they were leaving. And what they saw is when people were in the middle of the visit, they were more heightened in thinking societally Oriented ways, more expansively thinking, versus at the beginning or end, people are back in the everyday a little bit. So when you're walking into the museum, you're starting to disengage from the I'm stressed, I'm in a rush, or what have you. You're able to get more expansive. And then as you're getting ready to leave, you're preparing yourself for re-entry into the real world and thinking, okay, what do I have to do after this? What are the chores or what are the errands I need to run? Obviously looking at art in whatever way you can is important, but there's also something different about going into institutions that are designed and cultivated for these experiences. There's also great docents and educators in those spaces that can really enhance your experience to maybe give you new insights or hidden secrets about the art. You wouldn't be able to get in digital forums. So there's a there's a different social and communal aspect to being in the institution as well, I think. The way that you're describing it makes me think of when you enter a a religious building, like a church or a mosque. And museums do this too. They create this sense of awe about this big, beautiful space that does change your frame of mind. So maybe art museums are churches of art where we go to celebrate creativity and also I think making visual art is so important. And a wonderful activity, but also experiencing other people's art, it's like reading a book. You get this opportunity to see the world through someone else's eyes. Maybe that's part of where the social aspect comes from, or maybe that you're standing with a bunch of other people staring at the painting or the sculpture. Yeah. When you're going to the museum, you're with people who came there for the same or similar reason. So it gives you this. not concrete form of community. So you don't know necessarily all of the other people, but you're all there to see art, maybe depending on the museum for a special exhibit. And so then it's like, we're there for an even more specific thing. And so we're more alike in those sorts of ways. There's that. But people are always curious about the artists and what were they thinking? And what are they trying to tell me? And all of this. So it even if you're the only person in the museum walking around completely by yourself. You're still there with the artist, even if they're dead, even if they're unknown, they're still a human on the other end of that artwork. And that also exists as a social element. It's just the relationship between the viewer and the artist, even if it's mediated through a painting or sculpture or other type of artifact. Wow. So that's really interesting. It's the artist form of communication, but we are also part of that communication. when we view this person's art. So Catherine, the the other piece of your research that is new to me, I know the the word, but I don't really understand how it plays in to to this whole project that you're working on is the idea of flourishing. Can you explain from your team's perspective what is flourishing? Yes. So flourishing is a more all encompassing approach to understanding wellness or Benefits of engaging with anything. Flourishing isn't art specific, but just as we kind of navigate our day-to-day lives, we think of flourishing as having two components: well-being and ill-being. So ill-being is what psychology has historically focused on, those negative states, traits, conditions that we're not really desiring to experience. When we want to address ill-being, we're trying to prevent this. So doing preventative health care, anything along those lines. Or if we are experiencing some form of ill-being, We're trying to mitigate or reduce it to the extent possible. Whereas well-being are those positive states, traits, conditions that we actively are seeking out or are hoping to experience. Positive emotions, meaning in life, fulfilling relationships, feeling a sense of accomplishment and competence for well-being. These are the things that we're trying to promote if we're maybe not where we wanna be or we want more of something. Or to maintain it if we feel that we're at a high level. So when we say we're flourishing, it's when we're having relatively high levels of well-being and relatively low levels of ill-being. We can also think about it across dimensions because it's very possible that in your personal life you're flourishing, but in your work life you're languishing or the reverse. So it's not a all-or-nothing type of type of ordeal. We can also think about flourishing within particular life domains or situations and Get a little bit nuanced, but the notion of flourishing is an overarching umbrella way of thinking about how to live our best lives. Thank you. Thank you. Because when I hear the word flourishing, I think of a bushy plant with lots of flowers. And that's where the term comes from and was born from was from agricultural roots. So it's the absence of ill being and the increase of well being. Maybe not absence, but reduction in ill being because no one's life is perfect. Right. All right. Now, when I got to hear you speak about a month ago, you were talking about the impact of public art on people's flourishing. So we've been talking about museums where you have to really plan and go, but what about public art in spaces where you might not be expecting art and it you turn a corner and and there it is. Yeah, it's just a fun little surprise, a nice flourishing dose as you go about your day-to-day. And my interest on this topic really stemmed from that earlier project I did where we just asked people what is the most impactful arts experience you've ever had. We're expecting I got to go see this masterpiece painting or I got to go see this amazing singer. We expected these high fluent type of things. And then so much of it was this. day-to-day things that are easy for people to engage in and didn't necessarily have that same kind of high art piece to it. And living in Philly where you can't walk two blocks without hitting some sort of public art that's just fabulous, it became a natural question. We've been asking a lot about how does art impact us and not necessarily even thinking about what's in an art museum of sculptures and other artifacts, but really paintings has been what's driven a lot of the research. But then thinking of Well, what's the same when we think about public art? Because it's is still an art form, but what's different about public art and what might that shape and change how we think about the flourishing impacts of that engagement? Because public art is in a place. It's not a thing that you can move and shuffle around across walls or loan out to another museum so that other people can see it or you curatorily redesign. It's there. in a very specific place, often in a particular community. So it's not just in the shopping districts or the center city type locations, though there's public art in those as well. So thinking about how does that interact with where it is and who is existing in those spaces. How was it designed and conceptualized for that space? Who's actually engaging with it on a regular basis and who's just happening upon it? Some of them are deeply embedded in a community that doesn't have a lot of non-community traffic. So how do you think about that versus one that's near a museum where there is a lot of traffic from a lot of different people coming through? And so really starting to dig into what are the things that make public art unique? And how does that square with what we know about art museums and those kind of institutions of art engagement? One thing that stood out to me was the idea of art in communities where not a lot of other people who aren't from that community are going to see it. we have a huge amount of beautiful murals in Philadelphia. We have the mural arts project, and you will turn a corner in any part of the city, whether it seems like it's million-dollar homes or thirty thousand dollar homes, you're gonna find a mural. But what goes into deciding what art is there, how it's going to speaks specifically to the people most likely to see it. So I've collaborated a little bit with the mural arts program in Philly. I learned a little bit more about their process. And they are very community first in their approach, speaking really just to the program I'm familiar with. And they will consult with the local community to understand what's important to that community and where they're interested in having a piece to make sure it's resonant. For the people who are living and existing and navigating those spaces in some of the areas where it's more businessy, it's a approached a little bit differently, but particularly for the more community-focused ones, they'll engage that way. Oftentimes the people installing the mural will include community members, will assist the artist and the mural artist who is designing and conceptualizing the piece, who also has engaged with the community in that design process, they'll Help actually do it. I mean, one of their really, really cool projects is in Kensington in Philadelphia, which is kind of the epicenter of a lot of the opioid epidemic concerns. And they'll do day work pay for local unhoused populations to paint part of a mural project and assist with installing it. To represent their experiences and to also engage them in a positive process. So I know for Philadelphia mural arts specifically in the city, it's it's a huge focus of how they approach approach the work, which is really how it it should be. It should be. It's that's important. Again, it's that democratization of not just the art experience, but the making of it as well. Yeah. Catherine, I read in some of your research that Flourishing in the context of viewing art is something that can really be enhanced for older folks, even people with dementia. Can you tell me a little bit more about that? Yeah, so this has been a really common theme and a lot, in particular, led by art museums and the programs that they're developing and delivering and have been delivering for a very long time. In some spaces, there's this notion of social prescribing or thinking about some of the ill-being experiences people are having that don't have a neat pill that you can take to alleviate it. So feeling isolated or loneliness tend to be often focal points. And in particular older adults are at heightened risk because maybe they're out of the workforce or there's mobility limitations that don't let them socialize to the degree that they would like to or is healthy. So social prescribing programs kind of connect people into community resources to help address that particular concern. And a lot of the ways people are provided social prescriptions is through the arts. A lot of times there's programs by art museums to bring in older adults, their caregivers, individuals with dementia or Alzheimer's, and letting them engage part of it is just they're doing something for their flourishing that isn't in a healthcare space. yeah. Is a big part that we've seen in other research where they say it's it was really nice to feel good and it not be a healthcare space because the only places they go is to the doctor or hospital or something along those lines. So having that is an enjoyable experience. just having some joy is is important, but it's also a space where people can be cognitively engaged where maybe they don't have that in as strongly in their day-to-day. They're socially engaged with other people through these group programs and tours. There's been a lot of quality of life improvements. Feeling less lonely, less isolated, forming new relationships that are more accessible for non-art-related socializing. So there's definitely been a lot of benefits, particularly through these more organized, targeted type of offerings. So you're saying people actually get prescribed to go see art. Yeah. So the UK is miles, miles ahead of a rest of folks doing this. But if you go to your primary physician, they may notice that you're Articulating that you're feeling particularly lonely or disconnected. Maybe you're new to the area and don't really know anybody. And they would connect you with someone like a link worker. This is someone that has expertise in what are the community resources and what is available. And so the link worker would learn more about you and find something that is a good fit, both for you personally, your interests, your disposition, because some people Don't want to join a choir but are happy to go on an art museum tour. There's also book clubs, gardening is a common one. Exercise classes also might might route through these. It's really just trying to make available some of these non-pharmaceutical, non-medicalized interventions or activities that can have real benefits for people's flourishing and also to mitigate against more serious problems that could develop if these are not addressed earlier. I want a prescription for art. I know. It sounds great too, right? It does. and there are trials and things like that happening in the US. The Center for Arts and Medicine at the University of Florida is doing a lot of really great work on this topic. Tasha Golden and Jill Sankey are some of the kind of leading researchers doing doing a lot of that work. Catherine, so we've talked a lot about art and visual art and statues, public art, murals. What about flourishing or even just well-being when we see something that isn't meant to be art, but we find it really beautiful, like a beautiful bridge or even a product, really well-made product. Where does that fall into all of this? Yeah, so it's the complement to that way creativity is sprinkled in our everyday lives. And so we often term that everyday creativity. We also can have everyday aesthetics or everyday aesthetic experiences. And really an aesthetic experience is Just one and when you're evaluating the perceptual qualities of something. So you can find bird song, beautiful. Is it designed to be a music composition that we listen to? No. No. It has a utilitarian function for the birds. They're chirping away for some particular reason, but we may still say that was really beautiful. Or if you hear a really complex bird song, we're like, that's really interesting. I'm gonna listen to that. Like, I'm gonna keep listening to it. So we can have a lot of different reactions. But it's really common to have those things where maybe you stop and pause in nature and think, nature's really beautiful. There's a whole psychology digging into the kind of aesthetics of architecture because some buildings are just beautifully constructed, both modern and more historically designed. Architects are artists in the work they do. They're immensely creative in their processes and and in the kind of products that they they output. And so again, just like the creativity is kind of sprinkled throughout the everyday things that we do, aesthetic experiences are also sprinkled through. Now whether we acknowledge them, recognize them, consciously approach it from that angle is a whole other thing. But we are having those experiences very regularly. Absolutely. I Have worked in the tech industry and I've known product designers and UX designers who have made an interface that was beautiful. yeah. I do programming for my statistical analyses. I'll be like, that's some beautiful code. Will other people ever care or think that? Absolutely not. But I'm just like, that is a nice looking piece of code, or I just wrote a great function. And for me, that was like a nice little aesthetic experience. This is this is a great teaser because in an up Coming episode, maybe the next one after this one, I'm going to be interviewing some postdoc researchers from the neuroaesthetics lab at UPenn. So this is a this is a good teaser for what's coming next. Catherine, this has been so great. Is there anything else you would like to say or bring up that we haven't talked about yet? I think something that when I speak on this topic or on creativity, the arts, that I think is really important for folks to take away, especially when I teach on this topic and all of that, is these are things that anybody can do and engage in. You don't need to have any particular skill to be creative. You don't need to have taken art history classes to enjoy a museum or public art. really, it's about opening yourself up to those experiences and being willing to invest the time and effort to engage. And that's where we see those flourishing benefits really come through is when people put in that investment to meaningfully engage with the arts, creativity, what have you. And so it's really just about being willing to get over that hump if you're not sure, if that's not something you normally do. Bring someone with you, make it a fun little friend outing, a date night, something like that. It can really help loosen it up. But these are spaces for everybody, even if it maybe hasn't been your inclination before. How would you advise someone with, say, kids who think museums are very boring? I know you're not in child psychology or but what would you you recommend this is my case? That a lot of times my kids are not interested in art museums and I take them and they're they're bored out of their minds. What am I something that I've heard people do is gamify a little bit. So I know one family will what the discussion will be after the visit is if we could steal one of these pieces and take it home, which one would you take? that's good. Make it a little scavenger hunt. Or if it's a museum maybe you're familiar with or you want to do a little work ahead of time, you can make it a little bit of a scavenger hunt, depending on the age of the kids and whether they can free roam or not. Play a nice spy game with the art if they're really little. Something like that to get them looking and get them engaged, and they might stick with it after you stop gamifying it. So that's that's the one that I've seen folks use successfully. But the other thing is also ask the museum educators, because some of them have resources for kids. I've seen some museums that have little passport programs where you like the kids get a stamp in the different galleries or there's an activity happening that maybe you didn't know about before you come to the museum. Or there's a kid-friendly tour. And also just asking at the info desk when you get there. Are there any kid oriented activities happening today or things that they would recommend? Because I'm sure they'll have an answer for you as well. Thank you. Katherine, this has been so interesting. And it really makes me want to get up and go and experience art. Of course, digitally, but in person too. You've really provided a lot of great insights. So thank you. Yeah, thanks for having me. Love talking about this stuff. Can ramble on forever and ever. So have a great day. This episode is dedicated to all the visual artists I know and love, especially my twin sister, Jessie Cross. Incredible Mind Podcast was written, produced, and edited by me, Michelle Cross Smith. Peter Aronson is consulting producer. Angela Ferrero designed the cover art, and the theme music was created by Alex Grohl. For more information about Incredible Mind, check out our website at Incredible-Mind dot org. Thanks for listening.