Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us

including parenting, caregiving, and even community service.

neurons are very social cells. In order to survive, they need to communicate with other cells.

Within the lobes of the brain are a number of structures that together make up the limbic system. This system is sometimes called the “ancient” brain network and it underpins emotion and behavior.

taste is also a chemical sense: The foods you eat trigger your 10,000-plus taste buds, generating electrical signals that travel from your mouth to an area of the brain called the gustatory cortex. This part of the brain is also believed to process visceral and emotional experiences, which

Emotions precede our conscious recognition of a feeling, and often those emotional states can reside outside of our conscious awareness.

Synapses can fire together, meaning communicate, but it takes something special for them to wire together, meaning fuse into a connection. What stimulates our neurons to communicate with one another—to fire chemical messages—and to do so with enough energy that they wire together into a synaptic connection, is based on the intensity of the sensory

“A good orange, if it’s just sweet, feels insipid,” Anjan says by way of an analogy. “You need a little bit of acidity in there to feel like it’s a really good taste, and the arts do that in a more complicated way.” Art that spurs multiple emotions becomes salient, which, in turn rewires your neural pathways.

help to create our sense of what’s happening in our bodies. This sense can be disrupted, or amplified, when we are emotionally overwhelmed.

Tye has identified seven architectural elements, what he calls the “super vitamins” of enriched environments, that help us to be healthier and more in sync with our surroundings, and several of these are pulled directly from nature: natural light, natural materials, and structures reminiscent of natural shapes. He uses evidence-based design, which