Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us
Everything we experience subjectively, every thought and emotion, produces at least transient physiological changes in the brain.
Barbara Ehrenreich • Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer
Some 80 percent of the fibers of the vagus nerve (which connects the brain with many internal organs) are afferent; that is, they run from the body into the brain.6 This means that we can directly train our arousal system by the way we breathe, chant, and move, a principle that has been utilized since time immemorial in places like China and India,
Bessel van der Kolk • The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma
Oliver Sacks wrote, “When listening to music, we listen with our muscles.” One
Kelly McGonigal • The Joy of Movement: How exercise helps us find happiness, hope, connection, and courage
Some African and Indigenous languages don’t have a specific word for “singer” or “musician”; it’s a given that anyone who breathes can dance, drum, or sing. Music not only sprang from the human brain—it has the capacity to alter the structure and functioning of the brain itself. Aniruddh Patel, a music-cognition expert at Tufts University in Medfor
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