Your Brain On Art: How Creativity Transforms Health & Well-Being With Susan Magsamen & Ivy Ross

Art isn’t just for museums—it shapes the way we think, feel, and connect with the world. In this conversation, Tony Martignetti explores the science and impact of creativity with Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross, co-authors of Your Brain on Art. Susan, executive director of the International Arts + Mind Lab at Johns Hopkins, and Ivy, Google’s chief design officer, reveal how art fuels brain health, enhances well-being, and unlocks human potential. They share powerful insights on neuro aesthetics, the connection between art and healing, and why creativity is essential for a thriving life. Tune in to discover how embracing artistic expression can change the way you experience the world.

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Listen to the podcast here

Your Brain On Art: How Creativity Transforms Health & Well-Being With Susan Magsamen & Ivy Ross

The Power Of Curiosity And Connection In Neuroaesthetics

It is my honor to introduce you my guest, Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross. Susan is the Executive Director of the International Arts + Mind Lab. It’s a center for applied neuro aesthetics at groundbreaking neuro aesthetics initiative at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. She's the co-director of the NeuroArts Blueprint with the Aspen Institute and the co-author of the New York Times bestseller and one of my favorites, Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us. Susan studies how the arts and esthetics experience measurably changed the brain, body, and behavior and how this knowledge can be translated to inform health, well-being, and learning in medicine, public health, and education.

We also have Ivy who is the Chief Design Officer for Consumer devices at Google, where she has led a team that has won more than 240 design awards. She is the national endowment for the Arts Grant Recipient and was the nineth on fast companies list of 100 most creative people in business in 2019. She is the co-author of this amazing book, Your Brain on Art. I also want to say that we're being represented on both coasts. We have Susan who's in Maryland, and we have Ivy whose an LA, but she's a West Coast resident. It is truly a pleasure to welcome both of you to the virtual campfire.

It’s great to be here.

I already feel the heat.

There you go. I always say I'm going to send you guys marshmallows and have like a little you representative fire that we can get started, but we create our own heat through our conversation. As we do in the show, we are going to create this moment where we can start to explore the journey that have gotten you both doing such amazing work in the world. The impact that you've created is truly remarkable and I'm looking forward to understanding what brought these impacts to where you are making an impact on the world.

I want to know the journey, so that's what we're going to do through what's called flashpoints, the points in your journey, that have ignited your gifts into the world. How do you share that? Along the way, we'll pause and see what themes are showing up. Whoever wants to start first, you're welcome to be the bold one to go first.

The Impact Of Childhood Experiences On Creative Expression

First of all, I love your process and it's been interesting. I don't know why, but I've been invited to reflect in a life Journeys. It's unusual to stop and pause and do that. Normally, we're all full speed ahead and not reflecting back, but I've had a lot of wonderful memories and new insights come forward that's been happening. Thank you for the invitation to think about that. You can't ever predict your path. It's how you meet moments and the things that are in front of you or happening around you.

I was born. I'm a twin. I was born in relationship. My sister says I kicked her going out and I said she pushed me, and that's true. That relationships have always been fundamental cellular for me. The work in also finding, sharing, and celebrating your voice has also been important to me, identity, building that, and finding the ways to do that. I come from a family of makers, doers, and ritualistically in a way where that's how we lived our daily lives and still do.

We were very much gardens, cooking, hand work, and singing. My mother wrote poetry and my dad was hands-on, doer with horses and things like that. I came into this thinking this was the way it goes and this is what life is. A rich life is in the doing in creative expression. Also, there are these pivotal moments that happen where he likes changes and, for me, that was when I was twelve. My twin sister had a farming accident and almost lost her leg. It was a trauma. She shut down. She wasn't able to talk about it. In those days, the word trauma didn't even exist. It was just move on and keep moving. There are a lot of things like that. My mother lost his sister and it will be like, “Come on. Keep moving.”

There was this residual generational trauma many people had that we just kept moving and as a result, sometimes people didn't do well for years and sometimes for the rest of their lives. My mother suggested my sister that she started to draw. When she started to draw symbols, metaphors, and narrative started to come up for my sister that were stuck inside of her. It helped my sister but it also helped me reconnect to my sister where there was this severing of telepathy and knowing of each other.

That was the moment for me when I realized words are important. They're functional, but the way we share ourselves is through so many different things. That became a life course for me. The other thing I'll say and then turn it over to this child of wonder, is that I've always been a very curious person. Curiosity has been my word and been my thing then I met Ivy.

Words are important, but the way we share ourselves goes beyond them. Art, music, movement—these are how we truly express what's inside.

Who calls herself the child to wonder because, for me, life is about curiosity and paying attention to what gets my attention. That's because I grew up in a house of slightly different. My mother didn't knit, but my dad was a designer. He worked for Raymond Lowey, the famous industrial designer of the ‘50s. The house was filled with ideas and objects that were both from the present and the future and materials.

I realized he taught me what I can now call the flow state when I was probably four years old or he would say, “Ivy, look at the way that lamp is connected to the light shade. What else can be done that way?” He basically taught me how to look at everything and extrapolated, if that's the right word. Pull it apart, and then apply it to other things. I became this child of wonder that would look at everything and make up stories about how did it get its shape and what else can I do with that shape. It gave me this creative aesthetic outlook on life. Creativity is just a set of possibilities.

He also taught me that an artist puts a piece of their heart on a pesto, stands back and hopes that someone resonates with it. A designer solves problems from millions of people. I started being in an artist and got my work into ten museums in my twenties doing metalwork. I realized, first of all, life was about the journey, ironically, not about the end goal because here I was at 22 or 23 getting my work in museums. Sometimes, people spend their whole lives doing that.

The ego trip lasted two weeks and then life was back to normal. The amazing gift of that was knowing at such an early age that life is about the journey and not about the end goal. It gave me permission to go on this journey of discovery. I went from the soul artist because I love people and I'm also all about relationship. At the end of the day, that's all there is. I went into the corporate world running design teams because I was winning all these design awards. I thought, “How do I give the gift of what I did for myself to the others?”

Companies are like a petri dish of humanity. I thought, “This will be a good place to play out. Can I help create an environment in which people can bring their greatest gifts forward and creativity?” That became something that gave me such joy and I continue to do it for many years. I don't even know how long it's been.

The Role Of Art In Healing And Self-Discovery

I want to reflect back some things I'm hearing and thank you for sharing these moments. First of all, it sounds like you both came from strong foundations of there wasn't a push to like, “You have to do these things.” Instead, it was like explore, be, and get into the places that are going to make you be who you need to be. You aren't forced into a path, which often happens with young adults.

I do want to say something along that. I didn't get this personal, but because it's relevant, especially for women. My dad inspired me that I told him I wanted to be like him. He looked at me and said, “Ivy, marry someone rich, be a school teacher and have your summers off.”  I'm so glad he said that because it was like, “How dare you robbed me in my dreams? The dreams that you, Sir, put forward for me.”

I just wanted to make sure I said that because I believe what he said to me was the greatest motivator and it was. Still in this day, when I tell that story, I could feel it in my body of how dare you robbed me in my dreams. We're here to live only the life that we're supposed to live, so I agree with your point about play that out.

Piercing friction about that was that, basically, he was inspiring you at the same time but also trying to hold you back.

I realized that he said that out of love because he didn't want me to have a hard life.

I was say that I had an interesting parallel to that. I have four sisters. No brothers and we had like seven female dogs, cats and horses that are all female. I never knew that there was any limitation to what you could do as a kid growing up. We all did everything, and then when I hit the real world and you started to see that there was a ceiling. I was like, “Beat that. There's no way I'm not doing.” I was forged in knowing how to do stuff.

I was not going to like take back seat when I got offered half amount of money than my counterpart VP who wasn't as good as I was and all of that. When I got much older, I learned that my father's mother didn't think any of us should go to college because college was not for girls and we should get married, the same as I was dad. It was interesting because she had this class sense that women were to be at home, yet she worked full-time because her husband died.

These hard bought beliefs that just aren't true permeated society and still do in some way and are coming back. It's interesting to see if you buy into certain beliefs, you're in trouble. You have to have courage to fight police that aren't true for your best life. Ivy and I both are resilient. We're fighters because we had to be, and it's true for many people.

There's something about what you just said that has me thinking about how the paradox of this is like, people have the best intentions for wanting you to have an easy life, but the easy life is not what the purpose is here. Sometimes, there's a real power in struggling for what you care about or your passions. I had a guest a while back, Marcus Collins. He and I talked about how passion is something that's worth suffering for. Not to say we should be suffering for anything, but there is a meaningful suffering that we do because we love something so much. The question is, how much you don't want to give up yourself in the process of doing so?

You're so right.

I want to come back to something that you both shared. I love the C words that come up when we touch start talking curiosity and connection. Susan, when you were talking about your youth and your upbringing, there's a sense of connection that was something you were starving for. Curiosity was the word that came up for Ivy. Those two are such powerful forces in the world and also very prevalent in the work that you do now. Let's talk a bit about curiosity, connection, and in the work that you do now and where you see the importance.

The Intersection Of Art And Science

One thing I like one thing I do want to say before Susan starts, is we're both everything but people brand us as me the artist and Susan the scientists at its simplest level. You would think those two were so different but we realized working together, we both asked questions and that's the curiosity piece. A scientist and an artist both are in the business of asking questions for different reasons. That was a lovely thing we discovered working together.

To add to that, when we decided that we are going to write the book, first of all, I reached out to Ivy. I cold-call on LinkedIn. She calls me a stalker. I just say, “I was very interested in you and very curious about you.” When we got together, we decided that we would collaborate and curate a collection of people, so it’s about connection. We got neuroscientists and researchers together with artists, arts practitioners, and funders.

We were curious about what they thought in community and coming out of that that event, which we had at Ivy's home. It was a salon. We were at the beginning of the NeuroArts Blueprint and wanted to see how community forms that's interdisciplinary and translational. It was fascinating to hear every single story for hours. People shared how the arts impacted them. Coming out of that was when we decided that we would write the book.

The book itself was a curious journey about connection. We didn't just talk to researchers. We didn't say we're, “In a lane and we're going to just use this empirical data.” We talked to researchers, with people lived experience, with antiques, artists, arts practitioners, and academics and social scientists. It was in the blending of creating community and being curious about how all these things came together, which we didn't know how they would come together. We literally were needing it and weaving it as we were writing the book and was first getting the information out and making sure we had all the right people.

We’re making sure that was accurate and we were reflecting what people were saying. The last piece was the, so what and why does this matter. That was the last cut of the book. It was like French cooking. It kept layering and layering, but it was those two things. It was our curious nature of asking a question, trying to figure it out, and didn't know the answer. Ivy would say, “Is their research about blah, blah, blah?” I would say, “I don't know. There is research about this, but there's not research about that.” She says, “I know somebody who is in New Zealand who is doing this. Let's talk to them.”

We knew we wanted an evolutionary perspective, so we started digging who knew we Iyo Wilson and we were able to get a connection but it was a collaborative process of curiosity and interest. We could never have said what the book was going to be until it was done and could never known what community it would create until it got out there. There's leaps of faith in that but those instincts of curiosity, collaboration, and connection were surely the drivers of how we made the piece of how we created something new.

The Importance Of Play And Collaboration In The Creative Process

Susan, as I'm listening to you, it didn't hit me before but it's exactly what you and I say is the definition of play, “Doing something you do differently every day without a preconceived outcome.” You could say in this case, the outcome was we knew we wanted to do a book but we didn't know the format and the how. It was what play is about. It's like, “Try this and that. Let's put these two things together.” We stayed open to the process a lot of not trying to control it but we kept asking questions and kept being curious with each other and have each other the bounce off of.

We're very resourceful and passionate, so we go and find it. Susan and I often talk. We're both into textiles and I have the four-harness loom as a kid. There's the warp and the weft, the horizontal and the vertical. We realize at the end we were weaving this cloth together out of strands of information that came from all different angles. It's like looking at a prism. It's all different facets of this thing we call art that is about creative expressions. It’s critical for our health and well-being, especially now.

I don't think we realize we have micro-traumas every day. There's big traumas and micro-traumas. It keeps getting expressed because we've been taught to hold our emotions. There's a great quote in the book that Julie Bolte Taylor wrote. I'm paraphrasing it, “We think we're thinking beings have learned how to feel and we're feeling beings that have learned how to think.” That was a huge moment for us. It twists your perspective. If you walk around life understanding that, that we are, first and foremost, designed and wired to be feeling beings who have learned to think. You come at life from a different place.

We are not thinking beings that learned how to feel. We are feeling beings that learned how to think. That shift in perspective changes everything.

Susan, I'm going to say that, it's so ironic that you mentioned Jill. Her episode's going to be released and that conversation was one of my favorite conversations or probably now going to be replaced by this conversation.

We don't know her. We only know her work, so please tell her we love her. We do. We quote her all the time, because we think we know her story and we think a lot of her work. Another thing that happened is we're two authors to people that became co-authors. We had to find a voice for the book. That was a new voice. That was also like how do you create a we voice and us voice and the two of us voice that was optimistic and inspirational but was also grounded in explaining and take the reader on an artistic journey through the book.

That was important to us. We didn't want to just say, “Here's a lot of stuff.” We didn't want it to be a textbook. The narrative was something that we had to find our voice. Every now and then, we would write something and we'd be like, “No, that's not our voice.” Now, we talk, do things, or write things, we write in our voice, so we have individual voices. We have a shared voice. Isn't that weird?

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I want to talk about that for a moment because as you described this journey that you've been on, you're the co-authors of this book but there's also a lot of voices inside of the book that you've accumulated on this journey. That's what makes the book even more impactful. You're not just saying it's about us. Any ego driven book is going to fall flat. It’s is remarkable and different than a lot of books that I do and every ton of books. The cool thing is that you entered into this with like a very small notion of what it was going to be then you let the journey evolved. It made the book an exciting journey that unfolded. It made the quality of the book that much better.

Thank you. We realized that now. I'm so glad we stayed in it with that in mind being in the playful way without expectations. It's because it was so heartfelt and we were doing it for the right reason that the universe was on our side. Even the timing of it. We had two attempts where we wrote it. We tried a different format and our agent was like, “No. Not good enough.” We literally had to walk away from it for a couple of months. I said, “I know a painter walks away from a painting to get a different perspective and comes back to it. We stopped for a few months and said, “Let's give ourselves a break,” then came back to it and we nailed it. The truth is, the universe was on our side because had we nailed it the first time, the release of it would have been either during COVID. It was much better after COVID.

Right after COVID. The other thing that is worth saying about that is, I both had lots of dreams and a-has in the not getting it right. It required that marinating. Ambiguity is something. You have to have a tolerance for ambiguity if you're going to be creative because you can't know. It drives you to want to understand. You can't just get the answer. You can't say, “Here's the answer. Let's move on.” That requires patience that we felt throughout the book.

Each of the voices in the book, as you said, was also important. Maria Rosario Jackson is passionate. She was the former head of the NEA and an amazing person. She talked about equity and diversity and the fact that in a culture kitchen that gets created, that allows people to find their voice. We don't have a lot of room for that in society. We think people should know what they're doing and do it and all the inequities that come from that. That moved us into default mode network.

If you never take a pause and never know yourself, how do you bring your best self forward, if you don't know what that even is? We've started to honor the idea of having those moments in between the notes and how that plays out. There's been a lot of learning and incorporating that in our own lives. When we have grandchildren, remembering it with them that it isn't about booking every minute of the day either.

The Neuroaesthetics Movement And The Future Of Well-being

Unfortunately, in companies, we've been operating like machines since the industrial revolution for optimization and efficiency and not honored the way our brains function best, which is to have those moments of pause and plan pause to make the connections that only our brain can do so that we can be that much more creative as we apply our brain. We are so in this other mode. That's where a lot of the burnout, breakouts, and break downs are happening. If we have to understand how we're wired to do our best work, then honor that and how we proceed.

One of the biggest takeaways that I take from what you wrote is a sense of that's where the arts can come in. It gives us a chance to get out of our normal functioning and allow us to explore different path. Even nature as being a pathway of, “This is different. This is not me staring at my computer screen and allows me to connect with something different.” I'm a big fan of intentional pauses.

Not just because it's like, “I'm relaxing.” I don't relax very well personally, but when I do it with intention, I'm realizing that this is where I'm going to do my best thinking. When I come back in, I can do it. I'm a huge museum nerd. I love going to museums and allowing museums to be the place where I can explore think about things and lose myself.

Two things about what you said. First of all, nature is the most neuro aesthetic place there is because it a livens our sensory systems. It has smell, sites, sound, color, and temperature. It's why when we get out in nature, all the sudden, we feel alive because all the sensory systems are being ignited and your example about a museum. Doctors are writing prescriptions for people who go to museums. Standing in front of a new experience of painter that you may not even understand and want to think about, “What is that? What is he trying to say?” That is good for your brain to make these new connections.

Intuitively, when we do that, we know it's feeding us. That was another thing that I think the book did. We assembled this narrative. People said, “I see myself in this. I've known this, but it wasn't societally valued.” People didn't do it or weren’t doing it. Even though they felt good when they went. They were like, “This is not important. It's nice to have,” then putting the brain research and neurophysiology biology around.

It started to help it make sense like, “This is working.” Sometimes, the why is something that gives us exercise or nutrition or sleep. When we understand the why of that, we add it to have more value. Ivy said this before and maybe, Ivy, it's worth sharing more of this. People need permission. They didn't feel there was any permission granted and not that we gave them permission but the content gave people permission to start to do work, even if they weren't seeing themselves as artists or craftspeople The doing is very different than the imagining.

You didn't have to be good at it. Many of us were shut down as kids because we come in and our little souls want to express then we're shut down because someone tells us that we're not good at it or we decide we're not going to make a living at it. We don't realize how imperative it is for our health and wellness, so we park it aside. It was interesting when the book came out, we got calls from people to give talks. One of them was a pharmaceutical company and we're like, “Why do you want to come into a pharmaceutical company and talk?”

You don’t have to be ‘good’ at art for it to be powerful. The act of creating itself is what heals, inspires, and connects us.

It turns out the CEO had been a painter his whole life quietly. He continued to paint in his garage and share with anyone. He says, “I attribute my breakthrough in science in this drug I did because I was painting my whole life.” It's so important. That's an example where he wasn't doing it for his career or because he was good at it. He was exercising that constant creative expression and creative mindset and bingo. He comes up with an idea that propelled him into huge success.

The same thing with the people that funded Susan's lab, the Arts of Mind Lab at Johns Hopkins. It was a family who believed that the architecture of their home gave the husband this a-ha moment that also propelled them into huge success and wanted to give this money to Johns Hopkins saying, “We'll give it to you, but we want you to study what happens here. How did the arts or the aesthetic aspects do this to the family?” It's been a great process of discovery and weaving together information that we felt the world needed to know.

I love that you use the word weaving because it is. It's like a tapestry we're pulling together. Even though I'd love to do this again for hours, what are we weaving to next? How are we coming together? What's the next part of this chapter that you are seeing evolve? Whether it's the two of you. Where do you see the work taking the next step? Especially in light of where we are in this moment. I don't want to get too political. Whether you knew you were going to do this or not, you created movement of sorts or been part of a movement. Where do you see this going?

The Power Of Art To Build Community And Connection

It was unbelievable. We were able to bring together the BrainMind.org to have us host a conference where we brought live together, maybe a hundred people like educators. It's amazing. There’s programs now at major universities where they're pairing up an artist with a business person. There were people there from the health sector, education and all levels. It was spoken to Montessori schools, business and the buzz. These were people in the audience who were so excited to find each other to connect and to say at the end of the one-day event, “How do we stay connected and amplify this work?”

They have been. We get notes about, “I connected with so and so. Now we're starting this group that does X, Y, and Z.” Susan could talk about the NeuroArts Blueprint and what's happening there, which is super taking it to the next level but I'll end my part by saying one of the things that are does is bring create community. That's what we need, community, self-expression, and connection. That's what I'm saying. The timing could not have been more perfect and that is the next phase because it's happening all over the world. Susan could talk about that, but getting these coalitions together and keep connecting with each other, keep amplifying, and giving permission to express and to create.

I'll add the work on the NeuroArts Blueprint. We started that in around 2019, right about the same time that Ivy and I started our book project. We knew that it was a long road. It's not a short-term thing to build a field, but we felt that community was coalescing around the world and that's what the Blueprint looks at. What was happening around the world? What were the recommendations to take this movement that I think Ivy and I put wind in the sale of that was already coalescing? Say, how do you create a sustainable deal?

The North Star is mainstream medicine and public health education. How do you do that? The Blueprint has recommendations and an implementation plan that we're now in the third year of. We're launching a resource center that's a global watering hole. We've developed funding mechanisms for researchers. We developed something called the community NeuroArts Coalitions, which are hyper-local gatherings of communities who are making things happen there through the lens of the arts. They're first responders in a community, but it's schools, municipalities, researchers, artists and arts organizations all coming together.

Also, as Ivy said, looking at the academic side of like what is the pathway to be certified or degree or have licensure in this work? We would begin to start to get health care providers to pay for it like they pay for yoga or acupuncture and for other kinds of things. That's still going to be a long road to make this sustainable but we're in it. The Arts are accessible, affordable, and immediate. We are the first responders and you can do it at individual level or in an institutional level, or corporations, or schools, etc.

We're seeing it activated now because we're in so much pain. There's so much suffering. There's so much stress, anxiety, depression, and fear about the future. I didn't get a chance to tell you this, but one of the most heartbreaking things that happened as I got an email from Save A Child’s Heart, they've all been fired. That apps at USAID, this program that absolutely helps the most vulnerable children in disaster regions around the world has been cut. These people need this work more than ever. Hopefully, some of the skills that they've learned they can keep taking with them.

What's amazing about this too is that what you embody these art forms, experiences, and practices, they can't take them away. They can't be taken away. It's not a pill. It's not food, which is also at risk and there's something amazing about the fact that this is our birthright and it's within us, if we ignite it and we remember it.

That is so horrible because we interviewed them. They were talking about how these children lived through wars and like Susan's sister who got shut down in trauma, can't express the pain. Yet, they would give them crayons and paper and put them in the corner and give them a creative safe space for them to express. All of a sudden, all these things would come out that they could then work with and help them so they didn't hold that trauma.

It's sad. Even just for my own experiences, I have seen from people I've interviewed online show and from my own experience, the power of music therapy, for example. That was my first class that I loved in college and seeing how impactful it is. I've had Lane Gardner on my show, who helped the kids at Sandy Hook to express their trauma through the use of creating song and many other people who I talk to who see the power of not just using words, but using art to help them overcome challenges and to get people to come together. That's what we need most of all. The key thing is to bring people together to see the power of when we're committed to something, we'll need to do anything to make that happen. I hope we can overcome this moment.

We Will.

We will persist.

There is a rhizome that has been building out and connecting across all of these communities. It's been happening for a long time and we are organized. I don't want to be Pollyanna-ish about it because this is a dark time, but if you look at the history of the world, we persevere through arts. We sing. We dance. We tell stories. We hold each other and you think about just that as this ability to make people feel safe. This idea of human touch and connection. We do take care of each other. Most of us do. Most of us are not unkind and cruel. We have to keep remembering that. It's not the loudest voice. It's the multitude of voices. It's hard to remember that sometimes when the clouds are dark, which they are.

Most of us aren’t unkind. The loudest voices may try to divide, but the truth is, we take care of each other. That’s what truly matters.

We need something to bring us together. Hopefully, our situation is the impetus that will bring us together in a different way.

I'm glad that we've been brought together. This has been such a wonderful conversation. I have one more compound question, even though, as I said, I wish it was longer. This last question is very different but also very enjoyable for me. I always enjoy this question. What are one or two books have had an impact on you each of you and why?

The Importance Of Books And Imagination

I'll start with mine because I know it so well, Horton Hears a Who! That book I read as a kid and I have constantly see the parallels. I read it over and over again. I'm sure most of you know, but it was the elephant that knew that there were little people on the flower, but none of the other animals around him believed him. Her name was Lucy Liu. She ran around the village, and got everyone together to hold hands and make a noise so each individual separately couldn't be heard but the collective together could be heard. And all of a sudden, the animals saw the flower vibrating and it's like, “The elephant was right. There are people there.”

It's so astounding to watch that my little brain as a little girl who read that over and over again, I see so many parallels between the way I work with teams of people and companies about coming together and no voice is too small and how do we amplify that. I started studying sound and vibration. I've studied that for 40 years. I believe it came out of reading that and wanting to understand the power of the fact that they were together able to make a sound that the world could hear. It's a beautiful question you asked and it's something. I don't know if everyone has this one book that keeps showing up as a through line in their life, but I'm glad I'm able to. There's tons of other parallels. I won't spend time with it, but it's been a joy. Thanks for asking that.

Thank you.

That's a great question. There are a number of books from me over the years. This is not a fiction book. I’m holding a book my mother gave to me.

It’s called the Big Book of Things to Do and Make.

It's all of these amazing things around different clay and weaving. It's always been a book that I've come back to. It's my doing book and I still use it now with my granddaughter. I've just always loved this idea of doing and making. On a fiction level, a couple books that jump out one is Philip Pullman's, His Dark Materials. It’s a series and it's magical realism. I love this idea that the world were in is not the only world and that there are many worlds we don't know. We have the opportunity to make new worlds. That’s something that I just love. You don't know what forces are at play and what other worlds exist. I like to move through different worlds.

What you said there is wonderful. We can move through different worlds, and in many ways that's what is wonderful about being able to navigate through the arts and sciences. Also, something that I'm tapping Into these days is multidimensional aspects of who we are, identities, and owning all those identities and being okay with that. Not feeling like you have to stay in one lane and that's it.

In the old days, our parents told us, “Pick what you're going to be in one swim lane.” The future is all about multi-diversity, both between us and within ourselves and creating the conditions under which we can play those out is a gift. I know I think of my life as chapter in my life. Everyone should give themself permission to have different chapters then you're able to look back and you see the connective tissue even though maybe in the moment you don't. It doesn't matter if there's the impulse. One should do it.

It's why I started the show. It’s the idea of looking back and seeing how it all connects and even just hearing your stories of your youth, how they all came together to make you doing with the do what you do. I know we need to wrap up so I'll just say thank you so much for taking the time and being on the show. This has been just a wonderful conversation and so insightful.

Thank you for doing the work that you do. It's great.

You are a special man. Thank you. You are. What a gift. A work of art.

You're making my day. Before I let you go, I want to make sure people know where they can find out more about you. What's the best place for people to reach out if they want to learn more about your work? Either or, and if you want to give the one link or multiple links. Wherever you'd like to send people.

Our website, probably YourBrainOnArt.com. We also have an Instagram at @YourBrainOnArtBook. Hopefully, you read the book. It's out in paperback. It’s on the New York Times bestseller list for weeks when it first came out and we love that. It just means the information is getting into more hands. Certainly, if you're interested in the NeuroArts Blueprint, Susan, what's that URL?

It’s NeuroArtsBlueprint.org. On our website, there's a little query that says, “Share your story.” We love people to tell us their story about how the arts have impacted their lives. If someone's so inclined, we extend that invitation as well.

That's on our website, Your Brain On Art.

Thank you so much and thanks to readers for coming in this journey. If you haven't bought this book yet, go out and grab it. Do, go, learn more, and share your story of how arts have impacted you. That's a wrap. Thank you.

Important Links

• Susan Magsamen on LinkedIn
• Susan Magsamen on Instagram
• Ivy Ross on LinkedIn
• Ivy Ross on Instagram
• International Arts + Mind Lab
• NeuroArts Blueprint
• Your Brain On Art
• @YourBrainOnArtBook on Instagram
• Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us
• Campfire Lessons for Leaders: How Uncovering Our Past Can Propel Us Forward
• Horton Hears a Who!
• Big Book of Things to Do and Make
• His Dark Materials

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