Ep. 617 – Your Brain On Art with Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross
Mindrolling with Raghu Markus
Be Here Now Network
4.7 • 543 Ratings
🗓️ 27 October 2025
⏱️ 58 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Merging art, science, and spirit, authors and intellectuals Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross illuminate why creativity is essential for humanity.
Grab a copy of Susan and Ivy’s Book: Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us
In this episode of Mindrolling, Raghu, Susan, and Ivy explore:
- Redefining art as any medium that allows someone to express themselves
- Learning to see the world with fresh eyes and creative curiosity
- The powerful reflection: has there ever been a time when the arts have personally affected you?
- Resonance and vibration as the center of the universe
- Music as a pathway to experience oneness with all things
- The miracle of neuroplasticity—rewiring the brain and making new pathways
- Confronting ourselves with a new piece of art or doing a new arts practice
- Play through art: letting go of any preconceived outcome and simply playing with ideas and concepts
- Why change requires time, patience, and habitual practice
- Remembering that art in ancient cultures was highly valued and integrated into daily life
- The aesthetic mindset and walking through the world with attention to beauty in every detail
Listen to Sit Around the Fire, a collaborative musical journey with Jon Hopkins, East Forest, and Ram Dass
About Susan Magsamen:
Susan Magsamen is the founder and director of the International Arts + Mind Lab, Center for Applied Neuroaesthetics at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, where she is a faculty member. She is also the co-director of the NeuroArts Blueprint. Susan works with both the public and private sectors using arts and culture evidence-based approaches in areas including health, child development, education, workforce innovation, rehabilitation and social equity.
“It’s personal; it could be crocheting for her, gardening for somebody else, it could be I’m a collager, we’re all talking about personalized medicine and precision medicine, and the arts are probably the most personalized medicine that there is.” –Susan Magsamen
About Ivy Ross:
Ivy Ross is the Vice President of Design for hardware product area at Google, where she leads a team that has won over 225 design awards. She is a National Endowment for Arts grant recipient and was ninth on Fast Company's list of the one hundred Most Creative People in Business in 2019. Ross believes that the intersection of arts and sciences is where the most engaging and creative ideas are found.
“I think we’ve been focusing on productivity and efficiency and pushing these arts aside as a ‘nice to have’, not as an imperative to our health and wellness. Through the work on this book with Susan, learning more about the physiology of how we are wired to receive the sensorial nature of life, it’s no wonder when we deprive ourselves of that, why we’re in the state we’re in.” –Ivy Ross
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey, everyone, it's Ragu back with Mind Rolling, and I have with me, Susan Magsaman and Ivy Ross. |
| 0:19.2 | Hi, how are you? Welcome. They have put together a fascinating book, |
| 0:27.9 | Your Brain on Art, How the Arts Transform Us. So I'm really happy to, there's some great |
| 0:34.9 | choosy things and choice writing in in this book so we have a bunch of |
| 0:41.7 | stuff that we can talk about um you know i i just wanted to mention because i'm reading the |
| 0:50.4 | times new york times today i only read the headlines about the stuff that we are really upset about. |
| 0:59.3 | But, you know, Ezra Klein is, he's a great podcaster. |
| 1:04.8 | And he writes opinion stuff for the Times. |
| 1:07.4 | Anyhow, he wanted to get away from all the political stuff and all that. |
| 1:10.5 | So he brought someone stuff and all that. |
| 1:19.1 | So he brought someone on his show that it really fits with what this book is. |
| 1:20.0 | Brian Eno. |
| 1:21.5 | Do you know Brian is? Oh, of course, yes. |
| 1:22.5 | Love for him and his work. |
| 1:24.1 | Yeah. |
| 1:26.1 | So I thought, wow, this is really synchronicity. |
| 1:29.3 | Let me just read a little of it so you can get a feel for it. |
| 1:34.3 | I've actually thought that art is actually one of the most important things that humans do with their time. |
| 1:40.3 | In my book, there's a long list of things that I consider could come under the headline |
| 1:45.2 | of art. It includes, of course, obvious things, symphonies, photographs, paintings, but it also |
| 1:51.1 | includes cardigans and jewelry and makeup and tattoos and all the things that humans do that they |
| 1:58.0 | don't have to do. I love that line. |
... |
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