It's Monday, January 21st, 2019, and you're listening to Inquiring Minds. I'm Indravis Gontas.

Each week we bring you a new, in-depth exploration of the space where science, politics, and society collide.

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Have you ever wandered through an art gallery and thought to yourself,

Huh, my kid could have painted that.

What makes art art?

Well, it turns out there's a scientist for that.

Ellen Winner is a professor of psychology at Boston College, and she's a senior research associate at Project Zero, which is in the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She directs

the Arts and Mind Lab, and her career has been all about figuring out why we love art that we do,

what makes art art art, and essentially how art works.

She has recently put together all of this information into a new book called How Art Works,

a psychological exploration that is now available at booksellers everywhere.

This is a topic, of course, that I'm very passionate about, given my background in both music

and psychology. And so I was delighted to chat with Ellen Winner to figure out how art works.

Ellen Winner, welcome to inquiring minds. Thank you. So I want to start out with the question that

you start out your book with, which is what is art? And of course, your entire

book essentially is an answer to that question. But let's start with when you are posed that

question, what do you say? Well, what I say is that philosophers have been debating that question

...