The following podcast is a Dear Media production.

Welcome to Raising Good Humans.

I'm so excited for this episode because Susan Magsiman, the founder and executive director

of the International Arts and Mind Lab at the Center for Applied Neuroaesthetics, is so cool because basically she's going to explain why even doodling while you're getting work done can be incredibly beneficial to your brain.

Her New York Times bestselling book, Your Brain on Art,

How the Arts Transform Us, is so awesome. And I got so many beautiful tips on this episode

to incorporate art in our kids' day-to-day lives and our lives. But also part of this episode

that I think was so cool is how Susan defines

art. It may or may not surprise you to know that the definition of art is so much more broad than we

realize. And integrating it into our day-to-day lives is critical. Let me start by laying some sort of

groundwork that might be useful. I think the first thing that I want to say is that, you know, as human beings, we are literally born with 100 billion neurons, right? And so those neurons who come into the world and they're there for us to make these these neurobiological connections.

The only way that we can do that is by bringing the world in through our senses.

And so we all have different levels of sensorial capacities based on our physiology or our genetics,

but we all have to bring the world in through our senses.

It's the only way.

So when you really look at these profound ways we do that, the touch is an extraordinary sense

where you have, you know, touch ties into the somatosensory cortex that helps you really

interpret and understand what what you're

experiencing you know smell is an incredible sensorial sense as its vision and taste and hearing

and so you know we when we do that we are connecting these 100 billion neurons together through synaptic connection.

And those connections create neural pathways.

Those neural pathways connect all the different structures and parts of the brain.

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