113. Art as a Neurological Product

"Art is magical, but it's not magic. It's a neurological product, and we can study this neurological product the same way that we study other complex processes, such as language." 

Dr. Charles Limb 

The next three episodes will be all about how your brain is changed using art, and how hormones play a role in that. 

Transcript

113. Your brain with art, class 1, July 2025 

 Art is magical, but it's not magic. It's a neurological product, and we can study this neurological product the same way that we study other complex processes, such as language. This is a quote from Charles Limb, who is a neuroscientist. 

The next three episodes will be all about how your brain is changed using art, and how hormones play a role in that. Everyone's familiar with hormones and how they impact us from maybe basic science class in high school, yet it's time to have a little update so that you know exactly how to increase your dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, and sometimes endorphins. Welcome into the Modern Creative Woman podcast. I'm Doctor Amy Backos, your host is on this audio creativity journey. I'm so glad you're here. It has been a great reminder to prepare for the next few episodes of the podcast about how much control we really do have about feeling good. And I've got lots of suggestions that seem small, perhaps insignificant, and you might be tempted to think, oh, that's not a big deal. That's not going to have that much of an impact on me. Why bother? And I really want to challenge this kind of thinking and encourage you to take action on both creativity and the physical things that you need to do to feel really great. And we need this now more than ever. So let's get into this. Let's get this started. 

There's a quote by Eileen Miller that I think fits what we're doing today. She says. “Art can permeate the very deepest part of us where no words exist.” This is, in fact, true. It taps into the nonverbal parts of our experience. Creating art and looking are mostly unrelated to words and thinking. Art also gives us this very powerful tool to feel better. It's allowing us to, of course, learn more about ourselves, discover what might be lurking underneath the words to really identify our true experience and our real feelings. It also gives us a chance to tap into our own neurobiology to feel better. And this is a series that I'm excited to present to you. We're going to talk about the neurobiology of art, and I'll teach you a little bit about the science of hormones and the things that we can do to feel better. The biology of art is the absolute opposite of the verbal linguistic. Aspects of our brain, and it's almost like the verbal, linguistic versus the visual centers of the brain. When we make art, the repetitive movements with our hands are one of the reasons why we have the release of feel good hormones. The ones that I'm going to talk about today are serotonin, and we'll get a little bit into dopamine. But over the series we will talk about serotonin, dopamine, oxytocin and endorphins. The visual parts of your brain from the occipital lobe are connected to 60% of your brain. Your visual cortex is associated with a whole host of experiences, not just looking and receiving information visually, but also in movement, proprioception, where our body understands its position in space. Reaching your hand out to pick up your paintbrush, you're using the experience of proprioception to navigate your hand through space and grasp the paintbrush. When people write with a pen and paper to take notes instead of typing on a typewriter, the information is encoded differently, and researchers attribute that to movement. There is one more layer of learning attached to maybe we're hearing notes, or we're taking notes from something we're reading. We're hearing something we want to write down in a class or a lecture. And the act of using that pen instead of typing on our phone or the computer, changes how we encode the information. The same holds true with making art. That movement brings up a greater capacity to understand what's happening. The biology of art itself has been well researched in the subject of flow, and I've talked a lot about behind me. Check me. Hi. The Hungarian researcher who uses the scientific method to understand what it's like when our brain shifts into that state of mind and flow, is when we are engaged fully in a task that requires a little bit of attention and challenge, but kind of at the right level. It might be difficult, but not too difficult. It requires a certain amount of attention, and that brain state of flow increases our focus, our attention, presence, and good feelings. So focus and attention is what science is mostly studying. How long can we attend to a particular task, and how are we able to stay on that task, as opposed to our mind wandering when we're making art and we get into flow? It offers our brain a different way of relating to time, to thoughts, to problems. There's some aspect of that experience that helps us feel alive and focused and present and in the moment. Art making requires a lot of your brain, so it's good for, of course, relaxation calming our anxieties. It's also good for keeping our brain active as we get older. Making art requires of your brain attention. It requires tactile and visual input to be processed. What's happening in your brain is input. Processing of information. Planning what to do. Predicting how an action might have an outcome in your art. Proprioception I already mentioned it requires movement, self-regulation, recalibration, and then, of course, the output of making a piece of art. This is a full brain complex experience. I'd like to compare this to scrolling on your phone. And I started doing some research on this in terms of the science of what happens when we get into phone scrolling, and researchers have been looking at this for a while. The habanera is part of our brain that really is about avoidance behaviors. Phone scrolling activates this and the amygdala, which is for survival instincts. Did you know that that level of survival strategy is part of your phone scrolling experience? I did not. It also taps into reward pathways, and I think these are the ones we're probably most familiar with, the reward pathways, and those are the ones that might release dopamine, give us these pleasurable sensations when we scroll on our phone, looking through Instagram, going shopping online, whatever it is we're doing. Phone scrolling also encourages or causes Dissociation, and that is checking out from the present moment, not being engaged in the reality around us. And brain rot. It's an actual thing. Brain rot. It's the loss of the ability to create motivation. We lose our natural internal, hormonal biological motivation. Phone scrolling is also involved in our prefrontal cortex, and that's where we do our higher level thinking and planning. And this is where we want to be doing a lot of work. And this is less engaged when we're scrolling. Our prefrontal cortex is simply not lighting up in the same way when we scroll through our phones. It's so sad what we're doing to our brain. If you have a look right now at how much time you spend scrolling your phone, you might get shocked into making a change. So if the only change you make after hearing this episode is to start monitoring your phone scrolling, I will have been a great success and you will feel better. Let's jump into the hormones that art helps us generate. Therefore, I mentioned before dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, and endorphins. They allow us to feel good and we're designed to feel good. We're supposed to be having these. We're supposed to be rewarding our brain for something interesting. We're supposed to have a good, stable mood. We're supposed to feel love and affection, and our body has natural ability to kind of moderate our pain experience. So let's talk about serotonin. You've all heard of this. Serotonin is the hormone that staves off depression brings a feeling of euphoria. If you are feeling happy and all is right with the world, it means that you have been working on increasing your serotonin. If you are practicing strategies to consciously boost your mood, it's usually serotonin. The things I do for serotonin I've mentioned before happy jumps. Jump up and down a little bit. Move your body. I have affirmations that I say in the morning that orient my brain to what to think about and look for things that are pleasurable. In my neuropsychology classes, we did a lot around brain science. We did brain dissections. And serotonin comes from right in the center of your brain stem. And it acts on many parts of your brain, and it impacts such a variety of functions and behaviors. Here's where serotonin has a huge influence. Memory. Fear. Stress. Response. Digestion. Addiction. Sexuality. Sleep, breathing, and body temperature. There's four ways that the research shows we can increase our serotonin. The first one is an antidepressant. There are SSRIs, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, and there's serotonin and norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors. And they work by increasing your brain's ability to access your serotonin. It works at the brain level, allowing your brain to absorb your serotonin. It stops the reuptake or the taking back the closing down of the serotonin in your brain, and it allows it to remain in your brain longer. Antidepressants have changed lives. They are a revolutionary Illusionary treatment, and I think a lot of people still fear that they will somehow be damaged taking medication, because there was a lot of negative publicity about antidepressants in, I think, especially the 90s, 80s and 90s. They are much more nuanced and more specific. So many people will be prescribed a particular antidepressant and then something to accompany it. It's not that they need more and more medication. It's that the drugs are parsed out so people aren't getting all the things that they don't need, and they're just getting things that they do need. One of the challenges with someone who's experiencing depression is that they feel nothing will help. Things were bad. Things are bad, things will be bad, and nothing's going to help. And so many people who are struggling with depression engage in cognitive distortions about what is possible for them. If they talk with a doctor about medication and it's not right for everyone. But it is extremely helpful in helping people get out of a hole. Many people tell me they don't want to be on medication for the rest of their lives. I don't think we talk about it for the rest of our lives. We talk about it for what? What could be prescribed for the next year. The second way of increasing serotonin is working out. This is one of the more effective strategies for feeling better in your life. It is very under prescribed for mood, but your body releases more tryptophan, which is an amino acid your brain uses to make serotonin. That boost in serotonin when you're working out explains things like the runner's high. But when you're working out, you not only get these feel good hormones of serotonin, you also get endorphins and other neurotransmitters. Working out is not a punishment for your body. It is not a vanity metric. Working out is a biological need for your brain health. There is no substitute for balancing what you do with your brain intellectually. Go to work, read and balancing it with physical activity. Another way to increase your serotonin is through creativity, the movement. Planning, the experience of flow. Self-expression. The pleasure we get from making art. Sometimes I have a lot of frustration when I'm making art. Why is this not looking like I want it to? This isn't right. A lot of judgments will come into my head. And yet, when I'm done, there's so much pleasure and reward for that experience. And the fourth way I want to talk about for increasing serotonin is sunshine. Or that bright light that's meant to replicate it. Light naturally increases serotonin levels. Living in San Francisco, we are foggy a lot of the year, so I recommend a lot to people to look into light therapy. And it's one of the main treatments for seasonal affective disorder, which is when people have such a drop in their serotonin when it's dark, that they need a lot of support in terms of light therapy. If you live in a climate with four seasons, those winter blues can be triggered by a drop in serotonin. I know growing up people didn't seem to go out as much in the winter months. People just kind of stayed home, hunkered down, and we lost a little motivation to get out and about when it's dark. You can look into that light therapy, you can look up full spectrum bulbs. You can sort through how this might be really helpful for you. What about food and serotonin? Getting extra serotonin from foods is a little tricky. We know turkey is high in tryptophan. There's kind of a myth that we should eat more turkey to feel better, but our bodies don't convert it very efficiently. When you eat turkey, along with other high protein foods, the protein breaks down into amino acids, and these compete with tryptophan to get across your blood brain barrier. And the blood brain barrier is that border that prevents, like, potentially harmful substances from reaching your brain. The Journal of Harvard Health talks about food and serotonin. And they they write extensively about how we can increase serotonin. There's a lot of research to be found in that journal, but tryptophan can be helped in your brain by eating complex carbohydrates. So they recommend vegetables, fruits, legumes, whole grains. When you're eating these carbohydrates, your body produces insulin, which helps your muscles pull in more amino acids, giving that tryptophan a better chance of reaching your brain. Here's a quote from Christine Strang. She's a professor of neuroscience at University of Alabama and former president of the American Art Therapy Association. She says creativity in and of itself is important for remaining healthy, remaining connected to yourself, and connected to the world. Art is, in fact, a way of knowing yourself and others in your communities. That idea comes from Pat Allen, that art allows us to connect in extremely meaningful and in all the relevant ways self, others, and community. Really want to encourage you to do some art this week. You can draw a picture of your brain and use lines and shapes and colors to focus on what's going on in your brain and do the whole project over again, and include what you really want to be going on in your brain. We have so much more control over how we're feeling, especially with serotonin making art. Getting sunlight. Antidepressants if we need them. Exercise and creativity. So if you want to feel good, make art. From today's episode, you now understand why that works so well. Have a wonderful rest of your week. 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