Neuroaesthetics with Robyn Landau

Neuroaesthetics with Robyn Landau
Seeing emotion: The art and science of how environments shape us

How do you turn what your body feels into something you can see and share?

In this episode of Seeing Senses, Robyn Landau joins Sarah to explore the fast-developing field of neuroaesthetics. Robyn explains how our brains and bodies respond to everyday environments, why she and Katherine Templar Lewis founded Kinda to translate lab insights into real-world cultural experiences. Their studio-lab approach uses EEG, biosensors and self-report to create interactive works that help people learn about themselves. The conversation covers hands-on testing that visualises heart activity and skin conductance as colour, motion and shape, inclusive access, the “pub test” for science communication, and why building inner-sense literacy, interoception, matters for wellbeing. Their new experience Emergence has recently opened in New York. 

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Listen if you’re curious about:

• What neuroaesthetics is
• Visualising our inner response to sound
• Why Kinda Studios merges a creative studio with a neuroscience lab
• How physiological signals can be translated into live visual forms
• Interoception, flotation tanks, and learning to notice inner signals
• The “pub test”: sharing just enough science to pass on to a friend

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Key themes & takeaways:

• Knowledge as agency: clear, shareable explanations help ideas travel
• Science-informed design: start with “how should someone feel,” then work backwards
• Real-world measurement: EEG and biosensors plus self-report outside strict lab settings
• Arousal and valence: mapping experiences to energy level and feeling tone
• Visualising physiology: colour, shape and motion as a common language for inner states
• Individual differences: similar inputs, different responses, different baselines
• Connection as outcome: to self, to others, to place
• Interoception for wellbeing: practise noticing inner signals, not only external stimuli

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Guest:

Robyn Landau is a neuroaesthetics researcher, designer, and cultural entrepreneur advancing new interdisciplinary models connecting neuroscience with creative experiences. As the co-founder of Kinda Studios, the first women-led neuroscience studio and lab, she pioneers new ways to measure, design, and translate scientific insights into cultural experiences, expanding the impact of art, culture, and technology on human connection and wellbeing.

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Bonus for multi-sensory thinkers:

Head to Seeing Senses on Substack for updates and extras.
You’ll find sense-hacking experiments and book recommendations from the guests. Become a paid subscriber to support the making of this podcast (with extra episodes and content).

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Host:

Sarah Hyndman is a designer/researcher, author and speaker. You can book her for a talk or workshop about Multi-Sensory Thinking here via Type Tasting. Sarah is the founder of Type Tasting, curator of The Sensologists and author of the bestselling book Why Fonts Matter (Penguin/Virgin). 

Seeing Senses. Where there’s more than meets the eye. 

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Theme music by AudioKraken. 

#Neuroaesthetics #KindaStudios #Emergence #SeeingSensesPodcast #MultiSensoryThinking

Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00.66)
Knowledge is power, right? The more knowledge we have, the more agency we have to have and make action. How do you give somebody enough information that they're going to go to the pub and tell their friend about it, and then that friend tells a friend?

Today, I'm joined by Robyn Landau. She's the co-founder of the groundbreaking Kinda Studios, who I describe as being changemakers and provocateurs, but in a gentle and nurturing way. They combine neuroscience and technology to drive creative impact on an international stage. We talk about visualizing our inner responses to sounds.

people place their hands on a sensor, it turns each one of those signals into a different visual element, both the shape. And what's beautiful is that everyone has different responses. Yours might be yellow and pink and spiky, which is a marker of higher arousal. Mine might be blue and red and purple and more rounded and slow.

and about being human.

forward to today, what the research has found is that it's really no longer beauty for beauty's sake. These experiences are fundamental to what makes us human. They are hardwired into our DNA. Our brains and our bodies are constantly responding to these aesthetic and sensory environments around us.

Speaker 2 (01:19.382)
As always, head over to seeingcensus.substack.com. You'll get updates, extras and visuals to support this episode. And you'll get to see what our spiky and our round orbs actually look like.

Speaker 2 (01:42.988)
Welcome to Seeing Senses, where we uncover the magic and science behind what makes us feel starting at first sight. Join me, Sarah Hyndman, as I talk to the experts from different fields who have inspired my interdisciplinary approach over the last 12 years. Discover how they connect what we see to what we sense, feel, experience and remember.

If you want to know how the senses shape your audience's emotions, memories and choices and how you can use this to create unforgettable experiences that people can't help talking about, then this podcast is for you. Seeing senses where there's more than meets the eye. Are you ready?

Speaker 2 (02:45.368)
My guest today is Robyn Landau. Robyn's the co-founder of Kindr Studios, an interdisciplinary team of women who combine neuroscience and neuro-aesthetics to create cultural experiences. The field of neuro-aesthetics overlaps so interestingly with the Seeing Senses theme of this podcast and what I do more broadly. So I've been really looking forward to having this conversation. We're going to talk about what is neuro-aesthetics?

why you and Katherine Templer Lewis founded Kinda Studios, some of the amazing projects that you work on, your career path, and maybe, if we get time, a little glimpse of the future. Robyn, welcome.

Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure to be here.

I'm so excited for this. We met early last year at a fabulous supper club hosted by Tom Pinchard. Since then, you and your studio have been working on some seriously amazing projects. I'll come onto the hardcore science behind your work in a moment. But first of all, I'd really like to start off with what we experience as human beings as a way into this topic. So aesthetics is the appreciation of beauty.

which we think of as visual, but of course it goes way beyond sight. Could I ask you to explain what is neuroaesthetic?

Speaker 1 (04:06.218)
Definitely. The way I like to describe neuroesthetics is of course if we break apart the two words it's the neuroscience of aesthetics which really doesn't give you that much more information. So the way I like to describe it is the neuroscience and how our brains and our bodies respond to our environments. When we think about our environments we often think directly about the built environment and so I encourage people to think more broadly about what an environment means.

because of course it means our built environments, the homes we live in, our workplaces, but also the natural world and the natural environments. What about our digital environments or our virtual environments and all the other environments we place ourselves in? An airplane, a car. And so NeuroAesthetics looks at the various sensory and aesthetic ingredients that make up that environment. The sounds, the smells, the colors, the textures, the shapes, the densities.

all of these different aspects and arguably how they all work together in a moment to moment experience to shape our perception and to shape our feeling. so neuroaesthetic started as a field maybe 20 years ago now, which sought to uncover how do we form preferences towards things and why do we find things beautiful? Fast forward to today, what the research has found is that it's really no longer beauty for beauty sake. These experiences are fundamental to what makes us human. They are hardwired into our DNA, which means that

Whether we're conscious of it or not, our brains and our bodies are constantly responding to these aesthetic and sensory environments around us. And these are ultimately shaping how we feel and how we act and how we behave. And so when you begin to realize that you're in an environment, no matter where you go or what you're doing, and you're having these constant unconscious reactions, you begin to realize that it's incredibly important, the environments that we place ourselves in and understand how we feel and respond.

What you do is very much underpinned by science. This is like the engine that powers both the studio and the lab. What I really enjoy is the way that a lot of what you do is incredibly educational and you actually are sharing the process with the audiences. To quote, you pioneer a new approach to the creative process for our modern worlds. Take us through where did this begin and why did it lead to setting up KINDA Studios?

Speaker 1 (06:27.654)
thanks so much. You've pulled such great nuggets of information. Catherine Templer Lewis and I set up Kinda Studios nearly five years ago now, which is crazy to think time flies. And we started Kinda in response to the fact that this field of neuroscience was starting to explode in academic circles. We started to understand way more than ever before about how our brains and bodies respond to art, to culture, to design, to architecture, to environments.

but nobody was really translating this into the real world fabric of our daily lives, where it can make impact on the ground. And of course, the world of academia arguably works and lives in its own silo, the way that the information is communicated and speaks and the research processes they go through have to be very specific and they're not necessarily very easily understood or translatable to the general public. But meanwhile,

most of the research they were doing was really about these day-to-day life experiences that we were having. So we started the studio and the lab in response to this to say, how can we accelerate all the incredible insights that are coming out of these academic labs into our real world creative and cultural experiences so that they could deliver greater impact? Five years ago was the height of the pandemic. And we saw that more people were becoming aware of how they were feeling than ever before.

more people were understanding the importance of their mental health, of states like connection, where we are all kind of lacking in, for example, social connection to others. And so ultimately, this idea that knowledge is power. And so when we're talking about how do we set up new interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary ways of working in the creative process, the way that we like to describe it is a lot of the time we're translators and...

A lot of the time when we work with creatives and innovation teams and designers and other studios, we're often not telling people something that they don't already know intuitively or that they're not already intuitively doing. But once we help understand the nuances of how and why things occur, that's where more ideas are possible.

Speaker 1 (08:36.716)
Now that we have this nuanced understanding of frequencies of sound and frequencies of light and shapes and densities of spaces, we can begin to understand the more nuanced ways to apply these into creative work and how to inform creative decisions by knowing kind of what strings to pluck and notes to play, for example, that can help somebody feel a certain way. And so all of our work is driven by how do you enhance connection?

to ourselves, to each other and the world around us, knowing that connection and connectedness is really the gateway to wellbeing. We prefer to talk about connection because we find also it's more accessible. And that's a really big important part of our work. How do you increase access to, for example, helping more people feel well? You know, the neuroscience has shown time and time again that creative, cultural, artistic experiences.

really, really support people's wellbeing. And wellbeing, think, you people think about eating healthy or working out or doing yoga or getting to stillness and silence, and that's not for everyone. So how do we use new means of creative experiences to help really transform the way that people are feeling, knowing that we need that in society, as well as, of course, making the neuroscience information more accessible? You you mentioned that a lot of the way that we communicate and...

apply our work is by educating people in the process, distilling down and simplifying for lack of a better word. know, actually simplifying is not it. Synthesizing is probably a better word. A lot of complex information to make it applicable is super important for people because knowledge is power, right? The more knowledge we have, the more agency we have to have and make action. And of course,

learning how to distill and synthesize a lot of complex information is challenging. Science communications is fabulous, but you know what? Those posts on Instagram, I will tell you, where we share nuggets of information, they take hours to write, you know? Because how do you commune, you'll know this, know, equally as well, how do you communicate the right amount of information to somebody? And in a way where our general motto at Kinda Studio since from the beginning has been,

Speaker 1 (10:58.808)
How do you give somebody enough information that they're going to go to the pub and tell their friend about it? And then that friend tells a friend. Because as soon as you give them too much information, it starts to go over their head. How do you make the light bulb go off in their own mind for how they can understand themselves better and how to understand how they move through the world better?

And a lot of the time, if we can just help people activate that small little insight of information about how they respond and move through the world, then for us, that's really what success looks like no matter what we're doing.

I love that the pub test, that's like a better version of the does my mum understand it test. And also because it then has to break through the buzz and lots of noise. You've touched on a couple of things that I was going to mention. Firstly, that from all of our work is increasingly important. That work is not only underpinned by science, but that we show our workings in a world in an age where the truth is getting increasingly muddled and AI slopped.

and that idea of also just bringing it down to something that's explainable and we're going to come onto your projects shortly. I'm just going to shuffle some paper. I can't read my notes down. I would very much put you in the category of change makers and provocateurs, but in a very calming and nurturing way. So one of my questions was going to be, what is the impact that you want to have on the world?

Thank you, Sarah. That's really one of the biggest compliments I could receive. I think you're very right and it would definitely put you into this camp as well. It's not easy pioneering a new way of thinking and approaching things. For a few years when we started the business, Catherine and I would leave lots of conversations with people and they would say, wow, fascinating. Don't really understand how it works or how I would do it, but great chat.

Speaker 1 (12:58.284)
You know, and it took us our own understanding to say, how do we communicate this information and how do we go through the world differently or go through the way that we make creative work differently? Because obviously change is often slow, especially when you see, for example, innovation budgets getting cut. How do you make these things more important than before? In terms of the work we want to see and the change we want to be making, I think.

For us, especially what I've been talking about recently is the way that we're set up is we have our studio in our lab and our studio works as an extension of a lot of creative and innovation teams, as well as creating our own work that's informed by science. The process that we use is called science informed design, where we are looking at research all of the time in the field of neuroscience and we...

We piece it all together and we help understand some of the studies and interventions that have taken place and we say, how do we apply this directly into creative and cultural work for people to use? And then we have our real world neuroscience lab, which uses a range of EEG headsets and biosensors to measure your physiology. And of course, always self-report measures because you need to capture the lived experience that people are having within themselves. And all of this has been set up to be

we're reflective of the real world. In these neuroscience labs, in academia, they have to have highly controlled environments for very good reason. But of course, that's not the way that the real world works. In the real world, as you well know, all of these integrations are happening at any one moment in time. So our lab has been set up to reflect this, which means that we give up some of the control to reflect these real world settings. More more recently, we're fusing the lab and studio together to create interactive works.

Well, we're using these technologies that are allowing us to peer inside the moment to moment responses people are having in their brains and bodies. It's not just technology for technology sake or brain body sensing because it's cool and especially more than ever now the brain, it's sexy, but we want to use it as a gateway in.

Speaker 1 (15:02.082)
so that people can learn something new about themselves. And so it's not just creating beautiful, immersive and interactive artwork, which of course is excellent and we know is good for the brain and body. But as you mentioned, we're also really interested in the educational portion of it. And also we know from neuroscience that the more you can have interactive embodied learning experiences, the more someone can learn about themselves. That's what leads to transformation and change even on

tiniest level when you give somebody new experience of themselves. So that's what we're really moving towards is how do we help people learn something new through interactive and engaging ways. Because ultimately, when it comes to, for example, mental health and health care interventions, what we see is that a lot of these interventions don't have very good engagement.

There are really high drop-off rates, for example, in the NHS. So even though the intervention might be effective, people aren't sticking around for long enough in order for them to have the effect that they're meant to have. At Kind of Studios, don't, at the moment at least, work with clinical populations. We're very much looking at the general public, and we're not claiming to be using clinical interventions. But it's moving towards this idea of how do we begin to change how people care for themselves and really ask the question,

How do we make cultural experiences not just a nice to have, not a leisure activity, but part of our models and systems of care? Looking further into the future, we're thinking about how do we start to even the playing field a little bit about what real world cultural research looks like? Because I think previously it's been a one way system from academia into creative projects.

and creative industry. And we're trying to build a deeper two-way feedback loop. So with the Barbican, for example, we're going to be gathering a lot of the physiological data from the experience. And after it's done, we're going to be analyzing that data. And for me, that's what really lights me up because we can end up, hopefully, if all the data is streaming through properly.

Speaker 1 (17:13.642)
end up with one of the largest real world cultural data sets and then it becomes what can we do with that information? Can we analyze it and feed it back into academia to help understand what's happening in the real world? How does that inform new research questions that academics can ask? How do we use this cultural data set, for example, in some of these new hypotheses or research methods or build large data sets?

What's exciting for me is to help continue to discover new ways of having cultural and ecological relevance and validity and hopefully start to tip the scales about how some of this real world research is reflected while of course never ever superseding the importance and the rigor that academics have because if it weren't for their work, of course none of this would ever be possible.

Wow, I hadn't realised the scale and the scope of that project and the idea of where it's going to end up. There's a couple of really interesting points to...

that I'd like to pull out of what you were just talking about. This whole idea of the feedback loop, this two-way academia experience back to academia loop, it's something that's coming up with quite a few of the people I've been talking to. I spoke to a sonic strategist, Steve Keller, who's based in New York, and that's very much one of the things he does. And I spoke to Professor Charles Spence, and again, it's very much about the experiential events that then feed back these very obviously rigorous studies, which I love Charles said, which basically nobody ever reads.

and he was laughing at his own research, but then turned them into these experiences under this idea of senseplorational interactive research and also the idea of the self-reporting going hand in hand with the data that you're gathering.

Speaker 2 (18:58.018)
This is the stuff I get really excited about. These are where the stories happen, where people start telling you these really unique and individual things that have happened to them. It's the complete antithesis to all of this AI flattening and the idea that data smooths everything out. If we can keep pulling these stories and this humanity and a story that's unique to you, even though I might not have experienced it, it still speaks to my humanity and I can still share.

the interestingness of that story. So I think that's wonderful. You're kind of answering some of the questions already that I was going to ask you. One of them was going to be how much of your work is in the area of human connection and wellbeing and increasingly important in this crazy, weird and frenetic world that we're living in. Has your research produced any insights that have surprised you for better or for worse?

Yeah, I think that one of the age old questions in neuroaesthetics and aesthetic sciences is are aesthetic preferences universal or are they individual? And of course, well, the answer is it depends. So many of our aesthetic preferences and responses have come from our evolutionary basis. Ultimately, as humans, we're coded for survival. That's the most important thing. And so a lot of the ways that we respond to things are based on human evolution in that regard.

So food, is it going to be nutritious? Have sex and procreate the species? Can I use as little energy as possible? I presume those kinds

Can I use as little energy as possible? What is going to be the most efficient? Ultimately, the brain is lazy. It relies on past information to inform your next steps that you're going to be taking. Do I feel safe here? Do I feel there's any danger or threat involved? Am I closing off to something because I feel in danger? Is there a loud noise? That's why, for example, pink noise, the sounds of nature.

Speaker 1 (20:46.21)
babbling brooks, the wind and trees, even some bird song. We all generally have a calming response to this because as humans we've evolved from nature. That was our original environment. Now, of course, if you've had a life experience where some babbling brook had a traumatic event for you, of course that will cloud the response that you have because of that sense memory. However, those are our inbuilt responses. But then of course, all of the...

cultural experiences that we've gone through, the conditioning we've had in our lives, the memories and experiences, what we've been taught, those are affecting how we respond to things. That's why, of course, in Aesthetic Science Studies, you're looking at lot of cross-cultural differences as well, East versus West, and then also as well as a lot of studies will look at experts and non-experts because so much of our preferences towards things is, I understand it? And so if I don't understand it, my brain is not gonna light up in the same way.

I would say good references music and sound because everyone has different musical preferences and different genres that they like. Generally speaking in academia, there's a couple different ways that they do sound and music studies. One is to give everybody the same piece of music and see how their brains respond. And the other is to have everybody self-select their favorite piece of music because that's still, you know, consistency for control. Because if I love jazz music and you hate it and...

somebody puts jazz music on in the study, that's not necessarily gonna be an equal playing field for us. And so some of the things that are surprising that we saw and we have seen are the differences amongst people in terms of what energizes them, what relaxes them. Largely speaking, a piece of music with a low BPM, a calming sound.

You know, famously the most relaxing piece of music ever created was Marconi Union, Weightless. Most people will have a calming response to that and an energizing high BPM rhythmic piece of music will largely have the opposite effect, energize somebody, increase their nervous system response, their parasympathetic nervous system, increase their heart rate.

Speaker 2 (22:49.26)
it's to do with heart rate and in the same way that running cadence if I put different speeds of music on will make me run at different speeds so you're

Exactly. Your body is so quick to sync up in time with its surroundings. So your heart rate might accelerate or decelerate. Your sweat response might increase. These are all physiological markers of arousal. And so the Barbican exhibition called Your Inner Symphony effectively helps people understand their inbuilt responses to the sounds around them in the environment. People place their hands on a sensor and it tracks their heart rate.

heart affiliate zoology and their galvanic skin response, their SWAT response. And it turns each one of those signals into a different visual element. So there's an orb in front of the user and the heart rate controls the speed, the galvanic skin response controls the color, and then the heart rate variability controls the shape. And what's beautiful is that everybody has different baselines, everyone has different responses. Yours might be yellow and pink and spiky, which is a marker of higher arousal.

Mine might be blue and red and purple and more rounded and slow as a marker of lower arousal. And so when we were doing the kind of user testing before the experience launched, we brought a bunch of people in the room and we played them two different pieces of music. One objectively low arousal relaxing and one objectively faster pace, higher arousal. And largely speaking, most people had similar responses. You know, they had the slower rounded or

for the more relaxing one and the faster one and the colorful for the faster music. But we did see a few people who had the opposite effect, where the relaxing piece of music made their orb yellow and pink and spiky. And then the kind of techno track made their orb blue and purple and rounded. And then when we had the exit interviews with these people afterwards, I asked the people and they were just like, I just love techno music. I find it so relaxing.

Speaker 1 (24:49.502)
And so that's just a good example of a surprising finding where people responded differently and you you recognize that everyone has different responses towards things. And I think that's what makes things really beautiful as well. You know, this idea of perceptual and sensory diversity about how we all have different experiences. What we've tried to do as well with Yorner Symphony.

at the Barbican is hopefully create a new visual language for people to be able to talk about that, right? Because language is reductive. A lot of people don't have the words to use and we don't find these things easy. So if your orb is completely different than mine, Sarah, we then have a new way to communicate and share and learn more about each other. And of course, in that discourse and dialogue, we can grow further and learn more about ourselves and others as well.

I'm now envisioning this future. I'm just in the middle of reading his dark materials books again. Instead of our demons, we could actually have little orbs and understand and communicate by a color and shape instead of actually using words, how intriguing that might be.

100 % I think that as we all become more emotionally literate, literacy doesn't necessarily mean being able to verbally communicate it. And so how do we share with others how we're feeling without necessarily having to be overt or how do we learn more, for example, of how, of what we're feeling. With our work, it focuses on connection. And of course the inverse of that is disconnection. And that's something that we all struggle with. And so how do we help people learn more about even how they're feeling? Absolutely.

fascinating. The projects that you work on, I would really, I'm really interested to know about a couple of them, especially ones that link visuals and senses and what we've just been talking about very much as an example of that. Taking us behind the scenes, so anybody who's listening who's thinking about, I love the idea of getting into this world or doing these kind of projects. Where do you start and how do you plan the audience journey? And again, you've talked a little bit about how you test the ideas. How does everything get tested?

Speaker 2 (26:52.897)
you go about this?

In a perfect world, everything gets tested.

I know we don't live in that perfect world.

Exactly. As one of my teachers tells me, everything is perfect. Not always preferred though. We always start at the same place within our projects and we also encourage any partners we work with to do the same. We often jump to the end first. How do you want someone to feel and get nuanced about how do you want them to feel? And not only that, but perhaps what is the user outcome or the action or behavior? Because a lot of the time, you you always need to ask the question, so what?

So why are you doing something? And especially also when it comes to all the neuroscience research, what has the research shown about how this is impactful or how it affects someone's life? We jumped to the end first. So much of our work is centered around emotion and feeling. So how do you want someone to feel? Do you want them to feel relaxed, calm? Do you want them to feel frightened? Do you want them to feel in a state of awe and wonder? Do you want them to feel creatively expanded?

Speaker 1 (28:00.63)
And then we work backwards from there. And then we say, okay, what are the ingredients that we have? What is the medium? Is it a digital experience? Is it physical? You know, is it a video? Is it storytelling? And then from there, what are the various sensory ingredients at play to do so? And working backwards in that way. And from there, you can start to unpick and unravel. We work a lot with the...

arousal valence model of emotions, which you're probably familiar with, which is a very well-documented psychology and neuroscience model, which basically maps states of excitement and arousal, high and low arousal, and then positive and negative experience. It basically breaks apart this kind of graph into four different quadrants, high arousal, positive into low arousal, positive and negative, and so forth. These are some of the bases that we work.

on and you have to get specific. You can't just create something general. Otherwise that will lose its effect. But there's a lot of plucking and pulling. of course we're creating an experience right now that we'll be launching in New York. The plot on the graph that we've started on of how we want someone to feel is different than where we've ended on. In the creative process, things change and they shift. But largely speaking, we help people create safe.

opportunities to feel and safe opportunities to experience themselves in new ways. Because a lot of the way the world is set up now, and especially some of the social and economic and political challenges we're going through in this moment, means we do not feel safe. And we go to our coping mechanism survival, which is shutting down a lot of the time. But art and immersive experiences and design and culture, these incredibly potent spaces and environments allow us safe

opportunities to feel. In neuroaesthetics, there's something called aesthetic emotions, which are the emotions that I feel in the presence of a work of art. The easiest example is a sad piece of music where

Speaker 1 (30:00.012)
When I'm listening to the sad piece of music, I know it's not my sadness, it's the music sadness itself. And that psychological distance between that emotion, knowing that it doesn't belong to me, creates a safe opportunity as a gateway in. So whether or not I'm conscious of it, it provides an opportunity for me to process my own sadness as well. And the more we can have experiences to provide those deep states of feeling and sensation, the more I can feel comfortable with feeling and sensation. And we know that the more experiences you have of that.

the more it leads to new reprogramming, new understanding of the nuances of the myriad of sensations that we feel inside of our bodies and the effect that we said has on our brain and our mood in that regard. We feel very blessed to be able to work on a wide variety of projects. And I think that there's so many ways of reaching the same goal. And if the goal is how do I feel well? How do I feel connected?

There are so many different ways of getting there and they can be engaging and fun and inspiring and they don't always need to feel like hard work and certainly not getting to a point of stillness or silence, which is of course not an easy state to get to in our busy modern minds.

No. Apart from when you're on holiday, which I know is what you've recently done. You say that you feel blessed. I think you and Catherine have worked really hard to get to this point where you are working across these different fields. A lot of the work you do, it's in galleries and in museums and the whole context of where one would experience art sets up, would, I don't know if this is a question or a statement. It feels like a safer space anyway, because you're not being judged in the same way that you might in a very...

different contexts. I think it invites people in with their barriers down a little bit, or maybe it doesn't. Maybe that's just because I'm a demographic that's quite comfortable in galleries and museums. Maybe it's not the same for everybody.

Speaker 1 (31:57.74)
I think it's a both and situation. 100 % those spaces are spaces of inclusion a lot of the time and spaces where you can feel free and creatively express. And at the same time, we also think about the challenges across, for example, socioeconomic groups. There's a lot of research to show that people of lower socioeconomic status don't have physical proximity to those spaces and also don't have the financial affordances to visit some of them if they're paid experiences, for example. And there is...

a lot of great work. There's a great study from Daisy Fandcourt, who's a wonderful researcher at UCL doing a lot of work with arts and health that shows that wellbeing is slightly mediated by our access to these spaces. We also really think about digital access. You obviously can reach more people through digital experiences as well. And so really thinking about all of the means of doing so. We have a podcast we made on Audible.

called Beyond Five Senses, which does what it says in the tin. And it's a seven episode show all about seven different senses. The intention of the show was to create an immersive digital learning resource where we used immersive audio and sound design to take somebody on a journey. We have other experiences that we're doing as well. have an experience that hasn't fully launched yet, hasn't fully reached the distribution that it's destined to, if anybody's listening, called Inspirit.

which is an audio visual breathing experience where audiences are asked to sync their breathing in time with immersive visuals and audio. The beauty of InSprit is it can be applied and used anywhere. InSprit could be at a gallery.

It can be done individually within your own sensory pod. It can be done with others in spaces where all of your breathing syncs up in time with each other. And we know that that leads to huge states of connection, pro-social behavior, generosity, more feeling of community and kindness. Where I love to see InSprit is, for example, in any places of high stress. So imagine in your in-flight entertainment. It can be applied to so many different environments. And so that's what is also very important for us is how do we create

Speaker 1 (34:06.712)
flexible and nimble and variable experiences that can be applied across different settings and for different groups of people.

So if I wanted to experience this, is that something that I can include? Does it have to be installed using special technology?

Anyone can experience a bit a simple way to describe it as an immersive piece of digital content. We've had a premiere in New York at demo festival, which is the end of year festival for new Inc, which is the incubator from the new museum, which we were part of this year. And it was, it was wonderful to premiere. Inspirit finally for our public audience where the way it works is an app interface. You click in, choose your experience. We've got a high energy and a low energy experience for different.

states of being. We're working hard now at seeing, you know, where we can launch Inspirit publicly for a wider group of people and how to get it out there to a higher number of groups. Because the one thing I would say about galleries, to your point, is that I think this is changing now with a lot of new gallery experiences and immersive environments. But historically, sometimes galleries were seen as for people of a certain group. And, you know, the art group

can feel a little bit exclusionary at some times. You I never studied art history. I don't necessarily understand a lot of these historic Renaissance paintings that are in the National Gallery, for example. We need to still work to even the playing field in some spaces and make sure everybody feels that they can be part of it. Loads of third spaces opening now are doing that and have modern experiences are catering to different groups of people. So it's a very fertile time for new spaces that regard.

Speaker 2 (35:49.958)
I completely agree, there are so many interesting new spaces, but also what traditional galleries are doing. Courtauld does work with the perfumer, adding smell and storytelling to paintings as a way to bring in new audiences or working with school students to reinterpret paintings and art and to encourage a wider group of people to feel like they are welcome to walk through that door, which I think is really exciting.

Actually, I went to your performance last night, which is a really good example of that. It's called Rose, which is a performance from Sharon Ayal's studio.

beautiful choreographer I think based in Paris and then a collaboration with Young, the record label. And it was at Sadler's Wells East. I had the pleasure of seeing this in New York last year and then when I saw it coming to London, I scooped up loads of tickets and effectively just really simply put it's a club night meets a dance performance and for three hours there's an incredible DJ who's DJing and everyone's dancing around and then when you least expect it, you see these incredible

incredible dancers come out onto the dance floor where the crowd has to open for them and everybody is witnessing their incredible performances. And what was so beautiful about this was that continues to happen. So the dancers come out for 10 or 15 minutes. They do their choreography. Then they leave. It goes back to the club night. The dancers come back. You never know where you're expecting them. And what you see is the bodies of the people in the space begin to transform.

the head bobbing and shoulder tapping begin to transform into more full embodied movement. Last night at the premiere in London, I saw Sam Bompas of Bompas and Parr, who I'm sure you know.

Speaker 2 (37:25.558)
at the event on Tuesday.

What Sam said to me was, isn't this great for democratizing dance performances? Because of course you don't have dance performances and Sadler's Wells even isn't for everybody. But then you have people who love a club night and like to move their body in that way. And isn't it amazing to see these worlds colliding to democratize, for example, what a dance performance could be. So I feel like that's a really good example on this topic.

wonderful. I love that very much. That sounds absolutely, my god, magical. I do not remember seeing the word neuroesthetist, which took me a while to be able to pronounce, on the list of career choices when I was at school. How did you get here? How and why?

I choose not to call myself a neurasthetist for obvious reasons. I don't think I'd ever be able to say it properly myself. Yeah, it's a good question. I I certainly didn't start my career here. I started my career working in communications and music and media and entertainment. And so I was working in that industry for quite a while. And then over the course of time, as you develop and change, I started studying yoga. I became a ceramicist.

I became very focused on wellbeing and helping people understand creativity as a state of being. think creativity is something that as adults we often lose, especially if we were not conditioned for this within our family dynamics, for example. And I wanted to help people understand creativity as a state of being as opposed to an output. And somehow along the way in my journeys, I stumbled upon this master's in neuroesthetics at Goldsmiths University.

Speaker 1 (39:07.084)
And I thought, wow, this seems to really integrate all of the different parts. And after studying the Eastern science of wellbeing and the body and meditation and somatic practices and having grown up as a dancer, I wanted to go back and study the Western neuroscience of it all. And when I went to go study in that master's program, my friends, my family, they said, wow, sounds incredible. What are you gonna do with it?

I don't really know, but it feels like the right thing. And at the time, I could have really never expected the path that my life would take and where I'm at now. Of course, looking back, it all makes sense. I used to work in music and culture, and now I look at the science of how music and culture affect us for our health and for our wellbeing, which has always been a big focus of mine. And so I feel very honored to bring all the parts of myself together. And I think it's also important to communicate some of this because the world teaches you to do one thing and become an expert.

and I didn't start studying science. I started studying the body and I grew up as a dancer and then I circled back to neuroscience later in life. But all of those disparate parts of myself have come together to form what I'm able to do now. And that is synthesize this for creative culture communications. And I think that's equally as important. And so I do encourage anybody who has...

Lots of disparate interest to pursue those small little threads because all of them work together to actually lead to something a lot more powerful and potent. And of course, in my journey of becoming a neuro-aesthetician, I along the way met Katherine Templer Lewis, who had been doing these art science collaborations really for 10 years previous before neuro-aesthetics was a thing. Meeting her along the way was obviously incredibly potent for my journey.

really understanding how to formulate and develop these ideas. Catherine and I joined forces together to really create even more potential of what's possible here.

Speaker 2 (41:08.536)
So many of the people doing the really interesting things didn't have a linear journey. A lot of them have ended up creating the business or creating the company or creating the environment that they want to work in because it didn't already exist. Especially now in this time when careers are no longer linear, knowing that all of the different things might not make sense, but there's a moment in time when we go, okay, so in my case, I did science at school. I became a screen printer. have dyspraxia. So I look at signage. That's how I navigate the

world and then one day it's like, that's why it all makes sense. But the message that it's all going to be okay, it just if you don't know what you're going to do yet, just settle and one day it will all make sense. think that's such a reassuring message.

It is, it definitely is. And I couldn't agree more. And I think it's really important. And it's really important to celebrate yourself in that regard, because it's easy to also have imposter syndrome. When you look at other people who have studied this for 10 years and dedicated this and that. And I think of course, imposter syndrome is a completely normal life experience that everyone has, but no one is going to do it like you because the life experiences.

And the various disparate fields you've studied have all led to what makes the way that you approach something very unique. And that should be celebrated more.

Absolutely. I think this might be end up being the big takeaway from from this conversation. And it's a thing whenever I do talks at really big events, I ask the other speakers, even if they look really confident, how are you? And everybody has imposter syndrome. And maybe two people I've met haven't. But it is just the human condition. We just hide it and mask it incredibly well. I'm going to now come on to a couple of the universal questions that I've been asking everybody. The first one is to make a choice between either shudder

Speaker 2 (42:59.553)
or disappointment.

I'll go for shudder. I think we've all had experiences of disappointment when it comes to food, when something looks really delicious and then it's just not what you were expecting at all. I thought about this and it's really interesting because the idea of shudder, mine is a little bit complex. The same thing that makes me light up with excitement also makes me shudder a little bit, which of course is related to fear and danger. I don't have so many fears or phobias, but one of the things I am afraid of is sharp, jagged, slippery.

rocks. I grew up in Canada going on canoe trips. We would paddle down rapids. There was always a risk that if you got your stern of the canoe caught in a rapid, you could get pulled under. The idea of slipping and getting stuck between rocks was always very scary for me. And at the same time, I love cliff jumping into the sea. I love all sorts of adventure like that. I will never ever be the first.

to jump off the cliff, somebody needs to jump before me. Also, love the texture of the algae on the rock, but it also makes me shudder a little bit when I see it with this kind of sense of danger and potential fear of death.

think that's really interesting, the balance, but also being aware that you can almost document the balance between the two.

Speaker 1 (44:21.614)
Yeah, it's a contrast because generally as a human, I'm very tactically inclined. I like fabrics and materials, both from a visual perspective when I look at them and I can feel the way they might touch. And I touch them form and fabric are all very much how I like to experience things. And so it's almost like a contrast where I want to like the rocks because I like everything about it. But there's some inbuilt memories that get in the way of that full experience.

Which frankly makes sense. All of these memories, they come from somewhere that we just kept as safe from something when we were little. My next question is about an item that evokes a happy sense memory or happy sense feelings as soon as you look at it.

As I mentioned, I am a very tactically inclined person and I have a lot of homemade objects around the house from making ceramics and different forms and textures. And I've got a vast collection of handmade mugs. There's something about for me, yeah, the sense of feeling when I'm holding a mug in my hand. So really happy sense memory for me is I have one mug.

That was the first mug I ever made. And it was a fluke, Sarah. I was not a very good ceramicist at this point, but I just happened to make a fluke of an excellent mug that held in your hand perfectly. And I've never since been able to ever recreate it in the same way. There's a sense of all of these experiences that I'm mentioning are rooted in lived experience of bringing back the feeling and the idea of being.

at one with the clay hunched over on the wheel in this delicate dance of a flow state with a piece of clay is very happy place for me as a earth sign in my astrological chart. I love anything that has a sense of this tactile grounding to the earth. So certain mugs, especially the first one I made is a happy sense memory for me.

Speaker 2 (46:07.832)
And there will be lots of people agreeing with you. had a big conversation on LinkedIn the other day about how a coffee mug has to be the perfect shape. Just, I'm going to show you a mug that I behind me. I'm surrounded by ceramicists and artists. One of them made this, it's the most beautiful mug. It's covered in knobbly bits. This is my Kiki Boba mug. this is- Previous episodes, I've talked to various people about Kiki Boba. This is the mug that makes your coffee taste more bitter because it's got this spiky-

please do.

Speaker 1 (46:37.198)
You should do a taste test for people with their eyes closed and see how the taste changes. I'd love to hear about that.

Well, I'll invite you. I think we should all do it one day. We've covered so many really interesting things. What one thing about sight and senses would you like listeners to take away from this conversation?

Well, know, Sarah, as I've kind of spoken about quite a bit today, and I always say if I was an academic researcher, which I'm not, and I don't think I ever will be, I would probably research the sense of interoception, which is your sense of your internal bodily sensations, my ability to feel my heartbeat, feel my stomach rumbling, my gut instinct, sensing how I feel. I think that is one sense that people still really need to develop in a lot of us.

and we know that interoception is really tightly linked to wellbeing. So I would encourage people to close their eyes. And as we're talking about a lot of the senses, what we see and what we touch and what we smell and what we hear, all these senses are exteroceptive senses. They exist outside of ourselves. And take a moment to perhaps close down from those external senses to connect.

to your inner sense. One of my favorite things to ever talk about is a flotation tank, where you're in a forced sensory deprivation, a dark chamber free of all these extra receptive senses, and it allows you to heighten this interoceptive ability.

Speaker 1 (48:07.33)
We love smell and sight and touch and sound and all the other senses, but let's give a little bit more prominence to the beautiful experiences inside of our own self and arguably shutting down some of those extra-receptive senses is a very powerful gateway into those.

So many people have said, close your eyes. Sight is so dominant and we live in predictions. And so actually shutting that down and then paying attention to what's inside, I think that's incredibly important. Robyn, thank you so much. This has been the most wonderful and inspiring and optimistic conversation. It's been such a pleasure.

Thank you so much for having me, Sarah.

Speaker 2 (48:52.77)
Would you like updates, extras, sense hacking experiments and book recommendations from the guests? Head over to seeingsenses.substack.com. We'll take you beneath the surface to explore what's happening inside our brain and body, along with updates on the latest in cross-disciplinary science.