Music and Health: The Creative Arts and Healing
From lullabies to movie soundtracks to workout playlists, music has the capacity to change how we feel. But what is the evidence that music’s effects can transform physical health? On our new podcast miniseries, Music and Health, we’ll explore the power of music to heal our minds, bodies, and even communities.
On the first episode of this series, host J. D. Talasek is joined by Renée Fleming and Susan Magsamen. Fleming is an opera soprano, actress, and long time advocate for the healing powers of the arts. She recently edited a book called Music and Mind: Harnessing the Arts for Health and Wellness. Magsamen founded the International Arts + Mind Lab, and created the NeuroArts Blueprint. They discuss health and arts research, current initiatives to use the arts to heal, and how this vital approach to care can be expanded.
This series is produced in collaboration with Susan Magsamen and Leonardo journal.
Resources
- Read Renée Fleming’s book, Music and Mind: Harnessing the Arts for Health and Wellness, to learn more about how music and the creative arts are being used for health. The book was also recently reviewed in Issues by Susan Fitzpatrick, who called Fleming’s introduction “beautifully written, providing a lyrical and comprehensive summary of the main ideas in the book.”
- Learn more about Susan Magsamen’s work by visiting the International Arts + Mind Lab website, and check out Magsamen and Ivy Ross’s book, Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us.
- Visit the NeuroArts Blueprint website to find information on how the creative arts impact the brain. You can also find more information about and apply for the Renée Fleming Neuroarts Investigator Award.
- Visit the Sound Health Initiative website to learn more about the partnership between the National Institutes of Health and the Kennedy Center to research the potential of music to treat a wide range of conditions.
- Listen to the Real Young Prodigys’ song “Where My Bus At” and learn more about how the song helped inspire change in Louisville. Thank you to the Real Young Prodigys for allowing use of their song in this episode!
Transcript
J.D. Talasek: Welcome to The Ongoing Transformation, a podcast from Issues in Science and Technology. Issues is a quarterly journal published by the National Academy of Sciences and Arizona State University.
From the soothing lullaby of Rock-a-bye Baby, to the pumped-up jam of the Rocky theme—music has the ability to change how we feel, but can it’s transformative power go deeper and actually heal? That’s what we’re exploring in our new podcast, mini-series called Music and Health. Launched in collaboration with Susan Magsamen and with Leonardo journal, we’ll be examining how music impacts our minds, bodies, and community health.
I’m J.D. Talasek, Director of Cultural Programs of the National Academy of Sciences, and for this debut of this series, I’m delighted to be joined by Renée Fleming and Susan Magsamen. Renée is an actress, soprano and longtime advocate of the healing power of the arts. She recently edited a book called Music and Mind: Harnessing the Arts for Health and Wellness. Susan, founded the International Arts and Mind Lab and created the NeuroArts Blueprint.
Renée and Susan, welcome to the Ongoing Transformation Podcast.
Renée Fleming: Thank you, J.D.
Susan Magsamen: Thank you. Really a pleasure to be here.
Talasek: The phrase “ongoing transformation,” it’s a perfect description of the work that you both have been doing at the intersection of music, health and well-being. It seems to be a very dynamic and evolving terrain, so transformation is very appropriate, and you both have been at the center of much of this activity. To get started, you both are just perfect to ask this question. What do we mean when we say art and health?
We’re not the arts and we’re not entirely science, but we connect in all of those intersections.
Fleming: That’s an interesting question because it really is the intersection between the two. Anjan Choudhury said recently that we’re neither fish nor fowl because we’re not the arts and we’re not entirely science, but we connect in all of those intersections. And of course what Susan does is far bigger because the umbrella is vast. It includes every aesthetic experience, right, Susan?
Magsamen: Yeah. When you think about the arts, it immediately narrows your perspective, because the truth is is that we’re wired to bring the world in through our senses and to create meaning and to create expression. And I think at its core, the arts are really about creative expression. So whether that’s visual arts, singing, dancing, gardening, all of these things that really make us feel most alive.
And because science and health and arts and technology have come together in this, I think, very messy, but beautiful interdisciplinary work, we now understand that we’re wired for these experiences and they’re what make us healthy physically and mentally. What helps us build community, what helps us to learn. And I think we’re starting to redefine art, not just as something that you are extremely good at—Renée Fleming—or me who can’t sing but sings every day and gets great benefit physically and mentally from it.
So you use the word transformation, which I love. I think we’re always transforming. I mean, that is the magic of neuroplasticity. We’re always changing. Our brains are always changing. And in that lies, I think, hope for us individually and also for humanity. And this work is at the core of that.
Having science now validate this work is offering us tremendous opportunities for embedding these therapies and therapeutic values in healthcare.
Fleming: And what science has helped us do is measure the benefits of the arts, and particularly music and now dance movement because they go together for folks with movement disorders. And we’re finding tremendous benefits because of the plasticity of the brain for children, pain, so many aging and Alzheimer’s, et cetera, so many various disorders, mental health. And having science now validate this work is offering us tremendous opportunities for embedding these therapies and therapeutic values in healthcare.
Talasek: Renée, I’d like to jump in there because so much of the groundswell of activity around this is something that you and Francis Collins of the NIH initiated with a lot of funding going to the research around sound and health. Could you talk a little bit about that?
Fleming: Yes. I met Francis in 2013 and I was just named a creative advisor to the Kennedy Center. And I said, “Why are scientists studying music?” And he said, “It’s because we want to understand the brain, the most complex object in the universe.” So we started this relationship, I said, “I think we could provide a platform for the work that you are doing and other scientists with the public at the Kennedy Center.”
And it’s just been a fantastic program and it’s evolved this year to expand more to wellness—health and wellbeing—and include many more diverse activities. They have now chefs coming, and authors and yoga, and they still have Dance for Parkinson’s, which is amazing. So it’s been extraordinary.
And at the same time, the NIH has funded more than $40 million in research. So I’m very involved with Susan in strengthening the pipeline with young scientists who pair with artists or who are looking at the arts for wellness and for healing. The NIH is going to follow that with fellowships so that will start very soon. So this is the kind of ecosystem we’re trying to create. And as Susan said recently, this isn’t even just a field anymore, it’s a total movement.
People have been using arts since the beginning of time. This is not new.
Magsamen: And to add to that, you started by talking about arts and health, but the arts and what we call “neuroarts” are really in every sector of society. And the implications are huge. So in education and in cultural arts, in the public health sector, also in government, and I would even say businesses are starting to look at how you bring arts and aesthetic experiences, whether that’s in physical design or programs that build community that address loneliness and isolation that really are tools to help address some of the most intractable problems that we have.
People have been using arts since the beginning of time. This is not new. There used to be more work that in studying the arts in the 70s, and 80s, and 90s, but it was when we were able to get inside our heads because of technology, non-invasively understand what’s happening at a structural functional neurophysiological level, how we started to be able to create a map of how the brain changes on arts and aesthetic experiences.
And that has huge implications as we continue to invest in that work. And we don’t know everything. We probably know very little, but what we do know is profound. And I think that’s what we’re starting to see this movement embrace and take forward.
I’ll just tell you one more thing. My son’s partner is an art teacher and she teaches K-5. And she went to orientation this week and they were talking about the amygdala, they were talking about the hippocampus, they were talking about the parasympathetic nervous system and the vagus nerve and the connection between mind and body when you’re making art for the whole school. And so it’s getting out there, but it needs to go a hundred million miles faster and further.
Talasek: And I want to stop just there for a second because I want to hear a little bit more about the NeuroArts Blueprint because that’s such a powerful tool that you’re developing with your team to help make this information accessible.
The world was ready to create a new field to coalesce all of these different disciplines and programs and approaches to really come together.
Magsamen: So Renée is the co-chair of the NeuroArts Blueprint with Eric Nestler, who is a neuroscientist at Mount Sinai in New York. And we envisioned this work in 2018. So it’s so interesting how parallel lines really converged with the work that Renée and Francis were doing and the work that I was doing at Hopkins and pairing up with the Aspen Institute.
So for two years, we really listened around the world to what was happening around arts research, arts practice, arts policy and arts funding. And what we saw was that the world was ready to create a new field to coalesce all of these different disciplines and programs and approaches to really come together. So Renée and Francis have really seeded the work in music and rigorous research. There’s now protocol measures, there’s outcome measures, there’s tools and techniques to get the research to be more rigorous and to be able to repeat it because that’s the nature of science. You have to have the rigor.
Fleming: We also have a toolkit now that can be found on the NIH website for how to conduct good research and how to create a grant that would be funded by the NIH. So that was an important piece of this puzzle because the rigor is so important.
Magsamen: Yeah, huge piece. And it’s really extraordinarily easy to access and to use. But the Blueprint convenes all of the stakeholders wherever they are around the world. And we’re really interested in advancing the research, helping to honor and support the practitioners of which there are many, looking at how to build advocacy and policy, and then how to really think about capacity building and leadership.
Because when you’re thinking about building a field, you really need to think long-term. It’s really turning up that light switch. And so the Blueprint has created work in the communities. The Renée Fleming Investigator Award was launched last year, which has been hugely successful. We funded seven interdisciplinary teams who are working on everything from hip hop and memory to looking at spaces for healing, and we’ll be doing that continually. So we’re in the process of starting our second year with that project.
We’ve also put together a scientific advisory board that’s putting an agenda together around how and what we need to study over the next 10 years. Super important. We’ve also aligned about 25 organizations, global organizations, that have hundreds and sometimes thousands of members. It’s called the Bright-Eyed Coalition. And they’re coming together to think about messaging, and policy, and advocacy, and ultimately funding, how you make this a sustainable field. So it’s a really exciting project to be working on because I think of the Blueprint as being in service of the field and working together to figure out how we make it sustainable, and that’s essential.
NeuroArts is the most visionary of all the plans that I’ve seen.
Fleming: Susan, I want to say to that NeuroArts is the most visionary of all the plans that I’ve seen, which is why I’m so excited about being part of it and supporting her. And this has been a very siloed, small, little bitsy field in the past in terms of both the research. People didn’t know what other people were doing. There was redundancy, there were things that weren’t really well-planned in terms of the actual research itself.
But Susan put together this plan with this Blueprint to make it cohesive and bring everyone together and get everyone on the same page so that we could lift the entire field. And it’s just magnificent. I highly recommend at least looking at the website, or the summary, or some of the material. And the resource center is going to be incredible.
The fact that everyone can—she calls it a watering hole—can bring their work to this place. We have the same thing for Music and Mind. It’s called the Sound Health Network, based at UCSF, but it’s more specific to the benefits of music. But this resource center for NeuroArts is broader and also geographically broader because it’s so international.
Magsamen: The Sound Health Network is a node. There’s other nodes that deeply concentrated content affinity groups. What the NeuroArts Blueprint is trying to do is connect those nodes. And so we all have our groups that we work with, but how do you come together? And so this virtual watering hole is a place where you can find anybody, anywhere, anytime, and you can share your own work.
And I think that’s something people have said to us that they feel like they have really found their group. Artists are the most generous, kind, giving community. And to be able to find what you need and to be able to get the support that you need for artists, I think one of the things I’m most proud of is that we’re able to do that and to level the playing field so researchers and artists and arts practitioners come together in a way that they can really nourish what they each need for themselves, but also with each other.
Fleming: I love that, when someone on Susan’s team said it’s a LinkedIn for arts and health.
Talasek: So as I hear you both talk about this, I’m struck by the ideal that NeuroArts is both part and parcel. In other words, it is the subject matter of what you’re bringing together. You talk about developing a new field, but I think it’s more than developing a new field, you’re really suggesting a new way of thinking about research that’s more inclusive.
And I like that because sometimes when we think about new fields, we actually sometimes run the risk of a new silo, which is not what you’re trying to do, but the elasticity of the mind is really what you’re talking about. And you’re showing us a new way of thinking about this, that is actually probably what we need.
This field is a combination of lots of different kinds of knowledge to solve really intractable issues through the lens of arts and aesthetic experiences.
Magsamen: We talk about ways of knowing in this field, and by that I mean academic research, rigorous basic science is essential, so is qualitative research, so is indigenous knowledge and what the ancients have taught us, so is lived experience and so is what artists know.
And so this field is a combination of lots of different kinds of knowledge to solve really intractable issues through the lens of arts and aesthetic experiences. So I think of this work as solution science. It’s really trying to address very intractable problems. So it’s not going to just fit in a school of medicine, although it’s going to be in a school of medicine. It can’t just sit in school of public health, although it will have people from public health.
And one of the other things that we’re putting together now is something called the Academic Education Network. And we’re first bringing together 20 to 30 academic institutions around the world that are working in research, in education, and in practice to figure out what are the best practices for more academic trajectories. And those are formal, but there are also informal ways that we bring this work forward that we learn, that we mentor, that we apprentice, that we fellow. I love that Renée and the NIH are putting together this fellowship program because we all learn in different ways. And so that’s something we’re just starting to move into now.
Fleming: So I love also your economic model, Susan, the fact that you’re studying that as well. The economic benefits of having in an elder care facility, music for instance, gives a three to one return on investment. And so that’s a statistic I love to quote because it was KPMG, I think, who did that study? Is that right?
Magsamen: Yeah, KPMG did that study. We now are working with Deloitte on another study that’s looking at what they call True Value. And so this is taking into consideration person with dementia or Alzheimer’s, the caregivers in the facility, and then all of the ancillary people that are in the life of someone that has dementia or Alzheimer’s, and what is that cost? And when you bring music in, what are you saving and what are you gaining in terms of true value?
So if your mom has Alzheimer’s, you may not be at work every day because you’re caring for your mom. There’s a cost to that, there’s a hard cost, there’s an opportunity cost, and you can go right down the line. How does that affect children’s mental health if their grandparent or their parent has Alzheimer’s? What does that mean to the care worker who’s been burned out?
AARP is our partner on that, and I think what we’re trying to show is that there is a triple bottom line for this work. And so healthcare providers and payers also really need to begin to understand the value of this work as it relates to the transactional nature of what they do. And we’re beginning to start to talk with healthcare payers now to understand how they can incorporate this for prevention, for intervention, and also for things like end of life care and for residual ways that this can really provide real meaning, but also value, economic value and also human value. So that’s an argument that we’re just starting to move into because we need the data, we need to understand it more holistically.
Fleming: The wonderful thing too, from an artist’s perspective is that the storytelling is endless. There are so many examples of how the arts can be a healing mechanism for us, both in a rigorous scientific way, but also in a general public health way. And so it’s pretty endless.
I was with Tom Schweitzer last night who is my favorite example of a community service from a music therapist. He’s built what’s basically a community center for Middleburg, Virginia. And the stories that he was telling me about the families that come to him and some of the children stay with him into adulthood and support the organization itself because they’ve been so changed by it, turning kids away from the potential for violence, for instance, by sitting and agreeing to listen to heavy metal with them. That’s one of my favorite stories from him.
Those with cardiac failures benefit tremendously from just singing anything two or three times a week because for this population, singing is exercise.
But also he has somebody whose now really working with him closely as an adult who was found in Florida foraging for food in dumpsters whose parents were hopelessly addicted to drugs. And he’s got one story after another. Of course, the best known one is has been made into a feature film called Music Got Me Here. And that’s Forest Allen who had a terrible brain injury, snowboarding without a helmet, and who learned to speak again through melodic intonation therapy.
One of my other favorites right now is that women with postpartum depression do much better singing in a choir. Suddenly there are a lot of studies about singing and singing in a choir that have surprising benefits. Another one is cardiology, is the fact that Jacquelyn Kulinski in the book has discovered that those with cardiac failures benefit tremendously from just singing anything two or three times a week because for this population, singing is exercise.
So we’re hoping for instance, to also enable artists to have some kind of certificate that will give them the safety recommendation for working in healthcare alongside, of course, licensed creative arts therapists and board certified music therapists. So there’s so much potential for this.
But Susan and I are working on something called art care, which would by zip code or GPS, enable people to connect to existing institutions and artistic practices in their own neighborhoods and communities. There’s so much that… for instance, performing arts venues do, they offer all kinds of programming for those with special or certainly for caregivers with their family members. And it’s hard to get the message out. It’s hard for people to know about.
Magsamen: It’s so interesting. I love that you’re lifting this up. Art care is different from social prescribing or arts on prescription because it’s basically saying to someone, you can weave the arts through your life in your community that it’s integral to your life. It’s not about solving something, it’s about living and wellbeing. Art care is an amazing tool. It’s using technology in its best sense.
There aren’t that many things that are that multi-directional. And I think that’s the real promise of it. And it’s affordable, it’s accessible, and it’s immediate.
Arts on prescription is so interesting, what Renée’s talking about. We did a study with CultureRx in Massachusetts. Massachusetts is the first state to be allocating resources for arts on prescription. It’s very exciting to see that happening. But when we first started working with CultureRx, we did a survey and what we saw was that healthcare providers felt better because they had something to offer people that they hadn’t before. Sometimes medications don’t work or they stopped working or there isn’t a medication.
And that for loneliness and isolation, being able to offer someone an opportunity to go to a museum or to go to a dance class made them feel better. And then the people that they were prescribing to, they felt seen and they had something they could do. And then the provider, the arts practitioner, really was able to bring their work in a way that was so meaningful. So everybody in the ecosystem got something.
And there aren’t that many things that are that multi-directional. And I think that’s the real promise of it. And it’s affordable, it’s accessible, and it’s immediate. And that’s another thing that most things that we offer don’t have that kind of trajectory. And so it’s very exciting to see both art care and arts on prescription starting to really grow as the research grows, as the community comes together and we begin to be able to show that continuum of care from a community artist, to a teaching artist, to a creative arts therapist, to a psychologist, a neurologist.
There’s so many people that are using the arts in service of something. And the more we can lift that up to policymakers at all levels—policy happens everywhere. And I think we need to really start to think about not just top down, but bottom up, what’s happening?
I saw a video of youth today who were advocating for getting a bus to their neighborhood and they’re doing a rap song saying, “We need the bus. We need the bus. Without the bus, we can’t learn. I want to learn. I want to grow. I need the bus.” The video went to their local superintendent who got them the bus. So I think it’s amazing. It’s amazing how this work can be accessed in so many different ways. And when you advocate for yourself, you have power. And I think so many people in our country and I think around the world don’t feel seen and they don’t feel like they have any power and their voices aren’t heard. So singing is about your voice.
Talasek: What you both have articulated just so beautifully with all these wonderful examples is that we’re not talking about just individual health, we’re talking about community health, we’re talking about environmental health, we’re talking about economic health, we’re talking about governance and health and policymaking, so to speak.
And you both have talked about this need for changing policy. So if I were to ask you to just step back and dream for a moment, what does that moment look like on the other side when we get policymakers to hear us, when we start getting physicians to understand and how to implement this into the medical system, what does that look like?
Fleming: I’m working in Los Angeles and what I’d love to see for the state of California—who has this fantastic arts education budget now—is there aren’t enough teachers. In fact, there almost no teachers because people turned away from the arts as becoming a public school teacher because they were told that everyone’s cut all of those programs.
So for childhood development, there’s no question that not only are there benefits to the brain, you learn focus, you can tune out extraneous noise, there are lasting changes to the brain after two years of study. So we have lots of research that has looked at this. But you also give a child a sense of identity if they have an expressive outlet, if they can discover who they are because they’re in a theater, or they’re in a performance venue, or they just have to give a speech, or they’re reading more.
So it is incredibly important. And my thought is to have creative arts therapists alongside that who have pro-social training, who have behavior training, who can help the entire school with morale, who can help with messaging. The NEA has extraordinary programs with the tiny budget that they have countrywide that are doing all kinds of initiatives exactly like what Susan just described. Meaning that if government discovers that there’s something, there’s a need in the community, artists can be the best messengers for that through murals, through banners, through public art, through expressive gatherings, through bringing people together.
We have to serve people in our communities who are fragile. We need lift them up and make them feel seen and make them feel that they’re important.
And we have to serve people in our communities who are fragile. We need lift them up and make them feel seen and make them feel that they’re important. And these types of group, especially group initiatives that blend in the arts are really helpful for that. I think performing arts venues should be become community centers.
There should be more activity, more things for people to do together, to discuss together. I just heard a fabulous thing about Austin Ballet. They decided to offer one dance class to adults. They now serve 15,000 adults in the city who all want to take dance. If every performing arts menu offered initiatives like this, you suddenly have a community that’s talking to each other, that’s doing things together, that is not thinking about politics. This is the one area that is bipartisan and it’s being passed in Illinois and Texas. I’m talking about support for creative arts therapist. So those are just a few thoughts.
Magsamen: People always say, “Well, if I could only do one art form, what would it be?” And I always say dance because it uses all of your sensory systems, your cardiovascular systems, your motor systems, your muscles, but it also creates synchronicity between us. And it’s just in terms of endorphins and oxytocin and dopamine and serotonin. And I guess if there was only one thing we could wish for policymakers is to have a rule or a law that says you have to dance every Friday night no matter what, with everybody. That would be my first one because we could get that done. And you can dance anywhere, anytime. And I think it’s just so extraordinary.
But just to add on to what Renée is saying, if early childhood is where the action is in terms of return it, and we’re seeing the incredible damage that happened when our children were closed in and away from each other during the pandemic and youth mental health is absolute epidemic. It’s really frightening how these children are feeling. And a lot of it has to do with expressing their voice, and being heard, and feeling safe to be able to share their voices and to learn who they are and to build those neural pathways that are so important for resiliency.
So I think we need to be doing more at a local—and I mean hyper-local level—for education and for child development and going all the way up the ladder. But I think we also have an opportunity in these community spaces that we are already in, in churches and in faith-based practices. I think that’s a really important place. Thinking about museums and libraries and the programming they do, certainly the performing arts centers, all of those places have policy. They all make a decision about what they’re going to do.
And so I think we can start local and small and also think about what are those messages that are going to flip the light switch at a national level, the UN and the World Health Organization and the World Bank and Davos and the World Economic Forum, all of those folks have begun to really understand the connection between art creates culture, culture creates community, and community creates humanity.
And when we don’t have community in all of these different places where we go and are throughout our lives, it starts to fall apart. And I think we’ve been experiencing that going into Covid, coming out of Covid, the divisiveness, the polarization, not being able to share views with each other.
What they need is the virtual watering hole to be able to get what they need to take it to those communities.
I’ll just give one example. I worked on a project where we brought two gangs together that were fighting gangs, that really were killing each other, in an arts experience. And we had them create weavings where one gang member from one group and another gang member from another group wove to the center. And then so they had their own stuff and they did amazing complex things around weaving through these different themes and metaphors, but then they had to figure out how to finish the piece together. And what they found in common was that there was things, there were ways for them to come together, and that was extraordinary.
And so I think there’s ways to think about policy in prison and how we bring arts into prisons and to detention centers. I think in every sector, there is policy at hyper local and national and even global places that we need to be thinking about this systemically and really moving it forward. And there’s people in all these sectors, a million flowers blooming, it’s almost like a hub and spoke kind of a model where all these sectors are there. What they need is the virtual watering hole to be able to get what they need to take it to those communities.
Talasek: So as we come to the close of this podcast, I can imagine that our listeners are really excited about what you just said because I’m excited.
Fleming: I think Your Brain on Art, Susan’s book last year also just flew around the country. It was everywhere. People were talking about it. Everybody knows that these are beneficial aspects to life, but people hadn’t thought to really focus on it and make sure that it’s embedded throughout our lives.
I go to a healthcare conference and I find that they’re looking more at those parts of health. And I think not really fully ever recognizing the snapshot of our citizens at large, how much… the loneliness piece is incredibly powerful. What our Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy, has done to draw attention that it’s great. And just in terms of just getting together, finding that community again and figuring out how do we come together? What are we doing? How many groups can we start or become involved in?
But I think Your Brain on Art really made us understand that the at home making of art, making of art with friends, whether… I love Susan lifted up doodling, for instance. That’s all very important. I took a walk this morning just for 20 minutes so that I could smell the outside so that I could look at the trees and just let my mind wander, get off the phones and allow the default mode network to do its job. The brain needs to rest. It’s the same as meditation, any kind of mindfulness is also incredibly great for us.
The World Health Organization, I’m an ambassador to them. Dr. Tedros said to me is incredibly concerned because depression is up 30% around the world. And this is because of all the things we’re talking about, the negativity of our tribalism. It’s not been good for us. And I just feel like the initiatives that we’re talking about can do a lot of good.
Magsamen: It’s easy to maybe sound like, “Oh, we’ll just do art.” Like that’s a Pollyanna pie in the sky idea. But the truth of the matter is, for the most part, the arts are joyful and they’re life filling, and they provide meaning and purpose, and they do that through neurotransmitters like dopamine and serotonin and the way our bodies and brains work and our spirits come together. And so it isn’t frivolous to say, “We should sing together and we should dance together, and we should do expressive writing, and we should do these things that we are hardwired for.”
It isn’t frivolous to say, “We should sing together and we should dance together, and we should do expressive writing, and we should do these things that we are hardwired for.”
And I think bringing that message forward and telling it in a way that people understand is really where this work is now lying, right? We need to talk to the billions of people that need this every day to not just cope, but to thrive. And we’ve set a low bar for ourselves. We get through. We need to thrive and we need to flourish and everyone deserves that. And I think that’s what this work can offer, because it’s also joyful. And I don’t want to forget that, it’s really joyful.
Talasek: I think that is a wonderful message to end this magnificent conversation. So Susan, Renée, thank you so much for taking your time to share these ideas and these thoughts, and we look forward to hearing more and seeing how things developed. Thank you for being here.
To learn more about arts, health and wellness, read Renée Fleming’s book, Music and Mind: Harnessing the Arts for Health and Wellness. And visit artandmindlab.org to learn more about Susan Magsamen’s work. Visit our show notes to find links to these resources and the many more mentioned throughout today’s podcast.
Please subscribe to the Ongoing Transformation wherever you get your podcast. And write to us at podcast@issues.org. Thanks to our podcast producer, Kimberly Quach and our audio engineer, Shannon Lynch. I’m J.D. Talasek, director of Cultural Programs of the National Academy of Sciences. And thanks for listening.