What are the barriers to employing art more to improve wellbeing? Elizabeth Tracey reports

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Your Brain on Art, a new book coauthored by Susan Magsamen, director of the Arts+Mind lab at Johns Hopkins, explores the many ways art helps people thrive and flourish, and overcome difficulties in their lives. Magsamen says the artful approach has four requirements.

Magsamen: We talk about the esthetic mindset, which are really four things: this idea of curiosity and being really interested in the world, playful exploration, sensorial experiences, so really tapping in and being aware of your sensory experiences, and the desire to be a maker and or a beholder. We’re makers and beholders throughout our day, we flip back and forth all the time. Unfortunately what happens in the education system is that we are told explicitly and implicitly that if you’re not talented and if you’re not gifted, you shouldn’t do it.  :34

Magsamen advocates for an engaging approach for everyone to participate in the arts, beginning very early in education. At Johns Hopkins, I’m Elizabeth Tracey.