The Art of Slowing Down

0:00Hey gang, we are hard at work producing new episodes of SideDor for you, but while we're doing that, here's something else for you to sink your teeth into. If you're listening to SideDor, let's face it, you're probably a fan of museums, which means you might be familiar with the experience of zooming through rooms, trying to take it all in, read every placard, see every single thing. But what happens when you do the opposite? What if you were to sit down and spend time with just a single work of art? Today we're sharing an episode of The Science of Happiness Podcast. And in this episode, you'll visit the Nevada Museum of Art to find out what happens in our brains when we take more time to really look at art. Honestly, I think it has totally changed the way I think about moving through museums. Here's The Science of Happiness. Enjoy. I did not grow up going to so many art museums. I grew up in a rural part of Northern Minnesota on a sheep farm.

1:04But when I was 25 or 26, maybe I went to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and I saw an installation that was commemorating the disappeared of the Columbians of a war of the late 1970s and 80s. And it created this haptic response in my body. It made me physically almost sick to my stomach in a way that I was intellectually fascinated by. That was like, how does an artwork do that to you? How can it have such a powerful, visceral impact on your psychological and biological functions that it could make you feel ill? Or feel incredible joy or incredible wonder in response to it? Welcome to Cities of All, our series on The Science of Happiness exploring the intersection of public life and public health. So far, we've traveled to downtown San Francisco to see how

2:10thoughtfully designed public spaces bring people together. We've walked through Harlem and New York City to experience the awe of historic landmarks and the stories they carry. Today, we visit Reno, Nevada, where a museum encourages thousands of people to look at art a little bit more slowly and mindfully. We also go deeper into the science of slow looking with Dr. Anjan Chatterjee, a leading neurologist who studies how the brain responds to beauty and art. We chose four works of art and for two of them, people just looked at them the way they normally would and for two of them. They looked at the works for 15 minutes, which is a long time. Their ratings of liking didn't change, but their ratings of beauty did. That's after these messages from our sponsors.

3:10Comprehensive, witty, speculative, critical, insightful, profound, wide ranging, hopefully it doesn't take itself too too seriously. I'm David Remnick and each week on The New Yorker Radio Hour, my colleagues and I try to make sense of what's happening in this chaotic world. I hope you'll join us for The New Yorker Radio Hour wherever you listen to podcasts. The thoughtful, exquisite, just, you know, real. Welcome back to Cities of All, our series about how public spaces affect public health. Today we're visiting one of my favorite museums, a museum in Nevada that encourages thousands of people to look at art a little bit more slowly and mindfully. And joining us is a pioneer in this space, Colin and Robertson. Colin works at the intersection of arts education and the environment at the Nevada Museum of Art. And he's been guiding people in something called slow looking and approach that's based on the idea that when we really take our

4:14time to take in what art presents to us, it can change our life. Colin, I'm really glad to be talking with you. Thank you so much, Decker. It's great to be here. A lot of new research is starting to show that art is a pathway to well-being, that when we mean in art, it shapes how we feel, influences emotions like beauty and compassion, and empathy and it shapes how we behave in the world and try to lift up the world towards better ends. So when you and your museum team look at people going through exhibitions, what do you see? How do you think about a person's experience in front of a piece of art? There's a very famous study, at least maybe it's infamous, that the average museum visitor looks at an artwork for 27 plus or minus seconds before they move on. And it's hard because I think in an environment, in a place, in a culture where people don't know, they don't learn how to experience art

5:15or just embrace it in an open way. We limit our focus to a kind of entertainment value and not one that is actually about how to engage with our emotional and psychological lives. I really believe fervently that art can really change people and it can mobilize people to embrace their feelings and intuition and community in ways that are oftentimes surprising because in our culture, I think oftentimes museums are lumped into entertainment more than they are lumped into well-being or health and wellness. And so we try to bridge that gap a bit by engaging teachers and students and experiences in the museum. We really try to emphasize the slow looking idea, reminding them that if they're going to actually engage in thinking about and feeling through

6:21an artwork, they've got to slow down. I'd love to have you guide us through the exhibit as you did with eighth graders who visited the Nevada Museum of Art. What was that like from start to finish? The students' variety of artworks, but the first component of their visit is into an installation by the Brazilian artist Ernesto Netto, called Children of the Earth. So we're going to start in our first artwork. It's an installation that is very multi-sensory. You have to imagine a wall of fabric curtains in a kind of hand-sown pattern of green fabrics. And those fabrics sort of encircles you in this green wall of fabric. And you have to kind of bat your way through the curtains to get to the inside. All right, so I know we talked about our hands off the artwork, but this artwork is very special. We're going to have the opportunity to kind of play with our senses.

7:28And you arrive at the inside of a kind of jungle-like environment in the gallery. There are orange futons on the floor and they are kind of nestled in a tetris-like variety of shapes. And then hanging from the ceiling, which is kind of a crocheted macramey like ceiling structure, are these kind of pendulum-like crocheted bags and various sizes that are stuffed with natural materials like crackling dried leaves and fennel and basil, cloves and turmeric. And it is this very sensory kind of experience. And so we invite students to come in and just sort of interact with the installation, which is by design intended to be touched and intended to be smelled and intended to be experienced in a multi-sensory way.

8:45We invite the students and their teachers and chaperones just to take it in for a few moments. And make observations about what they're experiencing and what they smell, see, feel and so forth. We do a pretty good job of pulling them into that environment and letting them play with these kind of percussive rattles and elements that are made from seeds and pods and nuts that create sounds as well. Students just take it in sort of on their own for a fairly long period of time. Like they start to wonder like, are we still doing this? It's really quite interesting because our attention span is so short today because all of the scrolling and all of the 24 hour cycles of everything. It is a little bit disarming, I think, to anyone, but especially students to have the freedom to just sort of see,

9:49what does this thing sound like if I bump it up against this other thing? And then we unpack that in a conversation about what those students are experiencing and what they're observing and what they're feeling in response to those materials. Because the real idea behind Ernesto Netto's work is to remind us that we are multi-sensory animals, that we are people who have a physical relationship with an environment. This artwork is meant to resemble the Amazon reinforced. What do you think the artist wants us to take away from experiencing the rainforest this way? Connectedness, the way everything is connected, you have to feel it instead of just looking at the pictures like you get to be as comfortable and smells natural. It's like a little more natural than artificial smells.

10:55They're open-ended questions about what do they notice, what do they observe, what are they hearing or smelling in the case of the Netto installation? And then that observation capacity is something that just by itself is kind of counter to our digital lives. Close observation is a key skill in art, obviously, but it's also a very key skill in science and technology, engineering, and every other field. But our lives are kind of governed by technologies that wrap that all up in ways that obscure the importance of observation and physical experience. And I think this art installation really rewards that close looking and engagement. We never really look at more than four to five artworks in an hour's time with those students and try to have a more layered conversation with them about

11:56what those artworks are actually about. If they're going to actually engage in thinking about and feeling through an artwork, they've got to slow down. And so we take time and unpack and sort of pull the layers off of the onion as it were in terms of looking at an artwork and helping people just to look closely. Because I think so many times people have a hard time looking and seeing what might be there. But if there's a more experienced consumer as a kind of guide, they can really unpack that in a way that makes the artwork much more powerful. One of the most powerful things that art encourages is a sense of conversation and shared reality and other people's perspectives. And it sounds like you're really kind of bringing it to these kids that you're leading through your tours. What have you learned about the child experience of art and then an adult experience of art? Adults have been habituated to the idea that there are

13:02right and wrong answers about a lot of things. And so I think a lot of times adults are reticent if not reluctant to speak up about their thought or feeling about something. And I also think that in our culture and society we are so isolated from one another. And there are so many forces that are creating isolating circumstances or at least the perception of separating and isolating forces that we don't feel connected to one another in ways that are really important to civilization and to society's function. Museums ought to be understood as not merely entertainment value but as social catalysts because people, especially adults, need to experience something together in order to kind of provide an antidote to the isolationism that many people

14:10have felt more acutely since COVID and as a result of things going on in the world today. In our culture I think people are very reluctant to feel anything. We like to just try to ignore or put our feelings under the carpet and sweep them away and not deal with them. But art and sharing experiences with others about it can be a very powerful antidote to that isolationism. If people kind of embrace looking carefully and thinking carefully about what artists do and make and think you can see that a creative act is a very powerful way to respond in a time of turmoil. Kids and adults come into the Nevada Museum of Art. They have free time. You guide them through slow looking exercises. It has all these benefits we've talked about. But then we go outside and it's pressure in the classroom and it's making ends meet for parents. How do you think we can take the

15:13wisdom and lessons of being in slow looking exercises in a museum and apply them outside life? Just being present, just being where you are, when you are, and focusing on that thing at that time. How might slowing down and really noticing things be useful outside of the museum in your everyday life? Ooh, can't hands right on? You could pay like small attention to details of people like how they feel or their actions. Yeah, it's like to pay attention to more things that you usually wouldn't like the tiny details like understanding how someone's feeling, the more you pay attention to it, the more you understand what's going on right now. I'm always alarmed by the number of kids and adults I see walking around with headphones and pocket computers while they're walking across a street and I just think that lack of awareness is really troubling and I guess I feel like

16:17that presence and just sort of being attuned to what's happening around you when it's happening and as it's happening is really the key and that's true in a museum setting as much as it is while you're driving in traffic or talking to your dentist. Right, here you. Colin, I want to thank you for your work. You are leading the way in this country in terms of giving that to our school kids and our adults. So thanks for being on the show. Thank you. Up next, we hear from neurologist Anjan Chatterjee about what happens in our minds and brains when we look at art and how we actually have a need to fill our lives with it. You find these beads ornamentation as far as 100,000 years ago and this is all before we even get to figurines and the famous paintings in caves. Now we go to our cultural caves in museums, right? That's coming up.

17:27I'm Dacker Keltner. Welcome back to our Science of Happiness Episode about what happens when we slow down and really look at art. Joining us now is Anjan Chatterjee. He's a professor of neurology, psychology and architecture and the founding director of the Penn Center for Neuroesthetics. He's also the author of the aesthetic brain how we evolved to desire beauty and enjoy art. I remember buying the book immediately in 2014 reading it and it convinced me that we could study art scientifically. So thank you for writing that book. Anjan, thanks so much for joining us today. Dacker, it's wonderful to be here. You're one of the first people to really sort of champion the idea that we've evolved to respond aesthetically to see beauty in the world, right? Nature, a person's physical form, painting, et cetera of music. And I think that when we extend out to think about the role of art in society, we have a need for this. Tell us your thinking about kind of the evolutionary

18:29functions of our sense of beauty and why we need it. This kind of decorative impulse seems to go as far back as we can imagine. So even when we think about early toolmaking, so even early tools, seem to have a kind of elegance and beauty and symmetry that goes beyond just its pure functional abilities. And we can only speculate why that might be, but there's a suggestion there that the making of artifacts while they were useful, they also conferred an experience on the maker. And then you find these beads as ornamentation as far as 100,000 years ago. And this is all before we even get figurines and the famous paintings in caves, both in Europe and Southeast Asia, so it's not confined to one place. Now we go to our cultural caves and museums, right? So it's extraordinary how far back this goes. And we can only imagine what was happening in

19:32the minds of people then, but trying to infer based on what we think is happening in the minds of people now is a way to think back at that. But to get to your core question, this suggests that this kind of decorative impulse that was tied to functional tools seemed to be there all along. And at some point we have managed to sort of separate them out and carve them out so that we have these special aesthetic experiences, which on the face of it don't serve same kind of functional and social purpose they might have in the past. I would love you to kind of walk us through how you think about the process of having an aesthetic experience. How do you break down that process? What happens? We think about it in the context of a framework that we refer to as the aesthetic triad. Sensory and motor organization is one, our emotions and valuation that we're always imposing value on what we see. If it's beauty there's always some pleasure, but you know it

20:37can be other things. And the way in which semantics and knowledge overlays on that. And so this is where a lot of individual differences comes in, which is where have you grown up? What's your culture? What's your educational background? Even what point in history you happen to be? Most Americans will say that impressionists are among their favorite works 150 years ago. The salons in Paris threw them out and our brains are not that different than they were 150 years ago. And so whenever we're designing experiments or asking questions we try to tease those apart. With the idea, and I think this is important for the non-scientists listening, that every experiment is incremental and provisional. There's no such thing as the silver bullet experiment that's going to answer any deep question. So that's one key. And then the other piece I think worth bringing in is we've spent some time

21:39developing a taxonomy of aesthetic impacts. And the intuition here is that if you take a complex sensory experience, let's say wine tasting, most people can say, I like it, I don't like it, or it's kind of interesting, and then they get stuck. And then if you have a Somalia who gives you a set of descriptions that there's an oaky finish, there's some berries in there, there's a hint of chocolate. Most people can then start picking out those elements of their own experience. And this is as you know, a truism and psychology, we're much better at recognizing than generating. So you can recognize those things in your experience as supposed to generating what that is. And so our intuition that seems to be bearing out is that if given a vocabulary, people can start identifying their experience. And I think it makes the experience richer, and I think it becomes

22:43a vehicle for self-discovery. Yeah, that's cool. It's just a pathway to self-insight. Tell us like what you think slowing it down does to this three-stage process of aesthetic experience. And how did you test it in a museum? We have people look at specific works of art. In this case, this was the Penn Museum, which is an anthropologic museum. We chose four works of art. And for two of them, people just looked at them the way they normally would. And for two of them, they looked at the works for 15 minutes, which is a long time. And these were Penn students. And if you take young people and tell them, look at one thing for 15 minutes and you can't pull out your phone. This is close to torture for them. However, however, we are not as cruel as

23:44that might appear. We basically used, again, the systematic triad where we said, okay, now for five minutes, look at the form, look at the shape, look at the relationship of the component parts, look at the texture, giving them these ways of looking at it. For five minutes, get a sense of what your reaction is to it. What are you feeling? It's not a single emotion, right? What's the whole panoply of what you're experiencing over another five minutes? And then spend five minutes, use the work as a vehicle to wander. What does this make you think of? What are their associations do you have? And is any of this relevant to your own personal life? Once you do it that way, it turns out the 15 minutes goes quite quickly. And what we find is that their ratings of liking didn't change, but their ratings of beauty did. That somehow they were experiencing more beauty, which suggests that at least the way people are interpreting that word has a little more depth than just I like it.

24:49And then we found that people experienced more empathy, more compassion. You know, and in this case, even some of the negative emotions, because it's an anthropologic museum, these were indigenous works of art and African works of art. So that whole kind of colonial imperial sensibility then starts to get overlaid. The more people are thinking about this and experiencing them. So I think this is an important piece, which is that uncomfortable emotions are also important, right? They're ported well into in the context of a kind of safe space. You can have the time to feel it and experience it and not set it aside because of the next thing you have to do and you've got to be functional and all that. So the big picture, I think, is doing this allows people to be present, to really absorb what they're experiencing, to recognize their own reactions to it. And what we hope is that this becomes potentially a model that most of us in urban

25:58America live these hypermanic lives, right? It's very hard to be present when you're in one place, you're thinking what you had to do before where you have to do next, but just shutting all of that down for a period and just being present. And at least my fantasy is this has the possibility of developing a habit which we have lost and which we can do when you're in nature. You can do when you're sitting across from a friend at dinner that both of you aren't pulling out your phones and doing whatever you need to do. Just just being present with whatever it is in your environment and taking the time. Anjani Chattrity, thank you so much for the work you do for inspiring so many young scientists to study art from a rigorous scientific perspective. And just for our conversation today it's been inspiring and gives me hope. Very much glad to have been invited and lovely to speak with you.

27:01We have a special happiness break up episode coming up where we'll be guided in our own slow-looking practice with Natalie Ryan of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. This practice is about pausing the busyness of our day that's filled with doing, doing, doing and finding a place of just being. That's next week on The Science of Happiness. Our associate producers are Emily Brower, Tari Nhi Kucker, and Anizo. Our producer is Truk Wynne, our sound designer is Jenny Cataldo of a company studios. Our executive producer is Shuka Kalantari. I'm Dacker Keltner. Thank you for listening to The Science of Happiness. Have a great day. Check out the show notes for more information about the Science of Happiness podcast. You can find the Science of Happiness wherever you get your podcasts.