On the aesthetic mindset

I enjoyed the recent Armchair Expert conversation with Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross—the authors of Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us—about how the arts affect our brains and well being.

At one point they talk about having an aesthetic mindset, which isn’t some kind of highfalutin theory but instead just the concept of taking things in through your senses. Their four key aspects of that mindset: curiosity, playfulness, sense experiences, and making/beholding.

I’m definitely now intrigued by the book, not that I need to be convinced of its thesis…

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