In this episode of The Art Engager, I’m talking with Dr Elizabeth (Zab) Johnson, Executive Director of the Wharton Neuroscience Initiative and a visual neuroscientist whose work explores the intersection of art, perception and leadership.

Zab’s research asks one key question: how does what we see guide our decisions, actions and behaviours? Her work combines neuroscience, visual perception and museum-based learning to show how what we see shapes how we think, communicate and lead.

At Wharton, Zab leads sessions for business executives that bring slow looking and perspective taking together — helping leaders strengthen empathy and communication through shared experiences of looking at art.

We talk about her journey from researching colour and form processing in the brain to designing slow art experiences that build leadership skills. You’ll hear why museums are ideal for practising perspective taking, what happens when groups spend an hour with a single artwork, and how slow looking in dialogue with others fosters deep learning and connection.

We also discuss the neuroscience behind these practices, the ‘no pointing’ rule, and why words like ‘obviously’ can shut down conversation.

This episode offers plenty to think about for anyone interested in how collective looking can enhance empathy, attention and leadership.

The Art Engager is written and presented by Claire Bown. Editing is by Matt Jacobs and Claire Bown. Music by Richard Bown.

✨ If you've enjoyed this episode, please consider supporting The Art Engager on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/TheArtEngager

Or pick up a copy of my book, The Art Engager, for step-by-step guidance on creating meaningful, interactive guided experiences https://www.theartengager.com/

Buy it here on Amazon.com: https://tinyurl.com/buytheartengager

Episode Links

https://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/perspective-taking-brain-hack-can-help-make-better-decisions/

Visual Marketing: A Practical Guide to the Science of Branding https://www.routledge.com/Visual-Marketing-A-Practical-Guide-to-the-Science-of-Branding--Retailing/Kahn-Johnson/p/book/9781032731322

Dr Elizabeth (Zab) Johnson on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elizabeth-johnson-phd-a3160932/

Wharton Neuroscience website:https://neuro.wharton.upenn.edu/

Hello and welcome to The Art Engager podcast with me, Claire Bown.

I'm here to share techniques and tools to help you engage with your audience

and bring art objects and ideas to life.

So let's dive into this week's show.

Hello and welcome to a new episode of The Art Engager.

I'm Claire Bown, and today I'm chatting with Dr. Elizabeth Zab Johnson.

We are talking about slow looking, perspective taking and the fascinating

neuroscience of looking at art together.

Now, one quick thing before we start.

I started this podcast in 2021 thinking I'd make perhaps 25

episodes, and here we are at over 150.

Now creating each episode is pretty much a solo endeavor, and your support

helps cover hosting, editing costs, research, and interview time, and helps

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There are three different tiers to choose from with monthly support starting from

less than the price of a cup of coffee.

Thank you.

Now let me introduce today's guest, Dr.

Elizabeth Za Johnson is executive director of the Wharton Neuroscience Initiative

and a visual neuroscientist whose research focuses on vision and visual behavior.

Her work centers on a key question, how does what we see guide our

decisions, actions, and behaviors?

This drives everything from her research to her teaching to the

museum sessions she leads for business executives at the Wharton School.

Her journey into this work began during her doctoral research at

New York University where she discovered that color and form are

processed together in the brain.

This finding led her to realize that visual artists were the original

experimentalists with perception, and this sparked a passion for

using art to reveal how we see.

At Duke University, she co-created the neuro humanities in Paris program,

experimenting with how museums could become spaces for learning

about perception and cognition.

At the Wharton School, she's extended this museum based

approach to leadership development.

She partners with institutions like the Barnes Foundation in

Philadelphia, leading sessions where business leaders spend one hour with

a single artwork in small groups.

Her focus here is perspective taking an important leadership

skill that research shows actually declines as people gain power.

In today's conversation, we explore why museums provide the ideal space

for practicing perspective taking.

We explore what happens when business leaders spend an hour with a single

artwork and the fascinating neuroscience behind collective slow looking.

We discuss sabs ground rules, including why pointing is forbidden, and why words

like obviously shut down perspective.

Taking this episode is perfect if you want to understand the

neuroscience of perspective taking.

Are curious about how museums can develop critical leadership skills or

are interested in what happens in the brain when groups look at art together?

Enjoy.

Hi, Zab and welcome to The Art Engager Podcast.

Hi, Claire.

Great to be with you.

So could you start by explaining who you are and what you do?

Yes, absolutely.

So I'm Elizabeth Johnson, and I am the executive director of the

Wharton Neuroscience Initiative.

I am a visual neuroscientist and I do many, many things.

But one of the things that I hope we'll talk about today is is that I have long

led sessions in art museums and other museums for leaders and executives and

student learners at all different levels.

I use art as a way of giving insight into leadership into attention,

into perception, um, and into how we see and navigate through the world.

Brilliant.

And could you explain for the benefit of our listeners what the

Wharton Neuroscience Initiative is, maybe their mission and the role?

Yeah,

absolutely.

So the Wharton Neuroscience Initiative is a comprehensive research, educational

and engagement outreach center at the University of Pennsylvania at the Wharton

School, which is a business school.

And and our goal is to bring neuroscience brain science into direct application

within business in the hopes of making business actually more efficient, more

effective, and actually more humane.

And we got in touch through a mutual friend and now

colleague Sasha Igdalova, who is, a guest on episode 132 of the podcast.

And she told me, oh, you need to talk to, Zav.

She's my new colleague.

And she's doing some amazing work.

So maybe we could start right back at the beginning, and as you explained

in your introduction, you're doing a range of things, super exciting work in

the field of, uh, visual neuroscience.

But you are also teaching marketing.

You're taking business leaders into the museums.

How does it all connect up?

What's the thread running through your work?

The thread really

is about how we see, how what we see guides our decisions,

our actions, our behaviors.

Um, this is sort of a passion point of both my, both, my research

and my engagement with with, people at all different levels.

I really think that one of the, one of the things that I realized early on in my

own neuroscience experience and education was that we take reality as a given.

And that's sort of in the realm of philosophy, but I really think that when

you understand how we see, you understand actually that cognition is both optimized

and challenged in interesting ways that we are always navigating through uncertainty.

And that how we interpret the world comes from our experiences

and knowledge with it.

So, um, so that's sort of the running thread.

And so when I teach, um, I teach a visual marketing class to, business

students and to others at the university.

Um, and it really is to bring that sort of awareness into the idea

of how the visual landscape can be both optimized and challenged.

Um, and so thinking about the ways that people interpret the world, whether

that's through packaging or advert um, and other kinds of communications you

know, it really does require something, some knowledge around visual cognition.

Brilliant.

And as museum people, we are really interested in the visual as well, so I

see a great link there with your work.

But I'd like to go back a, a few years and talk about your doctoral research

because you discovered some really interesting things about color processing

and that led you onto finding a passion for visual art and color as well.

So can you talk a little bit about that?

Yeah.

So my doctoral research was really focused on the very early cortical

mechanisms of how we perceive color.

And this was actually using, non-human primate model, you know, they

share 98% of our brain constructs.

And allows you to sort of, see more of the inner workings, the inner

mechanisms, of how the brain is processing particular kinds of signals.

And one of the things that I discovered and was reinforced by work from

other researchers was that color and form were processed together.

And that is from the earliest sort of cortical areas of the brain that are

processing information about how we see.

And up until that point, people really had been in the field of

neuroscience, had been struggling with this idea that color seemed like a

separate feature from form and shape.

And and that never sat very well with me because I actually realized

that, um, that these things are, are quite tethered together.

And when I started to think about that construct, it actually

led me to this appreciation of visual art and visual artists.

Because I feel like through that discovery process, I began to actually see their

work in a completely different light.

And realized that they had been the empiricists, the sort of

experimentalists all along with color.

And so that, you know, many of the effects that neuroscientists were then

trying to scientifically ground had been explored and played with and experimented

on from the visual art perspective.

And so once you know that, then you realize that like edges really matter, you

know, that they fundamentally can change and shift the colors that we perceive.

And so of course, shape and form are and color are bound inextricably together.

And so that really led me to you know, from a person that wasn't

particularly like visually artistic, I'm a musician, not a visual artist and

but that led me to sort of navigate, I was in graduate school in New York.

And so I, I would go and visit museums and I, I was really captured by seeing,

you know, those works reflect some new understanding that I had from

my graduate work in the sciences.

Um, and that really, began a passion for that and a passion to bring

that kind of perspective to others.

so flash forward a few years and I was at Duke University and one of the

best experiences of my early life as an academic, was being able to take

students undergraduate students to Paris for the summer for a program that

was called Neuro Humanities in Paris.

And my section of that course was was about four weeks long, and I co-instructed

with an art historian, um, who was an academic curator at Duke's museum.

She still does that.

She directs the College of Worcester's Art Museum now.

And we co-instructed a section of that program called Art Vision and the Brain.

Um, and we spent the morning every day, of that month in the classroom

really learning the science and the different art historical approaches.

And then every afternoon the students would go to a different museum in Paris.

It was a really hard gig, as I like to say.

Like it's one of the things that I miss the most in my summers now

was the sheer joy of being able to bring students that were coming from

very different disciplines together.

to really explore that together And what an awesome playground that was

for them to have a deep dive into all of the art museums in Paris.

And we would then go on a trip to Provence, and they would see Suzanne's

studio and it would all sort of start to come together and, you know, and Van

Gogh's environment, they could really understand the influence of light and air

on the art that was produced at the time.

Could really think about the context and how that influenced the way

that people constructed and wanted to reflect, uh, aspects of visual

information in novel, new artistic ways.

So it was really one of the most fun things ever.

And co-instructing, of course, with someone from from an art history

background, when that really was not my background was just also such a

learning and growing experience for me.

Um, it really gave me a footing and even a vocabulary to really begin

to think from a new direction.

So interesting.

As you say, a complete joy and, not a hard gig to have at all.

And you said to me, off air that you had been gravitating towards

slow, looking long before people thought about it as a thing.

So perhaps we can talk a little bit about that, because I know we

also spoke about Jennifer Roberts.

People listening may know Jennifer Roberts, the three hour long

exercise that she makes her students do with one artwork.

So perhaps you could talk a little bit about when you discovered slow

looking, or do you feel it's always been a part of your approach?

I think it, it began in those graduate years, you know, which

for me was in like the late 1990s.

So this was definitely before slow looking was a termed thing.

And it was about my own experience of really having to take that time, that

extra time to, to think and reflect in place, in a museum setting, right?

About how my science informed and vice versa, this experience

of seeing visual art.

And what I realized very quickly, intuitively for me was that

although we often think that we perceive the world at a glance.

There is so much that's actually hidden from us.

And, nowadays I think we pay even less attention to things around us.

We're sort of more focused on, on very specific things like our smartphones and

other things as we walk through the world.

And as someone who also understands the mechanisms of attention, I

realized that like we are not, we're not passive, recorders of our visual

experience the way a camera is.

We are very actively processing and trying to determine and predict what might be

most relevant and interesting to us.

And what we do with our attention is to highlight the things that we have

pre-processed as being most relevant and interesting and suppress all the

rest of the information in the world.

And so we are sub sampling the world in a very profound way.

And I think when I realized that, then I realized that of course this

assumption of being able to extract information from how we see at a glance

was wrong and that there is a discovery process that has to unfold with time.

And that if you allow yourself more time, then your active process can extract

new, different information from the world around you, whether that's, when

you're on a walk outside or in a, one of these sort of laser focused viewing

experiences of looking at visual art.

And so that's really what began the process of, of understanding

the nuances of slow looking for me.

And when I found Jennifer Roberts' work, with this three hour exercise and her aha

moment, that students were experiencing something profoundly new, sometimes 20, 30

an hour, you know, into that experience, um, it really resonated with me.

And so our first dalliance with that formally was in the Paris program,

was asking our students individually.

To sit and spend an hour, not three hours, but an hour in

the Museum of Modern Art there.

And watching that process unfold for them and realizing that they would

come back and say, well, we thought that this was going to be really hard.

But by minute 20, I had discovered this whole new relationship with

the artwork that I had chosen.

And now I can tell you many more of the details about it and the

connections that it made to me, both personally and academically.

And then I began to think about a modification of that, which

is what happens as other minds come together in dialogue.

And I think that's one of the things that hasn't really been well documented

or studied is the role of how social communication might actually unlock a

whole new dimension of slow looking.

Yeah.

And, in that article about the power of patients with Jennifer

Roberts, she calls it a, a painful experience, the three hours.

But I think also that kind of individual aspect of the

looking, it can be much harder.

It can feel longer.

And when you get together with others, it feels as though the process is easier.

There's some kind of flow that happens to it, and there's all sorts

of things that we can note as well.

I can note anecdotally, and I think you are researching this as well, what

happens when groups get together and they spend time looking at visual art?

But it's so, so interesting, isn't it, seeing what happens when you have a group

of people who may or may not know each other, discussing visual art together

in the museum environment over time.

Yeah.

It's been a profound experience for me as an educator to watch that

unfold and to watch it unfold for people at all different ages and

all different levels of experience or non-experience with visual art.

I think it's just incredibly powerful actually.

So, so I've become a, a true believer in it as as something that we should all do.

And I think, much like what Jennifer Roberts says, we really

do need to instill in young people, you know, this idea of patience.

And how better to do that than through an active discovery process that actually

can be quite engaging once you relinquish some of the baggage or the, predisposition

to think that this is going to be boring or painful or, uncomfortable.

And I have actually seen that in the business execs that I take

into these experiences as well.

I always query each group, like, how many people think that this

is going to be impossible to spend an hour with an artwork?

And I think one of the most incredible experiences that I have witnessed

is that all of them in this social environment say time just flew

in a way that they didn't expect.

And that rather surprised them and that they found, you know,

was just an incredibly unlocking experience and not a painful, boring

academic, uh, experience at all.

And, I would say also I've experienced the same thing taking

groups of, teams from business and corporate world into the museums.

Could you tell us a little bit about how your work started with

business leaders in art museums?

Why did you want to focus on this audience?

And how is it set up?

So I'm in a business school and I'm educating future business leaders.

And Wharton actually has a very longstanding lifelong

learning program for executives.

And so there are many kinds of engagements that one can do within the school to, just

reach and do education for all different levels, including lifelong learners.

And so to me it was a natural extension of having taken, even

high school undergraduates, graduate students into these kinds of

experiences to think about lifelong learners as well in that construct.

And so, I think that the hardest part of the whole process was collaborating

with the local institutions here in Philadelphia, because of course, you know,

who am I, I'm just this neuroscientist that serves as this executive director of

a research center at a business school.

And many of the conversations in the beginning, or many of my emails, to these

relevant people, you know, was trying to introduce myself, trying to give a bit

of my background, including, all of those past experiences that I'd had while at

Duke University and and teaching in Paris.

And, as those things worked there, there were just some assumptions I think being

made about what I was asking to do.

And so there was some reluctance, you know, that I wasn't a docent that I

hadn't been trained, that I didn't come from that particular pedagogical

perspective et cetera, et cetera, that, that tours were forbidden.

And I had to keep explaining, oh no, I'm not trying to lead tours.

So I think that was the challenge number one.

And my breakthrough finally happened, um, when I finally made

contact with the director of adult education at the Barnes Foundation.

Here in Philadelphia.

And of course once we had a conversation, he realized that my method sort of

organically had developed very similarly to the Barnes pedagogy, in that.

And once that understanding came through, then we began to really collaborate

and learn from each other as well.

So that's how it began.

And I would say that yeah, being, being at Wharton now and having

these relationships with now a number of amazing art institutions

within the city, it has really grown.

And I think now even on the business school side, they now understand what

this sometimes unlocks for leaders and executives at different levels.

And we can maybe talk a little bit more about that specifically.

Yeah,

absolutely.

And before we talk about that, a little bit about how the the sessions are set up.

So do you take people from one team, one organization, or are

they from multiple organizations?

How do you choose the artworks?

How long are the sessions?

All those kind of practical details that I think listeners might be interested in.

Yes.

So I lead sessions within open enrollment programs.

Those are open to anyone.

And so those are often just an assortment of different kinds of people with

very different kinds of roles at their businesses, or even just people that have

a personal interest in their own lifelong learning as, as well as custom programs.

So Wharton has both those kinds of programs.

And I am enlisted within that scope, in both of those contexts.

And so sometimes for very specific groups and sometimes they're not.

And the way that I have usually or, orchestrated my exercise is

to have some classroom learning that helps to ground the approach.

And I often ground that in the science of perspective taking

and the assumptions that we make.

And as a visual neuroscientist, I have lots of examples that I can

use that that I think very quickly are understandable that we do

leap to assumptions very quickly.

Everything from, you know, by stable illusions like the like the base illusion.

I mean, there are better examples of those.

Um, but even like seeing patterns from, you know, noisy or really ambiguous

kinds of stimuli, I always say visual neuroscientists always have a lot of these

kinds of visual illusions up their sleeve.

Not because it makes them popular at parties, but because they actually

give real insight into the shortcuts, the cognitive shortcuts that we make.

All the time, rather than being these sort of one-off visual tricks

they teach us something about how we actually are processing the world in

real time, you know, all the time.

But those are very useful because people can see something

change right before their eyes.

And so there's usually a classroom portion.

And then we head into the galleries.

And my usual guide is that groups will be in small teams of about

three individuals per team.

They can choose the artwork.

I don't prescribe it for them, but I ask them to stay in a local area

just so that I don't have to find everyone throughout the museum.

And then I have written instructions and they spend an hour with an about

an hour with an artwork in teams looking on their own in the beginning.

And then in dialogue with one another.

So they have an hour with one artwork.

It's self-selected within their groups of three.

And then they have written instructions, which are a mixture

of individual looking to start with.

And then they go into some group discussions about the artwork.

And you mentioned the word perspective taking there, and I know

super important to these sessions.

So perhaps we could, first talk about what perspective taking is.

We do talk about it a fair amount on this podcast.

But just if we start with a simple explanation for listeners who might

not be familiar with the term.

So, so perspective taking, of course is seeing the world

through someone else's eyes, right?

So what we have to do in that capacity is to don someone else's or our assumptions

about someone else's knowledge, experience and beliefs about the world.

Now there are some layers in there to unpack but it's sort of

taking one's own expertise and one's own knowledge out, right?

And being able to think through how someone else might

be experiencing something.

That's one way of thinking about perspective taking.

And there are nuances there that I highlighted.

There are many assumptions that we make about other people.

And, uh, and I always say that there are three critical

aspects of perspective taking.

One is to shed your own beliefs, um, in order to be able to embody

the mindset of someone else.

The second is is to take a beginner's eye, right?

To just to think through that process pretty concretely.

And the third is that it's really important to actually ask people

what their perspectives are.

So, because otherwise again, we make these assumptions that we can jump

into another person's experiences, um, which isn't always the case.

And so it's always good to, to ground our own assumptions by checking to make

sure our perspectives when we're doing perspective taking is a better reflection.

There are always gonna be assumptions and there will always be a lack of direct

knowledge of someone else's experiences and knowledge and memories and emotions.

But that's, the most critical, I think part of perspective taking.

And it's, it's incredibly hard for us to do, isn't it?

To not place ourselves at the center and to try and see something

through someone else's eyes.

So, when we talk about perspective taking, quite often we talk about it as

a skill and it's something that we can practice and improve with effort and time.

Yes, that's right.

I mean, it, it is one of the core concepts of our social cognition, right?

And what we know about social cognition is that about half of

that comes from your genetics.

So half of that is what you inherit from your family.

But that leaves a lot of room for practice and doing other

things to really reinforce it.

And you can really lose it.

So I often say that perspective taking is like a muscle, social

cognition is like a muscle.

You have to use it or you will lose it.

and what we know from the science is that as you rise in your subjective

perception of your own social standing in the world, you're less

likely to take others' perspective.

And so it is our leaders and people who are at the top that

we have to really insist, do more practice in perspective taking.

And it is in essence what allows us to be more empathetic to to understand

others' experiences, and even to avoid common mistakes about layering

our own only experiences about the world onto the idea that others will

have exactly that same experience.

So, having power actually decreases your perspective taking

ability if you're not using it, correct?

Yeah.

So as people gain power, they become less, perhaps attuned to other

people's viewpoints and they're not seeking out as a practice per se.

That's

correct.

And I mean, it's sort of intuitive in a way, but of course this is

subjective self-report, right?

So that's very important is that you can of course get people who have a lot of

power who are still great at this, right?

But it is a pitfall , that can be fallen into, and in a sense, it makes sense for

us as social creatures to have to navigate more social complexity when we're lower

in social standing or power standing.

So we are already trying to integrate what people's motivations and

expectations are about the world.

And then as we rise, we can make more and more assumptions rather

than try to embody that ourselves.

And so the risk is that as you rise up in a hierarchy that you're

not practicing it as as much.

And so, my next question is gonna be why art museums?

So, two reasons.

One is that it is neutral.

So this is not a normal business context.

These are not a normal business experience.

And so it's a neutralizer.

So with the rare exception of someone who has a very formal background

in art history and visual art most people in this landscape, business

leaders are quite inexperienced on the formal level of really doing deep

looking and and discussing art, right?

There are of course business leaders that are, you know, very fond art collectors

and all the rest but even there, right?

I think that that tends to not be a ubiquitous binding.

Um, and so it is an environment where everyone can take a beginner's eye.

So that's one reason that I think it's particularly effective.

And the second reason is that unlike abstract ideas.

During this kind of perspective taking exercise, people can

literally see something shift right in front of their eyes.

And and it doesn't matter whether the art is representational or abstract, right?

Actually the category doesn't really matter.

And, uh, you can even use archeological objects, right?

But when you get new information about something, whether that's through

time or through dialogue with others, you can suddenly understand that

you can see it in a different way.

Some new information emerges.

And when I think you have that approach from.

A business lens or a business challenge lens, it is mostly abstract.

You don't necessarily see that change right in front of your eyes.

Of course.

Like I have an exercise in my visual marketing class where they do slow

looking with an advertisement.

So there are ways to do it in those contexts as well.

But you know, in that case, you know, I'm using an advertisement as

equivalent actually to visual art.

Right.

As that process for slow looking.

So, so those are the two main reasons why I find it particularly useful

to do this in a museum context.

Yeah.

And there's maybe something about.

Stepping out of your own environment, as you say.

Um, we know there's a change in atmosphere as people enter a museum anyway, but

entering a museum and doing an exercise would be very different to doing it

in your boardroom or, you know, going to a training day going to an offsite.

Yeah, and I think if we're thinking about visual art as well, and as you said, this

can be applied to objects as well, you know, archeological, historical objects.

So why is visual art particularly effective for revealing how we see,

you know, what makes it different from other ways of learning about perception?

So I mean, I think one of the things is that it very quickly

reveals that we make very quick snap decisions about the information

that's being presented in front of us.

And so oftentimes through the process, I'll give an example.

Someone will say, well, you know, the boy in the left corner, and one of the

people might say, 'oh, is that a boy?'

And suddenly you're now observing new features, right?

And trying to reconcile whether your assumption was an assumption and

whether you have enough evidence for it.

And you have the perceptual aspect of that unfolding in real time.

So again, it can be as abstract and objective as it can be more subjective

and more layered with, you know, our expectations around objects and labels.

And so I think that's one of the powers of visual art is that you have the

stimulus in front of you that is, you know, not actually representational,

completely representational.

And of course, what we know is that like as you go out into the quote unquote

real world, it's exactly the same.

They're exactly the same assumptions that we make about

how we're extracting information.

And but visual arts sort of helps condense that in a very

quick kind of learning lesson.

I think.

Yeah, and I completely agree when I do, um, exercises in workshops

in getting people to look at photographs and artworks or objects for a number

of seconds and a number of minutes, and really thinking about what they saw

and what they noticed when they were doing that on their own and what they

saw and what they noticed when they were doing that with others, and really

getting them to reflect on how they see.

And what's quite astonishing is the insights people come back with, oh,

I didn't notice that person halfway up the stairs until this moment.

So yes, I've seen exactly the same thing unfolding in, in real time.

And then there's this and you use this lovely phrase, the consortium of others'

minds when we spoke off air as well.

So, could you talk a little bit about that?

'cause I thought that was fascinating.

Yeah.

I think I think that there has been only a very recent kind of exploration around how

others' minds work together with your own.

And so from the neuroscience perspective, I'm really fascinated by that.

Um, mostly because we really don't, we don't have a lot

of understanding about that.

We have more fun, fundamental understanding about how, one brain

processes information and makes decisions and acts but actually as

social animals there's a real relevance to how others minds influence ours.

And there's such a tremendous amount of work now coming out about how this

alters communication and cooperation and competition and human social interactions

that I think is so fundamental to who we are and how we experience the world.

That's just one of the areas of, of work that I'm just really keen to,

to learn as much as I can about as both a researcher and as someone

who, you know, reads other works.

Yeah.

And I think again, thinking about how that happens with groups as well, um,

and seeing people, you know, as we talked about getting that joy of discovering

things together and feeling that there are all sorts of perspectives in the

room other than their own, literally from where people are standing and

looking at things, but the other perspective of they're bringing their own

thoughts, their ideas, their experiences to their looking at this artwork.

And that's sometimes like a light bulb going off in people's

heads when they realize that.

That's right.

And I think it's very clear.

Through this practice, right, of slow looking in dialogue with one another.

That you come to recognize that others have unique mental states, right?

Beliefs, desires, knowledge, emotions intentions that might

profoundly differ from our own.

And how that can actually be celebrated.

And how that can actually be at a human advantage, right?

That's at the root sometimes of what we call our most creative,

aha, eureka moments, right?

Is that someone else's knowledge can shift how we think and interpret

something in a profound way that can lead to breakthrough discovery, right?

And I often think about that.

As we are, embarking on this new relationship with ai, right?

Uh, is, is really like how others' minds working together has been less recognized

actually as being , a fundamental part of any discovery, human discovery process.

And really we should know much more about it.

Yeah, absolutely.

Um, I'd love to move on and talk about your rules.

So you have some guidelines, um, which I think are really interesting for

your sessions and will be interesting for listeners to, to talk about too.

So, can you talk about your ground rules for how these sessions are approached?

So, yes one of my ground rules is no pointing.

And of course, you know, gesticulating and using hands as

part of your emphasis is fine.

But I have a particular aversion to pointing.

Because that pointing actually assumes that others see out of your eyes.

And even though it's a shortcut.

And it's hard actually to navigate just using words.

So instead of pointing, it's fundamentally important when you're

trying to emphasize the nature of perspective taking and dialogue.

And so no pointing.

It also makes all of the museums security people very nervous, so Exactly.

With the art at risk, especially if people are holding pencils, I

mean, that's even worse, right?

And so that ground rule, what I tell people is that, you know, if they

catch their teammates doing that, they can deduct virtual points from it.

And so they become their own, moderators of pointing behaviors.

And many people realize how much they have relied on pointing.

And I want people to actually understand that.

It's hard to say, you know, that little green blob of paint in the

upper right corner is a lot of words.

But again, helps everybody make sure that they're confirming that they're

looking at exactly the same thing and, you're not trying to have them

only look from your perspective.

That's number one.

Um, and the other ground rules is that I say that you cannot say the

words 'clearly', or 'obviously'.

Or 'of course', even though sometimes I say that in the dialogue,

because those are negating words.

Those make assumptions that what is clear and obvious to you is clear

and obvious to everybody else.

I actually think that those words should just be struck

from our communication practice.

And I think once, you know, again, when I, because I have access to business

leaders, when I say that, they realize how much that's been layered into their own

memos, into their own communications with their own teams, their own organizations.

And really how much that is, layered in this idea of the

assumptions that one has about.

Whether these things are obvious and intuitive to everyone around them,

which of course most things aren't.

And I emphasize that as a business learning that, again, like to just

even think about how, how you use those words, right, when you use those

words and again they police themselves.

And it's sort of a beautiful thing to watch groups you know, struggle

with how language is so profoundly influential on how we assume other states.

Yeah, I think, language is, is so powerful.

And those words that obviously, and clearly they can so often

shut down conversation from other members of the group.

They almost make you wince when you hear them because it's such a firm

statement of someone's perspective.

Um, and the pointing thing yes.

Of course it makes museums nervous, but I think also there's there's a

real skill in being able to observe and describe something in such a

way that another person can see clearly what you are referring to.

And I think that really helps us develop our descriptive language, and there are

all sorts of other reasons why, observing and describing is such an important

skill that we tend to kind of lose.

I think as we get older as well, we fall back on things like

pointing and gesticulating.

So super interesting.

Ground rules and what do you generally observe happening during the sessions?

You mentioned time right at the very beginning, and I'd love to talk a little

bit about that because I've observed similar things in my sessions, but Yes.

What typically happens.

So I first ask them to note the first five things that they

first notice, uh, independently.

So to take a slow look around one or two minutes, just to note those things down.

And then to begin to share with one another.

In turn taking, I think it's really important to have turn taking because

you can always, in, even in small groups, have people who like to

manipulate, be the prime speaker.

And of course this is all on perspective.

And so I wanna try to help balance that as much as possible.

And then I ask them to go sort of a, sort of a critique.

Did they all identify the same things?

Did they, did anybody notice something different?

And so that begins a conversation.

And then I ask them to take a, another deep look for several minutes.

And think through, some additional layers, layers to that.

And then come and then again, take turns.

You know, share an open question that one of them has.

I think this is really important, this question idea rather than knowledge.

I know I have the evidence for this instead.

It is this idea of how to stay curious how to again, proceed as

if one can learn something new.

And so that's how that sort of ground gets started.

And then to really begin to discuss amongst the group, whether they've all

been very interpretive or more objective.

Are they, you know, who in the group is sort of highlighting things that are

more like lines and edges and contours and color versus, someone who is like

diving right deep into, you know, the emotions or the artistic intent and

to recognize that different people are approaching that quite differently.

And maybe people, some people are right in the middle, highlighting both.

And again, rather than prescribing how people should look I let

that sort of unfold naturally.

And then and then, they just go on to keep being in conversation.

So one of the things that emerges very quickly is that they enjoy it,

that there's this discovery process.

And as we talked about before that, that there's almost a flow state

that happens that has something to do with the consortium of others' minds

coming together in a discovery process where you are integrating brand new

evidence into your own perceptions and knowledge and experiences and real time.

And that's can be very profoundly expansive.

You have to decide whether you agree or you disagree.

You have to decide whether you're integrating or changing your mind.

And that process, I think is, is actually one that is what

human cognition is all about.

And so I think that that is, one of the reasons, I don't have the

scientific evidence for it yet, but it's hard to measure flow states

in real time in a group dialogue of of the experience, right?

We can ask people about their perceptions of time afterwards.

But that's rather limited because you're not in the moment, right?

Yeah.

Um, and so I think, that there is that process that unfolds.

And I think it's joyous actually because of the discovery about new knowledge.

We love seeking new knowledge.

And so when we have that, and even if we have assumed that we should know it

all right, within 20 seconds, what I think the participants understand very

quickly is that's not at all the case.

And I always remind them that like, wouldn't an artist love to have the

knowledge that someone was willing to invest an hour with their artwork?

I mean, it's amazing.

And the other thing that I have witnessed is that people will then

go back to those artworks as if they're old friends, their favorites.

That there's even more to discover and to discover with other people

rather than being done, you know, like, okay, checked that box

moving on to the next new stimulus.

Right?

And I think that that process is also such an important one in this

landscape where we're inundated with visual information all of the time.

And there's this idea that capturing attention needs to

be about novelty and newness.

And that there is fundamentally still things that we can discover

through getting to know the environment that we're being part of.

Right.

And I think that's one of the powerful lessons that people

take out of those gallery spaces.

And so powerful as well.

And, um, a really positive message.

I think when we are bombarded with messages about the fracturing of attention

spans and short form videos and all sorts of things, the fact that we have groups

of people who are initially perhaps skeptical about being able to spend an

hour with an artwork, as you said, and then finding that not only time goes

fast with the process, but they really enjoy it and then possibly may even

go back to the artworks afterwards.

I mean, yeah, I've witnessed all of these things as well in my sessions.

And I'm really fascinated about this time question.

Time does seem to behave differently during slow looking,

during these types of sessions.

Do you have any explanations why people feel that?

Is it because of engagement?

I think that engagement is part of it.

I think that you lean in, right?

And so we know, we know something about the brain activity of people

as they become engaged, right?

Versus disengaged.

And I am guessing , we haven't yet measured it, but one could

see how engagement is shifting, during a session like this.

And I know this is of interest and can be actually more practically done,

within the museum context by scientists.

The other thing I think is something that is just emerging in the brain science

literature around neural synchrony.

And so this is this powerful aspect of of brain resonance when groups,

teams of people come together.

And I think that there is likely to be a shared experience that leads to

more neural synchrony where essentially your brains and your bodies, because

this percolates down to respiration, heart rate, all of the other kinds of

physiological, signals of sharing minds.

And we know from some of the research that this is what happens when people have

a shared understanding and perhaps are, coming together to, to discover and learn

something new, uh, cooperate, et cetera.

And so I suspect that we would also see this kind of neural signature

or even physiological synchrony emerging over this process as well.

Super interesting.

So tell us about what you're hoping to research in the future around this.

So I'm working together.

Sasha Igdalova is now here as a postdoc working with me and

Katherine Kora and James Pawelski.

And we are really thinking about this aspect of human

flourishing through visual arts.

And thinking about how putting more concrete research measures into the

idea of, especially around social slow looking we have these intuitions

that there is something profoundly different about that experience

from even independent slow looking.

And from the sort of normal viewing experience where, where people might spend

only a few seconds with the each artwork.

And so now we're trying to quantify that.

The beginnings of that project are more focused around survey instruments,

asking people about their experiences.

And then the hope is that we can go into these more physiological kinds of

constructs once we understand a little bit more about how these experiences

might actually differ from one another.

So that's what we're up to next.

So

exciting.

So, I should wrap up.

But where can people find out more about your work?

So, a number of different ways.

Most of my work is, is done through my work channels, but

people can follow me on LinkedIn.

I do post things there and of course, please follow the work of

the Wharton Neuroscience Initiative.

I think that, that all the time we are trying to put out information

that I think matters to people.

We want more people to understand how their own brains guide their

own behaviors, actions, decisions.

And so this shouldn't just be in the realm of when things go awry for their brains.

And is a sort of a celebration of how we wanna empower people to

understand and be encouraging of neuroscience's application writ large.

So you can join our general mailing list and follow our work and and also come to

our website and I think that there will be a few articles around these kinds

of ideas of perspective taking that we can share with listeners as well.

Fabulous.

Well, I'll put all the links in the show notes.

That just leaves me time to say thank you so much, Zab, for coming on the podcast

and sharing all your wonderful knowledge.

Thank you.

Thank you.

It's been really fun.

So a huge thank you to Zab for being on the show today.

You can find out more about zab and the Wharton Neuroscience Initiative at their

website, or follow zab on LinkedIn.

Go to the show notes for all the relevant links for today's episode.

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Thank you for listening to The Art Engager podcast with me, Claire Bown.

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