A while back we shared the story of how Breaking Ice, a theater company working out of an arts based social service agency called Pillsbury House and Theater in Minneapolis, joined up with a large health care system in St. Louis to provide a powerful boost to their diversity, equity and inclusion program.

That led to a and exploration of what neuroscience can contribute to understanding and dealing with the human struggle with difference. Dopamine, synapses, and the prefrontal cortex might sound like a science fair project gone wild, but trust me, they're crucial when we dive into the colorful world of art and social change! In this episode, we’re unpacking how the brain's wiring and our creative expressions are intertwined, and how that connection can help us tackle the ever-pressing issues of diversity and social justice. We’ll explore the magic of storytelling and empathy, revealing how art can literally change the way our brains perceive and react to the world around us. Buckle up, because we’re taking a wild ride through neuroscience, creativity, and the transformative power of community art—a journey that’s not just enlightening but also a whole lot of fun. So grab your thinking caps and get ready to dance with some brainy ideas!

In this episode we explore:

• The intersection of neuroscience and creativity can help us understand the human struggle with difference.
• Empathy is not just a buzzword; it’s a fundamental part of our humanity that artists can harness to create impactful work that can change the way people think about each other.
• Art is not just about aesthetics; it’s a powerful tool for social change that can rewire how we think about ourselves and each other, ultimately driving cooperation.

Spending time with the Breaking Ice theater based diversity, equity, and inclusion program gave rise to a question: How might new insights about how the brain works might help us better understand the how and why of our continuing struggle with difference? Here is what ensued.

LISTEN TO Breaking Ice Chapter 1

LISTEN TO Breaking Ice Chapter 2

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Notable Mentions

Breaking Ice is the award-winning program of Pillsbury House Theatre that for over 20 years has been “breaking the ice” for courageous and productive dialogue around issues of diversity, equity and inclusion in the workplace. A diverse company of professional actors portrays real-life situations that are customized to meet the goals, needs and culture of each unique organization we serve.

Pillsbury House and Theater is a groundbreaking “new model for human service work that recognizes the power of the arts and culture to stimulate community participation, investment and ownership.”

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: was a Hungarian-American psychologist. He recognized and named the psychological concept of "flow", a highly focused mental state conducive to productivity.[1][2] He was the Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Management at Claremont Graduate University. He was also the former head of the department of psychology at the University of Chicago and of the department of sociology and anthropology at Lake Forest College.[3]

Sources

Question 2: How does our environment influence what we think and believe?

1.Lobel, T. (2014) Sensations: The New Science of Physical Intelligence, Simon & Schuster.

2 Eagleman, David. The Brain: The Story of You. Pg., 105, Vintage Books, 2017

Question 4: Why are stories important?

3.Hamlin, JK, Wynn, K & Bloom, P (2007) “Social evaluation by preverbal infants.” Nature, 450(7169), 557-59.

Question 5: What is empathy and what does it have to do with artmaking?

4 Eagleman, David. The Brain: The Story of You. Pg., 143, Vintage Books, 2017

5 Ibid.

Question 11: If human cooperation and connection are so important, why do we struggle so with difference?

6. How do children develop a sense of self? - The Conversation. http://theconversation.com/how-do-children- develop-a-sense-of-self-5611

7. Toddler | Preschool & Daycare | The Montessori Centre St Lucia. http://www.themontessoricentre.com/toddlers/

8. Eagleman, David. The Brain: The Story of You. Pg., 143, Vintage Books, 2017

Question 13: Why is play so important to human development?

9 Asma, Steven The History of Imagination, pg., 84, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2017

10 Asma, Stephen, The Evolution of Imagination, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2017

Question 15: How Can human creativity help us out of this mess?

11 Boyd, Brian, On the Origin of Stories, Harvard University Press, Boston, 2010

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Change the Story / Change the World is a podcast that chronicles the power of art and community transformation, providing a platform for activist artists to share their experiences and gain the skills and strategies they need to thrive as agents of social change.

Through compelling conversations with artist activists, artivists, and cultural organizers, the podcast explores how art and activism intersect to fuel cultural transformation and drive meaningful change. Guests discuss the challenges and triumphs of community arts, socially engaged art, and creative placemaking, offering insights into artist mentorship, building credibility, and communicating impact.

Episodes delve into the realities of artist isolation, burnout, and funding for artists, while celebrating the role of artists in residence and creative leadership in shaping a more just and inclusive world. Whether you’re an emerging or established artist for social justice, this podcast offers inspiration, practical advice, and a sense of solidarity in the journey toward art and social change.

Hey there, what in the world do dopamine synapses and the prefrontal cortex have to do with art and social change?

From the center for the Study of Art and Community, this is Art is Change Chronicle of art and social change, where activist artists and cultural organizers share the strategies and skills they need to thrive as creative community leaders. My name is Bill Cleveland.

A while back we shared the story of how Breaking Ice, a theater company working out of an arts based social service agency called Pillsbury House and Theater in Minneapolis, joined up with a large health care system in St. Louis to provide a powerful boost to their diversity, equity and inclusion program.

Disparities in quality of care are not getting smaller over time. The gap between whites and people of color has either stayed the same or worsened.

American Indian women are fighting now....

it's an amazing story, and if this sounds to you like a new wrinkle in the DEI universe, well, it's not. At least for breaking ice.

These St. Louis performances were among the hundreds that they have presented over the last three decades to universities, corporations, government agencies, and community organizations of all stripes. And if you listen to those two episodes, I'm sure you'll agree that those 30 years tell a powerful story about theater making real change.

Now, when I returned home from my time with breaking ice in St. Louis, I saw an obvious connection between what they were up to and my growing interest in neuroscience, of all things, specifically how new insights about how the brain works might help us better understand the how and why of our continuing struggle with difference.

Long story short, I decided to share some of what I was learning from my humble exploration of brain science in hopes that it might connect and possibly contribute to their efforts.

And despite its nerdy nature, after finishing our two Breaking Ice episodes, I thought it might be worthwhile sharing what I passed on to Breaking Ice with you, our listeners. So I hope you enjoy it. A word of caution though what follows is a layperson's scratch the surface reading of a very complex subject.

While I feel confident in my sources, which are shared in our show notes, bear in mind I am not an expert on this subject.

I'd also like to say that some folks may think that what I'm about to share here regarding neuroscience and art and the human struggle with difference is a way of avoiding the terrible and enduring truth of our racist past. So let me be clear. I know that science was complicit in fomenting the lie of white supremacy.

I'm also under no illusion that neuroscience is going to change the fact that our white supremacist history has an everyday presence that demeans and damages millions of Americans and threatens our future as a nation.

I further know that truly equitable community making and anti racism are multi generational quests that require moral courage and and character and are certainly not science projects.

But I do believe that some of what we are learning about how the human brain works can contribute to the work of organizations like Breaking Ice, who I believe are helping undo racism one story at a time. Finally, if what you hear leaves you provoked or intrigued, I encourage you to follow up with your own exploration with this fascinating subject.

Welcome to Change the Story, Change the World and a special episode of what we're calling Braindance for Breaking Ice Once Again, My name is Bill Cleveland Part 1 Dear Breaking Ice Dear Breaking Ice, as you may recall, I'm in the process of writing a book called Bright and Dangerous Imagination's Story and the Human Struggle With Difference, which I'm sure you'll agree is a mouthful. Anyways, the time I spent with you in St. Louis is part of my research for what I hope will become one of the book's chapters.

My motivations for this project are complicated. Part of it is a sense of personal responsibility to my kids and grandkids to my fellow humans.

Another is a combination of the angst and anger I feel over our inability to recognize and understand the stakes at hand. Here's how I see it. One of the most persistent themes of the human story has been the constant struggle for power and control.

Throughout history, this inexorable human impulse has taken many forms. War, enslavement, repression, propaganda. The list goes on and on. The common element, of course, is that they are all grounded in fear.

Today, increasingly powerful tools and strategies are being used to capture our imaginations, to influence what we think, what we believe, and how we behave.

Chief among these is the fear of the other, which is being provided with greater frequency and effectiveness, producing heightened levels of mistrust and conflict among people and their communities.

As an artist and as a teller of stories about artists and their work with communities, I sometimes describe myself as being in the imagination business. I've come to believe that the imagination is the most powerful aspect of what it is to be human.

Our ability to conjure new ideas, complex narratives, even entire worlds outside the constraints of the time and place both distinguishes humans as a species and I think is essential to our survival. There are a lot of folks out there who say the fate of the world depends on what we humans do next.

Given our destructive capacity, I'm Inclined to agree.

Surely, with regard to the future of the human race, if not the globe, there's also a consensus that we have dug ourselves into a hole ecologically and socially.

I'm certainly not alone in thinking that digging out will require a revolution of thought and deed, in essence, a new set of stories powerful enough to change beliefs and behaviors. To do this, I believe we will need to harness the power of the imagination in new ways with new urgency and much greater focus.

Through my work over the past 40 years as an artist, educator and researcher, I've been exploring how the power of the imagination and story helps us make collective sense and meaning. And along the way, I've come to believe that imagination and story are our most dangerously neglected natural resources.

If we're going to change the metanarratives that provoke humans to destroy each other and the planet, we need to better understand how they come to be and how they work for both good and ill in the story we're all living. I believe that breaking ice is one of the really bright sparks.

Through this work, you're not only in the imagination business, you're also in the mind changing business. And by mind changing, I don't mean switching brand loyalty or voting patterns. I mean through your work, you are literally helping to rewire brains.

Now, I've come to believe this because another of the bright sparks I've encountered are new discoveries about what's going on in the human brain and how it influences what we think and believe and how we behave. After we visited in St. Louis, I was thinking it might be worthwhile to share some of what I was learning.

So here's a bit of what I wanted to pass on.

I call it Notes from A Short Journey into the Frontiers of Neuroscience and Evolutionary Psychology for Creative change agents or 15 questions about art, Creativity and the Human Struggle with difference. Part 2 starters question 1 what's up with wiring in the brain? Well, our brains do have something like a wiring system.

And the amazing thing about this is that our wiring system modifies based on our experiences. The neuro connections that make these modifications possible are called synapses. Synapses connect and communicate chemically.

And the more we practice an activity, the stronger these connections become. This building process is reinforced through a chemical reward you've all probably heard of called dopamine.

Now, dopamine is released when an activity. Well, it goes well. So the more we practice something, the more the wiring builds to support a particular behavior.

At the end of the day, our most practiced skills become wired into the microstructure of the brain, then, well, honed skills like making a C cord or centering a pot require less conscious attention from our planning department and the prefrontal cortex, our sense coordination center in the parietal cortex, and our cerebellum, which is kind of a gyroscope for balance. This is a continual process as wiring proliferates in support of a specific activity.

The conscious effort, the memory, hand, eye coordination, the syncing needed recedes. So we're always wiring and rewiring in ways that reinforce the brain circuitry. Question 2. How does our environment affect what we think and believe?

Okay, I think most people would agree that feeling in control is important, but we're not as in control as we think. Believe it or not, something as simple as our level of physical comfort can impact what we think of as deeply held attitudes.

The temperature of a drink, the comfort level of a chair in a theater, or an unpleasant smell have been shown to impact expressed feelings and judgment about loved ones. I think we all know that change, whether it's small and sensory, like sounds or smells, or on a social scale, can be very disorienting.

In his book the the Story of you, David Eagleman describes crushing ambiguity into choices as one of the brain's primary functions. Pretty much everything we do requires hundreds of microchoices that are continually being undertaken by the brain.

As such, the brain needs to move quickly and efficiently through these sequences, most of which are happening in the background. Many of the decisions we make emerge from a kind of battle that is being waged among different parts of the brain in different combinations.

So, editorial alert.

Given the power of the imagination to impact the way we perceive the world around us, I think understanding how this deciding mechanism functions should be of central importance to art makers who are in the imagination business, who are also involved in social change.

And given the tsunami of marketing messages we encounter every day, we all know the downside of this knowledge in the hands of someone who just wants to manipulate our behavior and beliefs. Question 3. How does the imagination impact what we think and do?

So I'm not going to try and define the imagination here, but here's a description of what some scientists think is going on. Our imagination allows us to consider and weigh possible futures. Humans are very unique in that we can consider options that haven't yet occurred.

In doing this, our brain rehearses and tests different potential decisions, exploring how various causes and effects might might impact the potential rewards. Our decision making process is always trying to make the choice with the greatest future reward.

However we define that it's important to recognize, though, that what we imagine is not real and our fabricated landscape is subject to all kinds of distortions. Our imagined projections of what might happen in the future are based mainly on past experience in our current worldview.

More importantly, though, our past experiences and the accuracy of our predictions have a significant influence on future decisions.

This is even more the case because the endocrine system makes our good and bad predictions memorable with corresponding increases and decreases of dopamine. When we make what we experience as a good decision, the brain's pharmacist dispenses a reward.

When we err, the feel good endocrine dispensary is shut down. This error corrector theoretically reduces prediction error.

Unfortunately, if the feedback mechanism we're operating in is distorted or biased in some way, then this built in navigator can lead us terribly astray. Question 4 why are stories important? Well, we're predisposed to impose story constructs or social narratives on practically everything.

This is basic to our ongoing need to quickly identify the potential threats or benefits of our interactions with other human beings. These assessments are continually being undertaken by our brain as they have evolved as a survival strategy.

This capacity to recognize and use social narratives to make decisions appears very early in human development. In one experiment, one year old babies watch a play with two bears and a duck.

One bear is helpful and one bear hinders the duck's efforts to open a box. Afterwards, the babies get to choose which bear to play with. They overwhelmingly choose the helpful bear.

So some of you are probably scratching your head and asking about now what's the big deal here? A bunch of kids fell for a bear that was nice to a duck. So what? Here's what?

12 Months after being born, some very small humans whose brains will not be fully developed for another quarter century not only watched that little bear duck soap opera, they also absorbed and drew conclusions and made a choice based on what they learned from the story that unfolded in front of their little eyes. That is astounding to me.

It's astounding because I think it shows how essential this narrative making dot connecting capacity we have is to what it is to be human from the get go. From its earliest moments, our barely emerging consciousness is crafting and using the story to see and make sense of the world.

I think it's our superpower. So at this point I'm sure you can tell I'm turning into Bill the editorialist again.

I think the words, story and storytelling have suffered the same fate as words like art and community. Nevertheless, we use them, and conflict ensues. So it might be helpful for me to say what I mean by story.

Although I think storytelling in the traditional sense is a venerable and powerful art form, when I speak of story I'm talking much more broadly.

From my perspective, the story is the most complex and powerful form of human information sharing and communication, combining the complexities of human consciousness and character with time and place and events built on and reinforced by a foundation of assumptions about the way the world works. The stories that infuse and influence our lives come in many forms.

Image, song, conversation through curricula, worship, holidays, street names, social norms. The list is endless.

I sometimes like to point out that everything that surrounds us, animate and inanimate, is connected in some way to the vast web of stories that form our worldview and is sometimes referred to as the story field.

Tom Attlee, one of the sponsors of the Story Field Conference, describes it as the frame that defines what we think is real, acceptable, and possible and directly shapes our lives and world, often without our even being aware of it.

He's in alignment with my friend David Korton on the seminal power of story and his belief that when you change the story field of a culture, you change what is real, acceptable, and possible. That is, change the story, change the world.

As you know when Breaking Ice studies and then feeds back the stories rising up from Barnes Jewish Hospital or the Powderhorn neighborhood in Minneapolis, as long as it rings true, those communities have a chance to both see and then learn from their own stories. Done right, that's a powerful elixir for change. Question 5 what is empathy and what does it have to do with art making?

Okay, so we all know that people show emotion through their facial expressions. When this occurs, a brain function called facial muscle mirroring allows us to recognize and empathize with the feelings of others.

Interestingly, people with micro muscle paralysis caused by Botox injections are less likely to identify emotions accurately. With this in mind, we can think of theater as an empathy exercise machine.

An important aspect of acting is the ability to physically project a character's emotional state.

Watching others in pain in real or theatrical situations stimulates the parts of the brain that reflect the emotional impact of the pain or pleasure response associated with a given situation. This amazing capacity is called empathy. Here's how David Eagleman, in his book the the Story of youf, describes empathy.

To empathize with another person is to literally feel their pain. When this is happening, you your brain is running a simulation of what it would be like if you were in that situation.

Our capacity for this is why stories like plays, movies, and novels are so absorbing and so pervasive across human culture. Whether the story is about people you know, total strangers or made up characters, you experience their agony and their ecstasy.

You fluidly become them, live their lives, and stand in their vantage points. When you see another person suffer, you can try and tell yourself that's their issue, not yours.

But neurons deep in your brain can't tell the difference. But the capacity for empathy has not evolved simply to facilitate human connections.

At its core, empathy has evolved as a necessary social survival strategy for humans. The ability to tap into the feelings and motivations of other humans helps us predict what other humans might do next.

It helps us discern in a given moment whether that person is friend or foe, most importantly, whether they pose a threat. This capacity has played an essential role in our ability to navigate the complex social landscape that is unique to our species.

Part 3 Everyone is a Maker Question 6 what is flow? Particularly as it relates to art making?

Well, as Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi explains it, flow is a state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter. The experience is so enjoyable that people will continue to do it, even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.

Another way of putting it is that when we are well practiced, we can enter a neural state called hypofrontality, during which parts of the prefrontal cortex momentarily become less active. This focuses consciousness on what is happening in the flow state and dampens the part of the brain that attends to abstraction and planning.

Many artists know how to call up the flow state as an essential part of their creative practice.

But despite what we think, when that creative light bulb flashes and new ideas or concepts manifest in our mind's eye, these notions are not often as fresh or spontaneous as we imagine. These insights are a product of the brain's continuous working and reworking of possible next steps and new combinations in the background.

The job of this organ, the brain, is to gather information about the world and steer your behavior appropriately.

It doesn't matter if your conscious awareness is evolved or not, and most of the time you're not aware of the decisions being made on your behalf by your brain. Question 7 what is pattern recognition and what does it have to do with the stories we tell? Okay, humans love patterns.

Our brains are particularly good at recognizing patterns that are important to our survival.

That makes sense Threat patterns, food related patterns, patterns that communicate safety, nurturing, opportunities for procreation, kinship empathy, and Social bonding.

Paying attention to these patterns is so very important that our endocrine system has evolved a strong set of rewards and reinforcements to focus our attention on them to the exclusion of other potential distractions. These reinforcements are a potent mix of neurochemicals with names like oxytocin, dopamine, adrenaline and neophenephrine and serotonin.

Great art, compelling art. Art that moves us succeeds because it concentrates and plays with the world's profusion of intersecting patterns.

Art that is intriguing, entertaining, and captivating, art that teaches and transforms is art that reveals multiple layers of interrelated patterns in meaningful ways.

The best theater, the most successful plays involve intricate yet indelible patterns of character, plot, intention, and outcome that touch us in ways that are both familiar and surprising.

My day today, I have been working with this patient, this child who I've been treating, and we built this really great rapport between us. And today the parents found out that I'm Mexican, and so they asked for a different doctor.

And I. I just was so tired and I'm trying so hard to make it all work.

As this is happening, some aspect of an ever present set of existential human questions inevitably gets nudged. Who am I? Who are we? Where do we come from? And where are we going?

And when this happens, when the work touches us in this way, our endocrine drugstore also kicks into high gear, reinforcing our sense of fear or exhilaration or connection.

When these kinds of experiences become more common, more focused or intentional, when they start to inhabit us, when the stories you tell become infectious, like the stories of Rosa park or David and Goliath, they have the potential to modify our neurocircuitry and what we think over time. Like I said, powerful theater, like breaking ice, is in the mind changing business. Question 8.

How are empathy, imitation, and improvisation connected? Neuroscientists think that mirror neurons may be the mechanism that triggers a parallel pain response.

When we see pain in another person beyond mere imitation, this means that we're hardwired to know and learn from the actions and experiences of other humans. This same neural trigger occurs in ourselves when fear or sexual arousal rises up in other humans.

This happens whether what we're witnessing is occurring in our living room, on stage, or on some kind of screen. Here's another way of looking at how we are often unconsciously impacting each other.

Infants spend two thirds of their waking life looking at their own hands in action.

This touching, movement, learning experience not only sets the wiring for our own bodily understanding, it also Provides the neural mirror for recognizing and understanding the same movement in others. In essence, our bodies help us comprehend other bodies.

Most kinds of improvisation, especially social group improvisations, employ these unconscious associational communications. Performing artists rely heavily on the mind body loops or somatic cognitive loops we're talking about here.

If we're in a musical improvisation together, or a collective building project or a hunt. My simulation system reads your body automatically and unconsciously and helps me see, hear, and feel where you're going in real time.

My behavior adapts to your behavior and vice versa. And this helps us corner the animal, build the crescendo of a chorus or whatever.

I think my friend choreographer Liz Lehrman would agree when I say thinking with the body is intuitive. Associational Collective Problem Solving Part 4 the Story of Us Question 9 what is the relationship between art making and and cooperation?

Well, humans are not stealthy, we're not keen eyed, we don't blend in very well, and we most definitely aren't very fast. But we do know how to plan and work together. Some think that our big brain and opposable thumbs gave us our evolutionary leg up.

But we would have been a footnote in biological history if we had not evolved the power of cooperation. Actually, there would be no footnotes or what we call history if our brains had not evolved to support and reward our ability to work together.

The field of social neuroscience studies the brain's relationship to human cooperation and connection as an evolved human survival trait. This is important because most of what we know and can do comes from others.

Among social neuroscientists, there's a growing appreciation that art making and the development of language emerged in humans as a principal means of provoking this essential cooperation.

They're speculating that what artists do in the world on stages, in studios, in the streets, and around the proverbial ritual fire has in essence provided the heartbeat for the evolution and growth of the human community. Question 10 it seems obvious humans are wired to connect, but why?

Well, kinship connections, familial bonding, and tribal community bonding are all evolved behaviors called eusociology that stimulate and reinforce the cooperation necessary for humans to survive and work together. Human isolation, being left out socially, actually causes the brain's pain matrix to activate.

This is a naturally occurring adverse stimulation that reinforces social bonding. We are damaged in profound ways when these essential connections are not taking place.

The central importance of these connections manifests in societies throughout the world as a cultural norm.

One well known example is the concept of of ubuntu, which is a commonly used gunibantu term that means I am because you are or I am because of who we all are. It is derived from a phrase, umuntu numuntu nabantu, which literally means that a person is a person through other people.

Ubuntu has its roots in African humanist philosophy, where the idea of community is one of the building blocks of society. Question 11 okay, if human cooperation and connection are so important, why do we struggle so much with difference?

Well around the age of 18 months, children begin to perceive themselves as separate and apart from other humans around them, particularly their moms. This is an essential aspect of the emergence of a consciousness of self and identity.

Toddlers ability to think about themselves from the perspective of a second person also marks the start of their acquisition of what's called a self concept or stable thoughts and feelings about the self.

Between their first and second birthdays, children will be able to produce simple self descriptions and evaluations, such as I'm a good girl, which will become more complex over time.

By the time a child is around eight years old, they will have a relatively stable idea of their own personality traits and dispositions and whether they feel like a valuable and competent person now. Brain Talk the medial prefrontal cortex is the part of the brain that activates when we're socially engaged.

In brain scans fmris, it lights up when we interact with other people. This is the part of the brain where empathy lives.

So get this when experimental subjects are presented with a randomly selected image of first a hand being dobbed with a swab and then stabbed with a syringe, their differing FMRI scans show a robust empathic response to seeing a painful event experienced by another person.

But interestingly, when the hands are labeled with the names of various religious groups, the strength of the empathic response corresponds to the viewer's group membership. In other words, they show greater empathy for members of their own group.

In another experiment, subjects were shown photos of people that might lead the viewer to perceive them as members of social subgroups that are often represented negatively. Like unhoused or incarcerated people.

Brain scans show that the brain's responses to these images are more typical of an encounter with an inanimate object, like a rock or a chair, than with another human. In these instances, the medial prefrontal cortex was much less active. This is neural evidence of what we often refer to as dehumanization.

This research has profound implications for our understanding of how humans develop beliefs and behaviors that are uncooperative and antagonistic to people perceived as outsiders.

Bottom line repeatedly casting groups of people in a negative light as the other can effectively train our brains to respond to them as if they were things, not people, literally objectifying them.

Given this, in our increasingly segregated society, it's not hard to understand how groups form deep us we bonds with those they identify with and otherize people with whom they have little contact, contact, or even fear.

Once again, the fact that we receive on average 4,000 messages a day from hundreds of competing sources seeking to influence what we think and how we behave only exacerbates these tendencies.

And the ubiquitous presence of the ever expanding digital universe allows each of us to curate custom feedback loops that reinforce the prevailing patterns and predilect of our individual and group worldviews.

It's ironic that the exponential expansion of choice and diversity of data sources seems in some cases to have produced the same kind of propaganda bubbles that have functioned as principal social control strategies of authoritarian rulers. In the extreme, this opens the door to the kinds of unthinkable behaviors that manifest in Nazi Germany, Nanking rulers, Rwanda and Bosnia.

David Eagleman describes how these neural information feedback loops can become dangerously jammed. Genocide is only possible when dehumanization happens on a massive scale, and the perfect tool for this job is propaganda.

It keys right into the neural networks that understand other people and dials down the degree to which we empathize with them.

On the flip side, when we provide visceral experiences that allow people to experience things from the perspective of others, like breaking ice, we can increase our capacity for empathy. Part 5 creating question 12 what is curiosity? Humans are insatiably curious. We explore, we experiment, we meddle, we muse.

Most importantly, we ask questions. What? When? Who? How?

And all this questioning has its roots in what we call play, which is basically life practice for all the creatures in the animal kingdom, including us.

When we are young, a lot of our play is physical testing and problem solving, and as we get older, it migrates more and more into the realm of thinking and the imagination. It's interesting that the word kabuki comes from an obsolete Japanese verb that means to be playful or to lose one's balance.

An essential aspect of our playing is practice for when we really lose our balance, for when we are truly lost or confused, particularly when we need to figure things out together to survive. Another way of saying this is that our curiosity is driven by the need for clarity in a mysterious world.

So when things seem out of whack, we crave clarity. To get clarity, we trigger the persistent, probing, questioning strategies that we've been practicing all along.

The great thing is that questions always beget more questions, which in turn feeds the exquisite cycle of imagination and learning and invention beyond the realm of mere survival. Interestingly, when this cycle stops or is disrupted, we go into the odd state we call boredom.

Evolutionary psychologists have concluded that boredom is actually an emotion that evolves specifically to reactivate curiosity when it wanes. This is because being curious is critical to human survival. Question 13 so why is play so important to human development?

In his book the History of Imagination, Stephen Asma describes how extensive play during our extended childhood gives humans a safe place for the development and growth of emotional intelligence. For pre linguistic humans, this is where imitation, exploration and experiential learning proliferated.

For contemporary humans, both physical and social skill development are intrinsic to group child play. This is also where pretending, role playing and imaginative play can be explored with minimal jeopardy.

Now, pre sapiens 500,000 years ago were collaborators in their hunting and probably used a gestural mimic Intensive communication system to facilitate that movement and imitation are foundations of what we call theater, which Asma sees as a primary vehicle for conceptualizing future actions and outcomes, as well as sharing and learning information and ideas.

Asma calls this embodied imaginative work and says many evolutionary psychologists see this pre sapien period as where our predecessors begin to conceptualize the separate and distinct consciousness of their fellows.

Now this theory of mind capacity to differentiate me from you or us from from them, which develops in human children around the age of two, signals the emergence of the other when these concepts of us and them and other became ritualized. Asma also believes that this imitation behavior also marks the origin of ceremonial dance as a stimulation for group identity and cohesion.

Question 14 how does fear impact the stories we create to make sense of our rapidly changing world? The elephant that lurks and impacts all of the proverbial rooms I've explored here in this paper is fear.

Anthropologists will tell you that fear is our friend.

No, actually more than a friend, because without a well honed fear response, no species, regardless of its intelligence, can survive, particularly one as vulnerable as Homo sapiens sapiens. Fear's central role in the survival game is probably why it packs such an incredible punch.

Of all the brain body entanglements I've talked about here, the dynamics of the fear response are by far the most potent and complex. Here's a short description of what happens when it gets triggered from Kristin Dominel at the University of Washington School of Medicine.

Your heart and thoughts race. Your palms sweat, Your stomach churns. You're afraid. This is your Body on fear. Fear evolved in humans to protect us.

When you're scared, your brain sets off an elaborate and coordinated response. Even if there's no threat, these physical changes, from deep inside your brain all the way to the muscles in your legs, happen in seconds.

That's because of your sympathetic nervous system or your fight or flight response. It's part of your autonomic nervous system, which manages reflexes like breathing, digestion, and your heartbeat.

Fear kicks your fight or flight response into overdrive. Your adrenal glands secrete adrenaline. Blood flow decreases to your brain's frontal lobe, which is responsible for logical thinking and planning.

Your amygdala, a more animalistic part of your brain, takes over. Your heart rate and blood pressure increase. You breathe faster and your muscles tense up.

Your pupils dilate so you can see the threat more, more clearly. Blood flows away from your extremities, making your hands cold and clammy and making you feel flushed and sweaty. Your digestion slows down.

Your body doesn't know the difference between a real threat and a perceived threat. That's why your fight or flight response kicks in during things like public speaking or being in a crowd to your fear response.

You're always running from a predator in the woods. It's just trying to keep you alive.

Now, back in the days when poisonous snakes and hungry lions slithered in Rome, that kind of trigger was likely an everyday experience and surely helped keep our early ancestors from harm's way. These days, though, that same response is much more likely to manifest in the jungle of our imaginations than in the untamed wilderness.

And as I said at the top of this missive, increasingly powerful digital tools and strategies are being used to elicit those triggers to influence what we think and how we behave. Unfortunately, one of the dominant narratives being pushed here is the looming threat by a fictional beast known as the Other.

Confronted by this menace, the brain is just doing its job by not only switching on flight or fight, but also switching off whatever critical thinking capacities were there before the story of this illusory beast showed up in the mind's eye. We all know how humans fared when the threats they faced were real.

But the jury is still out with the challenge posed by the new world of fake news, conspiracy theories, and AI fabrication. At this point, the picture is not pretty, and actually, it's a bit scary. Question 15. How can human creativity help us out of this mess?

Well, this, of course, is a threshold question. Here's what makes the most sense to me at this point. Evolution is essentially a Creative process.

It's a recurring cycle that provides for the accumulation of successful novelty, which after many, many iterations of random trial and error, produces a more efficient wing, a longer neck, or a bigger brain. But these kinds of genera test, regenerate cycles aren't just evolutionary.

We see the same repeated patterns as people grow physically and learn and mature over their lifetimes, layer upon layer upon layer. If we look hard, we see it again, deeply embodied in our own human systems.

From the third trimester on, our brain's synaptic network begins a lifelong adaptive wiring and rewiring project in response to the demands of a continually changing world.

Every day, our immune systems are encountering new unique and evolving combinations of pathogens to which they respond by generating, testing, applying and retesting new antibody variations. These things are going on 247 evolutionary biologists call sub processes like these Darwin machines.

Now, these kinds of repeating patterns should be very familiar to artists. Generate, test, modify, adopt, adapt, regenerate, repeat. That's pretty much what artists do over and over, spurred on by curiosity and imagination.

In fact, in his great book on the Origin of Stories, Brian Boyd also characterizes the generate, test, regenerate sequence represented in human art making as a Darwin machine. He it goes further to assert that this art making Darwin machine that we all have is designed in part to support the evolution of human creativity.

But wait, didn't our innate human creativity give birth to art? Well, maybe not.

Boyd and many others find evidence that starting as far back as 60,000 years ago, the creativity was we use every day to solve problems, make art and share stories emerged as a primary driver of the neural development that drove the growth of our big brain. Wow.

If creativity and art making was once a principal driver of human evolution, then maybe, just maybe, it can help us dig out of the hole that our highly evolved big brains seem to have dug for us in our fragile world.

Maybe our curious maker creative capacities can help generate a new set of stories powerful enough to change what we believe and how we behave towards each other and our mother Earth. Who knows? So that's what I passed on to the breaking ice folks.

If anything, I think it reinforced much of what they learned from their experience making art in service to changing the stories and beliefs and behaviors of the communities they've worked with over the past 30 years. As I said at the top, this is my take as a layperson exploring a very complicated and fast changing brain science landscape.

If you're interested in digging deeper into these findings and ideas, I encourage you to check out our show Notes, which includes a bibliography of the sources I consulted during my research.

And if you haven't yet listened to our two part series on the history and work of Breaking Ice, please check out our two previous episodes, numbers 73 and 74 on the show's website and in our show notes. Artists Change is a production of the center for the Study of Art and Community.

Our theme and soundscape spring forth from the head, heart and hand of the maestro Judy Munson. Our text editing is by Andre Nebbe, our effects come from freesound.org and our inspiration comes from the ever present spirit of OOC235.

So until next time, stay well, do good and spread the good word. Sam.