Through art projects—including visual arts, dance, writing, and music—along with spiritual practices and guided imagery, Healing With the Arts gives you the tools to heal what you need to heal in your life: physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual.
Physiology of Art and Healing with Michael
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来自 University of Florida 的课程
Healing with the Arts
118 个评分
从本节课中
Conclusion
与讲师见面
Mary Rockwood Lane, PhD, RN, FAANAssociate Professor
College of Nursing
Michael Samuels, MD
Welcome to our video about the physiology of art and healing.
And I know this may sound kind of technical and kind of boring, but
it's actually who we are, it's this.
And it's the link, it's where a doctor works with bodies,
I'm a physician, I take care of patients.
So this is the part that actually deals with the physical body.
And the physiology of art and healing is actually, for me, alive and
real and interesting.
And it goes like this.
It starts with the physiology of the relaxation response and
the autonomic nervous system.
Now we all have a nervous system that deals with the world around us.
When we see a snake in the road, and we're afraid of snakes, our heart speeds up.
Our breathing changes.
Are stomach cramps and we feel like running away.
This is the branch of the autonomic nervous system called the sympathetic
branch and its fight and flight is called.
It's when you want to kill the snake or want to run from the snake and
it's for our evolutionary survival.
And it gets the blood to our muscles.
The heartbeat goes up so we can actually run.
The blood goes to the big muscles so we actually can have blood down there.
Our eyes change.
And important thing for us to understand is that every single cell in
the whole body has changed and it's changed several ways.
It's changed by nerve fibers going directly to the heart and
to the diaphragm and to the cells.
It's also changed by the hormonal system, the adrenal gland secreting adrenaline
which gets gives an adrenaline rush and makes us run.
So the autonomic branch, fight and flight which is also stress and breakdown.
And causing illness is this immediate get out of here.
And, okay, the second branch, the balancing branch of the autonomic
nervous parasympathetic is healing relaxation, meditation.
And after you've escaped from the lion, you lie down and
you rest and that's the dreams, that's the healing.
So we have these two physiologies and
when you're making art you actually use both the physiologies.
You go into the most relaxing place, a scene of white light and
that bathes every single cell in your body with
a different set of hormones and a different set of neurological impulses.
So just an image in the brain does it.
Now, how this is create the difference between the actual snake in the road and
the image in the brain and our work isn't aren't here.
It works like this.
Your body doesn't know the difference between the image and real life.
This sounds little strange but it goes like this.
Everyone's had the experience maybe of walking on the road and
seeing a snake there and then suddenly realizing it was a stick.
And then you've done the whole physiology, something you thought was afraid does it.
Now, a famous painter Rousseau used to paint lions and tigers and
when he painted them in the painting, you can Google his paintings,
it was so real for him in his imagery space that the heartbeat would go up and
he'd go into a full thing.
So our body doesn't know the difference It knows a little bit, but
it really doesn't know the difference between a very realistically held
image in your mind and reality.
So when you do guided imagery, when you relax, when you do a painting,
the body thinks it's there, and does that relaxing healing physiology.
So that's step one of how a physician looks at art and
healing as it creates the relaxation response which lowers heart rate,
drops your blood pressure, increases your immune response.
The second thing is psychoneuroimmunology which is
the serotonin in the brain transmitters.
When a person exercises, when a person goes into this imagery space,
their brain is flooded with different neurotransmitters.
And those neurotransmitters strengthen the immune system.
So that when you make art, you actually strengthen your white blood cells.
And there's many studies done showing that when you shift from sympathetic arousal
to parasympathetic relaxation, the white blood cells can eat cancer cells,
they can eat infection, and they're deeply healing for you.
Okay, step three is brand new.
It's from MIT in the last two years.
Me it's extremely fascinating and really groundbreaking work and how art heals.
They did a study at MIT where they took rats and they exposed the rats to
something that frightened them like a mild electric shock and
then they put a color in a room that the rats were in light blue.
And the rats were conditioned to have fear
when they saw the color blue without the electric shock.
And then they did an astounding thing which had never been done before.
Because it's modern MRI.
It's called visoptic brain scanning,
where they saw the actual cells that the memory of this fearful event.
And they put the blue light which made the rat afraid and
they can actually see which group of cells held that memory.
And then they stimulated those cells artificially and put in red light.
And then the rats became afraid of red.
So this is what the scientists interpreted in their mind.
That the rats held a memory of trauma.
It's held by one group of cells.
When that memory is stimulated and another
piece of information, red light is put in, the original memory is actually gone.
It's erased.
And the new red, that's blue.
And the new memory of red comes in.
Okay, you're not rats and you're not dealing with light, so
how does this apply to art and healing, physiologically?
Listen, it's wild.
When a person holds a memory of trauma, sexually abuse, post traumatic
stress as a veteran, something that's happened to you, a bad event,
a diagnosis of cancer, an illness, that's held by one group of cells okay.
When you remember that and
you're making art because all art starts in the darkness.
You'll see you in this course when you do a meditation a guided imagery,
the first thing you remember is the trauma and you waking up that group of cells.
But then when you paint the goddess, when the woman who's been sexually
abused starts to dance, and suddenly the moon goddess comes to her,
the cells are awakened, the goddess comes in.
And now the memory of the abuse is gone and
she's got a new memory of herself as a moon goddess.
So let me do it again.
You start to paint your fear of cancer.
You start to paint your, the AIDS patients painted their membranes red.
But then they see their lover.
Then they see bright light, and the painting shifts to that.
And the actual physical experience held in the memory cells in the brain of pain and
suffering is now replaced by something beautiful.
So the New Wave art heals.
Veterans who use art for post-traumatic stress, they start with the Iraq war,
with the Afghanistan war.
And there's a very famous artist doing, it's called Combat Paper,
where he has the veterans actually take the uniform they wore in Iraq and
make paper out of it and then make art.
So they start with the war and then next thing they're doing is showing the picture
of their girlfriend or their home or the swamp or the springs.
And the traumatic memory slowly,
slowly like in behavioral therapy are replaced by other memories.
The memories are actually gone, the cells don't hold them anymore.
The art itself, the process of making art
has actually replaced these memories with a different set of memories.
And I think this is the most interesting way art heals right now,
from MIT in the last years.
And you can google those studies, and the studies are getting more and
more impressive.
Because people are less interested in the rats in the light and
more interested in how rewiring memory actually changes your life.
