Mindfulness in the Museum: Art for Mental Wellbeing

Lilit Sadoyan: Hello, I am Lilit Sadoyan, a museum educator at the J. Paul Getty Museum. Welcome to Art + Ideas. I am your host for a three-episode series on mindfulness in the museum.
Dan Siegel: I know we call them art museums, but I think they’re really wellbeing centers, because people are coming in—maybe they don’t know that’s what’s about to happen—but you are helping them expand who they are, and give them these three feelings of awe, gratitude, and compassion, that are the keys to living a healthy and meaningful life.
Sadoyan: In this episode I speak with psychiatrist and author Dr. Dan Siegel.
What is the mind? The answer might feel obvious, but the mind has been surprisingly difficult to define in scientific terms.
Dr. Dan Siegel, clinical psychiatrist, professor, and founding co-director of the Mindful Awareness Research Center at UCLA, has spent his decades-long career defining and exploring what the mind is from an interpersonal and neurobiological perspective. Recently, he has turned to contemplative traditions and Indigenous sources to check for common ground with Western scientific insights to form a more inclusive view.
At the same time, he has focused on how mindful awareness can support emotional well-being. For Dr. Siegel, art also has this capacity and breaks down our expectations about the world.
I recently spoke with Dan about what the mind is and how experiencing art can change how we approach our inner world as well our relationships with others and the environment.
Hi, Dan. Thank you so much for joining us on the Getty Art and Ideas podcast. I am so grateful to be speaking with you today. It is a real honor.
Let’s begin by getting to know you a little bit more. What brought you to where you are? How did you come to understand the mind, and how did you get in the field of mindfulness?
Siegel: Well, the short version of that story is, I grew up in Los Angeles, and I was always fascinated with what it meant to be alive. And I studied biology, the study of life.
In college, I was on a suicide-prevention service. And we learned that how you focus on the person’s subjective inner life—their life of their emotions, the story of who they are, their identity, their relationships with others, all that you could put under the word mind—it really seemed to be sometimes literally a matter of life and death.
So when I decided to take my biology training, that experience in the suicide-prevention service, into a field where I could combine the two, medicine, I went to medical school at a research institution, which really didn’t focus on empathy or insight or ways of really honoring the emotion experience of the patients—or for that matter, of the students. So I ended up dropping out of school, and went kind of wandering around.
I had been a person very interested in dance, so I pursued dance for a while, and other things. And when I decided to go back to school, I thought there needed to be something to remind me that the mind is very real—this subjective inner feeling, the feeling you have when you dance, the feeling of music, the feeling of art.
And though my teachers hadn’t changed, I kind of was like an anthropologist studying, what’s it like to be in a medical culture where the mind is absent? And I did whatever I could for my patients, as a medical student, but I came to observe that when a physician did not sense and respect and tune into and communicate about the meaning of illness, the emotions of illness, then the patients didn’t do so well. But if, in contrast, the rare physician who actually tuned into the inner mental life of their patients— When that was there, everything changed. And it was like a whole new world, for the patient to be seen deeply.
And studies later would show that when physicians tune in, even for just thirty seconds, to the emotional experience of something, the patients actually get over the common cold, even if it’s that condition, a day sooner. Their immune system is more robust. So empathy connects us to each other. It’s that connection which is the basis of thriving in life.
Sadoyan: Thank you. So, tell me, how do you describe the mind?
Siegel: Well, Lilit, that’s the amazing thing is, when I finished medical school and went to pediatrics, and then switched over to psychiatry, a field which is the division of medicine that specializes in the psyche, the field of psychiatry does not have a definition of the mind.
And then I was trained in research, studying attachment relationships. And that’s a division of psychology. And I found out that psychology doesn’t have a definition of the mind.
In the search for why every patient I had came in with either chaos or rigidity or some combination of both, my supervisors, when I was in training, they couldn’t answer that question. And in systems science—it’s a mathematical science of probability theory—you came up with this incredible view of certain kinds of systems called complex systems. And they have emergent properties. That is, the interaction of the elements of the system gives rise to something greater than the elements themselves. Like, you know, having a handful of water is wet; but an individual water molecule has no wetness. The wetness would be an emergent property.
So when I was reading further in the mathematics of complex systems, I read that one of the emergent properties of complex systems is that they organize their own unfolding. So there’s no conductor, there’s no director. But there’s an innate emergent property, based on probability, that allows the system to regulate itself in something called self-organization.
And that it’s like a flowing river, if you wanna think of it that way, where the central flow of optimal self-organization is harmony. But if you go to either bank of this river, one is the bank of chaos; the other is the bank of rigidity, the math said. And I went, “Oh, my gosh.” And I thought, maybe the mind is the emergent self-organizing—so that comes from math; and then, in terms of our experience, embodied. So it’s more than just in the brain; it’s in the full skin-encased body. And it’s not just in your body; it’s also relational—in your connections with people and with nature.
So by defining it in this working way, as the emergent self-organizing, embodied, and relational process that regulates energy and information flow, you could basically predict that when this is not optimizing self-organization, in a way that promotes harmony, it’s going to chaos or rigidity. And I went to the book of all the mental suffering that we have—it’s called the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual—and every symptom of every syndrome could be reinterpreted as chaos or rigidity.
So I made a proposal, back thirty years ago, that if the mind is defined this way, then future studies would show that conditions that block optimal self-organization would result in mental suffering. And it turns out that every study ever done, for example, of the brain in someone with a condition we call a psychiatric disorder, has impaired what’s called integration in the brain. Different areas are not linked well.
So that’s the definition I proposed thirty years ago. And lots of research supports it. We wouldn’t say it’s proven, but it’s given an incredibly powerful guide to understand, for example, how we excessively differentiate our identity, and so people experience a lot of loneliness.
Sadoyan: Mmm. Now let’s get into how mindfulness works. You describe the brain as processing information two ways: top down and bottom up. Can you tell us what these mean and what happens in the brain?
Siegel: Sure. A top-down process is basically what you’ve learned from the past becomes like a filter, so that what you experience in the present is actually screened by these patterns that you’ve detected from past experiences you’ve had. So in a way, it limits your ability to see, because you only perceive what you believe, which is what you’ve learned how the world is.
In contrast, a bottom-up process is where something is coming into sensations with minimal filtration. You’re just feeling water on your face, without naming it even as water. Bottom-up would be like seeing a sunset and not going, “Oh, you know, the last five sunsets I saw, they were a little redder than this.” And you know, where you don’t have to judge it; you’re just open to sensing the majesty of what’s going on right now. And in many ways, accessing bottom-up is what it means to be mindful.
Sadoyan: So how does top-down and bottom-up processing relate to art experiences, on both a neurobiological level and beyond?
Siegel: Well, the brain in our bodies is trying to anticipate what’s gonna happen next. So as it can predict, it can try to protect. Safety comes from being able to predict. So it’s good to have a nervous system that has that capacity. That’s the upside. But the downside is that the more we learn, actually, the less we see, because we learn things from the past that create structures on how we think things are.
I remember going to an art gallery in Paris. And there was a painting. It was a exhibit of a Magritte. And the painting had a pipe on it, but then there was text on the canvas that said, “This is not a pipe.”
But it was beautiful because there were words there, but in seeing that, you could say, “Well, I, as this body of Dan, know what a pipe is.’ My grandfather used to smoke a pipe; I know what the word pipe means.” But the linguistic symbol sits on top of a lot of beliefs about what a pipe really is. So whatever the art form—whether it’s this painting or sculpting or music, melts away my top-down filters.
And then it opens me up with an experience that, in science, we would call one of the three emotions that are usually called self-transcendent—I would rename them as self-expanding—the awe, the compassion, and the gratitude that you come to feel when art really touches you, are expanding your sense of self. In our culture, unfortunately, in the United States, we don’t honor art enough. Because melting away these top-down filters is the key to wellbeing.
And so I know we call them art museums, but I think they’re really wellbeing centers, because people are coming in—maybe they don’t know that’s what’s about to happen—but you are helping them expand who they are, and give them these three feelings of awe, gratitude, and compassion, that are the keys to living a healthy and meaningful life.
Sadoyan: It’s incredible. I never thought of Magritte’s The Treachery of Images as melting down top-down processing. And you know, on the other hand, you write about bottom-up processing in the brain. How does bottom-up processing influence perception of the world, and maybe even the wisdom that’s gleaned from experiential learning that happens in museums, or as you say, wellbeing spaces.
Siegel: Yeah, absolutely. Well, in terms of bottom-up or top-down processing, the way I find it very helpful to think about it would be something like this. Art really invites you, in whatever its form, to take these energy-flow patterns that are coming into your senses—what you see; what you are hearing; if you’re an artist in the culinary thing, what you’re tasting and smelling; you know, if you’re a dancer, maybe the movement of the body and the kinetic feeling of that. Then what happens is, the senses are bringing them in. Okay? So that’s bottom-up.
Now, automatically, your filter is gonna come down and say, “Oh, I know what this is.” I mean, it doesn’t speak, but if we gave it words, it’d say, “I know what this is,” and start to select certain aspects of this bottom-up, pure, rich, unfiltered stuff, through the body senses into you. And then it starts to conform them and contort them and select them and— Until finally, it comes up with something that really matches what it already believed.
And so you walk by a dog, for example, and you don’t think, “What a miracle this is, this furry animal,” like the one I have right next to me know. You know, “Amazing,” you know, “Whoa!” Like this. But instead, you go, “That’s a dog. Onward with what I need to do with my day.”
But with art, instead of, “Onward, let me do what I need in my day,” you are pausing. The senses come up. Maybe your filter, top-down filter, is trying to constrain you; but with the incredible genius and the gift to all of us in society, of artists, and the gift of museums that allow art to have a sacred place in our lives, then what happens is, the artist has figured out a way to sort of match closely enough—this is what I think—closely enough to your top-down filter so you’re not just saying, “That’s just nothing.”
So you start to let it in. But then there’s a mismatch. It just doesn’t fit into what you thought, you know. And then it starts to then find its way upward, into a new awareness that is free from these top-down filters. But you can actually let go of those filters.
So I think what art does is it frees this bottom-up flow of energy to have its natural actualization, instead of what our day-to-day life is, which is to have a filter. The artist Rasheed, in the entry to the Brooklyn Public Library, says, “Having discovered the flimsy fantasy of certainty, I decided to wander.” Well, an art museum—or, you know a library like that library—it allows your mind to wander. Because when you come from bottom-up, I think what’s happening from a scientific point of view, is you’re basically saying to that filter, “Thank you for trying to protect me.” Certainty can be helpful, when I’m at a traffic light and there’s a red light. I wanna press on the certain brakes and stop my certain car, so this noun-like entity stops and I don’t become one with everything.
But when you allow yourself to wander— You know, you don’t necessarily wanna do this when you’re driving through an intersection; but when you’re in an art museum, the safety of that is that you don’t need to worry about red lights at an intersection. You come to what I call the plane of possibility, this—some physicists would call it the formless source of all form—and you allow these actualities to emerge without a filter of what you knew before. So the feeling inside is awe. And then you feel the gratitude. And then you can feel into stuff that before, wasn’t even in your awareness.
So when you come through a museum, when you’ve had that kind of transformative, integration-promoting— Why do I say integration-promoting? Because it’s allowing new elements to be differentiated and linked in new combinations. So a person’s standing taller, feeling freer, feeling more hope, feeling more optimism. Because you know, hope, in many ways, can be seen as when you start tapping into more possibilities than what you thought before were actually available to you. And art allows you to do that.
Sadoyan: Yes. Yes. And Dan, how does this relate to memory, then, and memorable experiences with art?
Siegel: Well, let me just tell you, this is a memorable experience, to be speaking with you about all this, Lilit…
Sadoyan: Likewise.
Siegel: … because, you know, our whole human family has an incredible moment now in cultural evolution to wake up to things. So when you talk about memory, in many ways, memory is a word we use for how an experience at one time makes the probability of something happening in the future altered. You know, that’s the broadest way of defining memory. The usual way we think of memory is, oh, you know, I was with my mom two days ago. We were walking our dog, and we saw a beautiful sunset. So I can have the factual memory of that; I can have the autobiographical sense of that—you know, myself in time with my mom. And those are called explicit memory.
But we also have something called implicit memory, which is just the feeling that was there and the perceptions and the, you know, behaviors that were going on. And those, if they’re left in pure form, when we retrieve them from storage—’cause memory has encoding during the experience, storage, and then retrieval—the retrieval of an implicit memory, like I’m describing now, is just the feeling of it, is just the perception of it.
So memory doesn’t always, when you retrieve it, feel like you’re remembering something. And this actually explains trauma, in many ways, post-traumatic stress disorder. But what you can do from a perspective of art is allow, basically, memory in the form of these top-down filters to then be activated. You know, you’re seeing something that looks like a pipe. But then the whole setup of what’s in that frame then has my linguistic centers, which are a part of my explicit factual memory, and maybe my sense of my grandfather with his pipe; maybe that gets activated in explicit autobiographical memory. It allows them to be activated just enough.
But then something happens that’s quite artistic, you know, that’s quite amazing, quite fantastic, quite helpful. Helpful why? Because it shakes me out of the doldrums of just living with what I’ve learned in memory, and opens me up to the incredible expansiveness of what it means to be alive as a human being.
Sadoyan: Fascinating. You’re providing so much clarity for what I’ve observed in my teaching experience. I lead mindfulness-based art experiences at the Getty, and utilizing mindfulness has led to these deeply moving encounters in adults, in teens. And, you know, thinking about what makes that so successful and what is it about these mindfulness practices that the participants find so valuable?
We had a formal evaluation done of this teen program. It was a eight-week mindfulness-based arts education program called Art Impact. And resilience just permeated throughout this formal evaluation. The teen participants were talking about the museum program expanded their perspectives—you know, physically, intellectually, emotionally. And my favorite is, one participant reflected, “I just find myself asking more questions.”
Siegel: Oh, yeah.
Sadoyan: “I wonder more.”
Siegel: Wow.
Sadoyan: “There’s so much to wonder about.”
Siegel: So beautiful. Can I ask you a question, Lilit?
Sadoyan: Yes.
Siegel: How did that make you feel, when you heard the impact of that program you’re providing in such a deep way?
Sadoyan: Well, thank you for asking. It was beyond my wildest dreams and expectations. So much of what they reported about their experience was embedded in my goals and objectives in developing the program. And I had never articulated that in those terms, in the words. So what was showing up in their evaluation was exactly what I had in mind. And so I think it provided me with a sense of coming home to myself.
Siegel: That’s so beautiful. You know, the coming home experience, in some ways, is, you know, how we all can come home with each other. Instead of feeling separate, we can actually feel this wholeness, if we can use that word. That, you know, from a science point of view, I think it does correspond to dropping into this— I call it the plane of possibility, this formless source of all form. That art then, when it’s done in this mindful way, is experienced as a coming home, as a becoming whole.
I know when I used to teach with John O’Donohue, sometimes he’d get ready to read poetry, let’s say to a bunch of therapists. And he would read it, and it would fall flat. And I would say, “Okay, let’s do take two. I’m gonna go do a very brief mindfulness-of-the-breath exercise for all of you in the audience, ’cause we’re not used to using the fullness of our open mind; we’re filtering things through our analytic mind. So let’s just focus on the breath, in and out, in and out.” And even in that practice, you develop kind of a coherence of the mind, just from simple breath practice. Then John would read the same poem, and people would be brought to tears. And we would then talk about the difference.
So it’s so beautiful to hear about how your work with teens and allowing them to pause, develop a different kind of being aware— ’Cause you could be aware without being mindfully aware. What’s the difference? Awareness is being filtered, I think, by these top-down filters we’re talking about. Mindful awareness is a receptive state, which brings you the awareness from that pure, I think, plane of possibility. That’s what I think is going on; that’s a proposal.
But the experience then subjectively is, I feel more alive. I feel like I’m seeing more. My gosh, I feel like suddenly, the colors become more vibrant, the sounds become richer. The way my body feels is electric, you know? Those experiences, they’re not by accident; they’re a part of letting the mind relax the filters, access the openness, and let the incredible synergy, where the person, in their body, is now literally joining with the piece of art, whether it’s poetry or music or, you know, a painting, a sculpting.
And in the joining with, there’s this interesting interpersonal element. You’re kind of joining with the mind of the artist. Right? So it’s the artist, the art, and the art, you know, soaker inner, what— Is there a word for that? The— I don’t know.
Sadoyan: Sure.
Siegel: The soaker inner.
Sadoyan: Sure.
Siegel: ’Cause it is certainly a receiver of the art, but that sounds almost too passive. It’s some active way, where I— The art joiner. Maybe we’ll make up a word like that. I am joining with the art.
And so the art joiner—if we’re gonna temporarily use that initial word, you know—the art joiner is now expanding who they are. Because who they are is not just in their body. So in a way, loneliness and the pandemic of loneliness we have has the opportunity to shift into the experience of belonging. I don’t know if the kids you’re working express that, but certainly, my experience in this body of going to an art museum is, I feel like I belong to a larger humanity.
Sadoyan: Yes, they definitely do, as do the, you know, adult participants and general public visitors, feeling the same way, moved to tears. I love that idea. How ’bout a cocreator?
Siegel: A cocreator. Yeah. I mean, I’m with you all the way on that. I don’t know how the artist would feel about that.
Sadoyan: Right. Right.
Siegel: But everyone could sign their name to the bottom of the canvas.
Sadoyan: Yes.
Siegel: But it is definitely a cocreation. And you know, when I was becoming a narrative scientist, my teacher, Jerry Bruner, he would always call it, you know, co-construction of narrative. But that’s really like what we’re doing now in our conversation. We’re co-constructing it.
Sadoyan: Yes. IntraConnected, your most recent book, what does intraconnected mean, and why did you invent that word?
Siegel: Yeah, we have plenty of words; we don’t need more, that’s for sure. You know, I was with a bunch of scientists and mathematicians, studying systems on a retreat. And we went to a forest and we spent three days, individually, separated out, in this big forest. And then we came back, and everyone was saying what their experience. And we’re using words like interdependent and interconnected and interwoven and inter, you know, being, like the Thich Nhat Hanh beautiful phrase, interlaced.
And then it was my turn to speak around the circle. And I try to be very specific about words I use, ’cause I know beneath those words are concepts and categories, and I wanna try to be true to it. So I said, “I resonate with everything everyone’s saying. But I can’t say inter anything because after a few hours, and then certainly for the whole three days, the feeling was, the sense was, the perspective was, I was the creek, I was the trees, I was the sky and the clouds, I was the body called Dan. And it wasn’t that the body was connected to the trees. There was a connectedness within the whole. And I guess I would say then it was—”
And then I paused and I looked and looked in my vocabulary inside my mind and I just said, “I guess it was intraconnected.” And everyone goes, “Oh, yeah, fine, fine.” And then when came back to computerland and wanted to type out notes on what that experience was like, you know, I wrote, “Well, you know, the experience was, I was intraconnected.” And the autocorrector kept on changing it to interconnected. And I said, “What’s wrong with my computer?” So I went to the autocorrector and it said it’s not a word. That intraconnected is not a word. And I looked it up in the dictionary; it was not a word.
And I thought, oh, my God, in English, we don’t have a word for the connectivity within the whole? And we don’t. Most languages, we don’t.
So intraconnection is like, you do have a me in a body; you do have a we in the interconnections; and the intraconnectedness looks at a system from it being a whole filled with this beautiful fabric that, in many ways, is built out of not just this, I think, open awareness and connection, but actually out of love.
So the intraconnected word can be, in a fun way, expressed as me plus we is this other word that, you know, is mwe. This is not about getting read of the me, getting rid of the individual self. It’s saying that modern culture has told us that the word self means only your body; that it’s a synonym for the individual.
If we only define the self as separate, the solo self, we’re in deep trouble. You know, it’s the source of racism and social injustice; it’s the source of climate disaster, ’cause we excessively differentiate the whole species from other species.
And the fun thing about mwe is that the person going to a museum, for example, goes with their individual history, their ancestry, the particular attachment experiences they had, what they’ve experienced in the last week. All those top-down filters are very real; they’re part of me—that is, who that person as a me, as they’re individual, like. And then they join with and belong to this larger humanity that the artist beautifully created and the museum is offering them as an experience.
So that they then go not from me to we, but me to mwe. And in doing that, they don’t have to lose anything. You’re not losing self, you’re expanding self. So that’s the idea of intraconnected, would be yes, you’re an interior, inner self; you’re a relational self—that’s the inter. Those are both real and really important. And you’re the wholeness of it all, the intraconnected self of mwe.
Sadoyan: And you trace this trajectory in your book from conception and birth into adulthood.
Siegel: What happens with the womb? What happens when you’re one, in terms of, you know, your sensations, perspective, and agency? How does the culture—through your parents, through your peers, through your teachers—how does it keep on giving you this message that in modern culture—not indigenous cultures or contemplative traditions, but in modern culture—it tells you, “You are separate, you are separate, you are separate.”
What is the outcome of that when you’re in a primary school? And then in secondary school, as an adolescent? And you go through all that into adulthood. And then you say, “Well, you know, what is adulthood about?” We continue to develop throughout our lifespan. So that it invites the reader on a journey to explore their own individual history. Think about ways you can have pervasive leadership, so that every human being can be engaged in a conversation, the intraconnected conversations, to say, you know, “Business as usual is not going so well.” I think we all feel it.
And it’s just a book, you know, just gently saying, “Look, things are going really badly, it’s true. But through the vision of art, and through bringing all these things—indigenous teachings, contemplative teachings, and science—to bear with what art is telling us, all those things together, we have an opportunity, actually, to say, ‘Okay, it was the human mind that was with a mistaken identity.’ Well, let’s course correct. We don’t have to beat ourselves up; let’s just say, ‘Woops. That didn’t work.’” We have time to actually course correct, see that the self is not the same as the individual that you have an inner self, yes; you have a relational self; and you have an intraconnected mwe self. And that feeling of mwe then allows you to go, “Oh, wow. It’s a pathway I didn’t even know was possible, but we can, mwe can do this.”

Sadoyan: And after having gone through this journey of writing and completing the book, is there a message you’d like to leave our listeners with?
Siegel: Yeah. I think individually, and with the immediacy of the relationships you have, and with our larger ways we work in the world, and our whole role as a human family—and now we’re 8 billion in number—there is an opportunity here that has a pressing urgency to it; that if each individual starts thinking in these ways, you know, we can really make a big difference. And you know, in working with a person named Joanna Macy, who’s been doing work with social activism, we were talking about how people who really have the courage to care also are vulnerable to burning out, because there’s so many things in life.
So when I said, as a person who trained in medicine, I just said, “Look, you know, if people interpret these experiences that are very real—social injustice and climate change, just to name two—if we keep on interpreting them as threats, then we wanna fight them, which is understandable, or flee from them, which is understandable. Or we freeze up; we don’t know what to do. Or we actually feel so helpless, in despair, we faint.” And those reactive states are exhausting. They’re hard for a minute, they’re hard for an hour, they’re hard for a day. But if you have them going on month after month, after year after year, it’s not sustainable.
So luckily, the human mind can actually switch from a threat-reaction state of mind to a challenge state of mind. I think we can shift our mind to a challenge state where we wake up every morning, we say, “Okay, these things that are coming at us, let’s think of them as challenges. And think of them as dance partners.” And ask the question, “What is the music today? What is the dance I’m gonna get in?”
So rather than worry about, “Can we really do this? Can we really do this?,” let’s do this together, to open up the mistaken identity we’ve had, where self is considered the same as the individual in the body.
And then realize that mwe can do this in an intraconnected life that’s filled with kindness, compassion, collaboration, creativity—all these things. And let’s just set our drive for that direction, and not worry about can we do it or not. We can do it. The biggest question is, will we? And I think if we do this together, we will.
Sadoyan: What a beautiful message. Thank you. Our highest purpose is to be in service of one another. And Dan, you’re doing just that with your book and sharing all of your knowledge and wisdom. Thank you very, very much for making such a positive impact.
Siegel: Well, thank you, Lilit. It’s really an honor to be here with you in conversation. And I really enjoyed it. And thank you so much.
Sadoyan: Thank you.
This episode was produced by Zoe Goldman, with audio production by Gideon Brower and mixing by Myke Dodge Weiskopf.
Our theme music comes from the “The Dharma at Big Sur” composed by John Adams, for the opening of the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles in 2003 and is licensed with permission from Hendon Music.
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