Why can making a few repetitive marks on paper become so absorbing?

We explore the neuroscience of creativity, doodling, colouring and structured drawing — including why creativity isn’t a “right-brain” activity, how imagination and evaluation cooperate, and why constraints can sometimes make us more creative rather than less.

We also look at Zentangle, NeuroGraphica and mindfulness, separating what neuroscience genuinely supports from the much bigger claims sometimes made about creative practices.

Perhaps making art doesn’t always need to be about producing good art. Sometimes the interesting part is what happens while your hand is moving.

What does the world feel like from inside another animal’s mind?

We travel through a decade of animal-consciousness research: optimistic bees, laughing rats, grieving dogs, extraordinary octopuses and the growing scientific recognition that subjective experience may extend much further across the animal kingdom than we once assumed.

Science still cannot tell us exactly what another animal experiences — but it is becoming increasingly difficult to assume that nobody is home.

How do you know you’re hungry, thirsty, anxious, tired or comfortable?

Welcome to interoception — the brain’s extraordinary attempt to understand what is happening inside the body.

We explore how interoception research has changed over the last decade and what it may tell us about emotion, autism, alexithymia, trauma and mindfulness.

It turns out that noticing bodily signals and understanding what they mean are not the same thing at all.

Why do humans repeatedly seek experiences that make the ordinary sense of self seem to disappear?

From awe beneath a night sky to deep meditation and psychedelic mystical experiences, scientists are beginning to study states once considered almost impossible to investigate.

We explore awe, self-transcendence, psychedelic neuroscience, the importance of setting and the fascinating boundary between neuroscience and spirituality.

Can science explain a mystical experience without explaining it away?

For a while, mindfulness seemed capable of fixing almost everything — stress, attention, depression, relationships and even the brain itself.

Then the science became more complicated.

We follow mindfulness research from the excitement of early brain-imaging studies through the replication and methodology debates, modern network neuroscience, trauma-sensitive practice and the growing recognition that meditation can sometimes produce difficult experiences.

The result isn’t the debunking of mindfulness. It’s a much more interesting and humane understanding of what meditation may actually be doing.

What really happens between two nervous systems when a human and an animal simply spend time together?

We follow a decade of research from the famous “love hormone” explanation of human–dog bonding to a much richer picture involving heart-rate variability, stress regulation and physiological co-modulation.

Along the way, we explore animal-assisted therapy, the importance of the animal’s own experience, and an intriguing possibility: perhaps sometimes neither human nor animal is doing the regulating alone — perhaps the relationship itself matters.

Episode Notes

The Spruce Podcast. Your Brain Is Not Separate From Your Body. We talk about the brain constantly. The anxious brain. The autistic brain. The ADHD brain. The traumatised brain. The creative brain. And sometimes our language makes it sound as though the brain is a small person sitting inside the skull, issuing instructions to everything else. But...

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Episode Notes

The Spruce Podcast. Why Making Art Can Change a State. There is a particular kind of relief that can happen when the hands become busy. A pen moves across paper. Paint spreads into water. A repeated pattern grows. A line bends around another line. Nothing important has been solved. And yet something inside feels slightly different. Researchers...

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Episode Notes

The Spruce Podcast. What Ten Minutes of Mindfulness Can Change. Mindfulness is often presented as something large. A practice. A lifestyle. A commitment. Something involving cushions, retreats, or twenty minutes of silence twice a day. But some of the most interesting recent research is asking a smaller question. What can happen after only a brief...

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Episode Notes

The Spruce Podcast. Mindfulness Does Not Have to Mean Calm. There is a subtle trap hidden inside mindfulness. We begin because we want to feel better. Then we sit quietly. And we don't feel better. Perhaps we notice irritation. Restlessness. Pain. Noise. Thoughts becoming louder rather than quieter. And somewhere along the way, we conclude that...

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Episode Notes

The Spruce Podcast. ADHD and the Rhythm of Attention. We often talk about attention as though it were a spotlight. Either it is pointing at the right thing or it isn't. But inside the brain, attention is also rhythmic. Neural populations produce repeating patterns of electrical activity. Different patterns appear at different frequencies, rather...

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