The Embodied-Enactive-Interactive Brain: Bridging Neuroscience and Creative Arts Therapies

Abstract

The recognition and incorporation of evidence-based neuroscientific concepts into creative arts therapeutic knowledge and practice seem valuable and advantageous for the purpose of integration and professional development. Moreover, exhilarating insights from the field of neuroscience coincide with the nature, conceptualization, goals, and methods of Creative Arts Therapies (CATs), enabling comprehensive understandings of the clinical landscape, from a translational perspective. This paper contextualizes and discusses dynamic brain functions that have been suggested to lie at the heart of intra- and inter-personal processes. Touching upon fundamental aspects of the self and self-other interaction, the state-of-the-art neuroscientific-informed views will shed light on mechanisms of the embodied, predictive and relational brain. The conceptual analysis introduces and interweaves the following contemporary perspectives of brain function: firstly, the grounding of mental activity in the lived, bodily experience will be delineated; secondly, the enactive account of internal models, or generative predictive representations, shaped by experience, will be defined and extensively deliberated; and thirdly, the interpersonal simulation and synchronization mechanisms that support empathy and mentalization will be thoroughly considered. Throughout the paper, the cross-talks between the brain and the body, within the brain through functionally connected neural networks and in the context of agent-environment dynamics, will be addressed. These communicative patterns will be elaborated on to unfold psychophysiological linkage, as well as psychopathological shifts, concluding with the neuroplastic change associated with the formulation of CATs. The manuscript suggests an integrative view of the brain-body-mind in contexts relevant to the therapeutic potential of the expressive creative arts and the main avenues by which neuroscience may ground, enlighten and enrich the clinical psychotherapeutic practice.

Repeating patterns: Predictive processing suggests an aesthetic learning role of the basal ganglia in repetitive stereotyped behaviors

“…Using aesthetic learning has been discussed in the light of predictive processing as providing a secure space for therapy. Within such a safe context, exploration and new experiences, guided by interpersonal coupling through a therapeutic relationship, could catalyze the creative destruction of overweighted priors, and the creative construction of new ones ( Vaisvaser, 2021 ). Building on such proposals, we suggest that creative art therapies may serve targeted goals in conditions characterized by more internally or externally biased agent-environment dynamics.…”

Beauty and Uncertainty as Transformative Factors: A Free Energy Principle Account of Aesthetic Diagnosis and Intervention in Gestalt Psychotherapy

“…Changes in the shared generative model can restructure the experiential field organisation and lead to therapeutic change. Coherently, some authors defined therapy as the generation of new predictive representations: “Moments of creative not-knowing may emerge and hence the need for active exploration, innovation and generative possibilities… [therapy] may encompass both strategies to engage predictive processing neurodynamics—sampling new sensory input through action (active inference) and shaping the internal models of the world (prediction signals) through meaning-making” ( Vaisvaser, 2021 ; p. 5). New predictions are therapeutic when they can explain a greater deal of prediction errors which can be successfully integrated into experience or otherwise remain unexplained when sufficient interpersonal support lacks.…”

“…. [therapy] may encompass both strategies to engage predictive processing neurodynamics-sampling new sensory input through action (active inference) and shaping the internal models of the world (prediction signals) through meaning-making" (Vaisvaser, 2021;p. 5).…”

Why art? The role of arts in arts and health

“…The application of embodiment to art, is developed in Embodied Aesthetics (Ticini et al, 2015 ). An article called “ The Embodied-Enactive-Interactive Brain: Bridging Neuroscience and Creative Arts Therapies” has already been presented (Vaisvaser, 2021 ). This article is however based on the Bayesian approach to cognition and “predictive coding”, which implies a computational understanding of the brain.…”