I'm writing this from a town I've never been in before. And I decided that an account of my thought process in my first hour here in Missoula, 
Montana is as good a way as any to introduce myself and what I will be writing about in this blog on art, media and the mind. Why? I suggest that we think about art more often than we might think.
Art in travel
Like all travelers, as I walk out of the airport gate, part of my mind (a part not still stuck in the lugging, blinking haze of flying in planes) starts building a conception of this new town. The first thing I see under the roughhewn wooden beams of the airport? A taxidermied bear in a large glass case looming on its hind legs over generic airport seats. This scene starts me thinking about how imagery is used to communicate the ideal of Montana as a place of wilderness, how well that imagery corresponds with both the ideal and reality and how all that shapes what we think. For example, because I associate Montana with ranches and the American West, I expected a dry, dusty and flat terrain in mainly oranges and browns, rather than the lush and green, restaurant and vintage clothing shop filled college town actually before me driving out of the airport.
Beautiful and Unexpected
Once at the hotel, the lobby forms an odd and amazing tableau that nobody purposefully set up, and yet it seems like art and helps build my conception of Missoula: Dozens of teenaged girls, all in floor length satin purple gowns, giddily mill about. Two men tromp through them in the hip waders and gear of fly fisherman. A hand-painted banner announces "The Grand Assembly of the International Order of Rainbow Girls." Out the windows behind, the Clark Fork River-high and fast from r
ecent rains-pounds and charges around mountains.
Aesthetic responses are heightened when we encounter discrepancies (e.g., I didn’t expect checking into the Doubletree would involve checking into a grand assembly of purple satin and fly fishing): our senses become more attuned and acute, our minds make up stories and associations to help us make sense. We become more engaged. Artists try to induce this state in their audiences, but it also happens in regular life.
And sometimes life and art mix together: this hotel lobby scene with its saturated color, absurd contrasts, grandiosity and natural grandeur captures perfectly the sensibility of
David Lynch's films. I remember that Lynch was born in Missoula. (He writes his biography in four words: "Eagle Scout Missoula Montana"). I start to wonder what this idiosyncratic scene tells me about Missoula, and how this
childhood home town shaped Lynch's art and worldview...
The point of this slide show...
I could go on in exhaustive detail on all the aesthetic thoughts and responses that happen in just one hour, but I don't want my first post in this blog to become any more of a traveler's slide show(especially since it's taken me this long to get from the airport to the hotel lobby). But I do have a point: Aesthetic thinking-the way we extract meaning, ideas and feelings from the qualities of our sensory experiences- is not limited to just when we explicitly think we are experiencing art. I could take an hour of anyone's life and find examples of this mode of thought. And it's not just about finding things beautiful or ugly. We have continuous stream of aesthetic responses that helps us attend to, make sense of, and envision possibilities in our worlds. These responses inform what we imagine, believe, desire, and understand about most anything: a new town, our idea of family, what it is to be male or female, a presidential campaign, love gone wrong.
What this blog will be about
In this blog on art, media and the mind, I will be exploring psychological and neuroscientific research and questions about how our mind/brains work in aesthetic ways and how these mind/brains interact with our overwhelmingly mediated worlds. We need to know more about this: we live in a world soaked in stories, music and images designed to use our basic human aesthetic capacities to shape our beliefs, desires and imagination, with often muddled and competing effects.
As a developmental psychologist and educator, I particularly want to understand how children can come to appreciate and mindfully navigate these aspects of their worlds and minds. I look forward to conversations with anyone else that finds this interesting (or wants to argue that it's not). So let me know what you think.
