Episode 20: Dr. Kathryn Cullen

In this episode of Creativity on Tap, host Frank Sentwali sits down with Dr. Kathryn Cullen, professor of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences at the University of Minnesota and Director of the Division of Child and Adolescent Mental Health. 

Dr. Cullen researches creativity in relation to mental health, particularly how creative arts interventions can help improve depression symptoms in adolescents. She is also studying the creative brain through neuroimaging and cognitive tests.

Put simply: She studies the effects of creativity on the brain and has conducted pioneering research on how making art can support healing, connection, and resilience in young people.

Drawing from years of clinical research and collaborations with artists and educators, Dr. Cullen discusses how creative practices, from visual art to music, dance, and writing. can help adolescents reconnect with themselves, express difficult emotions, and find renewed hope. She shares the origins of Creativity Camp, an intensive arts-based intervention shown to reduce depression symptoms and strengthen brain networks tied to well-being and creative thinking.

Insightful, heartfelt, and filled with practical wisdom, this episode offers a powerful reminder: creativity isn’t just an artistic skill—it’s a vital pathway to healing, connection, and thriving for young people navigating a rapidly changing world.

About COMPAS
COMPAS (compas.org) is a nonprofit with more than 50 years of experience delivering creative experiences to millions of Minnesotans of all ages and abilities, particularly those from historically marginalized communities. COMPAS connects professional teaching artists with students, older adults, and other community members to inspire creativity and empower voices.

About Creativity on Tap
Creativity on Tap is produced by COMPAS. In each episode, Creativity on Tap brings together educators, entrepreneurs, elected officials, parents, and other community leaders to discuss creativity and answer the question: What is creativity, and how can it solve the unique challenges facing today's world?

Creativity On Tap is part of Creativity Saves the World, an initiative led by COMPAS to explore, celebrate, and emphasize the pivotal role creativity can and must play in shaping a world that prioritizes equity, justice, and inclusivity.

Theme music (played at the end of the episode), "Krank It," was produced by COMPAS Teaching Artist Bionik.

Transcript

Creativity on Tap - Kathryn Cullen

Welcome to Creativity on Tap. I am Frank Sentwali. I'll be your host for today's episode.

Our guest today is Dr. Kathryn Cullen. She's a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the University of Minnesota and director of the Division of Child and Adolescent Mental Health. Dr. Cullen researches creativity in relation to mental health, particularly how creative arts interventions can help improve depression symptoms in adolescents.

She is also studying the creative brain through neuroimaging and cognitive tests. Put simply, she studies the effects of creativity on the brain and has conducted pioneering research on how making art can support healing, connection, and resilience in young people. Please welcome Dr. Catherine Cullen.

Dr. Cullen, thank you for being here at Creativity on Tap. How are you today? I'm great. Thanks so much for having me today, Frank.

Well, thank you for coming back from vacation and jumping right on to Creativity on Tap. With us, we met at a COMPAS fundraiser, and I was just fascinated by your work as it relates to creativity, the brain, young people, trauma, and looking for solves to help young people with what is kind of an epidemic and crisis going on in our society right now, which is depression and mental health issues. Let's start with your story a little bit.

How did your career path lead you to studying creativity and its relationship to mental health? Great. So, yes, I started out my career focusing on depression in adolescence. And as you mentioned, it's a major issue faced by many young people for a long time and increasingly so currently.

A lot of my work has been focused on trying to understand the brain in young people with depression. Why does the developing brain seem to be vulnerable to the onset of depression during these critical years of adolescence? What are the brain changes that are happening that might underlie the onset of depression? And what can we do about it to intervene? Adolescence is an important time for brain development, and it's not just a time of vulnerability, but also more plasticity. And that might be a great time to intervene and take advantage of some of that neuroplasticity.

And so some of my work has been trying to understand the neural circuits of depression and also what can we do to intervene that might be different from what we have. We currently have a lot of great treatments for depression that are available, and they don't always work. We are always really in search of new treatments.

And so that's kind of the space where I was when I started thinking about creativity, which was working with severely depressed adolescents who had been through treatments and hadn't responded and really noticing that some of these young people had started to give up hope on treatment and had dropped out of many things and had really developed more of a narrow focus in their worlds. And I was trying to think about ways to inspire them and shake them out of their stuckness. And I did notice that speaking to them about their creative interests and their arts or their music or whatever they're reading or writing would be a way to get some spark back.

And so how could we foster that more by giving some opportunities to engage in art and their creative talents and kind of being in that space? So I started collaborating with a wonderful artist and teacher from the University of Minnesota, Rochester named Yuko Taniguchi, who'd been developing some artistic art classes for young people at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. Okay. Can I pause you right there? Can you say that name one more time? Because clearly you've had lots of practice.

Yes. Can you slow down a little bit and mention the name of your working partner? Yeah. So my collaborator's name is Yuko Taniguchi.

Yuko Taniguchi. Yeah. The first name is Yuko, last name Taniguchi.

All right. Yes. She's originally from Japan and is, has done, is a practicing artist and also a teacher and has gotten, has received some different grant funding and fellowships to help her develop in this area, which is arts and health and developing interventions.

So she and I started collaborating and delivering an arts intervention at the University of Minnesota. And ever since then, we've been, we just, we really saw the strong impact that it had on young people and how much easier it was for them to engage in this kind of work compared to other kinds of therapies and how they were able to really kind of flourish while they were engaged in this kind of activity. So we created, we developed something called Creativity Camp.

We wanted to develop something more intensive and we wanted to study the brain in relation to how, how is the brain changing with creating arts intervention. If you don't mind, let me ask you, when you're talking about creative arts, are you speaking just visual art? Are you talking about musical and visual art? Cause I know musical arts therapy has kind of been a thing for a while. Absolutely.

I have a daughter who's studying that. So is this more focused on visual art or is it all the various art disciplines? Yeah, this is a great question. So yes, there are, there is a visual arts, music therapy, established field, same with music therapy as an established field.

In this case, we were really decided we were interested in arts and music broadly. And we kind of had the idea that different kids are going to respond to different kinds of activities and we don't necessarily know in advance what that will be. And so we really wanted to create an intervention that had a range of different activities with, that didn't necessarily have the goal of, you know, developing mastery or skill in a certain art or music, but to expose kids to different kinds of mediums and opportunities in a way that helped them tap into their creativity.

And I think one can tap into one's creativity in a lot of different kinds of activities. So that was, that's been our approach, which is this broad, different kinds of musics and, and, and arts. And that is, there are many, of course, many different ways to proceed with this.

So, yeah, so our creativity camp was eight days. It was a bunch of different kinds of art, medium and music. We had a dance session, for example.

Yes. And, and they, and it was really, really fun. It was really, really different.

And it was just very high impact. We were able to show that after the intervention, the depression symptoms decreased, the well-being increased and, and interviewed the kids and we interviewed the parents. And so from those interviews, we could really start to see some of the personal growth that was occurring in, in the camp, right after the camp and also six, you know, in the six months after the camp.

So we, we interviewed them again six months later. I can imagine, you know, some of it kind of almost seems intuitive in a sense that like dance, for example, it's probably been used for mental health therapy for thousands of years, right? Without it actually being scientifically studied, because we have cliches, like, you know, sing like nobody's listening, dance like nobody's watching, which is really rooted in like, make yourself feel better. Right.

And so I can only imagine that you get this relationship between joy and movement when the kids were dancing, that kind of almost seems like it would be. Yeah, that's right. Absolutely.

Yeah. There's something about dance in particular that, yes, it's, it's a way to use the body and get into the body. So sometimes with mental health, we get a little bit, it sounds weird, but we'll get disconnected from our body.

We have to get back into the body and be aware of it and, and, and just make things more tangible again, and not so abstract. No, no, no, that's good. So, so yeah, so we were, we, we published those findings and based on that, we've been starting to expand a little bit to look to see, could we tailor some to tailor this intervention to different populations? For example, we, we brought, we had a project in Japan.

We, we worked with students in Japan who were, you know, experiencing some struggles after the, especially after the pandemic and tailored the intervention to work with those students. And we were able to show in a small study that there was an impact on wellbeing. We've, we've kind of been tailoring it to a couple of other populations as well, Oromo youth in Minnesota and Native American youth in here in Minnesota.

And we're currently doing a project collaborating with some people, some collaborators in South Africa at the University of Cape Town, or they're just starting, about to start their version of Creativity Camp, which is going to be working with young people living with HIV. That's a area that is high, high prevalence of HIV and, and in fact impacts a lot of young people and their mental health. So, but yeah, the other thing we've been looking at with the Creativity Camp's original study that we still haven't published, but it's taking longer to analyze the data, but how did it impact the brain? So we're just getting ready to submit some results, but what we're seeing so far is that the, some of the brain networks that are implicated in both depression and creativity are kind of the same actually.

And the ways that they connect to each other seems to increase after the camp. So we're really interested in seeing that. So there's this potentially, brain change in how a brain, how certain brain networks are connected to each other after this sort of intensive intervention where you're every day practicing, tapping into your creativity.

So that's been exciting to see and also preliminary because these early studies are always small. And so we need to follow up with larger studies. This is fascinating stuff.

And it really, I think, tracks for the community where I'm from. I'm from St. Paul, an urban, you know, right off the, and... Right in this neighborhood. Right in this neighborhood.

And so much of how we navigated the various things we would encounter as youth was arts. You know, I was born in 1973, so it was hip hop. So hip hop, break dancing first, and then rapping was a big part of how we navigated just things we'd encounter in the, quote unquote, the hood, right? Right.

And of course, dance was always a major component, you know, graffiti, just notebook graffiti in the school. That was one of my things when I was disconnecting from the class or dealing with whatever I was dealing with at home, parents divorce or whatever, was through graffiti. And so it just seems, it's interesting that what you're doing in this study works.

And I want to backtrack a little bit and just talk about kind of the evolution of research in depression in general, and especially in adolescent depression in this society, because I can, I'd imagine that this is, you know, probably what last 30 years really work. I don't, you know, we didn't talk about depression when I was young. Mm-hmm.

And it really didn't become a conversation, I think, until a major conversation until my daughters were in adolescence. And there he's now, and actually two of my daughters are in mental health work with adolescence. One of them has a degree in sociology, but also some social work, adolescent social work study.

And then another one is working with youth with autism, Asperger's, and other developmental issues in England right now, over in London. So when did society start to look at the behaviors of young people and say, maybe this is deeper than just they're poorly parented, for example? Absolutely. First of all, congratulations on having those two daughters, and thank you for bringing them into the field, into the world first, and now into the field.

That is really, we really need more young people to go into this field because it is a major issue our society is facing. And yeah, you know, I think you're right. Decades ago, when we were children, depression was not well recognized in children.

And it's only, it was only in the, I think, in the 80s that people began to really start to recognize depression in children and adolescence. And it wasn't just something that occurred in adults. And I think we started to under, we've been, we've been recognizing it more and more.

And in fact, the teenagers now, I would say are much more likely to understand and have a language for mental health issues compared to when we were young. They, they're aware of, of issues. They have words to talk about and recognize mental health.

So I think that's part of why we're seeing more of a prevalence is because we're just recognizing it more. And there were issues like this when we were younger and they just weren't being unrecognized. But yeah, I mean, psychiatry tends to be, to kind of lag behind some other fields, like for example, cardiology, studying the heart.

We know what causes a heart attack. We understand these pathologies of the blood vessels and we can really like trace back to early, you know, if we can really just prevent, you know, fatty buildup inside the arteries by like early interventions or when a person is young, we can really prevent later. We don't have that same.

I mean, we're working towards it, but it's been slower. It's been more difficult to really get an understanding of psychiatry because these diseases are so much more complex. And it's also really hard to, it's hard to study the brain.

You can't just, you can't just take a biopsy. I mean, you can, but not as easily about, you know, risk of harm. So yeah, so the brain is ambiguous and complex.

Thank you for that. So yeah, I think we're making some progress. You know, there's a lot of interest in this and some breakthroughs.

And what we've, you know, the field got stuck with for many decades was a certain, you know, group of medications and not having the ability to really move beyond that one group of medications. And I think the field is starting to move beyond that and looking at different kinds of therapies and other kinds of avenues for medication. There's still a long way to go, however.

So, and I think, I think of creative arts not to replace other kinds of medications or therapies, but as a way to really look after a person's well-being and help, help a person navigate the recovery process and really find meaning and find a way to express themselves and find a way to connect with others in a time when it's really difficult to do that otherwise. Yeah. So how, well, first off, let me ask you, what was young Dr. Cullen, like, how did you end up deciding that this was the area of interest that you wanted to go into? Was there something in your childhood that was like, boom, creativity and the doldrums around me, these two things need to be merged somehow.

How did you get that here? Yeah, no, I would say they didn't really emerge for me until maybe like eight years ago or seven years ago when I met Yuko. I did. I knew I was interested in mental health and that had to do with some early experiences.

For example, there was a family member that I lost to suicide early on, an uncle, a beloved uncle. And we also had, I also had a suicide of a close friend. And it was kind of like these terrible formative experiences that kind of put this question to me, which is why, what is going on in the brain that leads to this? How could this have happened and what is going on? And so those are kind of the things that some of the, some of the things that drove, drove me to want to pursue medicine and try to understand the brain and the mental health and psychiatry.

Meanwhile, I was raised by a family that valued music and valued the arts. I have, my grandmother was a gifted piano player. She also wrote music.

She wrote a couple of musicals that our grade school performed directed by one of my aunts. So we all had music, you know, we had music lessons paid, you know, my grandparents supported us, musical education. Not to say I wanted to ever, I really was a gifted musician.

I'm not, but I learned to play the piano and my, my siblings all actually, you know, had additional instruments as well and, and choirs. So something like music was a part of our growing up. In fact, we had a rule that you couldn't sing at the dinner table.

Otherwise nobody would eat. No singing at the table. So that's gives you a little bit of an understanding of like how much music and the arts were present.

I think it just, but it didn't occur to me to sort of bring that part into my work as a medical doctor until fairly recently, which once, but once I've been doing that, it's makes so much sense. And it's also makes for a very meaningful aspect of my career. Yeah.

It's interesting because I don't even know what episode we're on of Creativity on Tap, but everybody we've interviewed or talked to, I like to call it conversations, CEOs to, to medical doctors like yourself, to people who have kind of gone into more niche entrepreneurship. Every single person talks about how the arts in some way, shape or form encouraged in their childhood. And it's just amazing how the relationship between the arts and career success, even if you're in a career that has nothing to do with the arts goes hand in hand.

It's been an interesting discovery that I've made in the process of hosting this podcast. So I want to ask you, how do you define creativity from when it comes to mental, well in general first, but also when it comes to mental health, both a scientist and a clinician, how, what would your personal definition of creativity be? That's a great question. First, I just want to underscore what you just said, which is like how that keeps on coming up in your conversations.

And that is just such an important thing to note regarding the importance of arts education and young people. So, cause not everybody has a grandmother who can sponsor their musical education and how we as a society really need to be supporting arts more. I mean, Compass is amazing and there, we should be doing more than that.

Like it should be more like access to arts and music education. So yeah. How do I define creativity? That's, you know, I should have prepared for that question.

There are so many different ways to define it. And that's something that we've been thinking about a lot. I think one definition is to, is kind of like to have an idea that is novel, more new, but also useful.

Okay. Like a creative, these two features of an idea. The problem with that, I think we've been thinking about in our group is things aren't always useful.

So for example, a beautiful painting. I mean, I guess there's a use to that or a beautiful song. I mean, the useful part maybe comes more into play for creative solutions or architecture or things like this.

But anyway, I would say I am interested in that question, which is I think evolving in the field. I've been just recently kind of participating in the field of creativity as a scientist. And so I've been able to start attending scientific meetings about the neuroscience of creativity.

And researchers who have been at this for many years are still kind of working on the definition of creativity. But I think from my perspective, it's tapping into your imagination. We all have that.

We all have the talent and the gift of creativity and knowing that and thinking about ways to foster it. I'm personally less interested in, you know, how certain people are more creative than others. That probably is true.

We see that and there's certain people that are just, you know, so creative, but that isn't as important to my work because I also, my work is more about acknowledging everybody does have creativity and it's about tapping into that. And in order to, that process seems to be relevant to mental health. And so that's what I've been interested in.

I think that's a perfect segue because I was going to ask you next, when someone is creating, making art, whether it be music, writing, painting, drawing, what's actually physiologically happening in the brain? Yeah, great question. There have been some studies about this, like what neural circuits are being activated and also what neurochemicals are going. And again, hard thing to study, but we do find evidence that there are like physiological changes, such as, you know, the autonomic nervous system.

So our fight or flight system gets calmed down. We do see that. We have, there has been studies showing that the stress hormone of cortisol is lower when we engage in the arts and music.

Yeah, certain brain networks firing when somebody has an insight, that's kind of, we haven't been, the thing that we've been studying is more just the ways that brain networks are connected to each other just during rest. So we're not even, that just even during rest is an important thing to study as well for creativity because creative insights occur sometimes when you're resting. That's why I create in my sleep and can't remember it when I wake up.

Yeah, but I think, you know, and I think there's so many different processes that are important when you think about mental health, one being just flow, creative flow. And if you think about, and that's something that artists, you know, really value. And one could see how that would be really relevant to wellbeing because it's a positive emotion.

It's a very positive experience. And people with depression don't get that many positive experiences. You can get, get that creative flow that could have a benefit, but also just that way that we're, that we're connecting with each other.

I find that creativity and engaging in the arts together can be a good way to have different individuals connect with each other in a way that they might not if they were just, I don't know, doing the crossword puzzle. They're sharing at a different level in that sense. That's my experience as a spoken word arts instructor.

And when I was, when I went back to school, I actually ended up doing a speech on a professor and students in Canada. And they had young people who were all immigrants from different parts of the world, do spoken word pieces, write poems and perform them as spoken word pieces in the classroom. And what they concluded was that because these young people who hardly ever spoke to each other, in part because of language barriers, because they were from different parts of the world, once they got a chance to hear each other's spoken word poems, they realized that no matter where they were from in the world, they had these common shared experiences.

They knew they were all immigrants, but they didn't realize that the journey that brought them to, I believe they were in Ontario, the journey that brought them there was pretty similar. And that not only was the journey that brought them there pretty similar, but a lot of their cultural traditions and customs didn't vary that much. And then the article went on to talk about how after they all did their performances, it was a completely different classroom.

Now the students were teaching each other their native languages and sharing all of, you know, native foods and all of a sudden it just opened up everything. Because of the process of finding that commonality through art. As I was listening to you, one of the things that came to mind was that maybe part of the reason that creativity plays such a helpful part is there's really no wrong way to do arts.

You know, I don't think I'm depressed, but I think a lot of times my experience with people who have been going through depression is you can never get anything right. Everything's wrong. Everything's dark.

Lots of negativity surrounding even positive things that happen. But when you're creating art, there's no wrong way. Art is, you know, beauty's in the eye of the beholder.

No matter what you're creating, it's correct. Have you found is there some of that that maybe changes moods or changes emotions because you can't go wrong? I think that's a great question and we haven't actually posed it in that way, but it's very insightful. But yes, I mean, this is something that Yuko, one of her central kind of principles is it's when she's guiding the students is, you know, there's no right way and it can't be wrong if it's something that's authentic to you.

And that's really what we're trying to do with the students and the young people isn't to, again, not to master a skill, but to really get at that authenticity and that true expression. And if we can succeed in that, then that's success. And that piece of it, I think, is really the critical part of or one of the critical parts about how it's helpful for mental health.

And I think you're right. Like it doesn't have to be positive. It doesn't have to be like a rainbow or it can have a sadness or a heaviness to the artwork or the music and still be beneficial for mental health.

Yeah. So one of the things I didn't tell you when we talked and why I was so I went to Sam, I said, we have to have Dr. Cullinan as a guest is because my youngest daughter lost her mother when she was 10. She's 12 now.

And there was a lot of transition. Obviously, we were co-parenting as it was, but her mother lived about 25 minutes and she went to school near where her mother lived. So every day during my parenting time, I would make that drive.

And so when she lost her mother, obviously, she's living with me full time now. And but she's always been into painting and art. She loves painting.

It's kind of prodigious at it. And I noticed that during the time she lost her mother, she was really proud of her paintings. And she painted a lot.

And a lot of them were really dark. Black skies, black oceans. One painting was like a black sky with red rain coming down into this deep, dark blue ocean.

But she and it was beautiful. But I could tell it was coming from a place of mourning and loss and all the things that happened. I just let her let her do her thing.

And we didn't get her a therapist right away. I wanted her to kind of go when you're 10, you experience a loss different than when you have lived long enough to really understand. Absolutely.

And so we didn't get her a therapist for about a year. But I noticed that the painting was really what kept her grounded and all of that. And so that was one of the reasons I really wanted to have you on because I've seen what art can do for a child firsthand.

You've seen young people shift out of depression through creative work. Two questions. What do you think that creativity offers that therapy or traditional medications alone can't? And then have you encountered skepticism when you're making a case for creativity as a serious mental health intervention? How did you deal with those doubts? Oh, man.

So yes to all. Yeah. So what can creative arts offer that regular that like standard treatments can? I think one right off the bat, accessibility and engagement.

So there's there's a lot of mistrust of mental health treatment. I mean, that varies across communities, but most most communities do have some stigma related to mental health and some sort of not wanting to admit to it or let other people know about it or something like this and or shame about it. And so there's that's a barrier to accessing mental health treatment and and going to a doctor and taking a medication or seeing a therapist, though, that all is part of what might what kids might be opposed to doing, whereas engaging in something like the arts doesn't have that.

It's fun. There's a there's an approach that's so it's so much easier to approach and more and more just more enjoyable. It feels like something they would want to do versus something they wouldn't want to do.

OK, so we have that and that and also what people were trying to do in psychotherapy, which I think we have some great psychotherapies and they are very important. But oftentimes what we're doing is we're teaching skills for how to deal with symptoms. And ultimately, we're focusing on symptoms and we're trying to make them go away with the arts, with this with kind of I mean, and I can't I can't speak for music therapy, art therapy.

I'm not I don't have a degree in any of those. I'm just speaking about just creative arts in general and music. But we're not necessarily trying to make symptoms go away.

We're just trying to engage in the arts and again, tap into creativity and and then things happen and and more natural. And there are I shouldn't say it's more natural, but it's there are indirect effects, I will say again, like the the ability to express oneself, the flow, the connecting with others, the having fun. These are all positive things that have kind of an indirect effect that can benefit mental health without sort of head on sort of saying, OK, how are you going to manage your fears? Here's some.

Those are super important things. And this is like a different, more indirect way. Yeah.

OK, so do they work then? Have you seen them work in conjunction, whether it be descriptions or some of the symptom attacking things that you mentioned with kind of creativity? Have you tried you know, have you done research on how they work hand in hand together? I think we're still early on. And so there's a lot of research that is needed to figure out like what sequence, what combination is best. I think the answer is probably going to be something like everyone's different.

We all need different things. And there might be some kids like maybe your 10 year old. Maybe all they need right now is to engage in some arts and that's going to be enough for them.

And in order to really get on top of and really get their head above water. So I think it's going to vary across people, but we do need more research in this area. And the research on creative arts and music interventions has been we have had a lot, but they're also the studies tend to be smaller and less rigorous than, say, most of the research on drugs or something like that, medications.

And that's kind of getting at your second question, which is you were asking, what about do I encounter sort of doubts or skepticism about creative arts? I haven't really too much. I think most people hear about this and they're like, of course, yes, this is so cool. You know, this is definitely it.

But on the other hand, it's not something that there's a lot of funding availability for. And so I think we really on the other hand, there's currently a move in the field, in the sciences towards understanding this better. So I think there is potentially some momentum currently to move the field forward and understand mechanisms and conduct and really working together to design the right studies to answer some of these important questions.

So I think we could be moving into a really interesting time. As I'm listening, I just keep thinking about when you said it's kind of like, yeah, that tracks is just this is how my neighborhood has survived and coped for as long as I can remember. And even now, I think I mentioned to you the Black Youth Healing Arts Center.

And that's the question I was going to ask. Do you involve breathwork in that type of work in creativity camp or in your work? That's a great question. We haven't directly.

But we were one of our very first programs that Yuko and I did was it was really a mental health. It was a kind of a standard after like after school day treatment program. And we incorporated Yuko's arts.

We incorporate Yuko's arts workshops. And then we also incorporated a yoga class. And I really appreciated the value of those two together.

And then when we went to Japan, we were collaborating with this group of Japanese professors who were wanting to do a creativity and well-being course for their students. And they we kind of worked with them on the curriculum for the arts, and then they incorporated a yoga class. And so every single day for two weeks, these Japanese students did a yoga.

It was just like a special course that anyone could register for. It wasn't like, you know, specializing in people with depression or anything like that. It was just for college students at this at this university.

But they all did this yoga class, and then they did three hours of arts. And I really think it helped get them into a space where they could be more creative and more free and more open. So I think there's a lot of potential there.

Tell me about your experience with Breathwork. Well, I don't have other other than the fact that growing up, my father was heavy into like holistic medicine, psychic healing, yoga, meditation, all that. But a lot of the artists in the Twin Cities community that I'm involved with all do yoga and Breathwork and phenomenal artists.

Some are like Joe Davis was on our roster. Some of our mentees have come through by active black youth healing our center. They teach yoga or kind of yoga class that then they are pretty much what you're talking about.

And they all swear by it. Yeah. They all say that it's such an important part of grounding themselves.

Yes. It makes them more free flowing, able to create better, but also just keeps them calm as they navigate the hustle and bustle of society and trying to make a living as an artist. Because you know, one of the things you had mentioned, how art kind of decreases kind of the serotonin or those stress levels in the brain.

And the juxtaposition to that is what do you do when your art is how you make your living? Right. And because I know for me, once I moved from a phase of, okay, I'm just an emcee or I'm just a poet to like, okay, now I'm the front man for eight person live band spoken word troupe. And I now have a child, you know, when I was younger, my, my first child and, oh, and you know, I'm done with college and I'm on my own.

It's like, okay, now my art has to pay my bills. And so trying to find that balance between being in that calm space to create good art, but then also realizing that I have to create good art. That was a tough juggle.

And so I wish I had back then kind of had the network of artists that I'm around now where, you know, you could go and do things out both ends, trying to not let your art also become the source of your stress, if that makes sense. Yes, absolutely. Yuko and I recently published a paper called The Artist's Mindset, and it was kind of a, um, a collaboration, a kind of a paper about some discussions that we had where she shared with me her writer's rules that she kept, that she really foster her own creativity.

And, um, I was so amazed when I learned these rules, because then I thought, oh, this is so relevant to mental health. And that was kind of really like part of, of some of our foundational ideas. But anyway, one of her, so some of her rules are be curious and be flexible, keep an open mind, those kinds of things.

One is go to discomfort and like kind of that idea of, you know, be, you know, you need to, um, be on, you need to be observant and, and just, and, and pay attention to what's really what your experience is and, and being willing as an artist or a musician to really go to that discomfort and, and, and write about it or express it, because that might be the most impactful thing to express in that moment. Anyway, um, that takes a lot of courage and it can be difficult, um, but it also can potentially be the thing that you need to do in order to really authentically kind of express what you're going through. So yeah.

It becomes therapeutic. When I'm teaching, I tell my students, regardless of what you do for this class, for this assignment, try to write the poems that you ever share with Try to write the poem that is your authentic, truest thoughts and feelings that no one may ever see. They crumple it up and throw it out.

But that reflection of like that outlet of getting it out and then the reflection of seeing it back on yourself, then you can decide what you want to do with it. But digging into that uncomfortable place of authenticity, I found therapeutic and I try to encourage my students to do the same thing. You said when kids start to see that, you said that when kids start to see themselves as artists, feeling better becomes a byproduct.

What does that insight reveal about how creativity can shape identity, not just a mood? Yeah, I think that, um, it's about adolescence is a time I mentioned for brain development. It's also a time when, you know, these, these mental health issues kind of start cropping up, but it's really also a time to when people, when young people figure out who they are and their identities and one danger of, you know, having a severe condition like depression that is becomes chronic is you can start to identify with it, with it and, and start thinking like, I'm a kid who has depression. I'm a kid who, you know.

Start to reinforce that. Yes, that's my thing. And, and actually there's so many more interesting things about that kid and like so many more.

And so I think when we encourage a young person to practice tapping into their creativity and expressing themselves as an artist and really expressing their authenticity, then it's helps them craft that identity that is their true self and their, and that they can really, you know, and also we have so many different facets of our identity. It's not just one thing. It's not just I'm have depression or I'm, you know, good at the violin or there's, there's so many things and really embracing that and celebrating it in a way is, is I think a really great, important process of, of this time period as well.

As someone who works with youth, I'm thinking of so many things that I want to try with it because I coach basketball as well. And, and I know for a fact that a couple of our players, some of our best players actually struggle with mental health issues, thinking about how they really identify as the only thing I'm good at is basketball. Yes.

Actually, that's not. Probably a few other things. Yes.

And trying to help them to see that, right. Cause they really lean into the things that they don't feel like they're good at. And then the problem is this, that one thing, if you lose the game, it's like this, so this huge tragedy, but if you recognize the other interesting, fun, great things about yourself, you have more.

So true. Well, as we wind down here, just a couple more questions. One, what's next in your research? That's great.

Yeah. So we are about to start a new study at the Masonic Institute, Institute for the Developing Brain, which is kind of a little bit off campus. It's kind of near the Franklin bridge and the railroad bridge.

Anyway, that's, we're going to be having a weekly afterschool class. I'm kind of like similar to creativity camp, bringing in kids with depression and I'm working with professional artists and looking at the impacts on their mental health. So that will be starting in January.

We're also doing a study collaborating with the university of Minnesota, Rochester and the, an alternative school in Rochester, Minnesota, looking at impacts of creativity on wellbeing. Really excited to see what we learn about this project in South Africa from Cape town. Yep.

I mean, I've submitted, I just submitted a bunch of grants. So hopefully we'll, if NIH funding can be obtained, we'll do a larger scale study looking at impacts on the brain. And can we really prove a neural mechanism? I guess I should say there are many different mechanisms as we've kind of touched on, but if we can kind of really like make some in some specific mechanisms, I think that'll be really helpful.

Then we can build on it. Yeah. So you're going to, are you going to be at the ALC down in Rochester? Yes.

Do you know it? Yeah. I've done spoken word programs there. I used to work down in Rochester for about eight, nine years in a row through Compass.

Okay. And one year I did a collaborative program with the ALC Rochester STEM Academy, which is a all Somali immigrant charter Academy down there and LinkedIn, the boys and girls club down there, a couple of the high schools. And we did a big old poetry slam and the kids from the ALC wrote some pretty phenomenal stuff.

They really enjoyed it. So I think that your work down there with them is probably in the various artistic disciplines. Oh, I'm so glad you told me about that.

So yeah, that's, that's going to be exciting for you. Looking into your scientific crystal ball, what breakthroughs or new understandings about creativity do you think are just over the horizon? Great question. Yeah, it's a, it's a really fascinating time.

You know, I'm, I'm actually on the scientific board for the NeuroArts organization, which is seated in Johns Hopkins. And they are kind of working on, they created something called the NeuroArts blueprint, which is kind of working on creating some foundations. So definitions of creativity, what are the right tools we should be using? What are the right, who should we be studying? That kind of thing.

So I would say there's, there's probably going to be a lot that we learn in the coming years. I think that if I, if I could predict, I think that if we can hopefully begin to start to see some of the brain, start, start to piece together some of the brain mechanisms with fMRI that can be observed probably with larger samples with creativity and the arts. And let's see, another, another thing that we're, one of my collaborators at the Institute for Child Development is really interested in is actually seeing if we can study what I mentioned before, which is the connection, the between person connection that gets fostered in the creative arts through neural synchrony.

So that's kind of like, you know, if you, if you have two people that are close, they start having their biological rhythms synchronized, if that makes sense. And, and that just, that's just something that we've observed many times, like in different, in different kinds of ways. But one thing that we've been starting to do is use a tool, not, not a neuroimaging tool because you can't move around when you're getting a brain scan, but something called fNIRS, Functional Neuro-Infrared Spectroscopy, where you can wear a little cap and measure brainwaves.

And we can kind of see like, do the brainwaves get synchronized more so during arts versus not? So things like this, I think will give us just a little piece at a time, like, and then we've had to put it all together. You say that research is going to help couples. Yes.

Some of this stuff has been looked at, looked, looked at in couples, like interpersonal synchrony. And, and there was a really interesting study recently in Lithuania, looking at this choir concert where they measured people's synchrony. And they were, at that time, I think they were looking at like pulse, like the pulse.

And they could tell that during certain parts of certain songs, the synchrony went up because of this kind of feeling of connection that people have when they're singing. And so that kind of thing I think is really interesting and potentially powerful. So we'll have to see.

It just speaks to the, I guess, theory that we are all connected as human beings. Yes. And maybe some of what's going on with a particular environment worldwide, not just here, and how that filters down and the emotional stability or instability of young people.

So I think if nothing else, I'm going to take away from this, that we do have the ability to impact others and especially our young people with what we, with the energy that we project into the world. Well said. Dr. Cullen, wow.

What, so much interesting stuff. I feel like I could talk to you for hours on these subjects, especially as it relates to myself who works with young people in multiple facets, both art and athletics and, you know, my own child and her experiences. Really interesting conversation.

I thank you so much for taking the time out of your schedule to join us here at Creativity on Tap. Dr. Cullen has been our guest. She's a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the University of Minnesota and director of the Division of Child and Adolescent Mental Health.

I don't know what you're doing December 18th, but Compass is having kind of an educator appreciation evening over at Black Business Enterprises and is featuring two of our artists, performing artists team, Michael Rambo and Terrell X and also visual artist Heidi Jube. And you are invited and welcome to come join us. It's an early evening thing from six to eight, and there's going to be performances, food, drink, and artwork.

Wow. That sounds amazing. I'll be there.

Is your sister living in town or out of town? All of my sisters are in town. Because I'm sure you're like, yeah, ask me one more question about my amazing sibling. I'll bring her.

Kelly. Yes. Bring her down.

And for more information about that, people, you can go to www.compass and would love to have you down and meet some of our teaching artists and also educators that I bet would be interested in hearing about your work because they're the ones who work with the youth that we're trying to all find ways to give a better life experience. Thank you to them. Yes.

And thank you to you. You've been listening to Creativity on Tap. I'm your host, Frank Centrale.

And until next time, as always, go in the world with peace.