My first visit to Peru was very serendipitous. It was a series of last minute changes that brought together Mauricio and I, preceded by months of persistent haggling to get the chance to do the thing we really wanted to do - work with a unique community of Shipibo artisans based in the Amazon of Peru. And unique is hardly the word to use here - try astonishing, flabbergasting, jaw-dropping artisanal techniques that feature a combined method of singing geometric patterns in storytelling practice by a traditionally oral community. I could certainly go on (and will if you’d like, another day). But as one thing led to another, Mauricio and I ended up spending weeks, months and eventually years exploring some of the incredible craft traditions that Peru has to offer.
When I first was introduced to the stone puzzles Mauricio had been developing with traditional stone-carving artisan communities in Pacasmayo, I was taken by the cool pleasure of holding natural, colorful stones, unusually cut in clean palm sized pieces. It was different from the beautiful amethyst specimens I had collected with my grandfather and have subsequently trucked around with me my whole life. My grandfather was a renowned paleontologist based in Ottawa, Canada, and my sister and I grew up enamored by dinosaur bones and special stones, particularly those with rare specimens of little fossils imprinted upon them - special in a different nature.
The raw gems my family relished over the years - how mesmerizing they are! The marvel of mother nature goes beyond words. We so typically end up seeing these stones in big sculptures, on display to look at and admire, or we carve them into earrings and wearable jewels, an equally mesmerizing and sparkly delight to look at each time.
But these geometric stone puzzles were something different. To pick up a smooth piece of colourful stone, large enough to appreciate the intricacies of each mineral embedded within its ancient composition, and yet small enough to manipulate in the palm of my hand didn’t relate to what I knew point blank. I distinctly remember noticing an invisible calming feeling, an imperceptible shift, a juxtaposed moment where picking up the heavy-ish puzzle pieces somehow dropped the shoulders a quarter inch.
In design, we designers have often spoken of these elusive feelings: presence, weight, hand-feel, soul. These were the right words, but they were borrowed from intuition rather than evidence, rather than information about how the nervous system is already doing the calming work we seek when interacting with something attractive.
Interestingly, this has all shifted recently. Over the last decade, a field called neuroaesthetics has been quietly assembling the science behind what makers have always known: that the objects, spaces, and materials we encounter are not neutral. They are doing something to us - measurably, biologically, all the time.
What neuroaesthetics actually is
Neuroaesthetics is the study of how aesthetic experiences — looking at art, walking through a well-proportioned room, holding a beautifully made object — change the brain, the body, and behavior. Susan Magsamen, who runs the International Arts + Mind Lab at Johns Hopkins, and Ivy Ross, VP of Hardware Design at Google, describe it in their book Your Brain on Art as “the closest thing to magic” — not because the effects are mystical, but because they are so reliable that they become invisible to the person experiencing them.
The findings are striking. Engaging with the arts and aesthetic experiences just once a month is associated with measurably longer life. Beautiful environments lower cortisol. Slow, attentive looking at a single object — what the Penn Center for Neuroaesthetics recently called slow-looking — produces deeper aesthetic experience and greater emotional regulation than fast consumption of many images.
This all comes as no surprise. The mechanism is not mysterious. Our brains evolved to read materials, proportions, light, and texture as information about safety, abundance, and care. A space with organized visual complexity — fractal patterns, natural materials, considered light — reads to the nervous system as a place where it is safe to settle. A handmade object, weighed correctly in the palm, reads as evidence of human attention. The body relaxes because the brain has been told, in a language older than words, that this is a place — or a thing — that was made with care.
Why this matters for objects you can hold
Most of the neuroaesthetics conversation has focused, understandably, on the large scale: museums, architecture, public space, the Salone del Mobile installations where Magsamen, Ross, and the architect Suchi Reddy have tracked visitors' physiological responses to rooms designed for different emotional states.
But the same principles work in your hand.
A stone that fits the palm exactly — that has the cool density of something pulled from the earth, formed over eons and shaped over hours, not seconds — is a small neuroaesthetic event. The temperature transfers. The weight grounds. The eye notices the variation in the material — the soft veining, the considered finish — and the brain registers what Magsamen and Ross call the aesthetic mindset: a state of curiosity, presence, and openness that is itself protective of mental health.
This is why, as Magsamen has put it, art and aesthetic experience should be treated as essential, not optional. “Art is as important as sleep,” Ivy Ross said in 2024. “People don't know that.”
We always suspected this but didn’t own the words to articulate the mechanism of how it all fits together until recently. We just knew that the stones felt right. Now we understand a little more about why.
What we've learned making them
Our stones are carved along the Pacasmayo coast in northern Peru, in workshops run by a network of stoneworkers we've collaborated with for years. The methodology - how a piece is shaped, how the surface is finished so it reads as both refined and vibrant, how the proportions sit in the palm - was developed slowly, through a social impact program we built early on and now run as standard practice inside every piece that leaves the workshop.
The various textures and colors that come from the stones give us the opportunity to play with natural compositions of minerals, which is no small honor. Seeing as one stone can contain an unexpected world of texture, tone, density and hardness, it is only once it is cut open that we discover what lays inside. From there, our artisan team expertly selects for the varying qualities in relation to the piece we are creating, in some cases looking for harder sections, in others a particular tone and color. With our multi-colored games, an additional layer of selecting attractive color palettes is part of the overall artistic process that elevates the resulting combination of Andean stones. The unique combination of each piece is an element of what draws us in to pick up the stones without even thinking.
Its exciting now to connect the ideas of objects as instruments for the aesthetic mindset. Not decoration. Not novelty. Tools.
What to do with this
If you spend most of your day looking at screens, your nervous system is in a near-constant low-grade state of visual flatness. Pixels do not transfer temperature. Notifications do not have weight. Your brain is not getting the inputs it evolved to read.
A few minutes a day with a real object in your hand - looked at slowly, felt carefully - is not a wellness trend. It is a small, evidence-based correction. You don't need our stone for it. You need an object, made well, that rewards attention.
But if you're going to keep something on your desk, we'd suggest making it something that was made by someone, somewhere, with care. Your brain will know the difference. It always has.
This is the first of two pieces we're publishing during Mental Health Awareness Month. The second, on fidgeting and the science of calming objects, follows on Thursday.
With gratitude to the work of Susan Magsamen and Ivy Ross, whose book Your Brain on Art shaped much of our thinking here, and to Anjan Chatterjee and the team at the Penn Center for Neuroaesthetics whose research on slow-looking we drew on.
Sources:
The Ivy Ross quote - "Art is as important as sleep" - is paraphrased from a 2024 Santa Barbara Independent interview well-worth looking into.
"Closest thing to magic" - an interesting idea from Magsamen
Slow-looking - from a 2025 Penn paper by Estrada Gonzalez, Youn, Cardillo, Chatterjee in Journal of Positive Psychology).