Nature, Wellbeing, Creativity & The Power of Meditation w/ DR. BEN SHOFTY

“I moved to Utah, which is a very beautiful place, and I feel like the mountains and the breathtaking nature that we have around here really help. There are many studies that have shown that exposure to nature and spending time in nature really helps us. It helps our well-being as human beings, and it also helps us to be creative, reflective, and calm. My personal creative process works through interaction with other people. Through genuine interest in other people and through spending time with them. These are the times when, through talking to people like you, friends, family, or even strangers, I usually think about questions that interest me and most of the time, these questions are abstract and amorphic. But every now and then, there's a question that I think, ‘Oh, wait, I can look into that through my lab or through my research, and I can utilize that question to try and help my patients.’ One such example is another project that we have in our lab, trying to understand how time perception happens in the brain and how subjective time perception works. This is something that, through interactions with other people in my lab, we eventually reach the point where we have a formed question that we can utilize to understand that process inside the brain.” Dr. Ben Shofty is a functional neurosurgeon affiliated with the University of Utah. He graduated from the Tel-Aviv University Faculty of Medicine, received his PhD in neurosurgical training from the Israeli Institute of Technology, and completed his training at the Tel Aviv Medical Center and Baylor University. He was also an Israeli national rugby player. His practice specializes in neuromodulation and exploring treatments for disorders such as OCD, depression, and epilepsy, among others, while also seeking to understand the science behind creativity, mind-wandering, and the many complexities of the brain.