In studio this week we were working on drawing expressive portraits and again the challenge of a face angled, turned up or down was profound. The French cognitive neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene in his book Reading the Mind, explores how the brain adapted for object and facial recognition has taken on the recent task, 5000 years old of reading letterforms. Reading someone’s face is actually backwards, it is the cognitive recognition of the forms of the face that has been called into service to read letters and words.
Dehaene’s work got me thinking about my approach to teaching angled forms, I use an approach that is built from how we see, rather than constructing a method or system to be applied like a one size fits all tool. We sure do love our Easy Bake oven recipes for being creative, but any method needs to fit in your hand, and most of the battle is getting to know your own damn hand.
These are exciting times as neuroscience explores the territory of our brains, but like most explorers they bring their own preconceived understanding with them. They also bring their own metaphors. In a recent NYTimes article, Working With Your Hands is Good for Your Brain, Dr.Audrey van der Meer of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology studies how writing and drawing engages the brain, “The brain is like a muscle, and if we continue to take away these complex movements from our daily lives — especially fine motor movements — I think that muscle will weaken.” The brain is not a muscle, even though I would love to tell my drawing students our class can give their brain a six pack, this metaphor along with the brain is a computer allow for all sorts of pernicious products that help us to ’change our brains’.
The NY Times article ends with, Dr.Kelly Lambert, a behavioral neuroscientist at the University of Richmond in Virginia, “You know, we evolved in a three-dimensional world, and we evolved to interact with that world through our hands. I think there are a lot of reasons why working with our hands may be prosperous for our brains.” Most drawing instructors will ask their students to just focus on their hand and the physical action of drawing, like focusing on the breath in meditation as an exercise. There is so much visual junk that all of us are surrounded by, our own bodies offer us one of the few clear pathways to engage our brains.
We can change our minds and how we input stimuli and experience the world is critical to solving problems and being creative. Another great Substack to check out is The Science of Creativity, hosted by science writer and journalist Annie Murphy Paul. Her book the Extended Mind explores the thinking that takes place outside of our heads. Much of her book that surveyed research across the planet aligned with my 34 years of working in studio with college students studying Illustration.
We will continue to have assumptions, theories, and metaphors presented as gospel as new territory of the brain is further explored. But that few pounds bound up in our skulls has so much more of us to inform it and just as we lose sight of knowing and knowledge when we remove people from our LLM’s, let’s not lose sight of our feet when we are studying our brains. We are complex because of connection, context, and the invisible web that ties us to each other. Maybe what we are navigating in the drawing studio is a map of how to use a practice to see in this world, no matter the turbulence and the noise. It’s in all of our hands.