art for all
Creative inspiration and advice to help you stop procrastinating and start making stuff. Any kind of stuff. Hosted by best-selling author Danny Gregory. Brought to you by Sketchbook Skool.
art for all
55. Drawing and the Brain
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This week John and Danny dive deep into the brain and discuss how we process visual information. They talk about how the brain affects art-making.
From Season 3 of "art for all," the Sketchbook Skool podcast. Join artists/authors, Danny Gregory and John Muir Laws in rich discussions about the creative process.
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Intro
Danny GregoryHi, and welcome to art for all the sketchbook school podcast. I'm Danny Gregory and I am the founder of scheduled school and I'm an author and I'm a guy who draws and I'm joined each week by my friend, John Muir laws. Tell us about yourself, John.
John Muir LawsHi there everybody. I am a wildlife biologist, a naturalist who uses a sketch book as his primary way of engaging with the world and am Danny's friend. And I have a passion for teaching about both nature and using art as a tool for engaging with.
Danny GregoryIt's a nice way to
John Muir Lawsbe. It
Danny Gregoryis it's true. Good. Well, so last time we were talking we, we actually missed a week, but we're back. But last time we were talking about some stuff that people had written into us because of course you can email us whenever you'd like, and podcast@sketchbookschool.com and people have been surprisingly, they've been writing to us, your friends out there. Yes. Thank you. And one of the people who wrote to us
How art affects the brain
Danny Gregorywas Kathy Waller and she said, Did you ever think about having a show on how art affects the brain? I know that Jack has mentioned a lot about neuroplasticity and I find that fascinating. I was thinking specifically how art lights up different parts of the brain. Do we use different parts of our brain? When we draw by close observation versus using our imagination, could drawing, painting and playing, give us healthier brains. Does the sketchbook practice produce different chemicals in the brain like serotonin and dopamine? What about art as therapy? Your sketchbook allows you to recall places, peoples and experiences does that process of remembering through pictures, activate areas of our brain involving memory, therefore giving us better overall recall. What about art as meditation? The practice of meditation has been found. Improved brain function is making art considered meditation. Can our brains become sharper by drawing every day? This information would further back up. The fact that keeping a sketchbook decreases stress makes you happy and also gives you a better brain. I think the answer is basically yes to all of them, but let's find that out. So rather than putting you on the spot, because you know, that would be unfair. We'll, we'll kind of work our way through this idea. And draw from our own experiences as well as from, I don't know, whatever we may have figured out that science has told us. And we can talk about just the brain in general. How does it affect our art making? What is it doing? What it, what is drawing as a kind of a brain activity? It's all very interesting. So what have you got there?
John Muir LawsOh, I I've got my own little plastic brain here. That's got one of those little, you know, a high school biology lab brains that I can take apart. I was starting to is part of my, kind of geeking out and, and trying to understand how things work I was looking at at brain functions and things and realized I needed a, a physical model in my hand. So I have my various. Plastic brain, which I, which I just love it's that it just, it feels good.
Danny GregoryIt is attractive. And I'm sure it smells good. Yes. But of course the people listening to this podcast can't see it. So we will, we will use it as a point of reference. If you're watching this on YouTube, then you will have the added bonus of seeing an actual, that's not your actual brain though. That it is you. That's your brain, man. If I only had a brain without, because it's song. So yeah. So you've got a brain and why don't you use it to tell us about what do you like? Let's talk, let's talk about what are the elements that go into drawing that the brain is responsible for? So, I mean, obviously seeing and, and moving our hands, those are the kind of the basics, but I imagine a bunch of stuff goes on in between,
John Muir LawsWow this early in the podcast and I'm already out of my
Visual cortex
John Muir Lawsexpertise. We
know
Danny Gregorythe brain has something to do with seeing
John Muir Lawsand that's that's right. So, yeah, we've got sort of parts of the brain that are involved in our visual cortex or sort of towards the back of our brain. If you take your, your, your hand and you just sort of, you, you, you rub the, the, the spot on your skull, just above where it connects into your, your, your neck. You've got a little a bunch of your visual stuff is, is, is processed in, in that area. There are there are, there are also areas that are. Are dedicated to, to looking at specific things to, to look at and analyze human faces. It turns out for our survival, very being able to quickly tell the difference between somebody who's who's aggressive and angry and a potential threat versus somebody who is just has an upset stomach, you know, is, is important for the survival we've got, you've got a whole little region in your brain, your fusiform face area. I think it's called the, that, that is processing those sorts of things. So all your, your, your visual information has to come in and there's, there's actually a lot more information that comes in that. We can really process. So part of what, what happens also is your, your brain is, is filtering out what a portion of the sense information, a large portion of the sense information that comes in and just sort of serving up to you, what it thinks is really relative really relevant in the moment. And it does some amazing things just in your perception. So for, for instance, it's actually as, as things are, are, are, are, are moving around here. It's predicting where things. Should be, if I threw a ball to you and by the time your if your brain was kind of working real time, it would buy the ball of bonk into your nose. By the time you reach started to reach up for it. So you're, you're actually seeing some things sort of projected a little bit into the future so that we can respond to them on time. And one other sort of crazy thing about our perception is that it is you. Don't how we'd sort of people tend to see what they, what they expected to see. There's, there's actually a neurological linked to that. What happens when you look up at look at something and you, you, you see something kind of moving around through the grass and if your brain goes, wow, That is, I think that's a tiger then what that message actually goes back to to the, the, the visual center and S and makes it look more like a tiger for you. Hmm. And so there's actually this relationship between what you see and the way that you're interpreting things. So you're not just getting the raw data, you're getting perceptions that have already been passed through the filter of what you're expecting to see,
Danny Gregorywhich makes sense in a way, I mean, if you. Just little bits of information, like seeing the grass moving and having to come to some conclusion about it. You don't want that to take a long time to figure out and you, and in some ways it's often it's okay to be wrong in a situation like that. Like it's better to be overly cautious. So you put together these little fragments of information, your brain then fills in the blanks. And we see that with drawing a lot. Like if you do a drawing where you just draw a little part of something, if you drew a face and you, you know, you drew part of one eye and you drew, you know, one nostril and those kinds of things, you show it to somebody. They will know that it's a phase. They may even be able to recognize who it is. And in some ways, those kinds of drawings are actually really engaging to look at because you're literally engaging the viewer by saying here's some bits of information fill in the rest. And so you look at it and then you go, okay, This is just a bit of a sketch, but I can see the whole thing in there. And that's, that's actually a way of, rather than saying, like, let me spoon feed every piece of data to you. I'm going to allow you to be a participant in this and then using, so using that function of the brain to your advantage in making more engaging art,
John Muir LawsThe, you know, the same thing is true of a book. There's what you want to the a good author will give you just enough detail so that you can start to build the full pictures in, in, in your head. And so that's the reader's share of the work. And if you set them up right, then the reader has this really rich experience because their brain will then fill in all the rest of the details. We do that when we look at pictures if the author says he had, he was wearing orange socks and there was little, kind of a little fuzzy Ridge around the top of the socks and you were like, it's just like, oh, stop it. This is, this is too much detail that is coming on here and you kill the story and we can kill our drawings the same way too. If I, if I try to show you like, look, there's little hairs here in here and look at this little hair here and here's another little hair here then it's instead of getting the, I, I want, I want the viewer to do, to fill in part of that themselves. So if I can give the suggestion of something, their imagination will it'll fill in the rest. I very often in a, in a sketch. I'll be drawing something and it doesn't look like a Mallard duck out there on the water. I was drawing a duck yesterday. It looked like a Mallard. I drew a line to it and said Mallard. And then all of a sudden it turned into a Mallard. So that's kind of an extreme way of kind of helping prompt us to see what we expect to see. And then there's also just the beauty of those sort of the, the, the lost and found edges. You know, something if part of a form disappears into the dark and then you sort of can pick it up later, or even in a line drawing that line that has some gaps in it. Your brain just puts all that together. Very often. Those are more. Exciting dynamic drawings than the ones that are trying to spell it all out for you.
Danny GregoryYeah. I was thinking about this. There was a movie made, I don't know when it was that movie, it was 10 years ago, maybe longer. And it was called waiting for Hockney David Hockney and the movie wasn't about David Hockney. It was about this guy who spent seven years trying to make the most, the best drawing that had ever been made. And so what he did is he took a photograph of Marilyn Monroe and he did this. Big drawing. And he this documentary is about him making this drawing and it was like, he took this photo of her and the drawing was virtually indistinguishable from the photo. And they made a lot of point about like, he would wear these sort of like glasses with like magnifying lenses that would click into place on top of it. And he had like special ways of sharpening his pencil so that he got these like really super sharp points. So he's able to get incredibly intense detail. So he spent his goal was to, to work on this drawing. And then when it was perfect to show it to David Hockney, because he considered David Hockney to be the greatest artists alive. And he thought, I, if I want David hockey to sign off on this drawing. So he worked on this drawing. Finally, like he manages to get a meeting with David Hockney. They don't actually film the meeting, but you just kind of hear like, they go into the David Hawkings house and they come out and basis basically. And I think you hear Hockney's voice at one point. And okay, so imagine this perfect photographic drawing and Hockney's reaction is like, yeah, it looks just like the photo, you spent seven years doing this. And he's like, yeah, yeah. And he said, oh, and the Hockney says, why Marilyn Monroe? And, and it was like, it was it's. It's true. It's like, so the guy kind of comes away from it. He's not really sure what to think, but you look at it and you go, like, what was the point of this? Like you spent all this time and energy creating something that looks like a photograph that looks kind of like the thing, but there was no, you didn't, you didn't allow us in at all. Like, there's nothing we can do except look at it and go like, yup. It looks like the photo. Yup. Looks like Marilyn Monroe spend a long time doing this. You're kind of a wacko. So, so that was sort of interesting. And, you know, it's brings back to your point, which is basically if you don't collaborate with the viewer and their brain, it's a hollow experience. It's a hollow experience. And that is not the goal. The goal is not to shut the viewer out. It's to bring the viewer in hallways. Not to some Marvel at you. You know, I was also thinking when we were talking about faces
Inability to recognize faces
Danny Gregorybefore and, and this, that some people don't have that ability to see face. They
John Muir Lawscan't remember that you are my, that I married you.
Danny GregoryYeah. Right? Yeah, because they're there. What, what happens is their, their brain can't assemble your features into I guess a piece of data that says, this is this person. And I'm like, I heard that Chuck close had that, I think it's called facial aphasia or something like that. And he had it, he was, he couldn't recognize people. And, and th it's it's thought that that's part of an explanation of how his style of painting, because, you know, he would do this photorealistic paintings, but then he also did paintings that was basically breaking people's faces down into rectangles or into their features. And so, and that can happen a lot of times when you do a drawing, you can draw. One eye, then you draw the other eye, then you draw the nose and then you draw the mouth and it doesn't look like a person, right? There's not the connective tissue there. So there was
John Muir Lawsno relationship between those, those, those details. And that's, that's a problem that I have when I'm drawing just about anything that when I'm kind of in there in that space, I'm now drawing the beak of the Finch
Danny Gregoryand you thinking this is the beak of the Finch.
John Muir LawsYes. And I am my brain, I I've, I've seen some videos by people who can sit down and just sort of free hand draw everything. But if I start over on one, end on the beak of the Finch, by the time I get down to it's a little bit. It's completely out of proportion and it's not in a position that really kind of reflects something about that bird or that, that organism for me, I have to start a drawing with this sort of loose gesture, connecting big picture proportions feelings, action, very kind of loose, rough sketch and modify that and then modify that. And then I can draw my details on top of that. But for me, those, those, those processes are very different sorts of things. And when I'm just focusing on the, I, I can get that by, but it's hard for me to have the bandwidth to get that I, in relationship to, to the other parts of the drawing. So what I usually do is create essentially a scaffold. For my drawing and then I will come in and drop in those details. On top of that scaffolding.
Danny GregoryYeah. I mean, I, I remember like when I was first, like we books on how to draw that you would always see, you know, first do this loose gestural thing and then, you know, refine it and tighten it. And I just, I never draw that way. I just never think that way I do though, often draw a contour line of the outside of, of like, if I was going to draw you, I would draw, you know, start like by your, on your shoulder and draw around your head and draw down your other shoulder. And yeah. So I'd have, I would have a frame, one of our, one of our instructors call us upon to, he referred to it as first you build the room and then you furnish it. So it was like you, right. So yeah. So you, you, you get your contour and then. Populated with features some other way of doing it. I mean, I see, I often see people who don't draw a lot and they'll start by drawing one eye. Yeah, exactly. They'll move over and they'll draw the other eye. And in a way it's like, it's, first of all, you're starting with dessert because the eyes are the most important part. But if you do it that way, then it's going to end up looking weird. Like Frankensteiny sort of patchwork. Probably because, I mean, unless, unless you can think of all of the negative spaces or all the, all the spaces, if you can think of like the upper cheek with the same intensity, if you can. Yeah. If you can think of that or the, or the middle of the forehead and spend as much time and detail and focus on that as you can, the eyeball, then maybe you'll get somewhere. But it's pretty, it's a tough thing to do. Yeah.
John Muir LawsAnd we, we tend to. The parts of something that we're the most interested in with important work, the most drawn to we will tend to render those larger on our page just because our brain is going like, oh my gosh, look at that. You know, like look at the hair. And so you get these huge hands. I, it most drawings that people do of birds of prey have beaks on them that would make a two cam crowd. Right. Because we're looking at this thing and we're going like, wow, that's crazy. Look at that big book beak. And so you, yeah, it does have on there, it was something like, okay, bald Eagle got a big, nice. Most of the rest of them, they've got these petite little things with the hook on them, but it's so cool that we draw it too big. And so like the eyes are the most interesting part of the head. So we draw those two big and then the heads, the most interesting part of the body. And so we draw that too big. So we have these big heads, big guides on little bodies, and it's just sort of this, this, we have this graph that, that we've made of what parts were the most interesting
Danny Gregoryto us. Well, it's like when they have people who were the victims of a crime and then they'll have them, you know, they'll ask them to do the drawing and, you know, or, or to describe it to an artist. And you know, if the person was holding a gun, you know, the details of the gun may not know the detail. And I think similarly withdrawing a bird of prey. It's like, what's the thing that really distinguishes it is, is its weapon. But yeah, and also a lot of times people will draw a face and the eyeballs. We'll be right at the top of the head, like, because you know, there's no forehead, whereas the forehead is boring and you just have the, I had I, and then the hairline starts immediately above it. Yeah. Half and half your head
John Muir Lawshas no business going on on it. And who's going to put that big, that big bear
Danny Gregoryzone in there. Exactly, exactly. So yeah, that's, that is interesting. I mean, I was looking up some notes, I'd taken on brains in, in preparation for this. And this is interesting. There is documented evidence that for the first few days, babies see upside down, this is because their visual cortices have not yet recognized that the image entering the retina is inverted, right. Because of the lens, your eyeball is a convex line. Usually this inverted image proceeds through the visual pathway from the retina through the optic nerve, to the lateral geniculate bodies, until it reaches the occipital lobe, which houses the visual cortex. It's the visual cortex that flips the image right side up. This makes sense because it would be much more difficult to coordinate all movements while you saw an inverted representation of the real world. Right? So for the first few days, babies brains don't recognize that everything is inverted. And of course the vision is also limited during this period, and they don't know what they're seeing anyway, but yeah, it's an interesting, and, and they've done experiments where they gave adults glasses that flip the image and, and they had to wear these for a few days. And then after a while their brains flipped it the other way. Oh. And then when they took the glasses off and so upside down again and adjusted yet again, that experience, like if you're lying on the couch, watching TV, Even though your head is sideways, the image doesn't seem sideways. Like it seems like the right way.
Why it is difficult to draw a 3D object
John Muir LawsWell, so that's another kind of Testament to it. Like all the processing that is going on outside of our outside of our awareness or, or, or consciousness, or even things in three dimensions each, like why is it difficult to draw something that is why, why is it difficult to draw the 3d object in front of you? And it's so much easier to draw from a photograph. Well, when you are drawing from the 3d object, you're looking at a three-dimensional object. So those, the, the light rays of those come into each eye separately, and that 3d each of those will project different two D images. Into that each, each brain. So if you close one eye, you're seeing this two dimensional world, you can see things are overlapping, but you don't have that, you know, have somebody try to play catch with somebody with, with, with an eye patch on and good luck. There are no, you know, outfielders with eyepatch it's except on
Danny Gregorythe Pittsburgh pirates. Oh, are,
John Muir Lawsand, and, and then your brain takes the difference between one image and the other, and refuses those together into one, three dimensional image. So the three-dimensional image is then created inside your head from two, two dimensional images. And now you are going to try to do output to suggest. Three dimensions on a two dimensional piece of paper, so close one eye. So, yeah. So if you close one eye, you're getting two dimensional image and you're trying to then put to a two dimensional image down on the paper. So especially if I'm looking at something that is close to me, like I'm drawing a flower there. The, because of the distance of my part of my eyes I will, if I switch back and forth between my two eyes, I can see dramatically different positions relative to each other of all the different pedals. So when I'm drawing something close to me, I close one eye and then draw that two dimensional image on the paper. So I'm then taking, going, it's coming in as a two dimensional image. It gets processed in my brain as a two dimensional image, and then outputting that onto the piece of paper. As on this two dimensional piece of paper. And then I can use a few, a few tricks to show some depth in there, but I'm going, I'm keeping this two D thing working for me.
Danny GregoryAll right. So to take that, but that, that makes that give me an idea, which is like, what if you, what if you got, you know, those 3d glasses with a blue lens and the red lens, and then you close one eye and you do a drawing with a blue pen. Then you close the other eye after opening the first one and draw the same thing with a red pen. And then you put on those 3d glasses.
John Muir LawsBut do you have to draw them both on top of each other? Yeah.
Danny GregoryI'm the same, same piece of paper. They maybe do a blind contour. You do a blind contour. So you're only looking at the thing. You're not looking at your paper and you do that. And then I'm telling you that I should go to that guy who spent seven years drawing Madonna, drawing, Maryland. He, that might be exactly the kind of idea that would turn him on anyway. Yes, that would be cool. But I was also thinking,
Drawing on the right side of the brain
Danny Gregoryyou know, we've all read Betty Edwards classic book, if you haven't drawing on the right side of the brain. And she talks a lot about the development of picky in the sixties, that book came out, I think late sixties, early seventies. Right. About stuff that they had discovered about how the brain processes patients. Yeah. And if you think, yeah, because they had people who like didn't have connections between the two hemispheres of their brain and stuff. To me the most valuable thing about that book. And it's so incredibly valuable that it's really transformed my drawing. I think a lot of people's as well is she talks about, you know, we have this enormous amount of data coming into our brains and the way that we process it is we reduce it to symbols. And we S we have symbols that allow us to say, that's a tree, that's a car, that's a person. And we don't really look at it. We've, we've like the things we were talking about before, where you have just a little bit of data and then you fill in the rest of it. Well, what ends up happening is we're dealing with these mental images, these things that we filled in, rather than dealing with what we actually see. So when it comes time to draw. We are drawing the symbols. And that's why, if you ask somebody to draw a person, they'll draw a stick figure because they draw the symbol. And in a way, we can't see, we can't get past this really intense machine that we've built to handle processes information. We can't look around that unless we train ourselves to see and to slow down to status to actually see without symbols. And as soon as you see, without that symbols, you can, you can draw, you can draw much better because you're drawing what you actually see. And then you're creating something that is really a depiction of the thing without it's the veil of processing in the middle of it. And I think she does various tricks to help you do that. One of which is to draw. To copy a drawing upside down. And when you do that upside down, that's I, I guess maybe it's bypassing the visual cortex. Is that possible? I don't know if that's what it's doing, but it's certainly taking away your ability to, to, to sort of streamline your thought process. And so when you're drawing something, you're not thinking I'm drawing an ear, I'm drawing and owes you thinking I'm drawing that line. And if you think I'm drawing a nose, then you think you have a way of drawing noses or, oh, someone's, you don't think you have a way of drawing. I don't have to draw noses. What does that mean? That means I don't have a good symbol to draw noses, but if you can avoid the symbols and just draw the line, then when he turned the paper right side up, you're astounded by what you've done.
John Muir LawsSo we'd have to do an experiment where we take a newborn baby and give them a right side of drawing and see if they're better at drawing that than an upside down.
Danny GregoryShould we should start hanging around maternity wards with art supplies.
John Muir LawsBut, but yeah, I don't think it's that it's about bypassing the visual cortex.
Danny GregoryNo, because that wouldn't work at all. Yeah.
John Muir LawsSo you have to kind of take in and process this visual information. But then I think that the upside down picture exactly, like you said, it gets you into, you're now drawing a shape and that's as opposed to as opposed to drawing the way you think a nose should be drawn. Right. So that book like, like many, many artists that one had a huge impact on my. On the way I draw, I still use the, you know, the, the negative shape and sort of playing with negative shapes. That's my fundamental go-to first-line and drawing a bird. I draw the negative shape along its back. Right. And I try to get people who are learning, how to draw birds. We start just by heading the bird and kind of looking at what is the angle. Your hand is on the top of its head coming down the neck there, then you're on the back and out to the tail. And you sort of feel that then you're trying to transfer that line for paper, and then you can hang the rest of the bird from that line. And it feels just the end. The energy of that bird feels right. Her work is, is SEMO in, in sort of best practices in drawing. The interesting thing is that that research on. You know, the split brain sort of brands of hemisphere dominance that, you know, there's, there's, you know, you talk about, you know, I'm people are right brain left brain it's totally wrong. So th the there are tons of extrapolations from that split brain research that was done, that sort of the, the split brain in popular culture. You know, you think of somebody who oh, their right brain, their left brain. Well, it turns out when you get anybody doing a creative thing or an analytical thing, and you stick them. If they sit in a, in an MRI, functional magnetic resonance, imaging machine, these things that can watch your brain doing its thing as you're actually alive. There is no. Any process from creative, artistic, mathematical analytical reasoning, all these things are lighting up, both hemispheres of the brain. There are a few little functions like there is you know, there, there, there is a a zone in the front of the left hemisphere that is involved in, you know, associating words with things, but we use both of those hemispheres of the brain in all of our thinking. Right. And so the sort of one kind of great neuro myth is this idea of some people being kind of right brain or left brain And it turns out that that's, that's just an extrapolation of this.
Danny GregoryIt's a style of thinking that we kind of have
John Muir Lawsth that, that, that metaphor, that explanation is, is sort of is, is a is, is not supported by any of the evidence, right?
Cognitive load of the brain
Danny GregorySo this is another piece of information that I found that I don't know how to deal with it, but this is this is from a book called evolve your mind. And the author says that the brain processes about 400 billion bits of information every second, but we're only conscious of about 2000 of those bits of data. So that's 400 gigs of information that are, that the brain is receiving. So I guess that means like, Everything, everything we're seeing, feeling, hearing you know, smelling all that is being reduced to information. And of course we're ignoring most of it, right? I mean, right now I'm having this conversation with you. I'm not paying attention to all the other things that are going on in this room. I'm not paying attention to what's going on behind you. I'm not paying attention to the sounds outside all these things. We're dealing with a very, very small focused amount of information, which is fine. I mean, that's, that's what we need to
John Muir Lawsdo, but what's interesting. So I think that that's correct. And I would be even surprised if we're able to handle that much information that, you know, generally in, in terms of kind of even grappling those ideas, your brain can handle about seven plus or minus two ideas at anyone's time, you try to kinda pack more stuff into your thinking about it. And then our brain starts kicking things. To get things out are the cognitive load of our brain is is, is the limit to the amount of stuff that we can manage. And we really cannot manage a lot of stuff at the same time. All the research on multitasking shows that we actually don't multitask, we task switch, and it impairs our memory. It reduces our ability to learn when we're trying to do that. If we're trying to do two things at the same time, we can't learn anything as well. It blocks our ability to encode things. So yeah, our brain is just super
Danny Gregorylimited
John Muir Lawsin the amount of stuff that it can, that it can manage. And that is, I think that that is, I mean, even at your we have the subjective experience of I'm attending to everything, right. And I'm alert and I'm aware and I'm awake. And, you know, even if you are in a state of hypervigilance, you are still only only, only kind of, you know, tracking a tiny portion of the information that comes in, which is why another big reason that I encourage people to keep a journal, because you can make an observation and you can put that observation down on your paper. You can make another observation. You can put that down on your paper, you start to collect more observations like that, that piece of paper can hold so much more stuff than your brain is going to be able to hold about that experience.
Danny GregoryYeah, it's interesting. I mean, I, this is a vague thought that I'm having, but I think the things that we notice are the things that change. Right. So if I'm looking at you right now, and I see, you know, if suddenly your expression changed well, that would only be a very tiny part of the data that's coming towards me, but I would, it has significance. I would notice a change. And I wonder if when we're drawing, we kind of don't want the thing that we're drawing to change. That's always a problem, right? If you're drawing, if you're, yeah. If you're drawing a burden, it moves right. Then suddenly it screws everything up. Like we kinda need to limit the amount of focus of attention. So I wonder, I wonder if that's, what's what's going on. There is it were, we find it hard to pay attention to things that are just static. It seems like pretty simple.
John Muir LawsYeah. The, well, for our, our survival tracking movies,
Danny GregoryIt's huge, of course, as M and also as, as, as creatures of prey, I mean of what's what's the term thing of predator, you know, that's what you notice, right? You notice a tiny movement in the brush and then,
John Muir Lawsand the phenomenon of change blindness is really interesting. So if you were looking at a screen and all of a sudden, a new dot appeared on it, it was a pattern and you change one little point. Everybody is looking at it, say like, oh, you just added a dot there. Oh, you just added a dot there. But if the screen turns black for a second and then flex flicks back on, you had, the change has been made during that little interval. We don't see it.
Danny GregoryRight. Interesting. I mean, when, when you compress a video file for a computer, right? If you take, if you take a piece of video and. There's a lot of cuts in it, or there's a lot of movement in it. Basically the, the, your computer needs to recompress every single frame. Whereas ideally, what it wants to do is only change, only add the data about the change. So basically it's saying in the file, it says all these things remain the same, except this one thing is changing. That's a lot less information that needs to be stored. Then if every single frame was different, right? So you can have two video files that are the same length, and one of them will be way bigger just because of all those changes that happen in it, you know? And so that's, that's sort of an interesting. I w I mean, obviously our brains aren't computers, but it would seem like a similar kind of thing that we're doing to process information. That's why, if you watch something that has too many cuts in it, if you're watching a fast cut movie, a commercial or a music video, it can become overwhelming. You can lose yourself. Because, because there's too much information, too much change happening.
John Muir LawsAnd those kind of tracking those things that move in it are also really important for our survival, the we, our brains keep track of and actually process differently. Things that we see around us that our brain interprets as agents or or, or, or things that are just in that. And, and, and not making pers purposeful decisions about, about what they do, but any time that something is I think that the description of it is that it's moving in a non inertial frame. So in other words, it is swimming, upstream. So it is if all the current is going this way and something's going that way, if something, then our brain interprets that, that little element there as an agent, and we have different parts of our brain for tracking and, and thinking about those, those, those, those, those agents.
Danny GregoryI mean, in general, we want things to remain static, right? I mean, that's, that's for survival. We want things to remain static. So they're predict. We don't, we don't invite change. We don't embrace change. And it's, it causes us a lot of anxiety when it happens, because we realize how much more, you know, we're gonna have to devote to dealing with it. Yeah. Now, as you get older, what happens though? Does your brain become less capable of dealing with, with noticing these things? Are we changing? Does does is from what you know about the brain, does it, does it become less you know, responsive and does it become sort of stiff and
Counter a very common neuromyth
John Muir Lawsflexible? I think that in thinking about aging and our brain, one of the critical things that we probably should talk about because we need to counter a very common neuro myth. Is that, there's this one idea that got sent out sometime ago. There's a few versions of it, but basically, you know, all your learning has done in your first three years. And then you know, then that's your brain from there, or that your brain sort of stops developing somewhere in your adolescent development process and boom, there's your brain. And that's what you get to play with. But there is there's no, there's no evidence for that. The the in fact, we have the ability at any age to learn new skills and to. To develop them to a really high degree of mastery if we're willing to put in the time and the work to do that. But for a lot of people, if you believe that your brain is basically fixed, then there's no reason to try something to work at things that you're not already good at. So we have a sort of where the kind of growth mindset versus the fixed mindset kind of comes back in on this is that if you have this fixed mindset about what you can and can't do, then it doesn't make any sense. In older age to start drawing me to pick up a new skill. If on the other hand, you're thinking about your brain as something that changes in response to whatever you do, then. Well, I've always wanted to draw and maybe I I'm to why, why don't I throw myself into this? And so there isn't at some critical period where you you had to have done it by this age. You can start wherever you are, and you can develop these things. The counterpoint to that is that if you do nothing with your brain, your brain is expensive meat. This is where your brain is 2% of your body weight. And it uses 20% of all the calories that you consume. So if your brain, if your body can prune this down, that's pretty convenient. So the counterpoint to this is that. For some people, when they retire, they've been, they've been actively before that they've actively involved in doing whatever they, they have done in a career. They retire. They withdraw from daily challenges. They withdraw from as much social interaction. And if you've got the fixed mindset, you can't really you're, you think that you can't really develop any new skills. And so it doesn't make any sense to try to do that. And so they don't, they don't take up new activities and the brain, which has been has all these synapses for, for, for handling these complex social interactions and whatever challenges you've faced during your, your day. It no longer has to do any of that. It's not having to learn anything else. Your brain starts. And a big portion of what people have termed senile dementia. It seems to be just the impact of us retreating from the world and reducing the degree to which we engage with with others and, and life and our brains. Aren't our brains. Aren't our brains aren't challenged and you don't need as much of that electric meat. You end up getting less of it, but you can. You can, the way to fight against that is not to go quietly into that good night. But to like my, my grandma in the, she, she died in her late nineties and towards the end of that, she's like, oh, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm going to learn to speak Spanish. She started taking Spanish classes and was working at vocabulary and conjugation and pronunciation. And there there, there were some folks who are helping her with her daily living needs, who also spoke Spanish and she thought it was felt it was, it was disrespectful for her not to be able to speak in Spanish. So she decided she wasn't learning and she got good at it. And could, could, could, could, could write, could converse could read in Spanish. And that was something that she picked up towards the end of her life. We've got lots of excuses of why we can't do things, but our brains are really plastic and adaptable. It's impressive.
Danny GregoryAnd it makes sense. I mean, what would be the evolutionary reason to just give up on your brain at a certain point? I mean, it doesn't, it makes sense that your brain would continue to do its job and continue to protect you by learning and thinking and problem solving for your entire life. It's not like this comes a point where you don't need that anymore. So I think, I think as you say, we, we tend to have a bias against older people having any utility. So therefore we don't support that in them, in our, in our society. You know, it's true. I mean, we have a lot of people come to schedule school. They are in their eighties and they've never drawn before. And then you can learn as long as you can see reasonably well, even if you can't, I mean, Matisse was right making collages when he was blind. You can continue making art for the rest of your life and you can certainly pick it up and start at any point. I mean, as, as long as you you know, allow yourself to, I think that, I think actually when you're older, once you can get past the idea that like, oh, I'm too old, but once you're older and you can say, I'm just going to do this for fun. And I'm just going to enjoy myself and relax and get into. Then you actually have an advantage over somebody who's younger and who maybe is, is going to beat themselves up more or is going to feel like, well, I'm going to learn this. I'm going to need to turn it into a job or something so that those things can actually get in your way of, of getting into a flow state and really allowing yourself to see in the way that you need to, to be able to draw effectively. So, yeah, it's interesting. Well, good. Well, I think we. I think, I mean, neither is, as we said before, we're not neurologists
John Muir Lawsscientists to non neurologists talking about
Danny Gregoryneurology. Exactly. But you know, here's another thing I think that Kathy brought up in her question to us, which is interesting is the whole idea of meditation. Why is it like, what is the meditative aspect of drawing? I have no doubt in my mind where my brain, that there is a strong correlation between the state that we get into in drawing. And when we're meditating, I find it, I find it personally much easier to draw than it is to meditate. But there's no question that, and I think part of it is when you're drawing. You are focusing intensely, right? You're looking at the thing that you're looking at and you are kind of dismissing a lot of those other things that get into your brain, that your brain, you're not asking your brain to process a lot of stuff. You're asking it to process intense perception and and to go deep on this thing that you're looking at. So, so I think that that focus means that it quiets a lot of the other activities of your brain. I think if you're allowing your brain to grind away at your daily problems or to interact with all kinds of other things going on in your environment while you're focused and drawing your drawing is not going to be particularly successful. You're not going to have a great time, but if you get into that state where you're just slowing down, focusing intently on your subject, taking your time, Turning off your critical faculty, the part of you that is, you know, telling you that you can't draw, if you can shuttle that down. And you're really focused. I think that whatever the benefits are of meditation, I imagine that you're getting most of those in this process of drawing. And instead of just sitting there on a pillow, you're ending up with great drawing and you're improving your drawing skills. So in some ways I think it's more valuable. We think,
John Muir LawsI don't want to, we sort of decide if it's more or, or
Danny Gregoryless valuable to trash the meditation industry.
John Muir LawsBut I do think that the one, when people would sort of describe some of the states that they get to into in a. In, in a meditative experience people talk about these sort of feelings of kind of deep connection of sort of losing track of, of sort of timelessness, of of, of, of real presence,
Meditative aspect of drawing
John Muir Lawsof of focus they're describing a flow state. I think a big kind of a goal of meditation is can I kind of induce myself into a flow state? And that happens all the time when we're drawing. One of the, the people have identified different kinds of precursors that make it easier to get into a flow state and focused concentration, a stimulus rich. You know, environment in front of you. These are, are, are things that very easily help us sort of pull into, into a flow state. So when you're drawing and you kind of get into the zone and you're, you're in a flow state when you are when you are, when you lose track of how long you've been drawing, you've been in a flow state. That's, that's what happens. And in the flow state that you talked about that that chatter kind of shutting down in your brain. So if you're a dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex, that part of your brain in FMRs in flow states gets less blood flow. And what they think is going on, or one possible explanation of that, that is zones areas seems to be where part of. Both of your sense of time and also your that kind of inner critic voice they think is hanging out in your dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex. Doesn't get as much oxygen takes a nap and that chatter simmers down and you're able to be present without it. You also lose track of time. So yeah, it's, it is for me when I want to get into flow. The easiest thing for me to do is to pick up that sketchbook and then go out for me into nature, which is sort of where I find my, my my stimulus rich environment of choice. And, and just the world unfolds from there. So yes, the connection between drawing and meditation, it is when you are meditating, you are trying to kind of cultivate this here in now experience. Every time you put your pencil down to paper, and then you look up again to get the next bit of data you are right here, you are right now, you're doing the here and now thing.
Danny GregoryYeah. Which is obviously like, you know, the sort of Zen, meditative state is all about that, right. Being highly present. And I also find that after drawing quite a lot on paper with a pen, I can also draw without a pen and without paying. You know, can sit and look at something and go through the mental process of drawing without, it's kind of like having, not having a ink in the printer. So I can just go through that same state and, and follow track, look at shapes and boundaries between sheeps and all those kinds of negative spaces. I can look at all that without actually having to draw them. Do you know what I'm saying? Yeah. So, so I think, you know, you
John Muir Lawstrained yourself how to pay attention or
Danny Gregoryhow to get back to that place fairly easily, you know, without having to, you know, without having to make a recording of it.
John Muir LawsAnd also a lot of the research on flow state shows that the more you. Get yourself into a flow state, the easier it is to get yourself into a flow state. So you're training your brain to kind of click into that sometimes, you know, for there, there are just sort of, you know, practices we have of, you know, you open up your, your sketchbook, you tuck it in under your arm and the way that you always hold it, when you draw the sound of, you know, your, your, your mechanical pencil or pen clicking the, you know, feeling the tool in your hand, this is just a signal to our brain. Okay. It is now time to kind of be in this state. And if you look at Olympic athletes, sometimes like PR person is in the shoot before they go on the big downhill race, there'll be going through these little motions and kind of tapping their feet in a certain way. Or you'll see people in the kind of before they run. They are, or they just have these little routines that they're doing and what this is doing is just sort of signaling their body. Okay. You know what we're about to do right now? So let's, let's get in that zone. And so by practicing that you're, you're signaling your brain. Okay. Now it's time for us to be in the flow and the the routines of journaling can do that for you there, you also just then have more practice of doing that, and then it's easier for you to do that in any place.
Danny GregoryYeah, I think it'd be, I think even when you go back and look at your own journals, you're entering into that area. That place, right? It's kind of like going to church, let's say just being in the church might put you into that spiritual state of mind, you know, going to the gym and just going through your ritual, putting on your shoes and, you know, warming up all those kinds of things you can get into that place. So you end up having a thing in your life, which is the thing of, of peace and centeredness and presence and all those things, which in our world right now, we don't have a lot of, I mean, we spent so much time in our phones and our phones are like transportation machines. They take us to some other place. Haven't you ever seen that experience? Like you're in the airport and there's a guy talking on the phone and he's talking really loudly on the phone. And it's clear, like he has no present sense of presence of where he is. Like, he doesn't realize that like, like glare at the person, they don't even see you. You know, they can like blunder around. They're talking so loudly. They don't sense that other people, but the same is true. When you look at your phone and you reading an email or you're watching a video, or you're doing all those things, you're not here. Now you have this little device that is a doorway that transports you somewhere else, which is fine, but it also means that you're not here. And you know, your sketchbook is an anchor to here, so that, right. So you might
John Muir Lawswant to write that down your sketchbook.
Danny GregoryYeah, it's your it's, it's a reminder of your presence, your engagement with the present, even when that present is an out pass, because these are drawings that you did in the past is a reminder of how, of that state of getting into that place with your, with your mind and your, your full being that you are present, you are looking at the thing that you're looking at. You can't see everything, you can't see everything in your environment when you're drawing, but you're seeing what you're drawing, you're being present in that moment. So, so, you know, that's, that is why, I mean, both of us love to recommend to people that you keep a schedule journal, because it isn't about saying I have a time and place for all. It's not like saying one of these days, I'm going to take a weekend workshop on watercolor or one of these days I'm going to build a studio in my house and I'm going to go in there and draw it's instead saying my art comes with me and it is with me wherever I am and I can therefore, you know, record my life. I can be observant. I can be connected. I can be present wherever I am. I don't need a time and place. I don't need to take a class. I don't need an appointment and I can do it with a pen and a piece of paper, you know, it's virtually free and it's available to everybody. And again, the drawing itself is really secondary to this process, this process of presence, you know, and if you do a drawing and it's not a great drawing, quote, unquote, the trip might've been just as great. You know, again, it's sort of, again, you, you might go to the gym and not have the most amazing workout, but it doesn't mean that it wasn't worth doing. You might. You know, cook dinner and it isn't the greatest dinner ever. It still was worth doing. And so withdrawing it's like the drawing itself and drawings are often an indication of how present you were, right? If you were fully engaged, fully present, paying attention, shutting down the distractions you're drawing is probably going to be a pretty good one. It's going to be a pretty clean recording of your experience. And that will probably be, feel like a good drawing. So in some ways it can be a gauge of how well you're going through this process, just the drawing itself.
John Muir LawsBut I don't know if we want to put that much pressure on the, on, on the drawing. Very often you can be really engaged in the, in the moment for at least for me, at least. And the drawing. Yeah. Not so much. It's, it's, it's not a pretty picture, but I just have to kind of accept that and like, okay. It's okay. Because just as you were saying, I have been anchored to this moment. And that's, that's the important thing. The the drawing is this tool that helps get me into that state that helps me bring me into this moment. And so if, if it doesn't turn out okay, that doesn't mean that I wasn't in this moment.
Danny GregorySo sometimes you're probably right. I was probably, I was probably going too far with it.
John Muir LawsI would pull back from that, that, that, that brink there just, just a little bit, but what you said was so rich, and I'm glad this is being recorded because I'm going to go back and there, there, there was a heap and helping of some Danny Gregory wisdom that was dropped on us right there. And I can't take notes fast enough to, but absolutely. You're, you're absolutely.
Final Thoughts
Danny GregoryWell, let's end it there on a good ending. And this was fun. I think, as you know, as often happens with our conversations, they never go quite exactly what we set out to go, but it's like a stroll in the park, you know, you don't, it doesn't really matter whether you reach the mountain or not. You still enjoy the hike. And I think we came with a bunch of ideas that gave me pause for thought. So thanks for the mental workout. It was good. Fun. So yeah. So any final thoughts, or should we just leave it at that?
John Muir LawsI, I just am going to go back to a quote by of philosopher, a poet and artists, Danny Gregory. Your sketchbook is an anchor to here.
Danny GregoryDid. But yes.
John Muir LawsAnd I think that just remembering the degree to which the more that we embrace this moment and you see the beauty in it, that's, that's so much a that's, that's the formula. That's the tool for living this life brief as it is as richly and fully as we can to pay attention to the details in the fabric of what is real, what is here.
Danny GregoryAnd with that, this has been our guest, Danny Gregory drop your laws and his dancing brain. Thank you for joining us. We will see you again. Next time. Bye-bye bye-bye.