The National Geographic article (May 2012) called “The Common Hand,” starts like this: “The hand is where the mind meets the world. We humans use our hands to build fires and sew quilts, to steer airplanes, to write, dig, remove tumors, pull a rabbit out of a hat. The human brain, with its open-ended creativity, may be the thing that makes our species unique. But without hands, all the grand ideas we concoct would come to nothing but a very long to-do list.”
Hey, what about drawing!!!
I attended a lecture at the Fermi Lab in Batavia last Friday, called “Sleights of Mind.” The researchers, Stephen Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde, talked about how and why we are taken in by magic. The brain, it turns out, cannot multi-task. It can only focus on one thing at a time, which is why misdirection, the fundamental trick in sleight of hand, works. Visual information is so complex for the brain to process that it takes 18% of the cerebral cortex to do the work, in the lump at the back called the Occipital Lobe. Your eyes can only focus on one thing at a time, which is why we keep shifting our gaze if we want to take in a larger scene. If we didn’t have to shift, i.e. if we could put our peripheral vision also into focus, the brain would have to be 500 times bigger than it is.
Seeing is a big deal: hasn’t that been the thread through what I’m saying here!?
Just think, almost one fifth of your brain is about seeing. And you’re telling me you don’t have time to refine your seeing…to practice drawing!!???
Master magician, Apollo Robbins, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjPVx4MNXoQ&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1LBbmvXM0WY&feature=related
Stephen Macknik and Susana Martinez-Conde, “Sleights of Mind,” 2010
All contents copyright (C) 2010 Katherine Hilden. All rights reserved.
artamaze by Katherine Hilden 