Several years ago I worked my way through Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain after deciding I wanted to be able to draw, then got busy with other real life pursuits and didn't really follow it up at all.

Earlier this year I had my passion for the visual arts rekindled, and as a result I've been doing a lot of figure sketching, picking up a couple more books on the subject and spending a silly amount of money on various forms of carbon. In the interim I've learned a lot more about the cognitive sciences, neuroscience, the human visual system, principles of design, aesthetics, and the psychology of producing good work. While drawing, I found an awful lot of those concepts and subjects were directly applicable to what I was doing, and also that drawing provided examples and insight into those areas.

One example is the Dunning-Kruger effect: If you train at something for about twenty hours, most non-practitioners will not be able to tell the difference between you and an expert. People who think they can't draw will see some of my stuff and conclude I'm an incredible artist, whereas anyone with a cursory amount of experience will be able to spot the (many) flaws in my work.

Another is the notion that drawing (and to an extent all representational art) is tricking your perceptions into recognising something that doesn't exist, and as a result is parochial to human beings. Things people like to look at tend to be things that engage specialised recognition patterns, (faces, food, idyllic landscapes, human bodies, tools, animals, etc.) Much to Clippy's distaste, it's very easy to recognise specific types of visual subject in a relatively simple set of geometric shapes.

There's definitely a lot of scope for a sequence like this to have bearing on LessWrong-conducive subjects.