This is Part X of the Specificity Sequence

Cats notoriously get stuck in trees because their claws are better at climbing up than down. Throughout this sequence, we’ve seen how humans are similar: We get stuck in high-level abstractions because our brains struggle to unpack them into specifics. Our brains are better at climbing up (concrete→abstract) than down (abstract→concrete).

If you’ve ever struggled to draw a decent picture, you know what being stuck at a high level of abstraction feels like in the domain of visual processing. I know I do. My drawing skills are nonexistent. I can draw kindergarten-quality stick figures, but I don’t even know where to begin drawing something that looks the least bit realistic.

Despite how pathetic a stick figure looks, it’s worth marveling at our brain’s formidable power to distill a mess of light and dark stimuli into a few geometric parts.

A stick figure is a mental representation of an animal which is great for practical tasks like throwing a spear at it.

The question is just, why can people like me only draw a pathetic stick figure even when we’re trying to draw a nice picture?

The visual system was only under selective pressure to evolve a processing pathway from sensing visual features to building an abstract representation of those features, not a processing pathway to transform a high-level mental representation into a low-level pencil strokes representation. I draw stick figures because my conscious mind thinks in stick figures.

But we know that the unconscious part of our visual brains isn’t one-way. When we first recognize that we’re seeing a cow, our brain propagates visual information from abstract mental representations down toward lower-level visual feature recognition.

Consider this image:

Most people have trouble identifying what they’re seeing in different parts of the image, until they realize it’s a cow, and then all the parts snap into focus. Their interpretation of low-level features of the image, e.g. that the white dots within the black foreground region on the leftmost part of the image are “furry”, is influenced top-down by their abstract mental representation of a cow.

How do skilled artists navigate down the ladder of visual abstraction consciously?

In Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, Betty Edw...

Nico Coronado

Nico Coronado

Nico Coronado

Nico Coronado