What you see is not what you get

For all those Visual Artists interested in how we see the world this article is a must..

The grand delusion: What you see is not what you get

16 May 2011 by Graham Lawton

Your senses are your windows on the world, and you probably think they do a fair job at capturing an accurate depiction of reality. Don't kid yourself. Sensory perception - especially vision - is a figment of your imagination. "What you're experiencing is largely the product of what's inside your head," says psychologist Ron Rensink at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. "It's informed by what comes in through your eyes, but it's not directly reflecting it."

Given the basic features of your visual system, it couldn't be any other way. For example, every 5 seconds or so, you blink. Yet unless you're thinking about it, as you probably are right now, you don't notice the blackouts because your brain edits them out.

Blinking is just the tip of the iceberg. Even when your eyes are open they're only taking in a fraction of the visual information that is available.

In the centre of your retina is a dense patch of photoreceptor cells about 1 millimetre across. This is the fovea, the visual system's sweet spot where perception of detail and colour is at its best. "When you move away from the fovea, visual acuity falls away really quickly, and colour vision disappears," says Rensink. About 10 degrees to the side of the fovea, visual acuity is only about 20 per cent of the maximum.

What that means is you can only capture a tiny percentage of the visual field in full colour and detail at any one time. Hold your hand at arm's length and look at your thumbnail. That is roughly the area covered by the fovea. Most of the rest is captured in fuzzy monochrome.

And yet vision doesn't actually feel like this: it feels like a movie. That, in part, is because your eyes are constantly flitting over the visual scene, fixing on one spot for a fraction of a second then moving on. These jerky eye movements are called saccades and they happen about 3 times a second and last up to 200 milliseconds. With each fixation your visual system grabs a bite of high-resolution detail which it somehow weaves together to create an illusion of completeness.

That's remarkable given that during saccades themselves, you are effectively blind. Your eyes don't stop transmitting information as they lurch from one fixation to the next, but for about 100 milliseconds your brain is not processing it.

Look in the mirror and deliberately flick your eyes from left to right and back again. You won't see your eyes move - not because the movement is too fast (other people's saccades are visible), but because your brain isn't processing the information.

Given that you perform approximately 150,000 saccades every day, that means your visual system is "offline" for a total of about 4 hours during each waking day even without blinking (Trends in Cognitive Sciences, vol 12, p 466). Yet you don't notice anything amiss.

Exactly how your brain weaves such fragmentary information into the smooth technicolour movie that we experience as reality remains a mystery. One leading idea is that it makes a prediction and then uses the foveal "spotlight" to verify it. "We create something internally and then we check, check, check," says Rensink. "Essentially we experience the brain's best guess about what is happening now."

In conjuring up this "now", the visual system has to do something even more remarkable: predict the future. Information striking the fovea cannot be relayed instantaneously to conscious perception: first it has to travel down the optic nerve and be processed by the brain. This takes several hundred milliseconds, by which time the world has moved on. And so the brain makes a prediction about what the world will look like about 200 milliseconds into the future, and that is what you see. Without this future projection you would be unable to catch a ball, dodge moving objects or walk around without crashing into things.

There's another huge hole in the visual system that can render you oblivious to things that should be unmissable. The jerky movements that shift your fovea around the visual scene don't happen at random - they are directed by your brain's attentional system. Sometimes you consciously decide what to attend to, such as when you read. At other times your attention is grabbed by a movement in your peripheral vision or an unexpected noise.

The problem with attention is that it is a limited resource. For reasons that remain unknown, most people are unable to keep track of more than four or five moving objects at once. That can lead your visual system to be oblivious to things that are staring you in the face.

The most famous demonstration of this "inattention blindness" is the invisible gorilla, a video-based experiment created by Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Viewers are asked to pay close attention to a specific aspect of a basketball game, and around half completely fail to see a person in a gorilla suit walk slowly across the screen, beat their chest and walk off again.

Creativity chemical favours the smart

THERE may be more to creativity than simply letting the ideas flow- brain measurements of a "creativity chemical" are revealing a complex interplay between ingenuity and intelligence. While high levels of the chemical in a certain part of the brain seem to increase creativity in really smart people, the reverse is true in those of average intellect.

N-acetyl-aspartate is found in neurons and seems to be associated with neural health and metabolism. Rex Jung at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque and his colleagues already knew that high levels of NAA in the left parieto-occipital lobe, which coordinates sensory and visual information, were associated with intelligence.

To investigate whether NAA also plays a role in creativity, Jung's team measured NAA levels in various regions of the brain in 56 men and women aged 18 to 39. They also tested the volunteers' general intelligence and, more specifically, their capacity for divergent thinking, a factor in creativity that includes coming up with novel ideas, such as new uses for everyday objects.

Overall, volunteers' creativity scores correlated with levels of NAA in a brain region called the anterior cingulate gyrus (ACG), which regulates the activity of the frontal cortex - implicated in higher mental functions. But while low levels of NAA in the ACG correlated with high creativity in people of average intelligence, in people with IQs of above 120, the reverse was true (The Journal of Neuroscience, DOI: 10.1523/jneurosci.0588-09.2009).

Jung speculates that if there is less NAA to regulate frontal cortex activity in "average" brains, they are freer to roam and find new ideas. In highly intelligent people, however, tighter control over the frontal cortex seems to enhance creativity. Perhaps this is because they are more likely to come up with new ideas anyway, and the tighter control allows them to "fine-tune" that ability.

"People say you have to let your mind wonder freely to be creative," says Jung. "For people of average intelligence, perhaps it's true that you need to utilise more areas of your [frontal cortex] for something truly novel and creative to emerge, but in more intelligent folks, there's something different going on."

Paul Howard-Jones of the University of Bristol, UK, agrees that different cognitive processes may underlie creativity in people with different IQs. "This backs up behavioural evidence for a threshold in IQ, beyond which the relationship with creativity changes," he says.

However, both Howard-Jones and Kenneth Heilman at the University of Florida caution that, since we don't fully understand how NAA affects neurons, Jung's conclusions remain speculative.

Heilman adds that it would be interesting to test whether NAA also correlates with a facet of creativity known as convergent thinking - the ability to bring lots of individual factors together into a single idea.

Jung also believes his findings could shed new light on what made the brains of creative geniuses like Einstein tick. "I don't think his IQ was ever tested, but it was likely around 120 - high, but not stratospheric," he says. "I would have loved to see what his ACG looked like, as IQ alone did not get him there, in my opinion, but rather intelligence plus creativity."

May 2009 by Linda Geddes

Meaning Making - Part 1 - Aligning thoughts with intentions

"What you think determines how you feel. It is up to you to get a grip on your mind so that you do not make yourself miserable.

A thought you have is not some sort of truth. It is just a thought. It may have arisen for no good reason whatsoever. A cloud passes in front of the sun and you think, “Life is meaningless.” What sort of thought is that? Why should you feel obliged to countenance it? Why even give it the time of day? It is a terrible mistake to take thoughts at their face value, as if they arrive from on high. They just come from you, with all of your warts and agendas.  

If a thought serves you, you keep it. If it doesn’t serve you, you reject it. If you think, “I’m spending the next two hours making meaning,” you keep it. If you follow that thought with, “But maybe I’m on the wrong track and maybe I’ve made a mess of my life,” you reject it instantly, without muss or fuss. You say, “Wow, that follow-up thought was a whopper! The heck with it.” - Eric Maisel

Should Creativity Be Exhausting? - ERIC MAISEL, PHD

Who doesn’t wish that he would create more deeply and more often? Who doesn’t have a list as long as his arm of reasons and rationalizations why he’s produced only two paintings in two years—and neither of them quite satisfactory? Who doesn’t wince a bit as he thinks about his productivity over the past decade and feel a little blue as he tallies the ledger sheet of time lost versus time well spent? Virtually all the people I know, coach, or train are painfully aware that they haven’t fought the good fight often enough—the fight to prove the exception and to completely exhaust themselves in the service of their creative work. As you say, a little more exhaustion might be just the right thing!

It is good if we try harder to honor our ambitions and our inner obligations. But maybe you aren’t ready to take those vows. Maybe you have doubts about the wisdom of exhausting yourself in the service of your creative work, especially considering how exhausting life itself can feel. Maybe you think that you’ll be visited by some demon if you work that hard, maybe by Beethoven’s bouts of nervous irritability or Dostoevsky’s anxiety attacks. Maybe you doubt that you or your efforts matter enough to be worth such an expenditure of energy.

Those are legitimate worries, because devoting yourself to your creative work in the way that I have in mind can indeed take its toll on your physical and psychological health. Nevertheless, there are excellent reasons to commit to making the Herculean effort of exhausting yourself in the service of your art: that this is your time on earth, that this is your chance to create worthy things, that this is your opportunity to conceive a startling idea when, an instant before, nothing existed.

Many religions demand arduous practices like fasts and confessions from their flock. But it is for the clergy class of each religion that the hardest practices are reserved. As a member of the clergy you may be asked never to marry, never to have children, never to own worldly possessions, never to speak except to praise God. With respect to creativity, each of us is a member of the clergy class. We are each penitent and priest. Shouldn’t we demand of ourselves that we be as dedicated in our own way as any monk or priest? Is it too much to ask that we exhaust ourselves in the service of our creativity, since we are creativity’s leaders as well as its practitioners?

If the only reason you have for trekking across the desert is that has occurred to you to give it a shot, the obstacles that the desert presents are bound to wear you out in short order. But if you are crossing the desert with high purpose, because you have a vital message to deliver, a lost love to find, or a pledge to keep, you will go further and maybe arrive at your destination. Your high purpose does not guarantee success: the desert may still win. But your high purpose might make all the difference. Say, “Let me exhaust myself in the service of my painting. Isn’t that a key place where I’ve decided to invest meaning?” Remind yourself of your intentions and your ambitions; and then exhaust yourself in their service.

A while back I attended a book club meeting of San Francisco coaches where my book The Van Gogh Blues was being discussed. There was a hunger in the room to better understand the language of meaning that I’ve been promoting in books like The Van Gogh Blues and Coaching the Artist Within and to come to grips with phrases like making meaning, investing meaning, shoring up meaning leaks, maintaining meaning, and the like. I explained some of my ideas: that all meaning is subjective; that each of us must step up as the sole arbiter of meaning in our life; that each us must nominate ourselves as the hero of our own story; and so on.

It is encouraging to me that we are beginning to better understand what our basic attitude toward the universe must be: I am here; I have principles and ideals; I have desires and needs; I am not separate from or immune to the facts of existence; and, as a bottom line, I must make my meaning or experience a meaning shortfall. One of the ways that we honor our pledge to make personal meaning is to do the work required of us, even if that effort exhausts us. If it exhausts us, then we rest; but we do not let the fear of exhaustion prevent us from making our meaning.

One day soon, exhaust yourself in the service of your work. Start at sunrise and go until midnight, getting tired, confused, crazy, anxious, frayed, sad, and whatever else befalls you as you struggle to create. When, after several hours of doing battle, you can’t muster another thought or another brushstroke, scream, cry, feed the cat, do anything you like, but do not even think about throwing in the towel.

Paint a suite of paintings in that single day. Paint the painting that defines your genre or that integrates all that are, the painting that you’ve been meaning to start for years. Even if you can’t reach your goal, making that effort is remarkable and courageous and deserves a reward. Exhaust yourself in the service of your work and then reward yourself, at the very least with the compliment, “I worked hard, I didn’t fall apart, and I’m proud of my efforts.”

ERIC MAISEL, PHD, is the author of more than 30 books and is widely regarded as America’s foremost creativity coach. He trains creativity coaches nationally and internationally and provides core trainings for the Creativity Coaching Association. His books include Coaching the Artist Within, Fearless Creating, The Van Gogh Blues, and many others. His websites include http://www.ericmaisel.com/ and http://www.brainstormthebook.com/ and he can be reached at ericmaisel@hotmail.com.

Main findings from Don’t Give Up Your Day Job - "Artists incomes—low and intermittent"

Main findings from Don’t Give Up Your Day Job

An economic study of professional artists in Australia

Read full report here

Artists—who are they?

·    There are about 45,000 practicing professional artists in Australia.

·    The term ‘practicing professional artists’ includes artists who are currently active or who have been active in the past five years; the ‘professional’ aspect limits the survey to those artists who operate at a level and standard of work and with a degree of commitment appropriate to the norms of professional practice within their artform. This excludes hobbyists and amateurs.

·    The biggest group is musicians with about 12,000; the second largest group, with about 9,000, is visual artists. Dancers make up the smallest group, with less than 1,500.

·    This survey covers the following categories of practicing professional artists: writers, visual artists, craft practitioners, actors, directors, dancers, choreographers, musicians, singers, composers, and community cultural development workers.

Artists incomes—low and intermittent

·    The survey income figures are for the 2000–01 financial year and are earned income excluding interest and dividends, etc. The figures show gross income before taxes.

·    Typically, artists have multiple job-holding patterns. An artist works in a ‘principal artistic occupation’ which can include rehearsal, practice, preparation and career administration.

·    Many artists have ‘arts-related’ work including teaching in the artist’s artform or writing about the arts. Many also have ‘non-arts’ work which includes paid work unrelated to any artistic field.

·    Artists were asked about their earned income for the 2000–01 financial year. Since most artists earn low incomes and a very few earn high incomes, the income statistics presented in the report concentrate on median income. This is the income in a distribution which is the half-way point, so that half earn above the median income and half earn below that figure.

·     Half of the artists in the survey had a creative income of less than $7,300 in the 2000–01 financial year. (The unusual distribution of artists creative incomes with many low incomes and few high incomes resulted in a mean creative income of just over $17,000.)

·    Total median incomes (‘arts incomes’ plus ‘non-arts incomes’) in 2000–01 ranged from $35,800 for musicians to $22,600 for both craft practitioners and community cultural development workers. The median income in 2000–01 for all artists in the survey was $30,000.

·    Only about a quarter of all artists work at their principal artistic occupation as employees on a permanent or casual basis being paid a salary or wages. The remaining three-quarters work as freelancers or as self-employed.

·    Female artists earn considerably less than male artists. The median ‘creative income’ of male artists in 2000–01 was $9,400 compared with $4,500 for female artists. Median total income (all ‘arts work’ plus “non-arts work’) for men was $35,000 and for women it was $23,600.

·     About half of the artists in the survey had experienced some period of unemployment in the five years preceding the survey, and half of those had applied for unemployment relief.

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An Artist’s guide to surviving a “9 to 5”

If only I could commit to my art full time, then I would be more productive and happy. Well you may have more time on your hands but if you give up your day job to pursue your dream career as an artist, be prepared for some strange happenings.

The truth is, the majority of people who give it all up to pursue their art are faced with a whole world of different challenges which prevent them from creating regularly and deeply. Indeed most people find they’re just as productive as when they held a full time day job… how strange! So what’s going on?

Creative work gives us insight and enriches our lives. Creativity is part of what makes us human, but it can also be very difficult and extremely challenging. There’s a lot going on inside most creative people and creating can throw up all sorts of insecurities and anxieties which lead to blocks, procrastination or other avoidance tactics which hinders the creative process.

Now add a 15 hour working day, which feels as though it’s robbing you of your sanity and what little spare time you have. This daily chore seems to consume your motivation and you ultimately leave your art for another day. Instead you switch on the TV to relax and unwind over a beer, and the resentment builds.

Creating under these conditions with zero energy is near impossible. So what positive action can we take to re address this balance, become more productive, create more meaningful work, more regularly? (and maybe even start enjoying our days a little more!)

Below are 5 ideas which you can commit to right now!

1.       Get up early

Starting your day an hour or two earlier is a fantastic way to get your work done. It’s amazing how good you will feel knowing that you have honoured your art and your day can start with a blast of creativity. You will also take advantage of the creative benefits of dream state first thing in the morning.

Once word of warning! Working on your art first thing can sometimes make your day job seem dull and uninspiring. When you finish working on your art pat yourself on the back for a job well done. Before you jump into your day job its worth saying out loud “I return with strength!” or words to that effect. You’re ready to take on your day and experience the wonders of the world.

2.       Understand the value of your time and how you use it

Your time is incredibly valuable.  Know where it goes and decide how you spend it. A useful tip is to break your day down into 100 points. Some of these points are spent sleeping, some are spent working and others are spent creating. You only have 100 points everyday so if you decide to spend 5 points watching TV they have to come from somewhere, what are your priorities? Alternatively if someone asks for your time, decide if you’re willing to invest these points. If not say no!

Some tips on reclaiming more points include

·     Get organised the night before your morning art sessions to get straight into your work first thing. Try getting up 1 hour early, it really is the best way to ensure your work gets done. (4 points a day)

·     Everyone has a least 30 minutes for lunch, most have an hour. This is a perfect opportunity for you to take yourself on an artist date, visit an art gallery, research your next novel, contact a few agents or anything which supports and/or develops your creative work (4 points a day)

·     Most people spend at least 20 mins commuting to work (I spend 1:30 daily). A good use of this time is listening to audio books or reading. I can get through a book a week listening in the car. (6 points a day)

·     Stop the TV madness – we sometimes find ourselves investing so much time on some very average programs under the guise of unwinding. Try turning off the TV for a week and invest the points in your art. It’s amazing how much you can get done. (6 points a day)

·     The internet is an amazing tool for research, networking and connecting with artists around the world. But is your time on the net productive or just time wasting? (2 points a day)

3.       Keep a notebook, journal and/or scrap book

When you get an idea write it down! (write it then and there). Dream journals (writing your dreams down as soon as you wake up) are also of great value and spark lots of creative ideas. Explore those ideas and concepts and let them evolve. Scrap books of inspiring ideas or quotes and images can also provide a source of energy and focus.

4.       Make use of your creative nature at work

You do not have two opposing lives; you have one life and a choice to make of it what you will. One of the greatest truths I have learned is that if you want to change your experience first you must change your attitude. If your work is boring, find ways to make it interesting and challenging.

Ultimately the trick here is to try and focus on the positive aspects of your day job and use your creative nature to make your day more interesting and productive. After all, like most things in life, you get out what you put in. If you want your day job to be more meaningful then put more energy into doing it well, engage in the challenges that arise and improve your own situation through the gifts you possess.

If all else fails find a new job! Maybe you could find something which is more in line with your art or supports your creative direction by providing flexibility around hours?

5.       Be active in the art community

Socializing with colleagues has long been recognized as important for creativity. Connecting with the art community and starting or joining a group is often the best way to generate ideas. Creativity is at its peak not in moments of solitary genius, but during exchanges with trusted colleagues.

It’s always a great help to have like minded individuals to provide support as well as give you the kick that is required to hold you accountable to fulfilling your creative goals.

Taking a course is also a great way to network. You may even learn something new! J