What art can teach us about the brain | Hacker News Reader

What art can teach us about the brain

scientificamerican.com

28 pointstokenadult10 comments

Anecdotal, but: My wife was born with limited forward vision in one eye and it has become "lazy" as a result. She always seemed to have a knack for representing physical objects on the 2D plane. She's recently begun spending serious amounts of time oil painting and her work continually impresses me, all the more so for her lack of formal training. We've theorized that her lack of depth perception facilitates the mapping from reality to canvas, so I'm willing to believe this research.

I've got to remind myself to not read comments on any random website.

An interesting idea, and it does make sense to me that being stereoblind may be an advantage for 2D artists. Just watch anyone trying to draw with proper perspective for the first time, they usually dramatically skew basic angles until they learn to see what it looks like, not what it is. Anyone who naturally has a less-strong sense of 3D would likely find this easier, because it's closer to how they see the world anyway.

I must be a great artist, because I never ever saw anything in these godamm'd "magic eye" images. :)

line drawings are "not something we've evolved to be able to understand," he said, but rather, people in all cultures—and even babies and monkeys—can understand a simple line drawing.

the metaphor is often more understandable than the real thing.

Finally a possible explanation as for why Mickey Mouse cartoons are "better" than realistic 3D animation movies.

Scott McCloud discusses this extensively in chapter 2 of "Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art." His general thesis is that detailed images that approach or achieve photorealism are close to the way we understand and experience the world around us and in turn how we view other people. Highly "iconic" simplified line drawings and cartoons, on the other hand, are closer to our internal representation of ourselves. The result is that we often find it easier to empathize with cartoons than realistic images.

Very similar to the uncanny valley: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley

Great comment, thanks for that. I've been meaning to read some Scott McCloud for a while, but my reading list is pretty long and it never bubbles up to the top. Can you recommend any articles you've seen online that are pretty good, or any insights by McCloud you found really fascinating or counterintuitive?

His work isn't just words. Just go through it. It's easy.

For those with a deeper interest in the topic, I suggest Rudolf Arnheim’s 1969 book Visual Thinking.

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