An Interesting Way Our Survival Instincts Influence Our Art (Part 1)
How our survival instincts benefit our art.
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hen we look at clouds, we see animals and faces. These are false positives; the animals and faces aren’t there. Think about what that meant for our ancestors: seeing animals and faces around them when they were not there was crucial for their survival! Better to see lions when they are not there than to miss them. For your survival, in that case, false positives are better than false negatives because false positive just means you were scared for nothing, and false negatives mean you’re eaten because you missed the threat. We were hunter-gatherers only until recently. We settled into villages only twelve thousand years ago, and our brains are still hardwired to lead a nomadic existence.
This is why we can see a face if someone draws two dots and a line, and this is why we can cartoon faces and persons quite a bit and get away with it. Our brain still recognizes them as faces or figures.
Use this freedom in your art! It is okay to deviate from realism in search of beauty in idealization and simplification.
Yours sincerely,
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