Listen & Draw - Two Ways Your Survival Instincts Influence Your Art
It was based on this article I wrote.
Transcript
Two Ways Your Survival Instincts Influence Your ArtWhen 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 when they are there. 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.
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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.
Our human brains have developed quite a bit over the past millions of years, but at the center of it is still our “reptile brain,” which acts on instinct for our survival and procreation.
We are also a social species, and status matters for procreation. If you have a high status, you will attract more attention from the opposite sex, so your reptilian brain will try to prevent you from taking risks that lower your status within the group.
And here’s the thing: making art is risky. You risk lowering your status in the group if your art is ridiculed for its poor quality. And so your reptilian brain constantly tries to talk you out of making art. It tries to talk you out of starting to make art, and so you procrastinate. If you manage to start, it tries to talk you out of finishing a piece of art. It’ll tell you your art is crap and to throw it away.
You’ve probably experienced this also. Art is a status game in several ways. Being “good” has high status. Being “bad” at art yet still trying is perceived as having low status while owning works by well-known artists has high status. Knowing art history has a high status.
It’s a status game for the outside world but not for us artists. We just enjoy creating. But we still have that reptilian brain that tries to instinctively and compulsively increase our status and odds of finding a partner.
What works for me is to tell myself I won’t show it to anyone. I reserve the back of my sketchbook (which I don’t show anyone) for having fun with a pen. This lowers the barrier to starting. And there’s no such thing as finishing, as I’m not making anything. I’m just drawing.
There will probably be scientists who say the “reptilian brain” theory is an oversimplification, but that is beside the point. What is important is that telling myself that I won’t show my art to anyone shuts up the part of my brain that actively tries to stop me from drawing. It works. And if a bogus explanation helps, then it helps.
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Thank you for listening.
Yours sincerely,
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