There have been a few discussions here on Substack about wonder and I’m keen to underline the value and the power of wonderment in the process of learning and development in the widest sense of those words, far beyond the concerns of mere schooling.

I don’t mean the kind of wonder that has an agenda, like “How can I make use of this?” or “What’s it worth?” Rather I mean an arresting kind of wonder that stops you in your tracks, grabs your attention and isn’t motivated by some self-serving agenda. So much of our daily lives are navigating familiar landscapes of reality through the filtration of our preconceptions that we’re mostly only half-awake at best. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but it does cost us the appreciation of beauty in the everyday and the experience of loving life as each unique and transient moment passes, never to return. So we need some way of at least occasionally coming off autopilot and getting into a state of inquiry rather than the anaesthesia of already knowing.

Drawing is one way to do that, because even the simplest things begin to reveal their subtlety when you force yourself to really look, rather than gloss over with the usual passing glance we give to familiar things. It’s not the only way, but it does have the advantage of circumventing words, which although powerful partition and solidify an interrelated flowing world into fixed components that represent it - always imperfectly.

Taking yourself to the edges of your current knowledge is another, realising the vastness beyond it and indeed recognising the provisional nature of what you normally take for granted. Scientific revolutions may be few and far between, but they have always arisen from a questioning of assumptions at the foundations of current orthodoxy. It’s obvious from daily experience that the sun orbits the earth and when you add to that a theological egocentricity and threat of heresy, the assumption gets baked in pretty firmly. It takes the tenacity of a Galileo to face down the power and improve the perspective. We celebrate such historical accounts, not realising that they are mirrored in our individual learning when we realise what’s been holding us back in some aspect of learning and development. A forehead-slapping moment of insight where something falls into place, where you ask yourself how you had not seen things this way before, whether it be in academic learning or something more prosaic like driving or playing tennis. The most powerful of these moments are those which dissolve a foundational misconception about the subject matter, about the approach you’ve been taking or about yourself as the one learning. Self-limiting beliefs are inevitably the hardest to recognise and replace with something more enabling, being deeply buried in the foundations of your psyche and therefore difficult to discern.

Getting out into nature is perhaps the most reliable route to wonderment. In our daily life in a constructed environment, both real and virtual, it’s too easy to be lulled into a false sense of security in the familiar. Our simplistic reliance on straight lines and on-off switches obscures the majesty of the natural world, with its complexity and resilience. It’s become too easy to overlook how we depend on the gifts that environment has bestowed on us, how dependent we really are on it. For me, even appreciating the intricacies of my own body and how it hangs together as a biological system is a cause for wonder and a stimulus to continue inquiring into how it has given rise to what I call “me” in my engagement with the world.

The truth is that we don’t know, not really. Our maps and menus are useful up to a point, but thinking that they are the be-all and end-all leads to an impoverished outlook and a wrong-headed engagement with life. Realising the limitations of one’s own outlook may be too humbling for some, but I find it to be an inexhaustible source of energy and inspiration to keep exploring and to love being alive, for however long that may be.

I must confess to feeling some irritation when someone say “I was brought up to...” (be polite, put others first, etc etc). Partly because it is usually said as a kind of self-righteous rebuke, but perhaps more because the speaker seems not to be taking responsibility for their own values and standards of behaviour. Putting it back on your upbringing seems to me to be a cop-out.

Maybe my irritation arises from the fact that I resisted much of my upbringing. Although I couldn’t articulate it at the time, in retrospect much of it was cant and a repeated assertion of power by angry adults. I’m thinking perhaps more of my education than home life, although there was a significant consistency between them.

The conformist milieu of the 1950’s in rural Australia bore heavily on the older generation as much as we kids, but of course we couldn’t see that. Like the pecking order in a flock of birds, when you’re at the bottom it looks like they’re all out to get you. I started school at the local state primary, but after the first year I was moved to the equally local Catholic school, for reasons that were never explained to me, and I don’t remember asking for anyway. My parents, who were churchgoers, had probably been pressured by the parish priest or someone of similar standing to make that change, as part of the deep tensions between denominations in those days, when ecumenism was inconceivable. There was also a push to extract money from the government under the name of ‘State Aid’ to fund private schools. This has led over time to gross inequalities and a sense of entitlement and imagined superiority of the private school system and its products. Not so, in my experience of having been a student in both systems.

In our little Catholic primary schools we were taught, if you can call it that, by these strange hooded apparitions called odd names like Sister Thecla and Sister de Paul. We had to recite from the Green Catechism, a slim volume that was a Q&A bank of numbered items, starting with “Q1: Who made the world?” A: God made the world.” I don’t remember much else about it, so uninspiring did I find its revelations. Like our parents, the nuns were quick to anger and thrived on the fear they provoked in we children. The order’s nomenclature “Sisters of Mercy” was a total misnomer. I once witnessed Sister Thecla take a handful of one boy’s hair and shake him so hard that a great clump of his blonde forelock came out at the roots, which she then threw down in disgust. Perhaps it was because he had a German name. In those post-war years, the Germans were still the baddies, but that had no bearing on my friendship with Joachim and Reinhardt. We all looked on helplessly, but my horror has only increased over the years since.

The teaching of other, subjects was no less didactic and authoritarian. Times tables, spelling tests, with mistakes met with corporal punishment. Like medicine, what was supposedly good for you was invariably made to taste nasty. At home and at school, we were reckoned to be in need of knocking into shape, presented with dogma and maxims that were rhetoric clearly contradicted by reality. A recipe for deep confusion, it took me years, decades even, to resolve the inner tensions it left me with and even now, I can’t be clear that it’s all untangled.

So not surprising that I resisted, but the irony is twofold.

Firstly, no matter how fervently you swear that you will never visit these painful actions upon your own children, inevitably in the thick of it you’ll end up channeling your parents when dealing with the challenges of your own parenthood. Secondly, despite, or perhaps because of, that resistance I find myself having inherited some of my parents’ quirks and predilections: for instance my mother’s dislike of waste, looking to make do and mend, reuse and recycle to a fault. And my father’s occasional delights in the absurd and peculiar. Sometimes I like to think that sense of humour has more transmissive power down the generations than anything in the DNA. It’s always the odd little things that slip under the radar and take up residence in your psyche as their new host in the interests of their own immortality.

Strange that it’s these incidental things that survive, woven into the fabric of your being. As for the rest of it, I don’t identify my values in later life as precepts handed down to me from on high but much more as hard-won principles distilled through a great deal of trial and error (lots of error, I will admit…). Even in my mid-70’s I’m very much a work in progress.

I am not sure why I remember clearly a few isolated events in my life and not the countless other things that must have happened in between. Some of the occasions which stand out though are instances of my being transfixed in wonderment, when nothing else mattered, nothing was going anywhere, past and future utterly irrelevant, indeed nonexistent.

The earliest such was when I was very small, perhaps as young as two and certainly no older than four. We had been travelling, driving somewhere in the night, although that is not part of the memory. I must have been asleep in the car and put to bed on arrival. It may have been a bed, or even a sofa. The room had been darkened by drawing the curtains or blinds. What I recall vividly is waking slowly in this unfamiliar room which was mostly in darkness, save some gaps in the curtains, through which the early morning sun shone in brilliant solid shafts. These golden beams illuminated a myriad of tiny motes of dust that swirled and swooped gracefully through the near still air like glistening murmurations of fairies dancing just for me. I have no recollection of what happened next, nor in days afterward. Just that moment of pure wonder at the spectacle in front of me.

Maybe that’s the beginnings of my interest in natural phenomena, matters scientific. But not just in the thing out there, also in the observing of it. A few years later in Molong that was crystallised in another seemingly random moment of looking into a somewhat more distant scene of cumulus clouds gathered on the horizon during an otherwise sunny day. In those days, I was certain that clouds like that were solid enough to lie upon if only one could get up there to stretch out and luxuriate. But this was not so much what preoccupied me on this occasion. As I gazed out into the distance, I suddenly became aware of myself looking and then wondering how come I was ‘in here’ looking out through these eyes at those clouds. I was struck by the seeming arbitrariness of my identity. How come I was of this body at this time rather than being say a middle-aged woman in some other place, perhaps at some other time? But still, here I was and all I could do was wonder. That question has stayed with me for a long time. Maybe I’ll say something more about it later.

The third such occasion was much later, in my late twenties when I was living with my young family in a faulty rundown house in one of the older suburbs of Sydney: Balmain, if you know it. The house was on the south side of a moderately steep hill and the backyard had a sheer stone cliff as its boundary, with a cascade of ferns and other vegetation spilling into the space. You have to remember that this is the southern hemisphere, so facing south is not the big selling point that it is in Europe and North America. In winter, the sun barely touched the house. One late afternoon I was at home on my own and looking out of the back door up at the waxing moon framed by the vegetation with the sky fading into early evening.

Most times if I looked at the moon, I would just see it two-dimensionally like a painting on the flat canvas of sky draped overhead. But on this occasion, somehow the lighting was just right along with the phase of the moon, so that I could actually see the sphericity of the moon, a solid thing suspended above me in a way that I could fully appreciate its size and location. It was just hanging there in space with no visible means of support. I could see gravity in action, not just as a concept.

The truly stunning aspect of this was not even so much seeing the solidity of the moon, but in seeing the third dimension. I came face to face with the vast space behind the moon, stretching ever further without apparent limit - putting things into perspective, well and truly. When you see how much larger something is than you might have previously realised, you begin to recognise your own stature by comparison Tiny, insignificant, miniscule, but in a way that is immensely liberating. almost as if in seeing the colossal scale of what is in front of you, it is subsumed within your perception. You become it rather than being dwarfed.

I choose these moments for their indelibility in my memory and imagination. They both anchor me and let my spirit soar in free flight. It is little use trying to recreate such experiences. They arise unexpectedly in random circumstance. Once is enough. two is a bonus, three goes beyond any possibility of denial. Perhaps that’s all that being alive is, underneath all of the busyness we otherwise engage in and prioritise, as if that is somehow more important than just being here, in wonderment.

Growing up in rural Australia, the only language I had any real exposure to was English and not being aware of the possibility of other languages, it became transparent to me, something I was completely unaware of. When my Dad told me a Dad joke about Mr Wing in China intending to ring Mr Wong, but he winged the wong number, something broke in my head. I couldn't believe that telephones would work in Chinese. Evidently they do, but I still remember being utterly nonplussed at the prospect of there being other languages in common use elsewhere. I would ask people to speak to me in one of them, but sadly in my little town there wasn't anyone so exotic and my quest fell into darkness.

Although French and German classes were on offer when I later went to high school, I gravitated toward the sciences and mathematics with a little history thrown in. I didn't really understand why I should learn languages that would never be part of my daily life. Mind you that didn't stop me doing Latin for six years, even less likely to be useful in the future. As a result, I'm a recalcitrant monoglot and I face serious embarrassment when I come into an environment where I have to force others to flex and deal with me in what to them is an unfamiliar language. I appreciate their generosity. Informal sign language helps a lot, but doesn't get you very far if things get at all complex.

Learning my first and only language in the course of life seemed fairly natural, but I've realised that in the unlikely event of committing the time to learn a second language, the process would be quite different. I'd inevitably be engaging with the second language through the filter of my first and it would be quite a long time before what I now hear in the streets as an incomprehensible hubbub of near random sounds would make natural sense to me. In my adulthood I've lost that childlike innocence and curiosity that would help me to embed the learning into my psyche.

That twigs me to the realisation that any language inevitably forms a filter, a kind of distorting veil through which I engage with the world and which predisposes me toward habits of mind of which I'm hardly aware. Certainly utterly unaware most of the time - stopping to think about it disconnects me from the immediacy of that engagement, so it's a kind of inevitable double bind. It prompted me to rethink that evangelistic mantra that one must be born again, not in the way that it usually sounds as a one-time event, but more like a recurring recognition of the fragility and limitedness of one's acquired knowledge and a committed return to innocence and open-minded curiosity. Life, and in particular my life, is such an improbable occurrence that it can only be regarded as something awesome, incredible and all those other words that have lost their meaning through overuse.

Even if I were to learn to speak (and listen) in French, what's even harder is the dead giveaway of my accent. The young woman who took my breakfast order didn't even need me to say anything to realise that I was out of place and generously used English to ask me what I wanted. I remarked on her perceptiveness and after we'd been speaking a little, she complimented me on my accent. I again realised that I don't think that I have an accent, just that other people talk funny. Another layer of hidden filtering in the midst of experience, but one that's even harder to consciously access and deliberately change.

Mind you, having lived for twenty-some years in England and as much as I've resisted taking on some of the linguistic oddities in that world, my Aussie accent has been softened quite a bit. Some people pick up my antipodean origins fairly quickly but many don't for quite a while. The funny thing is that when I go back to Australia, I get mistaken for an English person and I feel obliged to gently correct the mistake. So as an expat, I don't quite belong in either place. It gives me a mild identity crisis, but in some ways I quite enjoy the vantage point it gives me. It's enhanced my perspective a bit, but then when I'm immersed in different waters altogether I'm right back at square one. It's a good place to be, because it curbs my tendency to take things for granted.

If asked to draw a face, you might think to yourself “where shall I start?” and home in on a feature you can name, like the eyes or the mouth. We’ll often draw an outline to show the boundary of a thing or an internal feature, even though there’s no actual line visible in the scene itself. That might be why we find drawing somebody’s nose especially hard, since there’s no obvious boundary between the nose and the adjacent cheeks.

So wedded are we to the identification of named things in our field of view that our capacity to simply observe and record what we see is deeply compromised. Betty Edwards drew attention to this in her 1979 book “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain”. The idea of specialisation of right and left brain hemispheres was pooh-poohed by some, but more recently has been extensively supported by neuroscientist , who also writes here on Substack.

From my point of view in the cockpit of my life, I struggle with the idea of using this or that part of my brain at will, but rather I find it helpful to distinguish between the world-as-it-is in front of me at a given moment and whatever narrative about it that I may engage in before, during or after the moment in question. I can choose to simply observe and draw, sidelining the mental chatter that more often than not gets in the way. That distinction of mental faculties helps in a lot of other areas as well.

The personal preconceptions built from language make it difficult to see familiar things freshly, which we must do if we are to break through the limitations imposed by those preconceptions. First among these is the existence of things in the world, things that can be named and considered separate from the other things around them.

It’s one of the first things we teach children, that something can be named and that it persists in time. The common baby’s game of peek-a-boo teaches a child that something (or someone) can be hidden from view, but that it is still there waiting to be revealed in a delightful surprise. The beginnings of a child learning language will be to name things (including people) and to be able to recognise different instances of that kind of thing, be it a dog, a car or just” Daddy”. Only after populating the imagination with a decent variety of named things might the child begin to use words to convey their characteristics, behaviours or relationships.

Of course, it eventually dawns on a child that they have a name too and, although it seems exceedingly strange, they are another ‘thing’ in the world. Most kids seem comfortable with identifying themselves with the pronouns I and me, but I remember one child in my extended family who preferred to use her name instead of pronouns, like “Mary wants to go outside” instead of “I want to...” Self-referential language is peculiar at the best of times, so I’m not surprised she opted for this way of speaking at first.

I never really liked my name. It always felt wrong somehow. My parents fell into the established Catholic tradition of giving us saints’ names. so I am Paul and my brothers are Peter and Christopher. We were often reminded how far we fell short of saintliness, but when my mother told me that Paul meant “small” I was utterly disheartened. It was only much more recently when people began to comment when I introduced myself that my name was the same as a much younger actor (now deceased) in action films, that I relaxed a little. I’ve taken to telling them that I am indeed that actor, back from the dead and just a bit the worse for wear. How else can I explain my wrinkles and hair loss?

Things get Edgy

Progressively we become more and more committed to the identity and separateness of named things in our world and are less aware of their essential interrelatedness. An object in the world, say a stone or a leaf, may seem to have clear edges that form a boundary between the interior of that thing and the outside, that is between “thing” and “not-thing”, but closer examination will likely reveal that the boundary is not so sharp as we think. Likely the surface of the stone is covered with stuff from the environment, and the leaf will be porous, exchanging gases and water with the environment. The boundaries. we draw are at least as much a product of our imagination (collective and individual) as they are a feature of the reality itself.

Things can break. Another early learning is (aside from their maybe loss of function when broken) that the broken pieces are smaller than the original, leading us to wonder about the ultimate composition of things. Either you can keep chopping up indefinitely into ever smaller pieces, or you’ll find a point where you can’t go any further with your destructive campaign. The Greek philosopher Democritus opted for the latter, proposing that all things were made of much smaller things, that we now call atoms. It only took a couple of thousand years to develop this idea further, with John Dalton proposing in the early 1800s that things were composed of different kinds of atoms, forming elements and compounds in fixed proportions. Dalton’s atoms were minuscule objects, maybe thought of as little balls or somesuch that bonded together in large numbers to form the substances and objects that we’re familiar with.

I remember when I was first learning about atoms in high school physics classes, wondering what an atom looks like. Only much later did I realise that this was an unanswerable question, born of my preconceptions laid down in everyday experience. The way light interacts with a single atom is not simply a miniature version of what we’re familiar with in the human-scale world, where lots of light from a source bounces off an object in geometric patterns that give you the viewer subtle clues to interpret and work out the size and shape of the object, possibly also what it’s made of. The light and shadow patterns we can imitate in a drawing can have a similar effect and give a pretty good facsimile of the original object, sometimes very convincing indeed.

Learning to draw realistically needs us to observe these patterns of light and shadow very closely, more closely than we do when just glancing and recognising a thing in the real world. What shape is it? What colour might it be? But light interacting with a single atom doesn’t behave in a way that would allow us to give a meaningful answer to the question of what an atom looks like.The size of an atom is around the same magnitude as the wavelength of visible light and the interaction between the two (atom and light) is impossible to predict or describe in familiar terms. The light might be deflected from its original path, somewhat unpredictably, or it might be absorbed completely and re-emitted some time later, again unpredictably. So if we’re relying on our normal idea of appearances of things, nature shows itself to be beyond the reach of our conventional imagination.

But things get even stranger as we drill deeper. It’s now common knowledge but was a big surprise to the original explorers that atoms aren’t the indivisible things that they were originally thought to be, going back to Democritus et al. The shocking revelation via Ernest Rutherford just over 100 years ago was that the atom was mostly empty space, with most of its mass concentrated in a dense central nucleus and one or more much lighter electrons seemingly orbiting at the periphery.

The scale is quite staggering. If the nucleus were to be represented by a football in the middle of a field, the orbiting electron(s) aren’t even in the same field but are some 10 kilometres (about 6 miles) away. So to say that the atom is “mostly” empty space is something of an understatement; on those figures, it’s around 99.9999999999999 % empty space. So everything you think of as solid and real, including yourself, is more or less emptiness.

And the tiny weeny bits that aren’t empty space are stranger than you can imagine. They’re not little balls as we might conveniently imagine them to be. No, they’re smeared out with no well defined boundaries or positions, needing to be represented by probabilistic wave equations, both there and not-there at the same time, winking in and out of existence unpredictably but averaging out en masse sufficiently reliably to add up to the day to day reality are think that we’re familiar with.

I didn’t mean for this to turn into a Physics lesson, so apologies if you’re tuned out already. You can come back now.

My point is that the definiteness of things in our familiar environment is something of an illusion, which works well enough for us to navigate the ordinary world passably, but which holds no ultimate truth value. In fact it has the effect of obscuring underlying truths in the essential interconnection of things in reality, calling into question our way of regarding them as being independent and immutable. It can cost us the wonderment and respect that the world deserves, rather than the wanton destruction and careless consumption that has come to characterise our relationship with nature.

Stopping long enough to try drawing something or someone might give pause to wonder and appreciate what we so easily take for granted and think we know in some ultimate sense. When it becomes apparent that our knowledge, both scientific and everyday, is really a convenient fabrication, then we might naturally be a bit more humble and inquiring than we usually are. It will serve us better in the long run to be so.

When I was teaching Physics, I would often use analogies (that is, similes) to help bridge the gap between familiar everyday experiences and the new strange domains we were exploring. For instance, most students were new to electric circuit theory and the essential concepts that applied in that domain. I could make it more accessible by saying that there were similarities with water flow, where everyone will have had some experience and understanding. So the motion of electric current was likened to the rate of water flow through a pipe, maybe measured in litres per minute, and potential difference (aka ‘voltage’) was like the water pressure that drives the flow from where the pressure is high (the tap) to where it is low (the end of a hose connected to said tap). That simile is helpful to explain how you get a ‘potential drop’ across a resistance when current is flowing, as I daresay most people who have ever played with a hose as kids (or adults!) will be familiar with the buildup of pressure at the end of a hose when you block the flow with your thumb.

Analogies like this are great for making new fields more accessible to novices, but there comes a time when it’s advisable to abandon them, as the correspondence between the domains is imperfect. For instance, water can happily flow out of an open pipe onto the ground, but electric current has to have a return path to its source, hence the reference to circuits. In domestic circuits, you just want to be sure that your body is not part of the return path! As an aside, most people are not aware that it’s the current that can kill you, in the range ~ 15 to 100 mA (from memory) which will put your heart into fibrillation. High voltage with low current isn’t such a problem.

Later in my teaching career and also in everyday life, I became aware of the extent of cross-fertilisation in the other direction, that is concepts from Physics and other sciences being used as terms referring to psychological and social occurrences. Again helpful for some understanding, but also potentially misleading when correspondences fail. In the everyday world, we’ll talk about an argument being ‘heated’, someone having ‘forceful’ character, or exerting ‘pressure’ on us. Financial discourse can talk about inflation, or leverage and we can instinctively appreciate what is being signified based on everyday understanding of such terms.

But the conceptual cross-fertilisation has deeper dangers arising from the fact that much of the borrowing of concepts goes beyond simile, where we say one thing is like another, into metaphor where we say one thing is another. We’ll say that someone is putting pressure on us in a way that doesn’t acknowledge the borrowing of that concept from fluid physics. For the most part that’s not a problem. In fact it can make for a richer appreciation of what is being communicated. I’m envious of writers who can describe things in lyrical terms that inspire and delight me as a reader. But if you’re wanting to understand something properly, the mismatches can be hidden tripwires (erm, just to use a metaphor...).

The problems can arise in both directions. I came to the conclusion that the difficulty that most people had in learning physics arose not from their ignorance or inexperience, but rather from their deep familiarity with the physical world through everyday experience and conversation about it. It’s a similar obstacle to that. arising when adults try to learn drawing - it’s that they’re too familiar with what they’re looking at and that gets in the way of seeing it afresh. But I digress.

As an example of everyday use causing difficulty in learning Physics, consider the word “inertia”. This concept is a crucial one in classical dynamics, which most people first encounter in the form of Newton’s 3 Laws of motion (as an aside, notice what the use of the word “Law” might imply there). In everyday parlance, inertia is associated with inaction, a difficulty in getting going, stuck in a state of torpor etc. But in the Newtonian conception, inertia is an effect that applies equally to something stationary or moving at high speed. You could say it’s a resistance to change (but that way of expressing it has other problems I’ll explore in a little while).

There’s an old story about a farmer about to take produce to market and his horse refusing to even try pulling the cart saying that according to that human Newton’s Third Law its action in pulling forward will be met by an equal and opposite reaction by the cart staying put, so why bother trying? When you can resolve that challenge, you’ve really understand inertia and in fact understood all of Newton’s Three Laws of motion, which are really different facets of one idea. So when you use a term familiar from everyday conversation like inertia, force, mass, energy etc. people bring a whole lot of preconceptions with them that may help or maybe hinder their understanding.

But issues arise in the other direction too. Take the term “resistance”. I’ve recently had a brief exchange with a very good writer on Substack, Justin Foster, about the default mode of discourse in western dialogue being oppositional, not only in local interactions but very much in the political sphere, much to our collective detriment. Justin now prefers not to use the term ‘resistance’ as it likely feeds this oppositional mindset. For reasons I don’t yet fully understand he prefers the word “defiance”. But what struck me when reading his comment was that the term ‘resistance’ isn’t just oppositional pushback as we commonly conceive of it. In electrical circuits, resistance is something that dissipates energy. It only arises when there is flow in the circuit ie. current, so it’s not the static state that we might think it to be. The nuances transmitted unintentionally can get complicated and potentially misleading.

I’m not getting all Nitpickers’ and Pedants’ Society about it, much as I might enjoy that - especially with the apostrophe placement… It’s more a matter of bringing to the surface of awareness (to use another metaphor) the mostly hidden assumptions, the baggage (ooh, another one) that comes with the use of these concepts and the limitations that we’re often unaware of as we seamlessly move from one domain of inquiry to another. as ever, it’s a matter of seeking to become more conscious and remaining in a state of inquiry rather than making out we’ve got it all down pat.

PS: I know that there are several metaphors in the above discussion that aren’t explicitly acknowledged. I haven’t counted them, but I suspect that if you start looking at any piece of writing, there they will be glinting like half-buried objects in the conversational terrain. They might make good stepping stones, or they might trip you up. All depends on keeping your eyes open…

Conveying depth in a drawing is quite difficult when the paper or other drawing surface has no depth to speak of, being two-dimensional. The same applies to photographs and TV, movie screens etc but we have become so used to those limitations that we barely notice how we interpret those images to understand depth. So it takes a bit of systematic thinking to understand what we need to do to create that illusion.

I’m not focusing here on how to convey the 3D appearance of solid objects in a drawing. That’s mostly achieved through shading (as in the drawing above), which is a whole other topic deserving of its own post (I may have done something on this already…).

What I’m more concerned with here is judging how far away an object is from the viewer, relative to other objects in the scene along their line of sight. Projecting that third dimension onto a flat surface in a drawing or photograph loses the direct depth information and leads to two issues in drawing, usually called “foreshortening” and “perspective”. These are two quite distinct issues, although I’ve heard some people mix them up. So it might be worthwhile to explain, at the risk of labouring the point.

Foreshortening

Foreshortening is simply the effect where those parts of the subject that are partly pointing along your line of sight, whether towards or away from you, will appear to be shorter than they actually are. If someone is pointing their finger straight at you, you’ll only see its tip and a squashed version of the hand and arm to which said finger is attached.

If the arm is oblique to your line of sight, you’ll see a version of that arm that’s shortened. How much shortened depends on the angle between the arm and your line of sight. For instance in the drawing of the woman above, her shoulders and left forearm are oblique to the line of sight, so they appear to be shorter than if they were across the field of view like the left upper arm is and is therefore drawn full length.

The problem you’ll have with foreshortening is that your very smart visual system takes all this into account and will know that the forearm is longer than it appears. So you can experience the discomfort of a conflict between what you see and what you know, struggling to avoid drawing it too long on your paper.

The good news is that you can deal with foreshortening via the artist’s mantra “Draw what you see, not what you know” although as I’m sure you know by now, like all simple things that is more difficult than it sounds. As with many of the challenges of drawing and learning in general, your prior knowledge is often unconscious and when working at the limits of its assumptions, we too easily disregard the new input that doesn’t quite fit with the underlying preconceptions. In drawing, you need to strip back the business of seeing to the raw visual data in the scene, before the creative interpretation that we all do automatically. If only we could do that in other areas of life too, things might be a lot less messy.

Perspective

Perspective is an effect arising from how far away from your viewing position the various objects in a real scene are located. Let’s say that a scene is composed of identical objects, say tennis balls scattered across the court, some near and others further away. If you were to look at a photograph of such a scene, you’ll recognise that the nearer balls appear to be larger in the photo than the farther ones.

A ball that was a really long way away would shrink to a dot, eventually so small that it would effectively vanish. This is the so-called ‘vanishing point’ in perspective drawing. Everything parallel to your line of sight converges to meet at this point.

Constructing a perspective template with one or possibly two (rarely three) vanishing points is most useful in architectural or streetscape drawings, where buildings usually have fairly well-defined lines, usually parallel or perpendicular to each other and the viewer’s line of sight. For anyone interested, I’ll elaborate on that in another post, but if you’re drawing something more organic like a landscape scene or a portrait, the straight line constructions used for accurate perspective aren’t helpful. That’s not to say that there isn’t any shrinkage with depth in those kinds of drawing, but there are simpler and more practical ways to address perspective in those situations. Again, it comes down to the old mantra “draw what you see, not what you know”.

If you look at a real scene with depth so that there are perspective effects applying, your subliminal knowledge of the true size of more distant parts of the scene is likely to produce a mental conflict as you go to draw them, so your drawing likely will exaggerate the size of these parts and break the spell you are hoping to cast with your drawing.There are two simple ways that you can help bypass this conflict: framing and sight-sizing. Both draw attention to what you can see in front of you rather than any expectations you may have because of prior knowledge embedded in your visual circuitry.

Actually, before I explain those two there is an even simpler way, which is to take a photo of the scene and use that as your reference for a drawing. The photo automatically takes care of the difficulty of compressing three dimensions into two, so resolving much of the mental conflict in drawing from life. It might seem a bit of a cheat, but if it helps you build confidence in drawing then it seems worthwhile as a learning tool. It’s also especially helpful for portraits, saving your subject from sitting still for a long time. Use both where you can and go easy on yourself.

Framing

‘Framing’ is simply a matter of holding up something like the border card that you often find inside a picture frame, so that you are looking at your scene through a rectangular aperture in the card. Sometimes you see people using their hands to form a roughly rectangular aperture through which to view their subject, which is just another way of doing the same thing with less precision, but more convenience.

Framing is a bit like the photo method, in that it helps you imagine the three dimensions of the real scene compressed into two dimensions on the paper. If you then imagine this as the borders of your drawing (feel free to move the frame around to include just the parts of the scene that you want to draw, forming a so-called ‘composition’ for the drawing). This then excludes a lot of the distracting information from the visual environment, enabling you to imagine how the scene and the various elements of it would appear in your drawing. It will make it easier for you to position the various items in the scene and show them at their correct apparent size so that your drawing then conveys the sense of depth through perspective. It’s a way of helping you draw what you see, putting aside what you know.

Sight Sizing

‘Sight sizing’ is something you may have seen artists doing, for reasons that might not be obvious to a casual observer. It is just a way of gauging the apparent sizes of different features in your subject, and it works just as well for a portrait drawing as it does for a still life or landscape. As you are looking out on your subject scene, you just hold your arm out straight in front of you, with a pencil or other thin straight item held between thumb and forefinger, adjusting its position so that the pencil tip is in line with one edge of the feature you’re concerned about and the tip of your thumb is in line with the other edge.

You’ll notice that I said to hold your arm out straight in front of you as you sight-size from your scene. It’s important that the pencil is the same distance from your eye each time you sight a different part of your scene. That will make sure that your visual estimate is consistent and accurate.

You’ll take the distance between the tip and your thumb and use it in one of two ways. You can hold the pencil up against the relevant part of your drawing, with your thumb still in the same position, to help you make a fixed scale reproduction of the subject. This limits your choice of drawing size and scale, but in some circumstances that might be fine. Alternatively, you can compare the tip-thumb distance sighting one feature in your subject with the tip-thumb distance when sighting another feature. It’s a way of gauging the relative apparent sizes of those various features, so that you can draw different parts of your scene in the right proportions relative to one another. Once you’ve got a few key points in your drawing, filling in the gaps should be rather easier.

Perspective in a Broader Sense

These methods of helping make a 2-D drawing of a 3-D scene look ‘right’ to the viewer’s eye are like any process of seeking objective evidence to work towards a synthesis of observations and ideas. I’m hearing too many conversations in these times where someone feels able to put forward an opinion without considering the evidence, in fact sometimes totally at odds with the available evidence. When you see how easily we can misperceive even a simple visual scene, it makes it more important to cross-check your interpretations amidst the much greater complexities of real life.

When we talk about getting things in perspective in a more general context, we’re transferring the concept of perspective from the technical drawing context into something a bit fuzzier in the way we look at life situations, ideas etc. This way of understanding using a visual metaphor is far more common than it might at first appear. It’s enormously helpful in many ways, but also has limitations that we’re often unaware of. A lot of our language relating to mental phenomena uses visual metaphors, if you see what I mean…

It’s often difficult to obtain agreement between eyewitnesses to a past event such as a crime or car crash; people tend to report their interpretations rather than what they actually saw - “the man seemed shifty and up to no good”, rather than a more factual observation of someone’s appearance and demeanour. It’s often surprisingly difficult to drill down to what you see, rather than what you ‘know’. It’s a skill worth developing, both in drawing and in life, distinguishing clearly between the raw data from your observations, ideally free from the influence of preconceptions, and the interpretations you can validly make from them. If only we could do that better than we seem to be doing, even after all this time.

Long story short, I think understanding resides in a part of the mind that is concerned with visualising, underlined by the common way of asking “Do you see what I mean?”. Developing your visual faculty through drawing and imagining (which is close to “imaging”) may help with improving your ability to understand things that aren’t initially clear to you. Our visual faculties have a kind of all-at-onceness, a see at a glance characteristic that is much quicker than the verbal/symbolic kind of apprehension that is a serial, one-piece-at-a-time kind of process. This rapid mode of appreciating a scene or situation is very powerful, but also has some significant limitations that are worth bearing in mind.

This is one of the frustrations of teaching. If I understand something, I have a structured network of relationships that constitute the whole topic, but in teaching it I have to break it into pieces for communication one piece at a time, along with some instructions to the receiver(s) regarding how to assemble these pieces into a coherent whole. It’s too easy for a lecture like this to be just a stream of information that students might receive without clearly distinguishing what is information and what is guidance about how it all fits together. Never mind the fact that the way I’ve just described learning makes it sound too much like a passive process of following instructions rather than the essentially creative activity that learning is.

I remember when I was teaching Physics and was more than once approached by a confused student asking about which formula they should use to solve a particular problem. I would discourage them from trying to memorise a long list of various facts and formulae and instead advised them to seek understanding of the Physics. I may not have articulated it so well then, but what I was advising was for them to appreciate the way these various concepts were connected to each other. Their relationships formed a kind of virtual network, so that you only needed to remember one or two things, from which you could get to the rest quite readily.

For instance, in so-called classical mechanics. Newton’s Second Law (F = ma) stands proudly at the centre of a whole constellation of ideas about conservation of momentum, inertia, impulse, orbital motion and much more. Remembering F = ma is surely not difficult but it is the way in which it naturally leads to other representations that makes it powerful.

There are various advocates for visual tools like this diagram, called “mind mapping” or “concept mapping”, as a way to represent these relationships explicitly. I’m neither here nor there about such things, but I do know that when I understand something, I can almost see that mesh of relationships in the back of my mind. I say “almost” because it’s more a feeling than an actual vision, but it feels as if the knowledge tree is there in my mind’s eye. It has a kind of integrity that recognises the whole structure and the relationships within it.

When somebody says “I don’t understand”, they’re really saying that they don’t know where to put whatever new information it is they are being presented with. It doesn’t fit anywhere in their current structure of knowledge, beliefs or ideas and as such they’re likely to discount it, discard it or just plain forget. The discomfort they’re experiencing is often more emotional than intellectual, suggesting that the awareness of a structured set of relationships isn’t usually something that we are consciously aware of. It needs some reflective inquiry into what’s normally taken for granted.

So in seeking to understand something, that discomfort of not understanding could provide a nudge to reflect and become more consciously aware of the networked knowledge, beliefs or ideas that have become a lens through which one views the world and events in it. But more often than not, we don’t reflect in that way and our current outlook continues unexamined, with the contrary input cast aside.

When you seek to understand, you have to be willing to risk that the new input will force a sometimes radical reorganisation of your current understanding, with all the discomfort and exhilaration that comes with that. Typically it happens discontinuously, a sudden insight in which the structure of your current understanding recrystallises into something more comprehensive that now allows you to make sense of the new input and sense anew of what you had before.

It’s why scientific progress is often an achingly slow accumulation of ideas and observations, punctuated by the occasional conceptual resolution. That usually comes about because someone who might be a bit of a maverick dares to question an assumption that has been at the foundation of current understanding for ages. Perhaps the most well-known instance of this in Physics was in 1905 when a young patent clerk Albert Einstein questioned among other things the sacred assumption that time flows at the same rate for every observer; thereby was born Relativity as one part of a major revolution in physics.

But just because I’m talking about iconic figures like Einstein, don’t be thinking that it’s any different for you and me. The potential of revolutionary thinking is available in anyone’s learning journey in any field. As a more accessible instance, many people have put forward to me that being able to draw is the result of some inborn talent, one which sadly they are lacking. It’s precisely that self-reinforcing belief that keeps them unable or unwilling to draw. If one can credibly challenge such a defining premise, who knows what might be possible in people’s inclination to drawing, or mathematical physics or anything else for that matter.

The most accessible, and yet strangely the most elusive, arena for making quantum leaps in thinking is in the matter of your own capabilities. Much more is possible than we give ourselves credit for. And it all starts with seeking to understand rather than to remember. Understanding is a creative process of building your own network of relationships, and then having it collapsed by an inconvenient truth only to rebuild bigger and better - over and over again…

After the recent bushfire tore through our coastal community, we’ve begun the painfully slow process of reconstructing daily life, For some of us, that’s a very long journey and for others less so, depending on the wheel of fortune spun by the fiery wind on that long night. I’m in the middle of that spectrum, my house still standing but with power and water supply compromised by the fire damage. Both services are partly restored and I have a diesel-powered generator outside my back door supplying electricity to the house, as a temporary substitute for the silent power lines feeding in from the grid. I can run the washing machine, oven, dishwasher etc, have a shower (luxury!) and do all of the things that I have come to regard as normal daily activities, just as long as the generator is chugging away doing its magic thing. When I don’t need it, I turn it off to save fuel and reduce my already excessive carbon footprint a little.

As I am managing this process, it has occurred to me how easily the things in our environment become transparent, as if part of the furniture. When I was teaching Physics, I would sometimes point this out as a way of encouraging people to see their hidden assumptions. I might hold up a piece of copper wire as used in electrical power supply nowadays and speculate about showing this to some person from the 19ᵗʰ century or before, telling them that this cable could do the work of several servants for washing, cleaning, cooking etc as well as making evenings much brighter without the need for candles. They would not believe such a thing possible, let alone other features of present-day life such as global telecommunications, air travel etc. And yet in other ways we have made little if any progress - but I digress...

Even with the minor inconveniences in my current living arrangements, I’m very aware of how I normally take for granted the availability of power and light at the press of a wall switch. It underlines a point I often make in the matter of drawing and learning: that so much goes unnoticed in our day-to-day engagement with the world. Familiarity breeds, not so much contempt as indifference - simply not noticing, glossing over the dull familiar while in search for the next shiny thing.

Drawing forces you to look at familiar things freshly and in so doing offers a powerful reminder to notice what we are normally unaware of - the nuances and subtleties in the everyday, the marvels that surround us and which are too easily disregarded and devalued.

I’m in pretty good health but also aware of the toll that time is taking on my body. But I still marvel at the way it holds together, its intricacy and integrity in providing a life support system for little old me. I’m even more in awe when I remember that all this grew from a single cell, somehow constructing itself into this functioning person over a few months in utero and in the years since. It’s incredible (as in ‘I don’t believe it!’) when you think about it. I should remind myself of this when I feel like grumbling about the minor aches and pains or other bodily inconveniences that I sometimes experience.

It’s a miracle really - all of it!

I remember as a child (and it’s a while ago now) that the message was always about the future. “What are you going to be when you grow up?” was a question that adults would ask often, for lack of any better way they could think of to interact with kids. Much more than adults, kids live in the now, so questions like that would leave me scrabbling for an answer, or at least something resembling the right answer.

I remember at the end of primary school, we were set an essay topic “My Career”, at which prompt I wrote a very speculative piece somehow suggesting vague activity in the scientific sphere, maybe with a bit of astronautics thrown in. My Dad, in a rare moment of taking interest, rewrote my essay to specify that I would complete my secondary education with flying colours, then attain a Bachelor of Science degree at university and proceed to work thereafter in the plastics industry. I was all of twelve for Pete’s sake, but I dutifully rewrote my essay along the lines advised and submitted it for assessment. I have no memory of the outcome beyond that, but the forced re-visioning of my future and the massacre of my dream state lives on in my memory to this day.

Always there was a focus on this faraway future, as if being this now was of no value. In university years, I remember saying to someone “I’m just a student!” and later realising this to be code for ‘not a real person, yet - if ever’. Graduation (twice over) was followed up by a hamster wheel of futility in climbing the corporate ladder - or in my case the academic one, but these days they are barely distinguishable. It’s a chase that I never really bought into, hence my somewhat middling career path in which the promised prizes of progression never really materialised.

But, looking back on it, I have no regrets. In the midst of it, I never fully understood my aversion to playing the games of one-upmanship, but in retrospect I have realised that it never felt right and my heart was never in it. I chose to focus on teaching, which is or was a form of academic suicide compared with engaging in research and publishing scientific papers in respected journals with a very limited readership. All in the name of the game called ‘My CV is longer than your CV’ or some variant thereof.

Directing my energies to sparking the interest and enthusiasm of the students in front of me was far more satisfying in an immediate sense. And in my experience of having been lectured to (or mostly at), it was unusual to have an interested and engaged lecturer making serious effort to engender understanding. I wanted to make up for all those droning monologues and furious copying of notes with no thinking involved by either lecturer or student.

Many years later, I realise this choice may have been part of a broader quest on my part. Rather than finding myself motivated by acting for a future realisation of value, it was the down-and-dirty here-and-now that interested me. Rather than my energy being directed toward the ego-bait of eventual recognition, my juice was much more in the present, for all its ordinariness and lack of glamour.

This is also why I advocate learning to draw as a kind of spiritual exercise. Rather than glossing over the things you see, where you stop really looking once you recognise something and put a name to it, drawing encourages you to look afresh and begin to see the nuances and intricacies in the things in front of you. You start to appreciate the simple beauty in everyday ordinary objects and settings. You get out of your head and the way in which the normal use of language dilutes your attention, spreading it thinly across imaginary space and time. It’s what’s right in front of you right now that matters. And for a change, it can be all that matters - at least for now.

I hope that I’m not somehow trying to rewrite my personal history here to judge myself less harshly in retrospect. But it occurs to me that so much of human endeavour is focused on tomorrow at the expense of today and thereby devaluing what we have now in favour of the ideas of faster, fancier, more convenient state of affairs. As I age, I am increasingly aware that tomorrow is not guaranteed and never really has been. It’s who I can be in the ordinary here and now that is where life happens.

What if, instead of questing for an imagined future free of the problems and inconveniences that plague us, we could be our best selves in the present moment, facing whatever life throws at us, not needing anything more than we have already, not storing credits for an uncertain eventual reward.

Rather, we could be fully invested in the present, not because it might lead somewhere but because in truth it’s all there is.

In recent years, I have come to reserve all my swearing for cursing uncooperative inanimate objects like plastic bags that won't open as they should, the back door that doesn't close properly, the wind that blows my hat off and then gusts again just as I bend down to pick it up. I am too easily convinced that these things are intentional and in a conspiracy to frustrate me just for their amusement.

Of course I know this isn't true. I realise it's me personifying those things around me, projecting an agency onto them that they can't possibly have. It's perhaps a more obvious example of our continual projection of mental models onto inert things that we just don't understand. Truth is we don’t really know what anything is. Tell me for instance what time is - not what we assume about it, but what it actually is.

My tendency to think of inanimate things in this personal way was rudely interrupted last week when a bushfire tore through my rural neighbourhood, destroying many houses, outbuildings and vehicles, leaving some others miraculously untouched. After doing what little preparation that I could in the time, I evacuated from my house to a neighbour's place down the road and ended up helping defend their place against the still progressing fire. It was sobering, spraying my piddle of hose water against an initial assault of airborne embers and then the advancing wall of flame, consuming everything in its path with surround sound crackling roar and suffocating smoke.

That description makes it sound as if the fire had a malign intent or hostile purpose. But it became very clear to me during and after the fire that it had no personhood to hold such things as purpose or intent. Fire doesn't care. To it, I am just another piece of fuel, along with the sheds, car and tools of mine that it did burn up as I snatched an occasional look through my house cameras.

I was confronted with my utter insignificance in the fire's relentless onslaught, driven by an unseasonally hot wind. I see plainly just how thin and fragile are the many layers that we have constructed between ourselves and nature’s forces and uncertainties. I was, and still am, reminded of my temporary status on this earth, on that night looking ever more temporary with every passing moment. In the face of that, one gains some sense of perspective. All the issues that I might become preoccupied by on an ordinary day - the "difficult" colleagues, neighbours or family members, annoying household chores waiting to be done or even the blowflies that buzz their way inside the house at any opportunity - fade into unimportance in comparison with such an existential threat from elemental forces.

In the small hours, I creep back to my place and find that the fire somehow had miraculously parted and passed by the house, rejoining on the far side to form a single red wall and totally consume my neighbour’s house, full of mementos of his late wife and what they built together. All gone into a random assortment of chemical elements almost as if nothing had ever been.

I walk around the rest of the night putting out burning logs and smouldering leaf litter. On the very last one, I somehow manage to burn my foot. (I’m still on crutches, but I’m just glad that it wasn’t both feet!) It had been a full moon that night so I could find my way around well enough, but when the sun rose over the hills it reveals a devastated moonscape all around, utterly eerie to my dog tired eyes.

I manage to get an hour’s sleep before the sun shines too bright and as I wake, looking up at the perversely pristine ceiling of my bedroom, I find myself seeing the walls and ceiling smouldering, holes appearing and enlarging to admit fire into the house. It was only a moment of imagination, but the rational realisation that I an in a safe place doesn't really override the anxiety lurking in the background.

I find myself paralysed by dread of the inevitable damage assessment and reconstruction work to come. I recognise my old demons of despair and depression pressing heavily from behind as I stare into the abyss. I have to accept, even welcome, their presence since resisting just adds to their pressure. I've been much more fortunate than both of my neighbours and I've helped save someone else's house too.

One tiny action at a time, I find that I can move forward toward some reconstruction - not just in my life, but also in reaching out to others, some having lost much more than I have. I can reaffirm the value, strength and resilience of community. I can both give and receive, material and moral support, love and caring. For in the end, what else is there?

Images and words are both models, representing reality in some limited way. It seems significant that drawing comes before writing, both in the development of individuals and in the history of humanity. Yet drawing as a pleasurable means of expression is mostly abandoned in later childhood and overtaken by verbal modes of thinking and communication. I include writing in the verbal category, since it largely maps onto spoken language.

Our visual and verbal faculties are complementary, each with its own strengths and limitations - visual apprehension is rapid, intuitive, insightful - a kind of parallel processing of data and mostly automatic/unconscious, whereas verbal is serial and therefore slower, but maybe more precise and focused. Verbal representation is also more portable, historically the preferred medium over distances.

The difficulty seems to be getting these complementary visual and verbal faculties to work together, rather than verbal modelling dominating as seems most often to be the case. I think what we call understanding calls upon visual faculties, seeing at a glance where things fit in a coherent framework of connections and relationships. So visual faculties are not dead, just overshadowed. There is so much that is beyond words.

Whether visual or verbal, it’s too easy to forget that we are always dealing in models, layered over and somehow obscuring the reality they represent. It’s not just the names and descriptions with which we label things around us that are models, it’s also the interactions between them and the expectations we might form based on interpretations of experience. Logic and reason, cause and effect are models too, invented by us both individually and collectively rather than being inherent features of reality. They might hold good in familiar circumstances, but they begin to fail when we try applying them in less familiar or complex domains, such as the very small or very large physical worlds or in the messiness of human affairs.

The status of models as a human invention is also the basis for my assertion that learning is an inherently creative process, rather than an absorbing of data. While none of us does it entirely alone, the construction of models is a creative act in which we are each unavoidably responsible, even when we have guidance. Thus, and perhaps surprisingly, in the surface layer of knowledge, learning is ‘inside out’. How you learn a language (and all modelling involves some form of language) isn’t to passively absorb - you have to create by speaking. You’ll also know that when you take time to teach someone, you learn so much more about the subject yourself.

Humanity’s runaway ‘success’ as a species is largely due to our capacity for language, enabling us to engage with times and places beyond the here and now. The downside of this is a dilution of our experience of the selfsame here and now, bordering on disconnection at times. With the dominance of verbal modes we can find ourselves living in a kind of virtual reality, awash with words - not only written and spoken aloud, but also in the mental chatter that forms private thoughts.

It might not be too much of an exaggeration to say that we can often find ourselves living in a shadow world of stories, explanations, considerations etc. that are only marginally connected with the reality they purport to represent. With the visual mode being more strongly tied to location and time, could it be that bringing our complementary visual and verbal faculties into better balance might connect us better with the present moment and place?

Remembering that it’s all based in modelling might also serve as a reminder that the underlying reality remains mysterious. In short, we don’t really know what anything is - not time, not space, not matter and least of all ourselves in the midst of it. I can join Socrates and Manuel (of Fawlty Towers) in saying “I know nothing”, at least nothing that I can regard as final. That leads me to live in a mode of inquiry and exploration rather than trying to prop up false certainties or dogma.

Recognising that the foundation of our being in the world is something of a house of cards can be disturbing and we mostly deny or avoid it. But it can turn out to be a liberation. If much of what I thought to be solid and real turns out to have been a construction, whether collective or personal, then things may be more malleable than I might have thought. Not that it’s a pushover though; this is where sustained reflection becomes vital, surfacing and examining what I/we have taken for granted and have left unquestioned.

Further, it calls into question the often unconscious models of myself that I have constructed and reinforced in lived experience. In some sense, I am a figment of my own imagination and realising this makes me far freer than I might have thought myself to be. I might even become less concerned or anxious about my essential transience and inevitable demise, thereby becoming more able to live fully in the now, to be better connected and to recognise myself in others and they in me.

All this, just from learning to draw? How about that!

It is easy to look and recognise something - a plant, a dog, a person etc. But it is only when you go to draw something that you realise how much information you will have taken in with only a brief glance. Today, I found one rose among a dozen in a vase which had not opened out like the rest, but had dried out and withered. I was about to throw it out, but I hesitated and then decided that it would be quite a good subject for a drawing, with the way the petals had curled and become quite angular. Only when I considered drawing it did I realise how intricate the appearance was, with the way that the light falling on it from the nearby window giving a great deal of insight into how tightly the edges of the petals had curled, how dried out they were and how the colours had changed. Making marks on paper that captured this information in detail leads to even deeper appreciation of the process and majestic qualities of even such a humble object as a dead flower that was about to be thrown away. It can be frustrating, because you will not be able to capture all of the subtle shades and lines across the spectrum of tone and colour that you are seeing. But it is enough to get key features, those which allow the viewer's eye to fill in the gaps.

One thing that can be particularly frustrating is the fact that what you are looking at is a three-dimensional object, which you are attempting to represent on a two-dimensional piece of paper. When you go to draw anything from life - a person, an object, a scene - you will almost certainly find yourself struggling to do what a dumb camera does without thinking, to project an image of the solid object onto a flat plane in a way that someone viewing that image can recognise the original object. You may begin to realise that behind the scenes in your mind is an extraordinarily sophisticated process going on, interpreting the patterns of light falling on your retinas as recognisable objects. This is extremely fast and quite unconscious. Making a drawing of a solid object involves setting aside some of these automatic interpretations to get back to drawing the actual lines and shades in front of you, rather than what you have come to conclude about the form of various parts of the object. This is not easy - it is an example of the difficulty which arises in much of advanced learning, that in order to learn something genuinely new it is necessary to put aside what you already know about the object or phenomenon in front of you. In drawing, a good example is what is referred to as 'foreshortening'. If you were to stand and look down at your foot, or someone else's from a similar vantage point, you would likely see something like this:

But if the foot is placed with the toes pointing at your eyes (hard to do with your own now...), the image will be quite different and not nearly as long.

If you are drawing someone standing in front of you, your view of their foot is likely to be somewhere in between the two perspectives above, in which case the image will be of an intermediate length. But when you go to draw the foot, the fact that you know it is longer than it appears to be from your viewpoint creates a conflict in your mind and you may wind up drawing something disproportionately large because you know how long it is. How do you know this? Both through a lifetime's experience, both of feet and of seeing objects. Through your foreknowledge of anatomy and with the interpretation light and shade falling on objects, you know that it is positioned at an angle to your line of sight. You automatically compensate for this in your interpretation and make a mental note, perhaps completely unconsciously, of the actual size of the object rather than its apparent size. So any object or body part that is at an angle to your line of sight will form an image that is shorter than its actual size and the drawing of it will be consequently shortened.

This issue of learning being impeded by conflict of observation with prior knowledge comes up in all sorts of learning situations. When I was teaching Physics, I came to the conclusion that the difficulty that many people experienced with learning the subject was caused by a similar conflict. We are intimately familiar with our physical world from a lifetime of experience interacting with it, most of which we don't think about in any real detail. If someone throws a ball for you to catch, the amount of computation that would be needed to predict where it will be by the time it is within your reach is far more than your likely expertise in physical modelling would allow. Yet most of us can make a reasonable attempt to catch it without needing to compute anything consciously. Players of ball games can instinctively predict the trajectory of the ball even before it leaves the thrower's hand - there's no time for anyone to start computing with equations of motion, force, energy, momentum or anything else. The familiar process of walking is an incredibly sophisticated sequence of physical interactions, both within the human body and in interacting with the surfaces that you are travelling on. Picking up a pen, writing with it, getting a bite of food on your spoon or fork and getting it to your mouth, taking it in, chewing and swallowing are all far more complex than we normally think of them as being. Anyone who has sustained an injury and has had to re-learn basic actions such as these will attest to their sophistication. Yet we are so familiar with physical actions such as these, and that knowledge is so deeply ingrained in our unconscious minds, that when it comes to taking the genuinely fresh approach that learning physics (or learning anything else for that matter) needs, we encounter difficulties.

Try for example, writing with your 'non-dominant' hand i.e. If you normally write with your right hand, use your left and vice versa. Even something as simple as folding your arms is habituated and unconscious. There are two ways to do it - right forearm over left or left over right. Try doing it your normal way and then the other way. How does it feel? Most people say 'awkward', 'uncomfortable', 'unnatural'. In the case of writing with your other hand, the process and its outcome (the writing) likely feels all of those things as well as 'childish', 'incompetent' and 'embarrassing'. The point of this is not to have you now going around doing things in ways that feel unnatural, but just to notice that there are many things we've learnt to do in ways that we no longer think about and are not normally conscious of doing a particular way. These habits of body and mind make life easier in some ways, but create hidden barriers to learning to do things in new, more effective, ways. Touch typing is a good example, which I discuss in detail elsewhere. But for now to focus on drawing...

Most of my drawings fall well below my expectations, certainly at the time of making them and for a while afterwards. (But then I've seen worse in books, hanging in galleries and museums.) Rather than becoming mired in the disappointment though, this might be an occasion for being humbled and experiencing some wonderment and fascination with the thing being drawn. It is just there, perfection in itself, impervious to pathetic attempts to capture all of its being, mine or anyone's. It is more intricate and connected than any marks I can make on a piece of paper to represent its shape, its structure and surfaces. It is in and of itself a thing of beauty, whether so by common standards or not. It is something to wonder at, even if it is a dead flower that should have just been thrown out weeks ago.

Notwithstanding the groans of disbelief and giggles of embarrassment, which is a whole other story, when people realise I'm for real and get down to the task, what they produce usually suffers from two problems. The first problem is using outlines to represent features. If you look carefully at the original scene, there are very few actual lines in evidence. Where we draw lines is usually where there is a rapid change of colour or tone (lightness or darkness), which we automatically interpret as a boundary between one thing and another.

And this seamlessly leads to the second problem, which is the overlay of names that we give things seducing us into drawing a preconceived icon for each thing rather than making marks to show patches of light and dark that together would give a viewer an impression of the original subject.

Imagine yourself responding to this challenge. You get a good view of someone's face and have to decide where to start. Maybe you think to do the eyes first. I choose faces precisely because we are very familiar with them and that familiarity leads straight into a trap of knowing what the various parts should look like. So we all have a preconceived idea of what eyes look like - kind of almond shaped, with a circular iris and a smaller circular pupil in the centre. Perhaps some eyelashes, and crow's feet if you're feeling brave, so job done - a bit like the drawing above.

Anyone can recognise these marks as representing an eye, but it's a generic symbolic representation of any old eye rather than the unique eye that is in front of you. We'll have drawn the circular iris based on that foreknowledge, not seeing that in most cases the whole circle isn't visible (unless your subject is shocked or frightened in some way).

Once you can bypass this foreknowledge of named features and look to draw what you see, that is the shades and shapes, and yes sometimes lines, that are right there in front of you, you're on the way to drawing freely and realistically, producing something that you might feel satisfied with.

But why bother? What's the point of drawing someone's face, likely taking anything from minutes to hours, when you can just whip out your camera phone and take a snapshot in seconds? Good question, one with many answers, but what I'd like to concentrate on here is less about the specifics of drawing and more about how we observe and interpret what's around us, with the limitations that arise from the more common ways of doing that. Your current preconceptions act as a filter for your observations, but you can’t do without them, so there’s a conundrum.

The process of drawing, especially something familiar, brings that filtering front and centre and gives you the chance to see through it. What’s needed is maintaining an awareness that the preconception filters are there and getting down to the raw data rather than the summary arising from your recognition of features. More easily said than done, but cultivating your awareness in regular practice helps enormously.

It's not just about observing the physical world either. The curse of preconception affects the virtual realities that we inhabit too, from global politics to personal relationships and perhaps most especially the preconceptions we each carry about ourselves.

You'll likely have heard of confirmation bias, where observations that fit within a current set of beliefs or values are more likely to attract attention and be regarded as credible. This is active both at an individual level (you, yes you! and me too...) and collectively. It's something ingrained into good scientific practice, for instance in the use of double blind clinical trials to determine the efficacy and safety of new medicines.

A lot of people think that science is about the subject matter, whether it be biochemistry or astrophysics, rather than its being a rigorous method of testing for the reliability of various ideas to be tried out in practice. But at home with the guardrails down, scientists are probably just as human as everybody else and get caught up in the confirmation biases of everyday life.

We seek the comfort of familiarity, but it comes with the downside of being stuck with your current outlook and the results that it naturally accrues, some of which might be OK but others less so. It's a question of whether we're willing to put at risk those elements of comfortable familiarity to venture into the unknown and risk having our worldview challenged and just possibly broken apart with who knows what to replace it.

It turns out that the breaking open of one's preconceptions and assumed knowledge is far more liberating than we might fear. After a succession of such events in my life learning journey, I've found that what comes through it all is a recovery of wonderment and appreciation for the extraordinariness of what we too easily come to view as ordinary - weather, the ebb and flow of tides, ants on the trail, life on earth, just being here able to see any of it at all. Magical!

It's a tenet of science that what we call knowledge is always provisional and incomplete, pointing towards something rather than being able to act as a total substitute for it. Our descriptions, mathematical models and yes, drawings are poor imitations of reality at best and liable to be found wanting when tested to their limits. The truth is that we really don’t know the ultimate nature of things and we need to be humbled by that. Anyone who speaks from a place of dogmatic certainty is really clutching at straws and should gather the courage to let go. We could do with more open-mindedness around now, more than ever. That includes being open-minded about your own capabilities, even if it's something as simple as drawing a face.

I've long believed that to be a good teacher you have to be able to stand in the shoes of a learner in whatever you are teaching. A topic or skill looks different from the point of view of an expert to how it does from the point of view of someone learning. In my time as a student and as a teacher, I've encountered too many teachers who are impatient with those who don't understand immediately. As I'll say over and over again, the process of learning is a creative one where you have to invent your own ways of understanding.

This is not a one-time thing either. When the knowledge and understanding you've developed thus far fail to explain something new, it's time to revisit and revise. (Sometimes this involves slapping yourself on the forehead, saying 'how did I not see this before?') It's a never-ending journey that if pursued takes you to the edge of wonderment over and over. Anyone who tells you they've got it all figured out is kidding themselves.

Being a lifelong learner can lead to deepening realisations not only about the subjects being learnt, but also about the nature of learning itself, appreciating the transitory nature of what is being learnt. I include learning in its deeper aspects in this discussion, not only about the superficial intake and retention of information but about the development of skills and ways of being. This is what's behind my quest to use the journey of learning to draw as a way to shed light on many of the subtleties of learning itself, making it clear how learning in any area involves your natural creativity in a journey that's unique to you, with the potential for profound satisfaction.

The best teachers share with their students their spirit of ongoing inquiry, their natural curiosity and the simple humility of also being a learner. This is not about being a softie. It can take some patience and determination to get beyond the gamesmanship that often distorts the relationship between teacher and students. But you will no doubt remember the teachers who came from that place, rather than the ones who felt the need to lord it over you, or the ones who were just going through the motions.

There's a corollary to this assertion that teachers should also see themselves as learners. There's an old saying to the effect that if you want to really learn something, then teach it. I've found this to be true, over and over again. I must have taught introductory physics courses dozens of times during my teaching career at high school and university, but every time I did I understood the subject more deeply and completely than I did before - no matter if it was the second time or the twenty second. But it did take a while for me to relax a bit and adopt a spirit of inquiry, rather than anxiously trying to paper over the cracks of my understanding. So I strongly recommend this active approach if you want to learn something well, even if it's a matter of learning with a companion and taking turns to share your understandings, making learning conversational rather than a one-way process.

At its most basic, a model is something that represents. Whether we’re talking about a human model on the fashion catwalk, a model airplane or car in a child’s playroom, a model student or a mathematical model in scientific study, what they have in common is their function of representing something real. That representation can be sophisticated or sketchy, but it is never perfect and complete - otherwise it would be the real thing rather than just a model of it.

But wait, this cuts deeper than it might seem at first glance. Models aren’t just physical avatars like most of the examples I’ve used so far. The function of representation means that a drawing is a model, words are models, as are numbers and the mathematical theorems that relate them. Logic and reason are modelling tools, with behaviours that mimic the behaviour of the reality they describe, sufficiently well for the purposes they are designed for - but again never perfectly, never completely. Suddenly it seems that models are everywhere, overlaid on our experience of reality so thickly that we don’t usually realise it.

Digging Deeper

I’m surprised. It has only taken me three paragraphs to arrive at the edge of the abyss, where I have to confront the fact that underneath all of our descriptions, we don’t really know what anything is really. We use words like ‘time’ and ‘space’ freely enough, but even the most eminent and accomplished scientists among us cannot say what these things actually are. We talk about the passage of time with everyday familiarity, but if we go beyond the everyday scale of experience whether outward to the very large in astronomy or inward to the very small, at the level of atoms and below, then things become stranger than we can easily imagine. Cosmic rays coming toward us on earth have extended lifetimes because of their extraordinary speed slowing down their passage of time. But if you were on board a spaceship travelling alongside those cosmic rays, you wouldn’t sense time slowing down - rather it’s the earth rushing toward you that seems to have its time stretched. So who’s right? Are electrons particles or waves? How can they be both? But they are…

Before I take you too far down a Physics rabbit hole, we can come back to more familiar circumstances of daily life and find that similar uncertainties prevail. You and I use words like ‘you’ and ‘I’ all the time, and yet we don’t really understand ourselves or each other nearly as well as we’d like to think we do. And this isn’t just matters of personality differences and the things that bring us into conflict. No, I mean the basic fact of being a person - I might talk about my body, my feelings, my relationships, my mind, but where is the “I” that has all these things? I first became aware of the conundrum of being myself at age seven and I’ve never really come to a final answer about what “I” am. I am a mystery to myself and I suspect if you think about it, you are too.

How Far Down Does it Go?

So most of what we use to describe and navigate the world consists of models that are really some kind of vaporware: incomplete, fluid and ethereal. We don’t need hi-tech gizmos to experience virtual reality - it’s our normal way of engaging with the real reality, particularly when at some distance from it. Our capacity for language has enabled us to speak of and bring to mind things that are not present at the time of speaking. So anticipating something in the future and planning your actions accordingly puts you in the mode of modelling, as does talking about it afterwards. The funny thing is that even in the moment of action, we’re still usually giving a running commentary that acts as a kind of buffering of reality. Sometimes what’s needed is to just ‘get out of your head’ and ignore the internal chatter, but this is easier said than done (funny about that!).

I’m not speaking negatively about models. Their use has conferred many advantages upon we humans - perhaps too many advantages I sometimes think… It’s just that when we forget that we’re operating through that interface it can lead us astray. Not least in being overconfident about the rightness of our current view of the world. It might make us (in both a collective and individual sense) a bit more suitably humble to be constantly aware of the provisional nature of our current knowledge base, in the realisation that it is all a useful fabrication rather than being solid and real. It would behove each and all of us to act in a spirit of inquiry rather than dogmatic certainty. No matter how deeply you look, it’s models all the way down…

Model Learning

So the last question is to ask where these models come from? And the simple answer is that we made them up. Not just any old thing will do however. To have any useful longevity, a model needs to make decent enough predictions about the reality it purports to represent. It doesn’t mean that it’s the be-all and end-all though. Any model is only an approximation, representing certain aspects of reality and not others. So it’s another invitation to appropriate humility to be aware of the inevitable limitations of these inventions I’m calling models - words, numbers, pictures, relationships between them, the lot.

Oh, there’s one more thing. We might think that some of the heroic individuals in the story of human progress discovered things that have been passed on down the generations. ‘Discovery’ is a misleading term, since it suggests that something like the Law of Universal Gravitation was just lying around under a rock until Isaac Newton turned it over and ‘discovered’ it. No, he invented a mathematical model that accurately explained and predicted motion we can observe, both on earth and in the heavens where planets and stars reside. Calling it a ‘Law’ gives the wrong impression too, but I’m afraid that ship has sailed long ago.

So here’s the kicker: just as our predecessors like Newton and countless others invented the models that we inherit today, the process of learning these things as an individual in the present day is not as we often represent it one of simply taking in the facts and figures resulting from all that prior work. No, each of us as we go to learn about something in that canon of inherited knowledge has to invent it for ourselves. The process of learning is deeply creative and regarding it as such not only makes it more productive, but also much more satisfying. The world is an amazing place and we too easily forget that. This is just a reminder.

A Final Word

Well, just a few. Don’t hear all the above as if I’m putting out something I want you to believe. It’s something to check out in your own thinking, see how it might fit. It’s taken me many decades to arrive at the kind of thinking I’m expressing here, so I don’t expect it to land with you as factual assertions. After all, it’s all models and you have to invent them for yourself.

Vision is a sense whose complexity is too easily overlooked. Gazing on an everyday scene, you aren't really conscious of the mental processes that enable you to identify the various things that are present there - a person, a dog, a pathway, a tree etc.

It takes a lot less time to perceive these things than it does to talk about them, or in the present instance to read about them. As the old saying goes "A picture is worth a thousand words", but the relationship between the picture and the words is a bit more subtle than it seems at first glance. It's worth looking at this from a few different angles. (Notice all the visual metaphors in the last few sentences!)

If I were to ask you to do a drawing of this or a similar scene, most people will do a drawing where the various things that you've identified are represented as an outline.

But if you look carefully at the original image, you'll see that those lines identifying the boundary are not there in reality. What is there are changes of colour or tone which your visual circuitry interprets as an edge. When that edge goes all the way round and joins up with itself, you take that to mean that it's a 'thing' you're looking at, something that's effectively separate from its surroundings. Quick as a flash, this gets passed over to your internal word processor to give a name that identifies what kind of thing it is - "person", "dog", "tree" etc. You can also identify its location and its relationship to other things in the scene. Once this happens, you're starting to deal in a kind of virtual reality, where what's front and centre are the words that name or label the different things we're perceiving.

This is one of the reasons why many if not most adults find drawing difficult. Once we've identified and named a thing in a scene, we kind of stop looking. We know "what it is" and are engaging with it more through our faculties of representative language than with the thing-as-it-is in front of us. Studies have shown that competent drawers spend much more time than novices do looking at the scene in front of them rather than at the paper they are drawing on.

It’s Hard to See Familiar Things Freshly

One of the pieces of advice to people aspiring to improve their drawing skills is to "draw what you see, not what you know". This is more difficult than it might seem, since what we know (or think we know) forms a kind of automatic overlay on the scenes in front of us. It's a habit of mind and learning to draw needs these habits to be recognised for what they are and for new perceptual pathways to be developed and used when needed.

It's not just about drawing. These difficulties arise in most other areas of learning, since what you already know likely conflicts with your appreciation of something genuinely new. For instance, there's a story I like to tell about going to the beach in Australian summer and coming back to the car afterwards. There aren't many shady spots beachside, so the car will have been in the sun all afternoon. When you go to put your seatbelt on (as all good Aussies do nowadays) you might chance to touch the metal buckle and recoil because "it's hot!" What you don't realise is that the temperature of the buckle is exactly the same as the seatbelt webbing that you have happily draped across your scantily clad torso. (This is about thermal equilibrium, based on the "Zeroth Law of Thermodynamics" for anyone interested). So it's not that the buckle is hotter, although it feels that way. One has to develop a more sophisticated appreciation of heat capacity and thermal conductivity to understand what's going on. Same goes for the rather scary practice of "firewalking", stepping on a bed of red-hot charcoal, although I have to admit that no amount of understanding the principle would ease my apprehension if I were asked to do it.

So that uncomfortable feeling you get when you're being presented with something you don't understand isn't just the effort of taking in new information. It's more like the apparent threat to your worldview triggering mental antibodies. This reaction might be most obvious if people venture to discuss politics or religion in mixed company, but it's at play in much more subtle ways when there may be something to learn - even something as basic as learning to draw.

Realistic Drawing

Most things we draw are opaque. You might think that I'm splitting hairs if I point out that we don't see things, we see the light reflected from them. Our visual circuitry does a pretty good job of interpreting the patterns of light and shade that reach our eyes to identify features of the things reflecting that light. If you are seeking to make your drawings more realistic, it is worth attending to the patterns of light and dark in the subject, using however many shades of grey are enough for your purpose. A line drawing showing the boundaries of the thing and its relevant features is enough usually for a viewer to recognise it, but realism is another level.

If I draw an ovoid shape in outline, you'll likely recognise it as representing an egg.

But that recognition is based in expectation arising from prior knowledge of the typical shape of eggs. The drawing lacks any depth, so the representation is almost entirely symbolic. But if the drawing forsakes the customary use of outline and rather shows the brightness of light reflected from various parts of the egg's surface, it looks far more realistic and shows the egg as a solid object in its environment. There might even be parts where the edge of the object is about the same lightness as the background behind it, so drawing a line along the edge there would be just wrong.

What about Creativity?

Seeing is not as passive a process as we might think it is, like there's a scene in front of you from which you take in relevant information. It's much more creative than that, where you are actively constructing a mental model of reality. I like to say that a drawing is such a model, a representation that stimulates the viewer's visual faculties to construct their own mental interpretation. Often a drawing is more successful if it is incomplete, suggesting a subject rather than trying to be photorealistic, allowing the viewer to use their imagination to fill in the gaps.

Not only is seeing a creative process, but just about everything built upon the foundations of perception is the result of a creative process - whether at an individual level, or collectively by common agreement in a shared language. Neither seeing nor learning are processes of 'taking in' information already out there in the environment. Rather they are processes of constructing a kind of virtual reality which allows us to engage meaningfully in the world.

So it’s not as if some people are more creative than others. We are each and all creating the world in which we operate, every waking minute of every day. Recognising and tapping into that innate creativity in everyday learning and living is what I am promoting in this “Draw to Learn” programme.

The reason that adults might have more difficulty learning than kids do might surprise you. In a wide range of areas from drawing to driving, even my old stamping ground of Physics, learning is difficult not because of ignorance or lack of ability. Rather the thing that most gets in the way of learning is what you already know about the matter at hand. I use the word 'know' loosely here, because it's more in the realm of what you take for granted after your initial familiarisation with the area in question. I’ve also heard it described as ‘habits of mind’, or maybe just habits in action. Perhaps some examples will make this clearer.

If I ask you to draw someone's face, the internal struggle you'll experience arises not from your lack of talent or inexperience, but instead from your deep familiarity with faces as a way of recognising people. You'll probably mentally identify features like eyes, lips, ears etc and be trying to draw them influenced by your preconceptions, rather than seeing more basic elements of the scene as light and shade forming various shapes and drawing those without interpreting them as named features.

I found the same with Physics. Long before we reach adulthood, we develop a very sophisticated working familiarity with the physical world around us. The simple act of walking involves a much more complex appreciation of mechanics and equilibrium than any number of equations you could learn to model the process. Same with catching a ball, anticipating its trajectory and positioning your hands accordingly. And that’s well before we get into the conceptual contrariness of relativity or quantum mechanics, challenging fundamental notions of time passing or positions of objects. The mental struggle is more often due to the old knowledge conflicting with the new than it is about the novelty or complexity of the information coming at you.

Problem is that any 'knowledge' once gained becomes unconscious and thus very difficult to upgrade without first bringing it to the surface and taking it apart. I did some advanced driving training a few years ago and found I was a slow learner, because I was having to bring to conscious awareness habits that I'd developed to get by in my initial learning journey, to now see things afresh and respond to situations differently. Any of us that has driven for more than a few months will know that, unlike when you were first driving, you can now drive from point A to point B and arrive with relatively little specific recollection of the details of the journey. In so many ways we’re operating on autopilot without really thinking about it.

A final example from personal experience was when I learned to touch-type, some years along the way of using a computer keyboard. You know, like they used to teach secretaries to do in typing pools, where you can type without looking at the keyboard. I realised one day when typing a passage of text with the amateur’s “hunt and peck” method that my fingers kind of knew where the various letter keys were, but because my eyes were in the loop, I had to move my finger away from the key to visually check that it was indeed the right key. Realising that this was slowing me down big time, I loaded a ‘Typing Tutor’ program and trudged through the exercises of typing words like ‘sad’ and ‘flak’ without looking at the keys. It took about two weeks of doing this for half an hour a night for me to suddenly find that I was touch-typing, getting words on the page smoothly and much faster than before.

We do so many things automatically, which is no bad thing as the amount of information you're processing would lead to sensory overload if you had to remain conscious of it all. It's just a problem if you want to develop your levels of skill significantly, because you have to kind of unlearn the assumptions and perspectives that are limiting you without you knowing it. It's awkward and embarrassing, so most of us avoid it like the plague (unlike young children who will happily embarrass themselves and anyone else nearby). The annoying fact is that you have to go backwards before you can go forwards to a new level. Once you can accept that, you can learn anything you put your mind to and more importantly your heart is in.

And it’s all connected. What you learn in one area likely produces insights and benefits in others. This is how I use learning to draw as a way of unblocking learning difficulties in almost any area of endeavour. It’s surprising, but it works!

Quite a few years ago, a number of Swedish academics (Ference Marton and others) approached the thorny question of how people learn with what seemed like a radical, but obvious, process of asking the learners themselves. They analysed the freeform responses hoping to understand learning from the learner’s point of view, rather than from some kind of external observation as if the learners were rats in a maze. They defined a method that they dubbed ‘phenomenography’, which sought to gain insight into university students’ underlying conceptions of learning.

This they argued was important because underlying conceptions are the main influence on people’s approaches to the practicalities of learning. For instance if you conceive of learning as a process of taking in and retaining information, then what you do in practice will be in keeping with that conception. You’ll likely see classes as presenting relevant information, from which you’ll take notes as completely and accurately as you can with a view to using them to commit the important things to memory and recall them if and when needed, such as in a test. Many university students seem to subscribe to this view, furiously scribbling notes which more or less reproduce what the teacher is presenting, giving themselves a case of writer’s cramp and not much else.

Superficial Conceptions of Learning

In fact this delivery and absorption of information appears to be the predominant conception of teaching and learning across the board. The picture emerging from Marton’s research and others across the world was that the majority of students conceived of learning as a process of simply ‘accumulating knowledge’. This conception casts the learner in a rather passive role as a consumer of what is provided by authoritative sources, usually the teachers delivering courses, but also texts or online resources written with the intention of informing their readers. Thus the way in which students might talk about negative experiences of learning in this environment will say things like “I can’t take it all in” or “the lecturer was going through it all too fast for me”.

Worse, this crude conception is coupled with that of many professors seeing themselves as the deliverers of content, sometimes with little awareness or concern for how this might be best organised and presented to an inexpert audience. Those that do take their role more seriously will put time and effort into presenting their material more clearly, both for their visual aids and their personal presentation style. Even so, if both parties in the process subscribe to the ‘informing’ notion, there’s no real prospect for reaching a deeper appreciation of what is being learned and of the learning process itself. The behaviour validates the underlying conception and the conception steers the behaviour, so it’s a vicious circle that will be naturally resistant to change.

I argue that this informational view is quite primitive, but it is the predominant conception of learning across the board, not only in formal learning environments but in the wider world. Quiz shows, whether on TV or in the pub, are perhaps the clearest demonstration of this. We consider someone to be learned who can correctly answer a series of questions that require them to quickly recall from their inner storehouse of knowledge on a range of subjects. Even giving such shows names like “Mastermind” or “Brain of Britain” reinforces this conception of learning, with no subtlety or further development of the concept.

“Outside In” Learning

This information intake conception of learning is what I like to call ‘outside in’, where we think of information as being ‘out there’ in the world and needing to be taken in to add to one’s storehouse of knowledge. I prefer to focus on what I call an ‘inside out’ kind of learning, where as a learner, I am aware of my creative agency in the process rather than seeing myself as a passive consumer.

I mean something more radical than just being active and taking responsibility for my learning, as we are often encouraged to do. It takes a while to realise that there is actually no information ‘out there’ to take in. It’s all a matter of our creative interpretation of sensory and other inputs. Even the apparently simple act of seeing is a kind of outward projection of one’s expectations based on prior experience. Think of your experience of looking at an ill-defined or unfamiliar scene like the one below.

When you first look at it, there’s just a nonsensical arrangement of dots and splotches. If you see something straight away, that’s a shame because a memorable period of incomprehension tells you something about how frustrated we get when we can’t interpret something immediately. But there’s always a gap, no matter how short. You’ll also notice that once you’ve “seen what it is” it’s near impossible to “unsee” it and look afresh to see new possibilities. So what we already ‘know’ gets in the way of learning something more advanced.

“Inside Out Learning”

Our preconceptions form a filter through which we interpret our experience of the world and despite their inhibiting effect, we can’t do without them. If you are reading this, you are a creature steeped in language and it’s language that gives rise to those filters and tools with which we engage with the world we find ourselves in. What’s ‘out there’ in the world is ultimately mysterious and opaque to us, so we engage via the mental models that language has given us. So if I ask you a simple question about the picture I just showed you: “Where is the cow?” (I assume that you’ve seen it as such by now. If not, take another look).

Ordinarily you would respond to a question like that without a second thought - it’s there and if anyone says different they’d better get their head examined. But wait a moment. When you first looked at the image, it was - if even for only a very short time - a collection of dots and splotches that didn’t make any sense. And then after looking a bit longer you said to yourself “oh, I see. It’s a cow!” In that moment, you’ve mapped your preconceived label ‘cow’ onto what was previously a chaotic jumble. Where the cow exists in the way most of us engage with it is in our language, forming a representative model that is then what we think and talk about.

Learning Languages

Another way of creeping up on this unorthodox mindset is to recognise that all learning is language learning, whether it be everyday language as we ordinarily use it, or the language of science, mathematics, arts, economics, political science or any of the countless fields of human exploration. And how you learn a language is by speaking it, not by passively absorbing.

A new language gives you new ways of seeing the world. I remember several years ago accompanying a geologist colleague on a field trip to Cornwall. We stood on a hill and I was admiring the view, an unusual one for me as I had not been in England for long at that time and the English countryside was very different from the Australian bush. My colleague turned to me and said “You know, being a geologist spoils a good country walk!” At that moment, I realised that she and I were seeing entirely different things in the same scene. We were each creating our own interpretation of what we were looking at, arising from the language we were familiar with and used to mediate our experience of things, even something as simple as looking on a country scene.

I later realised that all of my prior learning, both through life experience stretching back into earliest childhood as well as the formal learning I have engaged with since, has a profound influence on how I see things, events and situations as I creatively interpret them with the language available to me.

This is the beginning of what I like to call “inside out” learning, where you realise that, rather than absorbing pre-coded data from the outside, you are a creative agent in your interpretation of the world and with learning new ways to engage with it. That’s probably enough to think about for now, but I assure you that it is just the tip of the iceberg. Taking it further has the potential to transform your learning from what is often a tedious chore into a fascinating creative exploration, even of fields you might think you are already familiar with.

Drawing Out Some Learning

This recognition of everyday creativity is also apparent in my other area of interest, drawing, not so much in the making of a drawing but in the viewing of it. Most people’s experience is that a drawing is better when it creates an impression and allows the viewer the freedom to fill in the gaps. A mistake that most novice drawers make is being distracted by detail and trying to represent every little thing in the subject, rather than making marks which ‘suggest’ the subject and leave the viewer the opportunity to exercise an essential creative agency in their perception.

So even in our most basic acts of perception, we are fundamentally creative. And whether we recognise it or not, that creativity is an essential ingredient in all of our human activity, especially so in the process of learning.

I don’t know about you, but I notice that I can think about something or I can do something, but it’s difficult if not impossible to do both at the same time. It’s as if thinking and action are on opposite sides of a high wall. That is when you’re thinking about things, you’re not acting and when you’re in the thick of action, you’re not thinking in the detached way that’s needed to strategise and plan.

In addition, possibly because of that separateness, it seems that each of us has a preference for one or the other of these domains.

Some of us like to think things out, examining every contingency carefully and thoroughly. And then when it comes time to act, still we hold back and want to think some more to be sure to be sure, only acting when there’s no alternative.

Others of us get impatient with all this prevaricating and planning and want to just jump into the fray, going for it hammer and tongs. And afterwards, if invited to think about what happened, we’d rather not pick over things, feeling impatient again and wanting to just get back into action.

So most of us have naturally developed a habit of staying mainly within our preferred domain, whether that’s thinking or acting. This means that your approach is off-balance, limiting you in succeeding with the task at hand as well as in becoming more skilled in that area of activity.

Whichever side of the thought/action divide is your comfort zone, the approach to practical tasks is likely somewhat haphazard and not as effective as it could be. Although it all seems fairly obvious, it’s worth considering what a systematic approach would look like and how to get better at adopting one.

If we agree that thinking and action are quite distinct domains of experience, then we need an intentional process of moving between them. The starting point is to engage in systematic reflection. At first glance, this is a matter of simply thinking about what you did, the steps you took and how it all turned out.

Emotion Can Distract You

If it turned out well, then likely you’re looking back on it and feeling good about the outcome and what that might mean about your capability. But if it didn’t turn out as you hoped, you probably don’t feel too happy about the outcome and might even want to just forget all about it. You likely feel that it reflects on you badly and you’re disappointed with yourself.

Neither of these ways of responding are likely to be helpful to you when you come to do something similar again, but it’s almost inevitable that there is an emotional component in the aftermath, good or bad. Part of the skill in reflecting powerfully is just letting the feelings be there but not have your judgement clouded by them.

Since thoughts can swirl around with feelings and then disappear without trace, it’s worth taking a bit of time to write up your reflections in a journal you keep for the purpose, whether you’re working to improve your sporting ability, driving skills, academic attainment or quality of relationships. That last one is often a minefield of feeling, so reviewing what you’ve written after some time has elapsed may yield real insights into what’s going on and what you might do about it.

Digging Deeper

A dispassionate analysis doesn’t have to be merely mechanical, as if you are thinking of yourself as a robot programmed to carry out certain steps and you’re planning to tweak the source code to ensure a good result. If that were the case, there’d be no mystery, with everything being out in the open. But in the case of people engaged in action, there’s an awful lot going on that we’re not aware of at the time. It’s only because there’s a limit to how many things you can keep in the conscious mind at a time, maybe five or six at most. Everything else is on autopilot, having been embedded after earlier learning experiences. For instance, you will have had to concentrate pretty hard when you first learned to walk but now the moment-to-moment actions you take while walking don’t need any of your conscious attention, so they don’t get it.

This is alright as far as it goes, but it’s likely that some of the habits that you’ve developed in your initial learning journey are limiting your effectiveness and potential for improvement. I find driving to be a pretty good example in this regard, since most of us will remember the heavy concentration when first learning and testing for your licence. Contrast that with the relative ease with which you can now drive quite some distance and arrive at your destination, with little to no recollection of the details of operating the various pedals and other controls during the journey.

Mind you, there’s a stage after that first learning curve where you think “Oh, I’ve got the hang of this!” and you’re feeling pretty confident. Soon enough you encounter a situation that requires more advanced skills, maybe making a dent in your confidence if not your vehicle. You might or might not decide to slow down a bit…

The Surprises in Advanced Learning

I took part in an advanced driving programme some years after having obtained my driver’s licence. I found that in order to improve my driving skills, I had to become aware of and ‘unlearn’ some habits I’d developed when first learning. Things like how far ahead I was looking, where on the road I was positioning myself, what gear I was in, even just the simple fact of how consciously observant I was to what was going on around me and anticipating well. It took me several months to identify and replace old habits with new ones, which can in fact be harder than the initial learning process.

And it’s not just the mechanics of driving either. Reflecting on aspects of my driving brought into focus more personal aspects, like my attitude to road rules, to other road users and the responsibilities of being an active driver. It’s not that these things were somehow forced on me by an instructor, rather that the process of naturally reflecting on what was happening while I was driving brought them into focus and provided a choice about retaining those attitudes and values, or upgrading them. Some of them I must confess were a leftover from my youthful belligerence and resentment of rules being imposed on me. I just hadn’t thought about it for ages.

Writing down your reflections will, for most of us, increase the effectiveness of the process manyfold. This is mainly because it encourages you to focus on one or two key things you can identify in your practice rather than the usually chaotic swirl of thoughts that bubble up in response to an activity when you’ve put yourself ‘out there’ to stretch yourself and become a learner again, with all the uncertainty that entails. Similarly, talking things over with a committed listener can help. Or do both things - write and talk, back and forth. It all depends on how serious you are about learning.

Learning Never Ends

At first, the process of applying any insights arising from your reflections will be slow and deliberate with likely missteps as you revert to old habits in the thick of the action. But over time, with a continued focus on one or two of the issues you’re working on, you find that the new learning points start to become embedded in your practice and at some point you realise they are the new normal.

Of course, this isn’t the end of the matter. The learning journey doesn’t have an endpoint where you can say “I’ve arrived now. There’s nothing more for me to learn!” So each stage in that journey will involve the discomfort of discovering embedded habits and attitudes that are not serving you well and putting yourself back in the position of being a learner all over again. But that’s the good part!