Mind in Motion: How Action Shapes Thought

"Getting to know Barbara Tversky and her work changed my life. I had been a practicing artist and teaching art in New York City public schools for many years when I went back to school to get a doctorate at Columbia University’s Teachers College. At Columbia, I had the super good fortune to find my way into Barbara Tversky’s cognitive studies doctoral seminar. I was interested in understanding more what is the kind of thinking that art-making facilitates. I focused on drawing, because, as John Berger said, it’s the most basic, primal type of mark-making. I wanted to explore the kind of thinking that drawing specifically enables. Tversky’s work allowed me to place Nicolaides and Berger into context. Her work helped give substance and context to the implications of recent advances in cognitive psychology and neuroscience for understanding the art-making process. “Visuospatial reasoning underlies all thinking” In Mind in Motion , Tversky shows that our cognitive processes and our interactions with the world evolved in the context of our need to survive in the world. She illustrates very clearly that the way we navigate as bodies in space is very much fundamental to understanding the way in which we reason and interact with the environments in which we find ourselves. Today, we’re talking about mark-making, art, and drawing, but Tversky relates it to our ways of existing, to social interactions, emotional responses to other people, and even on the level of scientific and philosophical thinking. The scope of the book is astounding. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Visuospatial reasoning underlies all thinking; that’s Tversky’s core idea. So much so that we don’t even realise it. In the sentence I just spoke I used two spatial analogies. We talk about the need to put something behind us, or the need to get on top of a situation or balance the scales of justice. All of these described actions are spatial. As a concrete action, drawing allows us to engage with abstract ideas in a really direct way, to visualise non-visible processes. In my own practice, I go back and forth constantly. I will do a sketch in my sketchbook and I’ll scan it and manipulate it on the computer, and then maybe I’ll project it back onto a piece of paper and draw it physically, again. But there’s a resistance that you get with physical materials, a kind of feedback that they give you that is really useful, and I don’t think will ever go away. That said, the possibilities for variation and manipulation that you can do digitally are really exciting and fun, allowing you to maybe go to places you couldn’t get to the other way. The digital domain is a kind of infinite space. In fact, it’s a little bit like Harold falling off the edge of a cliff into the void. Sometimes the digital world is so vast, and the space inside the screen is so infinite, that you need to get back to something with physical limitations. “Draw for half hour. And then take a walk and look around the world, look at your surroundings ” My digital drawing got a lot better when I got a protective screen cover that has a little bit of friction to it. It slows me down. When you pick up your average stylus and start drawing on a glass screen, it just skitters, there’s no resistance at all. By the same token, the iPad Pro with an angle and pressure-sensitive stylus was absolutely magical when it came out. Still, sometimes I just have to go back to pencil or something really messy. When I was finishing my book I ended up projecting some drawings that I had manipulated digitally onto large pieces of paper and reworked them with charcoal. I redrew them because I just needed that the interaction and resistance of the material. Just pretend to be a kid. Start scribbling and see what you can discover. Just do it! Honestly, don’t worry about what it will look like in the end. What matters is the experience that you’re having while you’re doing it. Focus on the experience, and if you do that wholeheartedly, the quality of your experience will be evident in the finished drawing. If you’re working from observation, try not to look at your paper. Look at what you’re drawing and try to see it as if you’ve never seen anything like it before. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter I recommend going back and forth between drawing from observation and drawing from imagination because the combination will employ two ways of working, complementing each other in a way that makes both more interesting and effective. We use the same parts of our brain when we’re imagining as when we’re looking at something. Strengthening those relationships, especially higher-level processing, comes from using the same parts of our brain to make sense of the visual and spatial world that we’re creating on paper. That can reinforce our capacity to make sense of the visual and spatial world of objects around us. Going back and forth between observation and invention is really valuable. But just draw. Draw for half hour. And then take a walk and look around the world, look at your surroundings. Notice how much more you are noticing. The most valuable gift the drawing process offers is how it can awaken you, and enrich your lived experience when you are not drawing."