Don't think of an apple, think of an apple.

Many people have told me, “I just didn’t get the artsy gene” and “I can’t draw at all”. In my experience, however, art can be taught, but it’s more about seeing than doing. You also have to test what the materials can do, how the pen feels in your hand, pressed against the paper, before you say “can’t”. On the other side of this pendulum are the people who tell me, “I’m just no good at math” and “I can’t add to save my life!” They have failed to realize that math is a process of building blocks, advancing understanding incrementally. You miss one piece, and everything past that is Greek. And much like drawing and painting, you have to test the materials yourself. The epiphany after the 34th problem on the multiplication worksheet, when everything suddenly clicks into place and patterns emerge from digits, is breathtaking.
Observation and practice are often ignored in the presentation of both science and art. Scientific papers, news releases, and resulting technologies based on those discoveries focus on results, not on the process of controlled observation and repetition necessary to arrive at those decisions. The finished painting looks effortless and immediate, and the years of studying objects, light, and color or the way a specific pigment moves using a certain brush are discounted by the viewer. Talent steals the spotlight from years of dedication and obsession.
My cousins used to ridicule my drawing skills as a child because I couldn’t draw a perfect face from memory. Their one friend in class could & in under 10 minutes! Why couldn’t I draw that well? At the time I found it embarrassing, like I had to hide my talent and my love of drawing in order to not be compared to this unknown other artist with a photographic memory & Xerox-like reproduction abilities. Years later, during my painting BFA at Indiana University, it occurred to me that looking and actually seeing what was in front of me was one of the most difficult things about representational art. It takes time and an ability to let go of our cultural abstractions of the world around us in order to create a painting that breathes, that feels like there is air and distance moving within the two dimensional plane. The lexicon we’ve attached to everyday objects have such a strong hold on us that we often fail to see things as they are and instead see them as we expect them to be.
Take the example of an apple. When I say apple, some of you will see the word “apple”, likely written in the childish script used in children’s textbooks when teaching the alphabet*. Another group of you will see a red bulb with divots at the top & bottom and a bright green leaf and brown stem protruding from the top, all outlined in heavy black cartoon lines – the pictogram of an apple. Very few of you will see purely darks and lights, reflections and shadows, blending into one another along some edges and contrasting starkly at others. All three images are understood to represent the same thing – you can imagine the crunch of its flesh and the juicy tartness of its taste and know it to be an apple. Each holds it’s own place in our visual language, but only one is truly seeing without the bias ascribed by our short hand for an apple.
When you think about light and shadow, actively seeing the colors and contrasts instead of only the common idea of the object, you start to see a completely different sort of abstraction than the pictograms used to name everyday things. The kind of seeing where you stop calling a thing what you expect, and begin to trust your pure powers of observation, these are the bounds where both great art and great science begin to cross.
*Weird aside: The word apple would feel really wrong written in the same font as the movie title Dead Alive or even in Edwardian script. Equally jarring is imagining the word zombie written in the font of a Blow Pop. Something about it seems wrong and darkly comical, like a Hello Kitty Storm Trooper.

Inoculating against fear

Ever notice how when you first hear the sickeningly sweet strains of that Miley Cyrus song you've heard approximately 48 times in the last fortnight, you automatically start tapping your foot, maybe even singing along? Then once the chorus kicks in you realize that Miley's antics make you mildly nauseous, but now the song is stuck in your brain like the saccharin pink bubble gum that it is. But initially, in the split second before realization you think, "Hey, I like this song!" Just don't blurt it out to the attractive stranger standing next to you in the elevator, okay?

People more readily like what they find familiar rather than what they perceive to have higher quality. This phenomenon is called the mere-exposure effect, and was first documented by Robert Zajonc in a series of experiments he conducted from the 1960s to the 1980s. One of the experiments identified the mere-exposure effect in people choosing characters from a group including some unfamiliar characters as well as some they had been primed to recognize consciously. The subjects were more likely to pick out the characters they had seen on previous visits. More interestingly, they were also more likely to pick out characters that they had been subliminally primed to see. Flashing the characters extremely quickly on a screen, faster than could be perceived consciously, produced the same mere-exposure effect as consciously seeing those images.

Zajonc took the conclusions one step further speculating that if recognition initially produces warm fuzzies, then novelty must produce fear or avoidance. He observed both this fear effect and that multiple exposures made the stimulus less novel and, therefore, led to less fear.

In Baba Brinkman's 2010 album The Rap Guide to Human Nature, he remixes an old Christian fundamentalist sing-along called There Ain't No Bugs on Me to point out that the lack of exposure to all kinds of culture, and the cultures that proliferate with them, might just be the problem that leads to xenophobia and racism as well as to shingles and measles. People living in large cities are exposed to germs and to ideas. Our bodies produce immune and emotional responses to these in turn. As ideas become more familiar, we become more capable of responding positively to them, instead of with fear.

The final leap I'm willing to make, a triple axel of a leap for some and a small skip for others, is that we can and do inoculate against fear of the unknown, fear of the other, and fear of novelty in the same way we inoculate against measles, mumps, and rubella: by exposure to milder forms of the hair of the same dog that would otherwise bite you. I'm not talking about hangover cures here, but I am talking about one of the most wonderful consequences of living in a place and time that allows us to access novelty of culture, religion, ideas, political views, and especially cat videos in abundance everyday. This constant influx of the new and exciting, combined with the interweb's echo chamber effect means we not only have access to what was novel two weeks ago, but in those 14 days that shiny new idea has become ubiquitous. The special bonus of all this connectivity is that if someone's herd has been exposed to the new idea, they can protect others by having a calm & collected, even accepting, attitude about what's novel for the person who missed last week's dose of culture.

Sorry, friends, but the curve of our existence bends towards tolerating, perchance even liking, that new Miley song!