Feeling the Picture

My husband still marvels over the fact that when Great Britain voted for Brexit, I spontaneously exclaimed. “God, Maybe Trump can win.” He couldn’t see how I could have related the two, he followed the newspapers more closely while I surf over various, radio, TV and internet sources. The difference in our thinking wasn’t between who had better information it was the focusing on the information and not the overall picture. To use the word of the 1940’s and 1950’s psychologists who studied perception, the gestalt is the sense of the whole that leads the organization of the information. Recent brain science says that the difference between hemispheres is in how they process information, the right dealing with the whole and the left more with the detail. Words are seductive details. As Walker Percy once wrote, “We tame the world with descriptions.”  Words, labels and facts give the illusion of knowing but are only islands in the big picture. Writers are now questioning the usefulness of educational emphasis on accumulating information and seeing the need for ways to build big picture thinking.

The big picture starts with the body’s adjustment. The word ‘feeling’ is not vague but represents specific sensations as the body anticipates what the scene suggests will be necessary. Nervousness is felt in our gut, excitement or apprehension, whatever the situation requires, stimulating hormones to coax the necessary parts into action. Even subtle recognitions are physical, an adaptation to the requirements of what we’ve noticed. The mirror neuron system understands other humans, resonating with body language and facial expression to know from our own feelings what is felt by another.

When my students are drawing only scraps of white paper there is still the wide variety of feelings created by the composition, how active or organized any relationship between scraps can suggest protectiveness or aggression. Perception is perception, the same systems processing art or the surrounding world. Simply how forms are arrayed in relation to gravity creates an expectation that has a feeling attached. This first level perception is often ignored. The cultural stress on language steamrolls non-verbal truth and stifles the development of wisdom.

The stress level created by denying what the body knows contributes to the psychological pathology of our time. The excess of cognitive dissonance, outright double-think requires a mental gymnastics made possible by the detail/symbol oriented part of the brain controlling most thought.  Because the actual picture creates one kind of feeling and the verbal arguments another, persuasion needs the emotional element aimed at forcing agreement. Accepting the explanations and verbal flourishes, the dissonance is between a physical reality felt in the tension of distrusting a person or circumstance, and a layer of words that repeatedly says trust.

Looking at art is a powerful tool for strengthening the early stages of perception that recognize the large relationships unfolding in the gestalt. Artists pull out the essence of the whole and sensitize viewers to overall structure. It’s an area of education that’s been neglected for too long.