The artist's brain: they are both right!

A new neuroscience study surfaced, focused on what makes artists' brains different from non-artists' ones!

The scientists used MRI to find out, put plainly, what areas of the brain got bigger in people who could draw from observation, and in people who went through artistic training, compared to the average.

Their findings?

"Observational drawing ability relates to changes in structures pertaining to fine motor control and procedural memory, and that artistic training in addition is associated with enhancement of structures pertaining to visual imagery."

The changes also seem to be in proportion to artistic skill.

What is noteworthy is that the three structures that visibly develop more gray matter in us artists are in the right hemisphere, the left hemisphere, and the right side of the cerebellum. There is no "artistic side" neatly located in the "creative" right hemisphere, as the pernicious myth propagated by Betty Edwards claims. Instead, unsurprisingly, drawing is a motor skill supported by visualization.


The science journalists, of course, are blowing this a bit out of proportion. I have encountered the claims that it means that artistic talent may be innate. Even the long pop-science article published by BBC states that:

"The research, published in NeuroImage, suggests that an artist's talent could be innate."

The research suggests little of the sort, yet. It is more than equally likely that the changes in the brain are the result of training than preexisting, because some the same areas are enlarged in people who learn fine motor control, like musicians.

The only way it could demonstrate any support for innate talent would be by finding that children who had preexisting enhanced brain areas ended up in art schools. But that kind of study was not done - and children aren't born able to draw, we all have to start from zero. At most, such preexisting enhanced processor would enable you to learn to draw a little faster. But you still have to learn.

Instead, it is now known that the brain is malleable and adaptable. What this enhancement of brain areas means is that with enough exercise, you can learn to draw. With enough exercise, you can learn visual imagination. There is no magic, just hard work.

Here is the BBC article: http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-26925271
Here is the original abstract: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053811914002237

Spritzing is not reading

These guys: http://www.spritzinc.com/ are in the news. They claim to have reinvented reading, they even call it "spritzing" in an attempt to go viral on the net, and claim that you can do it at the whopping 250, no, even 500 words per minute!

Problem is, this is a STEP BACK. I, like many people, already read 600+ wpm without their tech, and skim at 1200+ if I don't need full comprehension. I stop comprehending at maybe 1600, but I still get enough glimpse of the text to know if I want to read it attentively.

I know that there are a lot of people who read slower than the speed this app offers. But what the app does is not reading. They flash the text one word or syllable at a time at predefined speed and claim this increases reading speed because you do not have to move your eyes along the lines.

Why is that a problem? Well, they might as well say it increases reading speed because you do not have to move your lips as you spell out every word.

You see, speed reading is exactly about the level of comprehension of written word where you do not have to follow the lines. You just look at the paragraphs and move the eyes only a little side to side, to register the full width of the text if it is too wide, or nearly not at all if it is, say, a newspaper column. As your reading skill grows, you stop focusing on letters, then on syllables, then on words, taking them in whole. Then you begin to take in whole phrases in an instant. Then you begin to be able to glance a few times around a whole paragraph and see its meaning without effort, reconstructing the whole from fragments even out of order.

As an example, I cannot look at a piece of text in English or Russian anymore without comprehending its meaning automatically. It's like not being able to hear a clearly said phrase without knowing its meaning. (I am near-dyslectic in Hebrew, but that is a different writing system.) If you learn "speedreading" the Spritz way, you will never go to that level because you are never shown the whole phrase, you are fed syllables through a straw. And you cannot go back and re-read; reading becomes a linear experience like an audiobook.

They might as well claim to increase your moving speed by teaching you to crawl really fast, instead of letting you run.

Did people lose reading skills so much that this throwback to syllabic reading is what we have come to?