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221006 6min english artistic brain
6 Minute English
©British Broadcasting Corporation 2022
bbclearningenglish.com
Page 2 of 5
a) five years old?
b) ten years old? or,
c) fifteen years old?
Sam
I’ll guess he was a) five years old.
Neil
OK, Sam. I’ll reveal the answer later in the programme. If artists’ brains are
different, it could mean they see the world in unusual ways. Dr Rebecca
Chamberlain is a researcher in the neuroscience of art. She investigates how artists
see the objects they are drawing by measuring saccades – the rapid movements
our eyes make as they jump from one thing to another. Here she shares her
findings with BBC World Service programme, CrowdScience.
Rebecca Chamberlain
Artists seem to be processing the visual world in a different way to non-artists,
particularly when they’re drawing. The artist actually takes a more global
approach to looking – so they make bigger saccades, bigger eye movements, and
shorter fixations on the image. So, it’s almost like they’re getting much more of a
kind of gist level view of the thing they’re looking at.
Sam
Rebecca’s experiments seem to confirm that artists’ brains work differently
because of their processing of the visual world – the way their brains make sense
of information. Interestingly, processing also means the act of developing pictures
from photographic film.
Neil
When they draw, artists make bigger, quicker eye movements so they are able to
see the whole picture, something also known as the gist – the overall, general
impression of something without focussing on the details. If you ‘get the gist’ of
what someone is saying, you understand the overall meaning of what they say, but
not the details.
Sam
The second expert to answer our question about the artistic brain is Mike, a BBC
World Service listener from Malawi. Mike is a self-taught painter who creates
large, colourful pictures in his studio. According to him, artistic ability isn’t
something you’re born with - it can be learned, as he explained to BBC World
Service’s, CrowdScience.
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