Our Ability To Perceive The World Around

One Of The First Things We Teach Medical Students Is To Listen To The Patient By Taking A Careful Medical History. Ninety Percent Of The Time, You Can Arrive At An Uncannily Accurate Diagnosis By Paying Close Attention, Using Physical Examination And Sophisticated Lab Test To Confirm Your Hunch (and To Increase The Bill To The Insurance Company).

If You're A Thinking Person, The Liver Is Interesting, But Nothing Is More Intriguing Than The Brain.

In The Fetus, Or A Really Young Child, All The Different Brain Areas Are Connected To Each Other, Diffusely. And As The Brain Develops, The Excess Connections Are Turned Off, So You Get Very Specialized Areas. So Most People Have Really Specialized Talents. What Happens In Creative People Is This Pooling Doesn't Take Place.

Indeed, The Line Between Perceiving And Hallucinating Is Not As Crisp As We Like To Think. In A Sense, When We Look At The World, We Are Hallucinating All The Time. One Could Almost Regard Perception As The Act Of Choosing The One Hallucination That Best Fits The Incoming Data.

What The Artist Tries To Do (either Consciously Or Unconsciously) Is To Not Only Capture The Essence Of Something But Also To Amplify It In Order To More Powerfully Activate The Same Neural Mechanisms That Would Be Activated By The Original Object.