What Learning to Draw Feels Like

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Recently, I took it upon myself to start learning to draw. I should first go ahead and mention that I have always been atrocious with my artistic skills and my drawing skills have remained at the elementary school level up through adult-hood. I am currently working through the book "Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain" and it's been absolutely fantastic so far. The whole idea is predicated on neuroplasticity and the lateralization of brain function. You have to believe that your brain can change.

Engineers and lawyers tend often to be very L-mode oriented (previously known as left-brain), while drawing requires an R-mode state of mind. I can say that within a couple hours of the first exercise in the book, I have already begun to realize what it was like to draw. By day three, it begins to feel like I have a foggy vision, just almost able to grasp what it really means to know how to perceive things as an artist does. I will continue with this book because it is truly life-enriching.

Here are some before-after examples of what improvements people have made 5 days:

More Examples Here

Thinking About Thinking

Most people don't see the point in thinking about thinking.

One of the key themes I try to get across with this blog is the importance of metacognition. Simply defined, metacognition essentially means thinking about thinking or knowing about knowing. Everything that has to do with personal improvement rests on the belief that you can think about the way you think, to be able to learn from that process, and eventually to change it to your advantage.

A lot of people recognize "smart" people as people who are simply innately geared towards easily understanding complex concepts. However, in my experience, this is not the case. The malleability of characteristics which help people learn has long been underestimated. The relatively recent discovery of neuroplasticity tells us that the structure of the brain is, in a lot of ways, extremely malleable even in late-adult life. An interesting tangent to this is this Economist podcast about an author who investigated how to change certain attributes of children.