Another gem from the AIGA talk in London. There are ten of them and I’m posting them one at a time. Check back often.

#7

HOW YOU LIVE CHANGES YOUR BRAIN.

The brain is the most responsive organ of the body. Actually it is the organ that is

most susceptible to change and regeneration of all the organs in the body. I have a

friend named Gerald Edelman who was a great scholar of brain studies and he says

that the analogy of the brain to a computer is pathetic. The brain is actually more like

an overgrown garden that is constantly growing and throwing off seeds, regenerating

and so on. And he believes that the brain is susceptible, in a way that we are not fully

conscious of, to almost every experience of our life and every encounter we have. I

was fascinated by a story in a newspaper a few years ago about the search for

perfect pitch. A group of scientists decided that they were going to find out why

certain people have perfect pitch. You know certain people hear a note precisely and

are able to replicate it at exactly the right pitch. Some people have relevant pitch;

perfect pitch is rare even among musicians. The scientists discovered – I don’t know

how – that among people with perfect pitch the brain was different. Certain lobes of

the brain had undergone some change or deformation that was always present with

those who had perfect pitch. This was interesting enough in itself. But then they

discovered something even more fascinating. If you took a bunch of kids and taught

them to play the violin at the age of 4 or 5 after a couple of years some of them

developed perfect pitch, and in all of those cases their brain structure had changed.

Well what could that mean for the rest of us? We tend to believe that the mind affects

the body and the body affects the mind, although we do not generally believe that

everything we do affects the brain. I am convinced that if someone was to yell at me

from across the street my brain could be affected and my life might changed. That is

why your mother always said, ‘Don’t hang out with those bad kids.’ Mama was right.

Thought changes our life and our behaviour. I also believe that drawing works in the

same way. I am a great advocate of drawing, not in order to become an illustrator, but

because I believe drawing changes the brain in the same way as the search to create

the right note changes the brain of a violinist. Drawing also makes you attentive. It

makes you pay attention to what you are looking at, which is not so easy.