Transcriber: Nurul Nabeela Reviewer: Peter Van de Ven
Okay. Thank you, everyone.
So what I want to talk about today is to ask the question,
why do we draw?
And I want to talk specifically about using drawing
as a way of supporting creative thinking.
Now, we can think of that separately
for how we use drawing as a means of communication.
So, for example, say that you wanted to design a new kitchen.
You might grab a piece of paper
and draw on the piece of paper your layout for the new kitchen,
and then you could show that to someone
to give them an idea of what it was you were thinking about.
There are some other situations
in which we use drawing largely as a way of just communicating with ourselves
and we use sketches and drawings as a way of supporting problem-solving.
For example,
this is a very famous painting called "Guernica," by Pablo Picasso.
In real life, as you see now, it's a black and white painting.
It's also very large;
it's about 3.5 by 8 meters in dimension.
It represents an incident which happened in the Spanish Civil War
in the 1930s.
What happened is that the Basque town of Guernica
was almost completely destroyed in an aerial bombardment,
and it led to great loss of civilian life.
And Picasso intended his painting to make a very strong anti-war message,
and it's regarded by many people to be his masterpiece.
Now, as you see, it's a very complex composition,
and it's not something that Picasso just came up with immediately.
In fact, he produced 67 preliminary sketches
and drawings and paintings
in which he played around
with different types of composition
and different appearances of the figures you see in the scene
until he arrived at the final version that we know today.
Now, it's certainly not unusual for architects and designers and artists
to use sketching as a way of thinking through ideas
in terms of what they want to produce.
And normally, when we draw, we'd have a mental image
of what we expect the final drawing to look like,
and that mental image would guide the actual drawing process.
That raises an interesting question:
if we can already imagine what something looks like,
why is there any value in actually going on to draw it?
Why can't we just use the mental image on its own?
Now, to understand that, we need to understand how perception works.
Now, it feels to us
as if the way we perceive the world in front of us is automatic.
So we just open our eyes, and we just see the world effortlessly.
That is an illusion.
In fact,
our brain has to entirely construct our experience of seeing the world.
And the way it does that is by interpreting
the information that we receive through our sensory systems.
So, for example, in the case of vision,
our brain has to interpret
the way that light stimulates the retina of our eyes.
Now, in the vast majority of cases,
our brains interpret this information in the same way,
and therefore, we all have the experience of seeing the world in the same way.
But there are some circumstances in which that does not happen.
For example,
this is a photograph of a dress that was posted on Tumblr in 2015,
and it very quickly went viral
because it became apparent
that people were seeing this dress in very different ways.
So some people see this as being a white-and-gold dress,
and some other people see it as being a black-and-blue dress.
And when you look at the internet comments,
people were just amazed
that anyone else could see this dress
in a different way to that they were perceiving it.
And I'd count myself in this.
So when I saw this dress,
I thought, "Well, that's clearly a white-and-gold dress."
I felt great sympathy for the poor, deluded fools
who saw it as a black-and-blue dress.
That's why it's quite disconcerting
that it is, in fact, very clearly a black-and-blue dress.
In fact, the manufacturers of this dress have now created a white-and-gold dress
purely to capitalise on the publicity that came about
when the original photograph went viral.
But the point is that the original photograph of the dress, it's ambiguous.
So, it can support being a black-and-blue dress,
albeit in a very overexposed photograph,
but it can also support being a white-and-gold dress as well.
And because the information in the picture is ambiguous,
our brains can interpret it in different ways,
and therefore that can translate to us having very different experiences
about what it is that we actually see.
If you take a look at this picture here, what do you think that is?
So, tellingly, this is referred to as being the duck-rabbit figure.
So some people see this as being a rabbit,
and other people see it as being a duck.
So you can interpret it in two entirely different ways.
It's an ambiguous picture - what we call a bistable picture.
So you can either see it as representing a duck,
in which case you see it pointing to the left -
with the bill of the duck pointed towards the left -
or you can see it as being a rabbit,
in which case it's facing towards the right -
the ears of the rabbit pointing back towards the left.
Now, in 1985,
two psychologists, Deborah Chambers and Daniel Reisberg,
they come up with a very interesting study.
So they said, "Okay, when people normally look at this picture,
it's very easy for them to see the alternative interpretations.
What happens if they just imagined what the picture looks like?"
So they did a study where they had a group of people
who hadn't seen this particular picture before,
they showed it to them, briefly,
and then got them to imagine what the picture looked like,
and then said to people, "Okay, what are you looking at?"
Some said it was a picture of a duck;
others said it was a picture of a rabbit.
And then, they said,
"Can you see the alternative interpretation
of what the picture might be?"
And strikingly, in their original sample,
no one was able to see the alternative interpretation.
So those people who originally saw it as a duck
continued to see it as a duck,
and those people who originally saw it as a rabbit
continued to see it as a rabbit.
Now you might think,
"Well, maybe they just don't remember the picture accurately enough."
So then, Chambers and Reisberg gave them a piece of paper
and asked them to draw from memory
what they remembered seeing the picture was like.
And I can show you a representation there.
So these are people drawing the picture from memory.
As you see, they don't draw it exactly.
Those people who saw it as a rabbit
were more likely to draw it as a rabbit,
and those people who saw it as a duck
were more likely to draw it as representing a duck.
But, nonetheless,
once they actually drew the image, strikingly, everyone -
once they actually looked at their picture of what they remembered it looking like -
was able to work out the alternative interpretation.
So why was it that drawing a picture of the duck-rabbit figure
was so much easier to reinterpret than just having a mental image of it?
Well, again, this ties in to the way in which our perceptual system works.
So when we look at a picture of the duck-rabbit figure,
this is an external picture.
Our sensory system processes it.
Initially we see it as a duck or a rabbit,
but if we continue to look at it,
then our perceptual system can continue to reinterpret it,
and then we're able to see an alternative way of thinking about it.
When we imagine the picture, that is already interpreted,
so we don't have a mental image of this thing
as being an ambiguous picture
which could be a duck or a rabbit.
We have a mental image of it being a duck, or being a rabbit.
And that preexisting interpretation -
what we call in psychology a "reference strain" -
it can actually constrain our ability to see different interpretations.
In my own research on this topic,
I've made use of a task
in which I ask people to imagine things in response to verbal instructions.
So I'm going to give you an example of that.
I want you to try and imagine the things that I tell you to imagine.
Okay, so I'd like you to first of all imagine a capital J.
J for Juliette.
I want you to imagine a capital J.
Okay?
Then, next to that,
I want you to imagine a capital D.
D for Delta.
I now want you to imagine rotating the D 90 degrees to the left,
or if you prefer, 90 degrees anti-clockwise.
And now I want you to imagine placing the rotated D on top of the letter J.
Okay, what does that look like to you?
That's right.
If you followed that correctly,
you will see that it forms something that people see as being an umbrella.
I have a colleague, Robert Logie, who's at the University of Edinburgh.
We did a study where we got people to do a whole series of these types of tasks,
but we manipulated the circumstances in which they did them.
So one group of people just did it using mental imagery alone,
as I asked you to do.
Another group of people did it by drawing in the air with their finger.
So it was draw a J,
draw a D,
draw the D 90° to the left,
draw the D on top of the J.
What do you think it is?
A third group of people, we gave them a piece of paper
and we asked them to physically draw what they remember seeing,
so they drew a J,
they drew a D,
they drew the D 90° to the left,
and then they drew the D on top of the J.
What do you think it is?
Our final group
sat in front of a computer, in front of a graphics package.
There was a J and a D on the screen,
and they physically enacted all of the movements.
So they clicked on the D with a mouse, they rotated it 90° to the left,
they physically moved the D on top of the J,
and then they're again asked what they thought it was.
And we gave them a series of these kind of instructions,
where people manipulate shapes
to see if it produces a recognisable picture at the end.
So what you're seeing here is the data from that particular experiment.
It was published in a journal called Thinking & Reasoning in 2015.
And so what you're seeing is an average
of how many people were able to work out what the final picture looked like.
And you can see
that the more aspects of the task that people are actually able to see,
the easier they found it to do.
So when people were just using imagery alone,
performance was at its lowest,
and when we had people doing it fully externalised so they could see everything,
performance was at its highest.
So in order to do this task,
you have to stop thinking about it as being letters of the alphabet.
You have to start thinking
that it's potentially representing something else.
And our study demonstrates
that it's easier to do that
the more aspects of those shapes you are actually able to see
rather than just imagine.
So to answer the question I posed at the beginning - why do we draw? -
I'd argue that the reason we draw
is it allows us to capitalise on the ability of our perceptual system
to more easily reinterpret visual information.
So when you draw something that you're imagining,
you're taking an internal representation that your brain is creating itself,
and you're converting it to an external representation, a drawing,
which is separate from you,
and your perceptual system can process it as a separate image.
And our brains are incredibly good
at being able to detect novel patterns and familiar shapes in visual information.
So to show you a final image:
what do you think that is?
A kangaroo.
Some people see it as a rabbit.
Sometimes I've heard dinosaur.
It is, in fact, a cloud.
(Laughter)
There is nothing there.
It's just water vapour.
But our perceptual system has evolved
so we're very, very good
at being able to detect familiar shapes and patterns
in even something random like a cloud.
That's why on the internet,
you see pieces of burnt toast that look like people's faces
or trees that looks like dogs.
Our brain is very, very good at doing that.
So drawing allows us to capitalise on that ability of our brain
to more easily reinterpret visual information.
So if you don't currently use drawing and sketching
as a way of supporting problem-solving
and supporting creativity,
now I would encourage you to do so,
because imagining what something looks like
and actually seeing what it looks like
are not the same thing.
Thank you for listening.
(Applause)