Author: Simon Sheridan

Recently I was given the excellent book “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain” by Betty Edwards. It’s a book about learning to draw but, as the title suggests, the author takes an approach based on applied psychology/neurology. This is not a mere affectation on her part. Rather, it seems Edwards was teaching drawing for decades, discovered what worked and then realised that what worked had a basis in psychology. She introduces research from neurology about the functional differences between the two hemispheres of the brain and then frames the drawing exercises around that research. According to Edwards, the motor skills needed for drawing are not the main game, contrary to what most drawing instruction suggests. Rather, you have to learn to “see” and that “seeing” is carried out by the right side of the brain. Those who try to draw from the left brain are drawing “symbolically”. They translate what they see through the left side of the brain which is where language processing occurs. Thus, rather than draw the vase in front of them, they think to themselves that is a vase and draw from the idea in their mind. The results are not good and the person usually concludes that they are unable to draw and they give up. I’m skeptical of the neurological basis for all this; sounds very left-brain to me. But I think this distinction is true phenomenologically and it also maps on to what we know about how language works. I have mentioned before in this blog that I wrote an honours thesis in cognitive linguistics which deals a lot with the schematic nature of language and cognition. It hadn’t occurred to me before, but “childish” drawings are schematic and this lends weight to Edwards’ idea that learning to draw is learning not to draw the schematic representations in your mind but what is visible to your eye.

Edwards calls these differences R-mode and L-mode corresponding the right and left brain respectively. L-mode is verbal, analytic, sequential, linear, objective and time-bound. It is about intellect, logic and computation. R-mode involves intuition and leaps of insight. It is subjective, relational and holistic. When you are ‘in’ R-mode, you have a feeling of timelessness and immersion in the moment. According to Edwards, a major problem that students of hers have is that they are stuck almost permanently in L-mode. When trying to draw, they are not really seeing the thing they are drawing but are intermediating through language and logic (components of L-mode). Thus, they might try to render a cube reasoning that all the sides must be the same length. But this is not how the eye perceives a cube and thus the drawing will be wrong. What they must do instead is learn to see the angles and relations of the cube. That is what needs to be taught and learned. It’s because L-mode is so strong in our culture that Edwards spends the first half of her book trying to get the student to use R-mode instead. She has several exercises intended to make the student distinguish between the two. I seemed to be cured of this problem as I didn’t have any difficulty getting into R-mode but the exercises reminded of a time when I had to learn the distinction the hard way. I’ve told this story once before on this blog, but I’ll re-tell it here as I think it perfectly describes what happens when L-mode dominates over R-mode.

Some time ago I decided to teach myself audio engineering. I had been a musician for a number of years and learning the basics of sound mixing seemed like a good practice tool as well as a way to record ideas for songs. The technology to record audio had also become incredibly cheap and it was possible to do home recording to a technically high standard. The technical means to do audio recording are now not much more expensive than the technical means to do drawing. But, just like drawing is all about seeing, audio engineering is all about hearing and that is not a technical problem but a perceptual one. To put it in Edwards’ language, it’s about learning to use R-mode. But I didn’t know that at the time. My early mixes sounded dreadful. Although I knew at some level that this was a problem with the fact that I wasn’t listening properly, I still went looking for technical solutions. I employed an L-mode way of addressing what was an R-mode problem. I jumped online and started searching for solutions to make my mix sound better. One of the ideas that came up was compression. Compression was the difference between a professional sounding mix and an amateur one. That’s what the internet said. This statement has some level of truth. Compression is essential to a good mix and many of the sounds we hear in professional recordings are created by a compressor. But the key task for the sound engineer is to learn to hear what the compressor can do. That was what I had not yet achieved and it was part of the reason my mixes sounded so bad. The internet didn’t tell me that, though. The internet told me to try this compressor or that compressor. And that’s what I did. I downloaded the compressor that somebody said would fix all of my problems, eagerly loaded it into the track I was working on and switched it on. Instantly my mix came to life. The highs were high, the lows were deep and mellifluous, the vocals rang out like a choir of angels. I sat back to take it all in and then figured I should check the settings on the compressor so I could remember them for future reference. I looked down at the computer and realised that the compressor was not even switched on. I had clicked the wrong button. I switched it on for real and the mix went “meh”.

Obviously I’m exaggerating the story for effect but I really did perceive the mix to have changed at the time and when I learned that the compressor wasn’t switched on I was genuinely shocked at how easily I had fooled myself. We all tell ourselves stories about the world that turn out not to be true, but on this occasion my base perception was wrong and no amount of excuses or post hoc rationalisations could have shown otherwise. As I was reading Edwards’ book, I realised she was explaining why that had happened. L-mode really can interfere and override our perceptions. If it can do that with seeing and hearing, it can certainly do it with more complex phenomena like, oh, I don’t know, pandemics. On the other hand, what Edwards says is true about R-mode is definitely correct. As I became proficient at audio engineering, I would regularly achieve the state of immersion and timelessness that Edwards associates with R-mode. It’s a state of deep focus where one loses all sense of time. It’s sometimes referred to as being “in the zone”. I experienced that feeling again when working through some of the exercises in Edwards book this time in relation to drawing. Phenomenologically, I think the L-mode/R-mode distinction is very useful to highlight the artistic mindset but also more general cultural traits. The reason Edwards needed to write such a book is because we live in a culture that has become massively imbalanced in favour of L-mode. All of our education system, which now lasts about sixteen years for the average person is about the manipulation of symbols without any corresponding real world experience. It’s like talking about how a compressor works without ever hearing how it affects a mix or hypothesising how a line on a page represents an object without ever drawing an object.

Using the L-mode/R-mode distinction, I can now see that this what Gregory Bateson was getting at in his excellent book Mind and Nature which was all about parts and wholes, relations, hierarchical structures, synthesis and other R-mode concepts. It’s also what underlay Christopher Alexander’s book A Pattern Language, or Ivan Illich’s critiques of our education system. In fact, many of the important critiques of our society and culture from the 20^th century were really pointing out this imbalance. Western culture systematically excludes R-mode from consideration. We consider any intuition to be superstition. We dismiss subjectivity as “anecdotal evidence”. We know how to break things down through analysis but we’ve forgotten how to build things up through synthesis which is why we can’t create things of beauty anymore. Most importantly, I think, we are drowning in symbols (L-mode) without the subsequent perception of reality (R-mode) that would ground those symbols. As Edwards notes, her students struggle even to hold their attention on an object so they can draw it. They fall back to symbolic representations. Such people find it easier to think “that is a vase” and draw a schematic version than to actually look at the vase and really see it in order to draw it. This change seems to happen about the time of adolescence when the symbol-manipulating faculty develops to a high level. It’s at exactly that time we subject teenagers to an education system that does nothing to develop their R-mode but makes them work through exercises based entirely on L-mode. The grading system of exams is also pure L-mode. All this education was originally intended to train people to serve in the bureaucracy which is, of course, just a symbol-manipulating organisational structure. That training is relevant to bureaucrats. It is, however, entirely irrelevant to any occupation outside of an office. The increase in higher education in the last few decades has, thus, swung the existing cultural imbalance in western society even further to the left (interestingly, this statement also works in a strictly political sense too).

How do we address this imbalance? Teach people how to draw, paint, play music, mix audio, sew, knit or any other handicraft or art. Learn any skill in an empirical fashion with only minimal book learning. Disconnect from exposure to symbol manipulation. Learn how to trust intuition, guessing and leaps of faith. Take naps. Fritter away time on “useless” activities. Sit around and do nothing. If you need an excuse to do these things, just say you’re developing the right side of your brain. Or better still, tell your left brain to STFU.

After I graduated from university, I did the Aussie-backpacker-in-the-UK thing. My first stop was London where I arrived with what, in hindsight, was far too little money. I didn’t have any contacts there and London was much more expensive than I imagined. Had things not gone well, I may have been flying home with my tail between my legs in short order. Fortunately, I managed to pick up a job almost immediately working as an administrative assistant in a small law firm. The principal was an Australian expat who was also from Melbourne originally, which no doubt helped my chances in landing the job. The offices of the firm were in Gray’s Inn, which is one of the four Inns of Court in London and which is over six hundred years old, three times older than the country I had just arrived from. Because of the location of the Inn, I would often go on foot to carry out various tasks such as lodging paperwork at the Australian Embassy down on The Strand. It was almost the perfect job for a young man wanting to experience the sights and sounds of London.

The work itself was mundane but what was really interesting were the people you got to meet and the aspects of human psychology that were revealed by the various cases we dealt with. I was amazed by how much money people would waste on matters which clearly had no merit. We had people coming to us with cases they were never going to win often because they were the ones in the wrong. As a lawyer there is a code of ethics you must abide by in such matters so that you don’t take money for cases that have no basis in law. But in practice there is a huge grey area and there is almost always some glimmer of merit in a case; some thing where the other person was to blame. In fact, that’s true of almost all cases. Both parties are at fault but both parties think they are wholly in the right.

I was reminded of my time at Gray’s Inn recently when an acquaintance spent tens of thousands of dollars on legal fees. It was obvious from her story that she was just as much at fault as the other person. But she thought she had been wronged and it was that grievance which led her to take legal action thinking that justice would be done. I did my best to talk her out of it explaining that the only people who win in such cases were the lawyers and that she would be far better off negotiating an end to the matter with the other person directly. But she had to learn the hard way. When it was all over, she complained of all the money she had spent even though she didn’t get “justice”. Actually, from an objective third party point of view, she did get justice as she was also to blame for what amounted to nothing more than a communication problem. As Robert Plant once sang: “Communication breakdown/It’s always the same/Having a nervous breakdown/Drive me insane.” Lawyers earn an awful lot of money because of such communication breakdowns.

One of Australia’s most famous lawyers, Geoffrey Roberston, once noted that the justice system does not guarantee justice, it only provides the possibility of justice. He needed to point that out because the average person seems to think the system does guarantee justice where “justice” means prove they are right and the other party wrong. That’s rarely possible, however, for the simple reason that there are always at least two versions of justice: yours and the other person’s. But the main reason the justice system doesn’t guarantee justice is because it would be enormously expensive to do so. In the real world, systems are set up according to cost-benefit considerations. We don’t optimise, we satisfice. This follows from the 80/20 rule which states that eighty percent of the value comes from twenty percent of the cost. Every extra percent of value after that becomes more and more expensive so that the last one percent costs more than the other ninety nine and the last 0.1% more than the other 99.9% and so on. That’s why murder cases get more resources than fraud and fraud gets more resources than traffic infringements. There are no doubt all kinds of crimes that occur every day that never get addressed because the system doesn’t have the resources to attend to them. Ideally the major crimes do get dealt with but even then there is still only the chance of justice not a guarantee.

It’s a strange fact of our culture that so few people understand this. People seem to think systems are these flawless machines that deliver a fixed result every time where the result just happens to be what they want. They think that if somebody does you wrong, the justice system will make it right. They think that if you get sick, the medical system will bring you back to perfect health. Actually, the justice system and the medical system are there as a safety net when things go wrong. The best thing you can do is avoid them. If you never have to see a lawyer or a doctor in your life you can consider yourself very fortunate. And you should try and make it so you do avoid lawyers and doctors. You can avoid the justice system, especially in business dealings, by making all expectations clear upfront and signing agreements and contracts that stipulate clearly what people are agreeing to. It’s far cheaper to get the lawyers involved at the start than at the end. Same with the medical system. Keep your health in order, eat well, exercise, practice basic hygiene and you will avoid the medical system as much as possible. That’s the best strategy. But many people seem to think that they must go to the doctor in order to be healthy even for things which are obvious lifestyle problems like high blood pressure.

No doubt there are many factors that have led us to this strange position but one that I think is a big part of the issue is that people apply the consumer mindset to such systems. The consumer economy works by providing an item that does a fixed thing for a fixed price. You buy a toaster for $30 and it cooks your toast. You buy a microwave for $150 dollars and it warms your food. Simple, linear and reliable. Of course, the consumer economy itself relies on an enormously complex system of mining, manufacturing, transport and electricity generation but all that is hidden from the consumer. With the rise of consumer society, people have learned to think in a linear, simplistic fashion. They then apply that model to domains where it doesn’t belong. They think that they can just pay a lawyer to get “justice” or a doctor to get “health”. But the legal system and the medical system are not the consumer economy. They are irreducibly systems and in systems there are no guarantees, only probabilities. They should be used as a last resort but that’s not the way that people think about them these days. Thus, the medical system and to a lesser extent the legal system have come to be seen through the consumer mindset.

When the system doesn’t deliver the desired outcome, some people blame the practitioner. Lawyers already have a low reputation for this reason but it wasn’t long ago that doctors did too. We used to call them “quacks”. My grandmother always used to say “we better get you to the quack”. Doctors and lawyers were seen as necessary evils. They didn’t guarantee you an outcome but they did guarantee that you had to pay them. Fancy offices at Gray’s Inn don’t pay for themselves after all. On current trajectory, I wouldn’t be surprised if we again start referring to doctors as quacks in the near future. That won’t be a bad thing. It will be a recognition that systems don’t guarantee outcomes, that self-responsibility is the best bet and, to use another favourite phrase of my grandmother, “life was never meant to be fair” (where “fair” means almost exactly what my acquaintance meant by “justice”).