This is Part X of the Specificity Sequence

Cats notoriously get stuck in trees because their claws are better at climbing up than down. Throughout this sequence, we’ve seen how humans are similar: We get stuck in high-level abstractions because our brains struggle to unpack them into specifics. Our brains are better at climbing up (concrete→abstract) than down (abstract→concrete).

If you’ve ever struggled to draw a decent picture, you know what being stuck at a high level of abstraction feels like in the domain of visual processing. I know I do. My drawing skills are nonexistent. I can draw kindergarten-quality stick figures, but I don’t even know where to begin drawing something that looks the least bit realistic.

Despite how pathetic a stick figure looks, it’s worth marveling at our brain’s formidable power to distill a mess of light and dark stimuli into a few geometric parts.

A stick figure is a mental representation of an animal which is great for practical tasks like throwing a spear at it.

The question is just, why can people like me only draw a pathetic stick figure even when we’re trying to draw a nice picture?

The visual system was only under selective pressure to evolve a processing pathway from sensing visual features to building an abstract representation of those features, not a processing pathway to transform a high-level mental representation into a low-level pencil strokes representation. I draw stick figures because my conscious mind thinks in stick figures.

But we know that the unconscious part of our visual brains isn’t one-way. When we first recognize that we’re seeing a cow, our brain propagates visual information from abstract mental representations down toward lower-level visual feature recognition.

Consider this image:

Most people have trouble identifying what they’re seeing in different parts of the image, until they realize it’s a cow, and then all the parts snap into focus. Their interpretation of low-level features of the image, e.g. that the white dots within the black foreground region on the leftmost part of the image are “furry”, is influenced top-down by their abstract mental representation of a cow.

How do skilled artists navigate down the ladder of visual abstraction consciously?

In Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, Betty Edw...

Nico Coronado

Nico Coronado