PERCEPTUAL THINKING

Let’s try teaching our scientists to think like artists.

One of the themes of these pages is the confluence of art and science. We have talked about scientists using the same language as artists. We have also touched on art and science sharing the same process. Yet our current cultural mindset is to promote science at the expense of art.

The unifying element here is perceptual thinking. Scientists must do it. Artists must do it. And how well we do it pretty much dictates how good our work will be.

If you accept the thesis that our visual thinking is ordinate to our logical thinking, then the best place to train visual thinkers is the atelier, rather than the lab. What if the scientific lab were more akin to the artists studio?

For it is the artist, rather than the scientist, who is vastly more experienced in the organization of visual patterns. It is the artist who has spent their years developing the means for imagination expansion. It is the architect who’s basic operating environment is admist visual complexity. The architect is trained to generate solutions and solve problems in the visual realm. Who knows what sorts of scientific intuition and expansion might occur if the scientist is trained like an artist.

With all of the continually unresolved problems in the world, I’ve never understood why artists and architects are not pulled into any number of problem solving teams. Simply because of the immense visual training and experience that we offer, it would seem that our expertise would be of great demand.