Old Dogs and New Tricks

We see what we know. Our brain has taught us to recognize what we see, but what if we see something new- something completely new? Are we the 2-month-old newborn all over again- staring in wonder? Or do we instantly correlate our vision with our life’s library stored in our little gray cells and surmise to know what it is? I don't think so. I think we are always newborns. As we live, seeing something new and learning about it occurs less often, but our brain still works like a newborn when it happens. I think we come the closest to newborn blankness when we view an abstract painting.

Who hasn’t stared at a Jackson Pollock abstract like this for the first time and thought- what is it? Or, anybody can paint like that- it doesn’t look like anything. When our brain scans our memory banks and tries to correlate everything we expect it to be against what we view, it comes up empty- no correlation. Therefore, it doesn’t look like anything. That’s the beauty of the art. It’s so completely original that it has no frame of reference. We are learning something new. The really cool thing is the next time you view a Jackson Pollock; you may recognize it before you look to see who the artist is. Our brain is uncanny that way. Our brain notices style and nuances to recognize something we haven’t even seen before- like unique handwriting. That’s how we learn to recognize what we see. Picasso and Matisse are other great examples of unique painters, yet they both have a style that we learn to see and recognize. From a distance we can safely say- "oh, that’s a Picasso", and upon closer inspection we confirm it.

We also learn new thoughts throughout our life, probably even more than we see. That’s why great stories stir our mind and stimulate us so much. It’s fun to read something new, yet familiar, and have the internal correlation of our knowledge and experiences embellish the words we read, and pull us through the story. When food or odors are described, we taste and smell them in our minds. They're familiar to us and we relate to them deeply. Sequels to novels are like that too. We’re familiar enough with the setting to breeze through the story comfortably, without questions or uneasiness that comes from reading an entirely new author for the first time-like JK Rowling. The unfamiliar names, places and behaviors can be unsettling, because we don’t have the apriori knowledge. But as we learn the lingo and all the syntax of the two worlds portrayed in Harry Potter books, we’re learning just as a child learns. We take in the unfamiliar words and build a new internal library of thoughts, and then the setting and the story becomes easy to read and understand. It all happens without trying. Don’t you just marvel at what our brain can do? Computers, as fast and as good as they are, haven’t come close to replicating how we think and learn.