Seeing and Experiencing 3. Bad Dog! Global Catastrophe!
Seeing and experiencing: Bad Dogs! Global Catastrophe! 3.
Initially, new events need conscious attention to yield new knowledge or awareness. This usually then ‘sinks’, becoming part of the sieving process applied to newer events. It is not necessarily carried in awareness, but ready to be activated, re-cognised, by a ‘fit’, a detected pattern.
The function of the system is to make the future more predictable, and our responses to future events better tuned. (‘Experience’ originally meant ‘to have tried or tested something out’). In a way, we are all scientists. Events prompt a hypothesis, based on previous findings. We test it by an experiment: acting. If the results are what we hoped, our hypothesis is confirmed and becomes more embedded. Or it can be invalidated, telling us this situation demanded a different or new understanding. Ideally.
This event/ experience/prediction/ testing cycle works brilliantly for most events most of the time. It builds up a relatively stable internal working model of the world. In every day speech we often, without noticing, use looking and seeing as synonyms for this process of taking in and comprehending. We will say ‘I see’ as shorthand for it. (This was brought home to me by my friend Blind Steve, who, blind from birth, would still say ‘I see’, in this sense, without batting an eye).
Say I was badly bitten by a dog. That event will have its significance marked by a powerful emotional tag, making me avoid dogs. My hypothesis is that ‘All dogs in all circumstances are dangerous’. The emotional response makes me avoid testing it. Not so scientific. So when I say ‘I see’, on the subject of dogs, I may be seeing only my templates (‘schemata’ ), not dogs. To some extent most of us are doing this most of the time.
This is how the ‘sieves’ we perceive through are grown. Like a coral reef, the growing points are tiny compared to the mass and form of the relics of previous growth on which they rest.
There are other flaws in the system, of course. If the stability of the model feels easily threatened we will tend to actively defend it against any invalidating evidence.
This is called ‘confirmation bias’: we stop attending to the new, the anomalous, and, frequently, to what is right in front of our noses. Our anxiety to have robust sieves can lead us to over-engineer them to the point that new information can’t get through. Things can get so clogged we barely see anything or anyone outside of ourselves at all, and exist in the dead coral of past experiences, rather than live on the growing tip.
That defensive constriction strangles respiration, the breathing flow between inner and outer that is essential to looking, seeing, comprehending and adapting. It often leads to personal tragedies of unlived life. It can also make us terrifyingly stupid, individually and collectively. I think we can call those poor mental health outcomes. And as any coral reef would tell you, our poor mental health is manifesting as global catastrophe.
Brain Coral, Jan Derk, Public Domain
So can art therapy save our hides? (In the long run, the planet will be fine). Probably not. But it does embody a practical methodology, working with the grain of the human mind, which opens us to new possibilities, questions assumptions, encourages safe experiments, and nurtures more creative and less destructive ways of being with ourselves, one another and the world. Art making is a way to experience and learn to trust that breathing in and out that keeps us psychologically and creatively alive, autonomous and choice-making.
Autonomous? Choice –making? Environmental degradation as a symptom of mental illness? It seems like we can’t go far down this road before another characteristic of an art therapy perspective emerges: it acts like the political is personal.
It’s the intention to make these blogs as plain speaking as possible. They are not therefore referenced or playing by academic rules. I don’t want to seem to claim originality for many of the ideas, and do want to encourage people to find sources, (without doing all the work for them!). Some ideas I am simply attempting to succinctly apply; others are used as starting points. James Hillman, (Archetypal Psychology), did great thinking about experience, George Kelly’s insight about the predictive intent of how minds work has huge implications, (Personal Construct Psychology) and ‘The Internal working model’ derives from John Bowlby, (Attachment Theory). Daniel Kahneman opens scary doors into what makes us humans so smart, yet so terrifyingly dumb. (Heuristics and Bias). ‘Heuristics’ here means ‘Rules of Thumb’, more or less. That statement was a rule of thumb.
It’s the intention to make these blogs as plain speaking as possible. They are not therefore referenced or playing by academic rules. I don’t want to seem to claim originality for many of the ideas, and do want to encourage people to find sources, (without doing all the work for them!). Some ideas I am simply attempting to succinctly apply; others are used as starting points. James Hillman, (Archetypal Psychology), did great thinking about experience, George Kelly’s insight about the predictive intent of how minds work has huge implications, (Personal Construct Psychology) and ‘The Internal working model’ derives from John Bowlby, (Attachment Theory). Daniel Kahneman opens scary doors into what makes us humans so smart, yet so terrifyingly dumb. (Heuristics and Bias). ‘Heuristics’ here means ‘Rules of Thumb’, more or less. That statement was a rule of thumb.
The image: Brain Coral. Jan Derk, 2005. Public Domain
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Posted by Malcolm Learmonth
16th March 2016
