Name: Are artistic brains different? - 6 Minute English
Uploaded: 2022-09-03T16:45:11.000Z
Duration: 6 min 19 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

I play the piano a bit. Yes, I’d say I’m

Well, if you count playing football as artistic

then yes, but basically no – I can’t paint.

We’ve been wondering why artistic ability

comes more naturally to some people than others,

We’ll hear two expert opinions, and as usual,

we’ll learn some useful new vocabulary as well.

So, what do you think, Neil? Are artists’ brains

I’m not sure, Sam, but it’s true that many

artists behave differently, often in very

that Michelangelo worked so hard he never

took a bath! Or that guitar legend, Jimi Hendrix,

We’ll hear more about the artist’s brain soon,

but first I have a question for you. As you said,

artistic ability comes naturally to some people,

considered a child prodigy - a young child with

very great musical talent. So, how old was

piece of music? Was he: a) five years old?

b) ten years old? or, c) fifteen years old?

OK, Sam. I’ll reveal the answer later in the

programme. If artists’ brains are different,

it could mean they see the world in unusual ways.

Dr Rebecca Chamberlain is a researcher in

the neuroscience of art. She investigates how

artists see the objects they  are drawing by measuring 

saccades – the rapid movements our eyes make

as they jump from one thing to another. Here she

Artists seem to be processing the visual world

in a different way to non-artists, particularly

when they’re drawing. The artist actually takes

a more global approach to looking – so they

make bigger saccades, bigger eye movements,

and shorter fixations on  the image. So, it’s almost

like they’re getting much more of a kind of

gist level view of the thing they’re looking at.

Rebecca’s experiments seem to confirm that

artists’ brains work differently because of their

processing of the visual world – the way

Interestingly, processing also means the act

of developing pictures from photographic film.

When they draw, artists make bigger, quicker

eye movements so they are able to see the

the gist – the overall, general impression of

something without focussing on the details.

If you ‘get the gist’ of what someone is saying,

you understand the overall meaning of what

about the artistic brain is Mike, a BBC World

According to him, artistic ability isn’t something

you’re born with - it can  be learned, as he explained

I had this other student… he was really

at the zero, like, he could not draw – at all.

So, I gave him some tips, and in a month,

he was really good – he was like really surprised,

So, there are some things that are trainable,

it’s like a bike. In my case, I learned how to do

you know like, if you are drawing the face,

the human face, the distance between your eyes

Mike gives tips to his students – helpful

pieces of advice about how to do something,

in this case, to paint. After getting Mike’s

tips, one of his students really improved and

blown away – an informal way to say very

Like learning to ride a bike, Mike thinks that

painting is trainable – a word from American

artists’ brains are not so different after all.

So, there we have it – two different options,

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Are artistic brains different? - 6 Minute English

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