Aha!

Perspectives from The Artist's Road

A New Spring Day Oil John Hulsey

In The Art of Seeing I and II, we discussed the existence of and need for a personal visual bias, which is a type of cognitive filter that allows us to navigate a visually complex world. There are cognitive filters for thoughts, as well, which operate at the subconscious level. While we are awake, these filters prevent us from recognizing and believing in many of the bizarre thoughts which buzz around in our subconscious and often play out in our dreams. They also serve to sort through the massive amounts of incoming sensory information, stored memories and images, which if allowed to reach our consciousness, would likely be disabling. However, recent discoveries by cognitive researchers have begun to recognize that creative people have a propensity for what they call “cognitive disinhibition”—a failure to ignore some of that information which is irrelevant to current goals or survival.

The really interesting part of…