Hand, Eye, Brain

Hand, Eye, Brain: The Neuroscience of Blind Contour Drawing

As an artist/scientist, I've often practiced the following exercise: I draw a picture of some object while looking only at that target object and not at the pen hand or the drawing itself until it is done (see Teacup example). It's called blind contour drawing. The finished drawing does not match up very well with the overall form of the original object. Unlike tracing the borders of an object through a transparent overlay, there's no visual comparison allowed to help my unseen pen emulate on a remote sheet of paper the path that my eye follows around the isolated target object. My earlier investigations into the disfigured character of blind contour drawings pointed to the basal ganglia as the area of the brain where hand-eye coordination goes astray but I now examine the role that the cerebellum plays in hand-eye coordination - or in this case, disconnection. (Update: Also read The Guitar Player's Brain")

You can read my rigorous scientific treatises sprinkled with a few humorous anecdotes at this link:

(Note: FAA no longer auto-links external files. It's up to you...)

www.garypetersonart.com/research.html

Spoiler alert: Turns out the cerebellum isn't to blame for pen drift after all - but there are some shady goings-on in the parietal lobe. --GP

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