Words, Words, Words

Could you edit your OP down to size?

Dave

Roger, I feel the top part of your post shows how "expectations and education" get in the way...not words.

People are taught to ask artists for their inspiration and all those type questions...they're just following what they've been told. They take too many museum tours where the tour guide tells everyone what the artist was "thinking"...lol

The test was interesting to read! Wonder how the Indigenous kids would do getting from downtown east side to uptown west side on the subway? ;)

Yes thats very interesting Roger, different IQs, different tests and differents tasks to survive. In a desert, your sense of remembering where things are is paramount. Unfamiiliar objects may not have a name but shapes and colour identify them. The terrain is identifiable in this way. A hunter needs agility, stealth, strength, speed... A fisherman may develop gills and a tail - in a few hundred million years. A nomad may recognise the stars like we read a map.The whale is related to the hippo!! I found the NYC subways difficult to deal with. A confusion of numbers... (for me). ... Oh visual arts - a way of thinking? an IQ as yet unmeasured? or maybe it is. or maybe it is meanngless to suggest suchh a thing. Im sure its diverse, as visual arts are very very diverse...
.. as is the written form...

edited.

One thought: there are a lot of other cultural differences between European children, and native australian children. Psych experiments can be very hard to design, and control for all the variables.

Another thought:
It probably pays to be able to think, pay attention to what's going on around you, and be silent, at the same time, if you're trying to survive in the outback. If something seriously life-threatening is going on, people probably go silent.

It probably pays to be able to think in words, understand what the grownups are saying, and do what they tell you even if that doesn't make sense given your understanding of what's going on around you in your environment, if you're growing up in western culture.

Totally different skill sets.

There is nothing wrong with words relative to art. We look at art with our eyes, but all of us no doubt has an art book collection. It is the great writers of art the enrich the product. I go back to a piece of art often because writers have made its relevance to a historical context interesting, worth repeating. This is not different than music--yes, I "listen" to a song, but also enjoy the story about its making, its politics, its place in time. Circulating stories of the cultural arts art what keep us going. Otherwise, we should close all the bookstores at museums.

Words are fun, but sometimes simply too much. Mostly that has to do with their content though.

When I'm engrossed in a book (as distinct from reading off a monitor) I don't see the words, the page just becomes this amazing thing going on in my imagination.

Unless it's crap that is - then I just subconsciously criticise everything about it

The human brain can process images far more quickly than words, written or spoken. It's why analog watches far outsell digital ones. We can glance at an analog watch or clock and instantly know the time. When we look at a digital clock it takes longer for our brain to process it.

In NASCAR (the largest stock car racing club in the US for those overseas) all the gauges in a race car are set so that the needles point straight up when everything is working properly. That way it's a single glance to know if all is good or there is a problem. Any other configuration would require a second to thing about it, which at 200 mph, could mean disaster.

One thing taught in many photography classes is to look at colors, shapes, composition, etc, without putting words to things, which is what we automatically do because that is what we are taught to do from very little on. Putting words on a potential photo subject can often lock us into standard ways to look at that subject and miss something that's different from the norm.

I read an interesting article recently, it stated that humans may not have always
been able to see the color blue, because there was no word for it.
A recent development for humans to be able to see blue.

They asked different peoples from around the world to identify the color,
supposedly they couldn't because they had no word for it. I don't know if the theory makes total sense to me, I'd have to read more on it.

Interestingly, on this subject of colour perceptions - despite having the same rods and cones, a culture was identified where the expected and obvious colours were not expressed as words, instead colour compositions realating to their environment, if i remember correctly this was the mountains and land at time of day, possibly season, were expressed... a fantastic study on the psychological creation of the spectrums of thought and understanding being overided by other internal philosophies that dictated perception! This must be learnt and then expressed by a single word...

Chuck,

What you were taught about photography, I believe can apply to everything..

" Putting words on a potential photo subject can often lock us into standard ways to look at that subject and miss something that's different from the norm."