BBC: Are artistic brains different?

Would you say you're artistic, Sam? Can you draw or paint? Do you dance or play music?

I play the piano a bit. Yes, I'd say I'm quite artistic. How about you, Neil?

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 than naturally to some people than others, so in this programme we'll be asking: are artists' brains different? We'll heart two expert opinions, and as usual, we'll learn some useful new vocabulary as well. So, what do you think, Neil? Are artists' brains different from other people's?

I'm not sure, Sam, but it's true that many artists behave differently, often in very strange ways. For example, did you know that Michelangelo worked so hard he never took a bath! Or that guitar legend, Jimi Hendrix, once set fire to his guitar on stage!

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, including the famous composer, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Mozart was considered a child prodigy-a young child with very great musical talent. So, how old was Mozart when he composed his first piece of music? Was he:

a) five years old    b) ten years old     or c) fiften years old?

I'll guss he was a) five 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. Rebeca 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 shares her findings with BBC World Service programme, CrowdScience. 

Artists seem to be processing the visual world in a different way to non-artists, particularly when they're drawing. The arsist actually takes a more global approach to looking- so they make bigger sacccades, bigger eye movements, and shorter fixations on the image. So, it's almost like they're getting much more a kind of gist level view of the thing they're looking it. 

Rebecca's experiments seem to confirm that artists' brains work differently because of their processing of the visual world- the way their brains make sense of information. 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 whole picture, something also known as the gist- the overall, general impressionn of something without focussing on the details. If you 'get the gist' of what someone is saying, you understand the overall meaning of what they say, but not the details.