TONI TALKS | PAINTING PICTURES WITH PROSE | CREATIVITY EXPLAINED
Tonal Vision [How] Colors Contextualize Content
Art is a coded visual language that assigns vocabulary to instantly understand concepts that take more than a moment to articulate
You’ve likely heard the saying, “You don’t know what you don’t know.” Now let me blow your mind. Unless you’re a brain researcher, you don’t know how much the right side of your mind influences the left.
Language is cataloged in the left side of your brain. Images are housed on the right. Cutting to the chase, visual identification is quicker and easier than subdividing then sounding out every letter in each word.
That’s why the right side of your brain is a creative genius. It’s been programmed to communicate in the language of images. It functions below the level of cognition.
It helps the left brain process language and words in silence… like the “g” in lasagna. It sorts information into images and then translates them into language stored in artistic frames inside your brain.
The right side of your brain is playful. Unlike its twin on the left, which likes to calculate the hell out of everything, it gets easily bored. That’s because language is linear and sequential.
Neurologically speaking, understanding language is best undertaken by the left side of your brain — the reason why is straightforward. The left side of your brain meticulously tackles every task with the precision of a serial killer.
The right side of your brain thinks, “Ain’t nobody got time for that.” The problem is that processing cuts into playtime. That’s why your right brain overtalks the left.
The right side of your brain constantly explores options to get out of doing soul-sucking, slow-ass work. The creative brain thinks, “How can I cut in and show up my bro on the left? I know there’s an easier and faster way.”
In all seriousness, there’s scientific evidence to back up my statement. Don’t believe me?
Just watch the Youtube video on the Stroop Test.
Amazing right? Summarizing what was shown in the video, your unprompted brain instantly searches its frame library when you see a color.
The sort function has previously coded and stored words associated with each color as language. This information is parked inside a coordinating frame installed in your brain.
When your eyes see the word, both sides of your brain kick in to begin processing it. The left side looks at each letter. It takes out a piece of paper. Sharpens a pencil. Then writes down the first letter in the word.
To which, the right side of your brain sends a signal to your optical nerves… cue an over exaggerated eye roll. Then it tells the mouth to smirk and visibly leans hard into judgement.
The right side of your brain thinks it’s superior and skips the steps that hold up its left leaning counterpart. Why? Because it reasons that it ingeniously controls the color cheat code.
It wonders why it’s not heralded for cleverness.
Quicker than you can say wham, bam, thank you , mam.
The answer is instantaneously called forward. It’s delivered without a second thought, intact in its language frame.
This Just In… from Margie Pearl
A definition to explain the right brain phenomena is called synesthesia. It is a real medical term. Artists are the primary population who appear to be afflicted with this particular ailment.
Disclaimer: To avoid being placed on lockdown by the Medium Platform Police, I googled the term. Refer to https://myclevlandclinic.org — 24995 synesthesia. The Cleveland Clinic compiled the information. It’s not some loosey-goosey, pie-in-the-sky assertion by me.
Synesthesia includes tasting words or linking colors to numbers and letters. It happens when your brain routes sensory information through multiple unrelated senses. This caused you to experience more than one sense simultaneously.
For the Record: I am proud to be a “Synesthete.” Researchers coined the term to identify all who are fortunate enough to have brains that function in this manner. I took the liberty of adding the word fortunate.
Hence, the root of the problem. Confusion arises when the word is different than the color associated with it.
The right side of your brain gets defensive and thinks don’t blame me; I was trying to help.
That’s when the left side of your brain saunters forward, and cockily takes over. It thinks about the context associated with the color as a secondary function. It first puts in the work to figure out the core content by sounding out each letter of the word.
To hear how left-brain people think about colors, watch the video below featuring Scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson.
[1]: Lotto RB, Purves D. The empirical basis of color perception. Conscious Cogn. 2002 Dec;11(4):609–29. [PubMed]
[2]: https://lesley.edu/article/what-the-stroop-effect-reveals-about-our-minds
[3]: Ting Siok W, Kay P, Wang WS, Chan AH, Chen L, Luke KK, Hai Tan L. Language regions of brain are operative in color perception. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 2009 May 19;106(20):8140–5. [PMC free article] [PubMed]
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Artist In Residence. Piloting the Inaugural “Think Tank” Cohort. University of St. Francis. Joliet, IL/USA. Center for Innovation.
