Tom’s Wordpress Blog

A clever approach to learning to draw is in Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. One of the ones I remember best is upside down drawing. For a non-artist like me, it’s downright daunting to attempt to draw something exactly as you see it. “There’s no way I can do this” I usually think. But when I turn the original drawing upside down and simply draw the lines I see(and the relationship between them), a passable copy of the drawing begins to appear.

The instructions have you change the context you’re approaching drawing in. Rightside up, my brain can’t seem to figure it out, but upside down, a very different context, it’s just a bunch of lines, and I can draw lines.

We use this sort of approach in Feldenkrais work, changing the context of movement to offer outselves and our clients new options for movement. Often, the outcome is pretty creative and useful. Sometimes dramatically useful for us or our clients.

I don’t normally think of this context-changing approach when I think of comics. But one of the most widely distributed comic artists does just that when faced with losing his speaking voice permanently.

Scot Adams writes about discovering a clever learning approach to a condition called Spasmodic Dysphonia after a doctor told him no one ever recovered completely from the condition. Adams somehow came up with the idea, in his words, of remapping his brain. Changing the context of his speaking has done the trick, at least so far.

Adams first began experimenting with the voice he had left, changing pitches, looking for patterns, singing some words. Then he disovered a kind of jumpstart that really got him going with his natural voice - speaking rhyme.

But the best part of Adam’s description of his process was what he calls reestablishing the connection between his brain and his speech:

When I say my brain remapped, that’s the best description I have. During the worst of my voice problems, I would know in advance that I couldn’t get a word out. It was if I could feel the lack of connection between my brain and my vocal cords. But suddenly, yesterday, I felt the connection again. It wasn’t just being able to speak, it was KNOWING how. The knowing returned.

Adams blog post is worth reading: it’s not only very well-written, but really conveys the passion of someone left with only learning as an option to the life he wants to lead. That’s a big change in context.