Back in August the New York Times ran a piece called ‘Your baby is smarter than you think’. On more or less the same reasoning, adults are smarter than they think. TLC exhibitions are a demonstration of what this means.

The Times item said: ‘…babies and very young children are terrible at planning and aiming for precise goals. When we say that preschoolers can’t pay attention, we really mean that they can’t not pay attention: they have trouble focusing on just one event and shutting out all the rest. This has led us to underestimate babies in the past. But the new research tells us that babies can be rational without being goal-oriented.’

I’m convinced that these same processes occur when adults engage in art (which takes them out of their usual logical landscape). Essentially art takes us into different kinds of thinking from the routine habits of school study. Rather than being something to abandon, like a pair of shoes which are too small, it’s a dimension of thinking which could be fostered throughout our lives.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/akaradrix/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

The writer of the Times article, Alison Gopnik, and fellow researcher Tamar Kushnir, carried out some intriguing tests which enabled them to gather clues about the effectiveness of ‘baby thinking’. For example, pre-schoolers could do a kind of statistical analysis and make reliable choices between coloured blocks which caused a machine to light up. They would choose the colours that worked more often (quite a subtle test).

When you try to find what ‘works’ in art you’re doing much the same thing, and far from being a limited aspect of pre-school intelligence it’s something that crops up again and again in the more complex aspects of our lives. It’s relatively straight forward to do the arithmetic for a shopping list (how much do you have to spend and what do the items cost?). On the other hand it can be extremely complex to figure out career choices or the value of education. How can you predict the benefits of tertiary study in the overall arc of your life?

Art gives people the opportunity to practice complex, non-linear reasoning. This is different from reductionist thinking in which all unnecessary aspects of a problem are set aside. The challenge with real life is that everything is a factor. Pre-schoolers are doing something fundamentally important when they see a world in which everything is happening at once. That’s the way things are. The arithmetic of shopping lists is useful but it’s only a small part of the big picture.

When you grapple with art, even the apparently simple things like the choice of colours are really complex. One of the extraordinary benefits of art is that it provides real practice for this type of thinking. You get clues about what is working. The clues are different from getting the right answer in a multiple choice question but they’re nevertheless effective. Just as pre-schoolers can do statistics without numbers, adults can use art to sharpen their skills at navigating complexity.