Is that a good comparison? How often does the average person actually see either of those things? The reason it's surprising that people struggle to draw bikes from memory is that most of us see them all the time.
How about drawing faces of famous people then? Presumably those results would be even worse. With these bicycle drawings, even the most inaccurate ones are pretty easy to recognize as bicycles. But I don’t think you’d get very many recognizable pictures of famous faces, except for a few subjects with famously recognizable features (like hairdo or facial hair).
I think that has more to do with being able to draw. As I argued in another comment here, I think sketching a bike has nothing to do with drawing skills. But sketching a face is not enough: the level of detail that goes into a face is much more sophisticated than a bike. On a bike you connect the lines right and you're good, but in a face... there is no logical, mechanical structure to it that you can easily replicate. The proportions all have to be right, the way skin falls... I think that's different.
Is that a good comparison? How often does the average person actually see either of those things? The reason it's surprising that people struggle to draw bikes from memory is that most of us see them all the time.
The brain doesn't work like a photo camera. It remembers strictly the minimum required to do it's job, in a highly abstract and compressed form.
How a bike fits together it's kind of irrelevant for most people, even if you ride one or if you must dodge one.
Which is effectively the point of the article.
How about drawing faces of famous people then? Presumably those results would be even worse. With these bicycle drawings, even the most inaccurate ones are pretty easy to recognize as bicycles. But I don’t think you’d get very many recognizable pictures of famous faces, except for a few subjects with famously recognizable features (like hairdo or facial hair).
I think that has more to do with being able to draw. As I argued in another comment here, I think sketching a bike has nothing to do with drawing skills. But sketching a face is not enough: the level of detail that goes into a face is much more sophisticated than a bike. On a bike you connect the lines right and you're good, but in a face... there is no logical, mechanical structure to it that you can easily replicate. The proportions all have to be right, the way skin falls... I think that's different.
3 replies →
That would probably be worse. At least the weird contraptions they drew are (even if only vaguely) recognisable as a bicycle.
This also raises the question of what you'd get if you asked drivers to draw what they see when they're sitting in the driver's seat.