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The Strange Case for The Alleged Ability to Draw
Some years ago; A Psychological Behaviorist [ Name Withheld ] that had an Interest in The Macabre, Strange Talents, Ghosts & Goblins, Little People, Cryptic Zoology & Flying Saucers had from time to time come across An Account, Always Anecdotal, Completely Unsubstantiated, with No Verifiable Names or Addresses— Of someone with The Alleged Ability to Draw Things. These Stories had a thread of consistency to them; So that they peaked his Interest.
The gist of the Anecdote usually asserted that some person had the ability to take a sheet of writing paper, And an ordinary pencil; Then make marks on the Paper that eerily resembled some object or person that the drawer said that it was. In many of These Cases, The drawer was not required to suggest what the drawing was of, The viewer would be able to identify it on their own, without prompting or hints.
This was of course; Completely Unbelievable.
No such ability was know to Established Science and any mention of these stories were met with jeers & hoots from his peers at The University.
Nevertheless; He decided to perform an experiment to see if maybe there was something to this. The board of overseers at The University made vague threats that he was jeopardizing his pending tenure; But he assured them that it would be a small test of randomly selected students, and there would be no publicity of his experiments. Some of the professors in his department shunned him from then on, but he was able to quietly gather together about 30 of his students to come in on a saturday to participate in an undisclosed psychological experiment.
On the appointed afternoon; 46 students showed up and the professor handed out sheets of paper and pencils to the students. Then he instructed them to try and draw something.
He had to explain what he meant by this, by reading a few of the accounts, and naturally many of the students were so incensed by this nonsense that they walked out. A few decided to give it a try and made a feeble attempt to draw something. When asked what they should try to draw, The Professor was vaguely non-comital and hadn't really thought this experiment through very thoroughly; So he told them to just draw anything. Most of students just sat without drawing anything for several minutes and final began aimlessly doodling on the paper. They then were given random numbers which they wrote on the bottom of the drawing, and tore off a small piece of the paper with the number on it, and wrote on it what they had drawn.
The Professor then took the Drawings and gave them to another group of students to evaluate. They were to examine each drawing and describe what they thought the drawing was of. Then these responses were compared by another, Third group of students, with the tiny scraps of paper which revealed what the drawings were actually supposed to be.
All this data was then statistically tabulated and the results were no better than random.
The Professor and a Colleague of his that shared his interest in these strange & inexplicable tales looked over all the drawings and decided that while statistically & scientifically the test demonstrated that this fabled talent was completely bogus, They both hesitantly agreed that maybe they should perform another test; a more carefully constructed test.
So The two Professors rounded up another 30 students and one of the professors brought his dog. The Instructions this time, after explaining the alleged ability, was to draw the dog.
Regretfully; The dog wandered throughout the classroom, But neither professor thought that this was relevant to the testing.
Again; The statistical results of accuracy were nearly random.
The professors were encouraged however because while none of the judges thought that any of the drawings were of the professors dog, they did presuppose that the drawings were of cows, lions, a table, a chair and a few of dogs, but not the professor's dog.
The Other Professors were becoming very impatient with the two professors that were conducting these tests, as they were now accepting wildly wrong answers as near misses.
Then one of the Professors that was interested in all this, had a student that had read some of these accounts, and posited a theory that the drawer had to be carefully looking at something to accurately draw it. The Professors then conducted another test with this new constraint. The volunteers were set down facing one another and told to draw their partner.
The drawings were carefully tabulated with Double-Blind Statistical Analysis, and again; There were No Hits. None of the drawings were correctly matched to the person that they were supposed to be of...
But looking through all the drawings, The Professors and a few of the students that had taken an interest in this decided that there was something to this drawing stuff, but they couldn't quite nail it down.
Regretfully; The Board of Trusties at The University was deeply annoyed that these experiments had become known to the local paper and then other papers in the region had picked it up, resulting in significant ridicule of the School, So that the professor was denied tenure and soon afterward quit when rumors began to circulate that he was responsible for a series of indecent exposure incidents in a city several miles away.
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When this is made into a film; There can’t be any Artwork or even photographic images anywhere. They have billboards, but they only contain words, they have TV but it is only Words that appear on The Screen with perhaps a few diagrams. Kids wear T-Shirts with Words on them. Lunch pails only have words on them. Instead of Galleries of Art, they have Galleries of Posters with Words on them. children’s books have big words in them. Simulicons in Nature are of Words. People look at clouds & say; That looks just like an ‘R’. In Preschool Classes, The children are given crayons & encouraged to mindlessly scribble on paper. The Best Scribbles are put up on The Wall, Especially ones with anything that looks like a letter or word.
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1 comment:
Awesome. Wordplay is Everywhere.
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