Theft at the Public Till
to be in the saddle, reason and truth take a holiday, and a lot of stupid, unfair, self-destructive things end up taking place. Now, fiction is not imagination. It is what anticipates imagination by giving it the form of reality. Walter Lippmann wrote, "For the most part, we do not first see, and then define, we define first and then see." And the perverse effects of the media affect what and how we see. A schema is a cognitive structure that a person uses when processing new information and retrieving old information It is a mental framework the individual constructs from past experiences that helps make sense of a new situation. Schemas are a way of coping with complexity. The world would be a buzzing confusion of unfamiliar information if we had no way of deciphering it. Schemas help us to understand new information, provide us with a framework within which to organize and store it, enable us to derive added meaning from the new situation by filling in missing information, and provide guidance in selecting a suitable response to what we have just seen. When a child has a fit, we recognize it as a temper tantrum, and not as a sign of some deep emotional disturbance. We are able to identify it because the combination of new information (the child's behavior) and our past experiences (we have seen this pattern before in children) tells us what it is. Schemas are powerful. People who "see" the same activity but apply a different schema to it "see" different things. For example, by changing the way you look at things, you can release your innate ability-to draw them. In her book Drawing on -the Right Side of the Brain, Betty Edwards demon- strated that anyone could draw anything. The key was to see that the subject of a drawing was not an apple or a chair; the subject was a pattern in light and shade. The drawings by Edwards's students were not merely accurate, they were alive and full of spirit when they learned to see this way, all her students, not just a chosen few, "got it." Edwards showed how to change the paradigm of what a drawing and its subject were. What made the transformation possible was being told a hand is a pattern in light and shade; a drawing is a pattern in light and shade. All you have to do is look at the pattern and draw. Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain teaches that to draw a picture that looks like the thing you are drawing, you don't draw what you what the
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