Appearance of two dimensionality as a cognitive realm

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  How drawing can be an adaptive tool to link the three-dimensional world and the two-dimensional surface of the printed screen?

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  Our research on children’s spontaneous drawings clearly indicates its cognitive potential to understand the real world in terms of two-dimensional space. In order to understand the real-world, children re-enact their experiences by creating playful recreation by utilising whatever objects they find. So, what we call as play and toys are nothing but children's cognitive activity which serves the purpose of developing the cognitive system and at the same time their understanding of the world. Drawing is the play that children do on two-dimensional surface. By this process they are clearly able to understand the nature of two-dimensional surface as a mere representation of the real world, which is what children are biologically equipped to make sense of.

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  Two-dimensional experience is very new to human beings which became part of general life style only much after the invention of printing press. One could say only by eighteenth century literacy occupied the cultural space in Europe. That is after almost 300 years after the invention of the printing press. In most of the non-western countries even now, half of the population would still belong to the oral cultural sensibility. The manner in which literacy is being introduced clearly alienates people from the real world and is creating an uprooted way of existence. This has not only totally changed their relationship to outer nature, but also denied their own biological connection with cognition.

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  Literacy has brought in a fundamental change to the way we are formed.

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  From raw food to cooked food was the first major change that took place in the biological nature of human being. It totally impacted the digestive system in a very deep manner and also impacted total change in behaviour and the whole social life changed due to this. This impacted total change in the biochemistry and our bodies must have rebelled against this for some time by causing various ‘diseases’. But having lived with this for around 120,000 years or so, we biologically adapted and even impacted our genes.

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  The second event that totally changed our biology was our shift from orality to literacy, which took place on a large scale after the invention of printing press. Till then writing was like small craft activity which only few skilled people could do, who scribed letters into various mediums. It was just like any other craft skill.

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  What cooked food did to the digestive system, literacy did to our cognitive system. It totally changed the cognitive source, cognitive tools, cognitive process and cognitive foundation or the structure. It completely changed the realm of understanding. The two-dimensionality which literacy brings in, in fact, has created a virtual cognitive realm and many of our experiences are now not only two dimensional but also vertical. Up north and down south would be an example of this. Word as the cognitive source completely dislocates us from our context and hence our way of locating ourselves with our own body as the point of reference. For example, use of our hands to get sense of left and right directions. In most oral communities this is done by their contextual reference of where the sun rises and sets, or some other geographical factor.

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  Even though, all the symptoms have been recognized - like alienation, fragmentation, masculinization, exclusion, compartmentalization, linear thinking, binary creation with hierarchical imposition, appropriation we have not been able to understand the real cause. As we are fully entrapped within this linguistic maze created by the mind, we are unable to understand the real experience of the context.  

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  The manner in which processed and chemical food is impacting the nature of digestive system, the digital experience which started with television is again impacting our cognitive system. Some of the senses are getting re-activated by the cognitive source but mind still dominates our being-ness. The rise of feminism might have something to do with the appearance of television and the experience of intuition might have something to do with the digital experience. We can trace this by locating the appearance of the word ‘intuition’ and its acceptance within the ‘rational’ culture.

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  It seems that all our so-called advantages of having a pliable and flexible brain is working against us due to the disappearance of subtlety, sensitivity, ability to stay between the opposites and wisdom. This is because we have misjudged the power of the cognitive source in shaping us. The delusion that we are in control clearly shows we have fallen off the razor’s edge. From being non-dualistic to becoming dualistic is a very thin line which we seem to have crossed.

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  However, our only hope are children because they are born with the original possibility which life has endowed us with.

Children could help us to get back some of our original nature provided we can ‘loosen up’ our over confidence, learn to be sensitive and open to life.