In the Asmat culture of New Guinea, God is represented as a carver who
created people from wooden statues. This myth dominates the culture, to
such an extent that all rites of passage, marriage, death rituals, birth
rituals, and all acts of war depend upon the sculptures the village carver
creates for these various rites. The sculptures are sanctified and used
by
the other most promintent figure in the traditional village - the medicine
man.
The simultaneous struggle, and interdependance, of the carver and the
medicine man,
as personifications of art and science, serve as a useful (if somewhat
optimistic)
metaphor for the tentative balance between art and science
in our own culture. If this metaphor is extended to include the more
general
concepts of visual and linguistic cognitive modes, along with art and
science - the balance that exists in our educational systems, in
particular, becomes disturbing.
Science is unquestionably favoured over art, since it ostensibly has a
much more
practical social impact. It is not simply the greater importance given to
the sciences, but a dismissal of the arts, at the level that images are
used freely,
and apparently with little thought for the greater significance they might
be imparting.
As Thagard
says in Mind: An Introduction to Cognitive Psychology,
" . . [M]ental imagery is useful in problem solving, [and] education may
profitably involve teaching people to use images more effectively. . .Most
psychological work on imagery, however, has been concerned with how people
use images, not with educating them to use images better."
(Thagard,1996)
This prefernce is reflected in the structure of our education. The misguided
dichotomy of science versus the arts is truly ridiculous
when considering how many major breakthroughs in modern science have been
accomplished through the use of visualizing a solution. As Albert
Einstein stated in 1945:
"The words of the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to
play any role in my mechanisms of thought. The physical entities which
seem to serve as elemnts in thought are certain signs and more or less
clear images which can be voluntarily reproduced or combined."
(Einstein, p.142)
Not only the Patriarch of Physics, but many others, including the
Patriarch of Evolution, Mr. Charles Darwin, and countless others, from
molecular biologists to chemists, have relied on the visual, particularly
visual mental imagery and dialogue, to aid in the solutions to their
problem-solving. " . . .[A] reliance on verbal concepts alone may lead
the scientist to a certain rigidity of thought which can interfere with
the discovery process."
(John-Steiner:
p.86)
The nescessity to scientists of what Howard E. Gruber characterizes as
wide scope images can be traced to their multiple functions: " . .
.the scientist needs them in order to comprehend what is known and to
guide the search for what is not yet known."
(Gruber:p.137)
