Wendy MacNaughton The art of paying attention TED
All right, I’m going to go out
on a limb here.
I’m going to say that every single
one of us in this room
made drawings when we were little.
Yes?
Yes? OK.
And maybe around the age of like,
four or five or something like that,
you might have been drawing,
and a grown-up came over
and looked over your shoulder and said,
“What’s that?”
And you said, “It’s a face.”
And they said,
“That’s not really what a face looks like.
This is what a face looks like.”
And they proceeded to draw this.
Circle, two almonds for some eyes,
this upside-down seven
situation we have here,
and then a curved line.
But guess what?
This doesn’t really look
that much like a face, OK?
It’s an icon.
It’s visual shorthand,
and it’s how we look
at so much of our world today.
See, we have so much information
coming at us all the time,
that our brains literally
can’t process it,
and we fill in the world with patterns.
Much of what we see
is our own expectations.
All right.
I’m going to show you a little trick
to rewire your brain into looking again.
Did you all get an envelope
that says “do not open” on it?
Grab that envelope, it’s time to open it.
Inside should be
a piece of paper and a pencil.
Once you have that all prepped,
please turn to somebody next to you.
Ideally, somebody you don’t know.
Yeah, we’re doing this, people,
we’re doing this.
(Laughs)
Great.
Everybody find a partner?
OK, now look back at me.
OK, now look back at me.
You are going to draw each other, OK?
No, no, no, no, wait, wait, wait, wait.
I promise this is not
about doing a good drawing, OK?
That’s not what we’re doing here,
we’re looking, this is about looking.
Everybody’s going to be terrible,
I promise, don’t worry.
You’re going to draw each other
with two very simple rules.
One, you are never going to lift
your pencil up off the paper.
One continuous line.
No, no, trust me here.
This is about looking, OK?
So one continuous line
never lift the pencil.
Number two,
never, ever, ever look down
at the paper you’re drawing on, OK?
Yes, it’s about looking.
So keep looking at the person
you’re drawing.
Now put your pencil down in
the middle of the paper, OK?
Look up at your partner.
Look at the inside of one of their eyes.
Doesn’t matter which one.
That’s where you’re going to start.
Ready?
Deep breath.
(Inhales)
And begin.
Now, just draw but notice where you are,
you’re starting there
and you see there is a corner,
maybe there’s a curve there.
Notice those little lines, the eyelashes.
People are wearing masks,
some aren’t, just work with that.
Now just go slow.
Pay attention and draw what you see.
And don’t look down.
Just keep going.
(Murmuring)
And just five more seconds.
And stop.
Look down at your beautiful drawings.
(Laughter)
Right?
Show your partner
their incredible portrait.
It’s so good, right?
I want to see them.
Hold them up.
Can you guys hold them up?
Hold up, everybody.
Oh my gosh.
Are you kidding me?
You all are amazing.
OK, you can put your drawings back down,
tuck them under,
put them on the paper.
That was wonderful.
I mean, they’re all terrible,
but they’re wonderful.
Why are they wonderful?
Because you all just drew a face.
You drew what you saw.
You didn’t draw what you think
a face looks like, right?
You also just did something
that people rarely do.
You just made intimate eye-to-eye,
face-to-face contact with someone
without shying away
for almost a minute.
Through drawing, you slowed down,
you paid attention,
you looked closely at someone
and you let them look closely at you.
Good job.
I have found that drawing like this
creates an immediate connection
like nothing else.
Alright.
So I call myself an illustrator
and a graphic journalist.
I draw, I tell stories.
I spend time with people
looking and listening.
And I take the words
of the people that I speak with
and I put it together with drawings
that I do, mostly from life,
just like you all just did.
I found that drawing like this
does a lot of things
that photography can’t do.
So when somebody points
a camera at you, how do you feel?
A little objectified, right?
When I’m drawing,
I hold my sketchbook low
and it keeps an open channel
between me and the person I’m drawing.
A lot of time somebody will see me drawing
and they’ll get curious.
They’ll come over to me,
and a real, authentic conversation begins.
Let me give you an example.
So a while back,
I wanted to do a drawn story
about how the public library
serves our elders.
But after spending a few days
kind of lurking around with a sketch pad,
looking over older folks' shoulders
and asking them what they were reading,
I wasn’t really getting the story.
Until I stumbled upon Leah.
Leah is the first, and at the time
was the only, full-time social worker
dedicated to a library in the nation.
Turns out, public library
definitely serves our elders.
It is also a social service
epicenter of a city.
This is Charles.
Charles works with Leah.
And he does outreach
within the library to folks
who are experiencing homelessness.
And he took me around,
I carried my sketch pad
and I was drawing everything I saw,
and he showed me a very different library
than I’d previously seen.
So computers that I assumed
were for checking-out books,
or, you know, looking at emails,
were in fact a lifeline for folks
who are searching for jobs and housing.
The sinks in the public restroom,
they are a laundromat and showers
for folks who are sleeping on the street.
A library is a safe, quiet place
where anybody can go and find resources
and rest for free.
See, the moment I stopped looking
for the story that I expected to see,
an entirely new
and richer truth was revealed.
I found this to be true with everything
and everyone I’ve ever drawn.
OK, so I draw from life,
right, like you guys did.
And so I built myself a mobile studio
in the back of a swanky Honda Element –
So that I could go anywhere,
talk to anyone at any time and then draw
and paint and sleep in the back.
It is very cozy.
I was on the road in Utah,
drawing and talking to people,
when I spotted on the side of the road
a hand-painted wooden sign.
It said “Bootmaker.”
I stopped.
A tall, white, handlebar mustached man
wearing a cowboy shirt,
opened the door and found me,
a sketchbook-carrying, jumpsuit-wearing,
urban, lefty lesbian,
smiling like, waving like a dork.
(Laughter)
When I spotted the stuffed cougar
on the wall behind him,
this vegetarian thought she knew
all she needed to know
about Don the bootmaker.
But there we were.
So I asked him if he’d just show me
quickly a little bit about his craft.
He agreed.
And we ended up spending
the whole day together,
as I drew out Don in his workshop,
and he told me about the sudden death
of his beloved wife,
about his deep, deep grief,
and about this hunting trip
that he was planning,
and so looking forward
to taking with his son.
Every tool in that shop held a story.
And he was so, so happy
to share it with somebody
who was genuinely curious and interested.
By the end of the day,
Don and I looked
very different to one another.
And this drawing,
which ended up in my visual column
in the New York Times
or as Don likes to call it,
the fake-news media –
(Laughter)
now hangs framed on the wall
of his big game trophy room.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
So I was getting ready to start
on a new drawn story
when the pandemic hit.
And overnight I was, like so many people,
just unable to do my job.
It was my own mother who suggested
that I teach drawing to kids.
Kids who were about to lose
their routines,
be stuck at home,
and to help give parents
a much needed short break.
Now I’m trained as a social worker,
but I’d never taught kids before.
But the night before school
closures in San Francisco,
I went on Instagram
and announced that the next day
we’d try something called DrawTogether.
10 am.
I sat behind my drawing table
in my home studio
and my wonderful wife
pointed an iPhone at me
and pressed “Go live.”
And what I thought would be 100 kids,
ended up being 12,000.
All eager to draw a dog.
The next day,
14,000 kids came
and we drew a tree,
and that drawing exercise
that you all just did.
What was supposed to be
five minutes for five days,
ended up being 30 minutes a day,
five days a week,
for months.
And yeah, we talked about line and shape
and we learned about perspective
and light and shadow.
But what was really going on
was we were actively looking our way
through a global catastrophe together.
See, drawing slows us down.
It keeps our hands moving
so we can pay attention to things
that we usually overlook
or that we ignore.
Studies show that drawing
is one of the most effective ways
for kids to process their emotions,
and that includes trauma.
It helps us talk about hard things.
We say something in DrawTogether,
it sounds hokey, but it is true.
Drawing is looking
and looking is loving.
If we can give kids the right
supportive environment,
drawing helps them let go
of perfectionism and fear of failure
so that they, unlike you and me,
and especially those of us
who might have freaked out just a wee bit
when I said earlier
we were going to draw, right?
We can let go of these
harder self-judgments
so we don’t have to undo
them later in life.
OK, I don’t expect you all
to become drawers.
But I do know that all of us,
kids, grownups, everyone in this room,
we can all be better at looking.
Because this is not a face.
And when we live like this drawing,
we miss out on all of the depth
and detail of the world
and people around us.
This is a face.
And this is a face.
And that is such a face.
(Laughs)
And these are faces.
And if you slow down, I promise,
pay attention and really look.
You will fall back in love
with the world and everyone in it.
And after the past few years we’ve had,
I think we all desperately need a chance
to look closely at one another
and at ourselves,
and tell the real truth about what we see.
Thank you.
(Applause)