The Brain on Art

Recently, I have struggled through the text I'm reading for a class on learning and how the brain reacts to learning. The chapters we are reading at the moment discuss the importance of art on the developing brain. this is hardly material I need in my job or for my organization.

However there was one statement that with me. Much of my organizations training development in the past twenty years has been centered around using our in-house development application that provides little to no artistic freedom to our developers. There is a place for an image at the top right of the screen. It takes up no more than 30% of the total screen area. The rest of the screen area is dedicated to text. The text is word for word verbatim what the narrator says. Black text on a white background. Clients came to us because they valued speed of production, the ability to deliver to the masses, free development and updates, and a secure place for the instruction to be provided.

I was hired to improve the quality of our training deliverable. I wonder now, if we have been severely under-serving our clients and our learners. By not providing any artistic quality to any of our training modules, have we been inhibiting the ability for our learners to effective learn the material? Sousa states "In recent years, neuroscientists have been developing theories about ways in which art develops cognition. One common element of the current theories is that each art form involves different brain networks" (p. 247). If this is the case, and our learners have been developing neural networks since childhood that include art and artistic works accessing different areas of the brain, and our module in no way help to access those networks, are we potentially leaving untapped areas of the brain which could be useful for effective learning and memory retention?

A tangential thought-line arose at the same time. We have been struggling to help our developers use new software applications that would allow for a more dynamic learning environment. Instead of the staid and standard text book style computer training they're used to producing, we are asking them to think about animations, interactive games and movements, videos and images, and sounds that before were a never a part of the repertoire. I under estimated the amount of time and talent it would take to break them of their old habits. I believed that it was merely a function of giving them the opportunity and they would rush to make more effective training. Instead what we've found is that the old traits they learned are what they are most comfortable with and thinking outside of that box is not something they are eager to do. Worse yet, I worry that we hired developers who were happy to not at artistry or provide any artistic license to their product but who were instead happy to remain in the staid, stable confines of the black on white, small image CBT. We may be trying to make artists of those who don't want to nor see the value of art in our product. 

References

Sousa, D.A. (2016). How the brain learns, (5th Edition). Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin.