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Posts by Aaron Hertzmann

This editorial discusses the critical value of human-generated scientific writing in the era of large language models (LLMs), arguing that writing is essential to structured thinking and research comprehension. 
Writing as Thinking: The act of writing structure's thoughts, sorting research data, and identifying the main message, unlike LLMs which may lack true understanding or accountability.
LLM Hallucinations: LLM-generated text requires rigorous verification because these models can produce incorrect information or fake references.
Human vs. AI Roles: While LLMs are useful tools for brainstorming, improving grammar, or overcoming writer's block, human researchers must maintain control to engage in the creative task of shaping a compelling narrative.

This editorial discusses the critical value of human-generated scientific writing in the era of large language models (LLMs), arguing that writing is essential to structured thinking and research comprehension. Writing as Thinking: The act of writing structure's thoughts, sorting research data, and identifying the main message, unlike LLMs which may lack true understanding or accountability. LLM Hallucinations: LLM-generated text requires rigorous verification because these models can produce incorrect information or fake references. Human vs. AI Roles: While LLMs are useful tools for brainstorming, improving grammar, or overcoming writer's block, human researchers must maintain control to engage in the creative task of shaping a compelling narrative.

Writing forces your brain to coordinate memory, reasoning, and meaning-making simultaneously.

Every time you write, you rewire toward clearer thinking. Every time you let an LLM do it, you rewire toward consumption.

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I got 42.64, but I have a lot of practice using HSV color sliders to match colors (from practice with digital drawing), and I can think of a lot of words to describe color that help me remember a color

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Adobe takes home an Emmy for pioneering work in VR editing tools Adobe Researchers have been honored with a Technology and Engineering Emmy for their groundbreaking work on virtual reality (VR) editing tools. The Emmy celebrates Adobe’s “significant contributions to the development of 360-degree consumer video capture, editing, and presentation technologies.”

Our internship project earned an Emmy
adobe.ly/4rO38ik

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The art of Aphantasia: how ‘mind blind’ artists create without being able to visualise The condition challenges the centuries-old idea that all great artists are able to envision what they’re drawing.

There are some nice articles and papers about artists with aphantasia, like this one from @mmcksck.bsky.social: theconversation.com/the-art-of-a...

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Lots of fun to write together, thanks so much for working on it with me!

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Learning from Painting, Part 1: Art is a Process In July 2019, I got a new iPad and Apple Pencil, and experimented with some drawing apps. In college, I had studied art (and computer science), but I stopped painting after I graduated. This digital d...

Here's the first in a series of blog posts when I started to pick up drawing again seriously for the first time, more than two decades after I'd finished an art degree and then mostly stopped drawing and painting.
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aaronhertzmann.com/2020/10/05/a...

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Here are some encouragement and tips for how you, yes you, could learn to draw if you want. If you put some time into, it can really enrich your life.
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aaronhertzmann.com/2024/06/21/j...

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The Illusion of Awareness: Why We See Much Less Than We Think We Do A few years ago, while walking home, I noticed a dry cleaners across the street from my house. “Was that always there?” I thought, surprised. I’d walked by that spot many, many times over the years, b...

Here's a post where I've written more about our visual and memory limitations, and how they create an illusion of awareness of the world: we see much less than we think we see, and how this can affect our daily lives.

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OSF

Now for some links: here's the preprint of our paper, accepted to Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts.
psyarxiv.com/pqkxh
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One disclaimer: good drawing is not about copying! Like many psychologists who study this question, we focused mostly on the task of accurately copying an existing drawing. We study copying because it isolates crucial aspects of realistic drawing skill. It's also a useful drawing exercise.
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Our work suggests reasons why people mistake the difficulty of life drawing for lack of innate talent. It’s like there’s this invisible mental block—limitations of vision and the illusion of awareness—and we think that it means “I’m not good.”

Drawing is a set of skills that anyone can learn.
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This led to misguided educational methodologies that discourage children from copying pictures, as @neilcohn.bsky.social has written about. Copying is a valuable drawing exercise. As a child, I copied pictures on my own just for fun, long before my first art class.
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bsky.app/profile/neil...

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Four Important Eras that Define Art This blog post describes four Western art-historical eras, and why I think they are crucial to understanding how we talk about art today (at least in the US and Europe).

In Western culture, we’re taught that artists are some sort of special geniuses with innate talent—you’re either an artist or you’re not—a belief that comes from 18th-c. Romanticism, when artists first needed to self-promote themselves to broader society.
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aaronhertzmann.com/2022/09/27/a...

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Quick cartoon I drew of a person. Eyes are too high up in the head for a realistic drawing. For a cartoon this is great, but not if this were an initial sketch for a realistic drawing or painting.

Quick cartoon I drew of a person. Eyes are too high up in the head for a realistic drawing. For a cartoon this is great, but not if this were an initial sketch for a realistic drawing or painting.

How to plan faces as ovals, by William Goeree, 1688

How to plan faces as ovals, by William Goeree, 1688

Detail of planning sketch by Paolo Veronese, 1568

Detail of planning sketch by Paolo Veronese, 1568

Artists also use conceptual knowledge. For example, a person's eyes are halfway between the top & bottom of their head. But it's so easy to get this wrong, like in this sketch I made! Here's are illustrations of one technique for avoiding the problem, including sketches by Veronese, 1568.
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Learning to draw also involves learning eye-hand coordination skills, like the "Target Locking" behavior shown in this clip from John Tchalenko's film "Capturing Life." This is a common drawing behavior, but people don't know about it because people don't know what their eyes are doing.
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Beginners tend not to look at the source much. And so they can’t get many details simply because they never see them. One study found that requiring novices to look at the subject more frequently improved their copying accuracy. Learning to draw is partly about learning to look more.
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What happens if you restrict eye movements? Here’s a 30-second "blind drawing" I made, without looking once at the drawing. I took the photo a moment later. The “errors” are typical of blind drawing: individual shapes are accurate, but their proportions and placements are not.
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The brain can store very little detail at a time, so you move your eyes back-and-forth to gather information from the source and then put it in the target. It’s like trying to transfer water between two pots using only a leaky teacup.
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These visual limitations explain why artists typically move their eyes so frequently. Here’s a person copying a picture, recorded with an eye tracking device. The black rectangle show where the his eyes are looking at any moment.
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(Clip from "Capturing Life" by John Tchalenko)

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Now try the same exercise, but just staring at a single leaf on the houseplant. Can you count the leaves and branches without moving your eyes at all? Again, it's nearly impossible: you couldn't draw an accurate copy of the plant without moving your eyes.
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Look at the photo, and then look away. How many branches does the plant have? How many leaves does each branch have? These questions are easy when looking at it, but nearly impossible afterward. Drawing the picture from memory—capturing details of contour or shading—would be mostly making it up.
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A houseplant with several branches and several leaves per branch

A houseplant with several branches and several leaves per branch

One clue is that human vision is severely limited, both in terms of what we see at any moment, and how much of it we remember.

And, we are *totally unaware* of how much we do not see, until it is pointed out.

Suppose you wanted to draw a picture from this photo of a houseplant,
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Vintage Film: Watch Henri Matisse Sketch and Make His Famous Cut-Outs (1946) French artist Henri Matisse sat down at his easel to make a charcoal sketch of his grandson, Gerard, at his his home and studio in Nice. The brief clip above is from a 26-minute film by François Campa...

More information on the film it came from: www.openculture.com/2012/09/vint...

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Here's Henri Matisse drawing a portrait of his son. Watch his head and eyes, and how often they look back and forth between his drawing and his son. Why does he look back and forth so frequently—why can't he just draw his son from memory?
And where exactly is he looking?
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Flowchart from source copy to a mental representation produced by perception, to a copy of the drawing made by motor control.

Flowchart from source copy to a mental representation produced by perception, to a copy of the drawing made by motor control.

One might think that an artist draws a picture by looking at the world, forming a mental picture of it, and then drawing from that picture. Drawing errors are perceptual or motor errors.

But no one draws this way, because no one actually keeps a complete picture of what they see in their head.
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The author sketching a church altar on an iPad

The author sketching a church altar on an iPad

Drawing is a creative activity, accessible to everyone: all you need is a pen or pencil and paper, and people have been drawing for at least 45,000 years. Psychologists have extensively studied drawing for decades, but no coherent theory for the process of observational drawing has emerged.
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Why Drawing is Hard: Visual Limitations and the Skills to Overcome Them If asked to draw a picture of a tree or a person in front of them, many people would say “I cannot draw.” Thirty years ago, two psychologists pointed out that this should be surprising. They reasoned ...

If asked to draw a person's portrait, many people would say “I cannot draw.” Why is observational drawing so hard? In a new paper, @judithfan.bsky.social and I answer: it's the limitations of human vision. Learning to draw is learning skills to overcome them.
aaronhertzmann.com/2026/03/23/d... 1/

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Transference in the Afternoon Jesse Barron on the destructive potential of transference.

This article was adjacent in my BlueSky feed: granta.com/transference...

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If navigation apps like Google Maps were invented today, they would be called "AI" and hyped as "AI agents." It's truly amazing how well they work, and now everyone completely takes them for granted, and many people completely outsource the mental task of navigation to them.

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free video for intro lectures on auditory perception

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