Bridging the Explanatory Gap
I am the type of person who has a hard time describing my own personality or appearance because I never feel like I fully know who I am. As a result, I’m always on a quest to find new ways to learn about myself or describe myself, and recently this has led me down a rabbit hole of looking at art that tries to depict what things like anxiety would look like visually. However, I have yet to feel like any of this kind of art feels familiar to how I experience my emotions, or even how I experience being inside my own head, so this piece is my attempt to show what I think my mind would look like if someone else could enter it. To be clear, I don’t really “see” anything when I close my eyes and think, so this piece is more of an abstract representation than an exact translation.
This was one of the most difficult pieces I’ve ever tried to conceptualize and execute, and it took me many rounds of sketching out an idea, staring at it for a little too long, and then scrapping it completely and starting over from scratch. Eventually, I decided I wanted the background to try to capture the chaos of my thoughts, so I sat down for a few hours and scribbled down my stream of consciousness, purposefully making it illegible for privacy, but still recognizable as words. I also wanted to include the sensation I often have of being too small to manage everything going on in my head without making it seem too dark or depressing, so I added the very simple, bright outlines of myself in a flowery field facing the wall of thoughts. The very last feature I added is a slight motion blur on the character that represents myself because the original solid outline felt like it didn’t represent the constant shifting between different topics inside my head.
While I can provide that summary of why I represented things in certain ways, anyone other than myself will never be able to fully understand it. Psychologists have an explanation for why this is: the explanatory gap. Best explained in terms of how we understand color, the explanatory gap is the reality that we can’t describe what we see or feel to others accurately because all of the words or visual cues we use to communicate relate to our individual perception of what they mean. For example, we may all be able to name the color red and (as long as we’re not colorblind) point it out when we see it, but there is no way to know if we are all seeing the same thing or describe what red looks like to someone who is either colorblind or completely blind from birth. Another example is pain: I could rate my pain on a scale from 1 to 10 if my doctor asks, but they will only be able to understand that measure in terms of how they personally experience pain. The same concept explains my inability to accurately communicate what I feel inside my own head in a way that won’t be obscured by other people’s personal perspectives.
The explanatory gap probably explains why I was never able to find any art about anxiety and other mental experiences that felt familiar. Not only am I probably feeling completely different things than those other artists, but we would also never represent the same feelings in the same ways. Despite these limitations, this exercise of trying to process how my brain works and translate it visually was both fun and a good way to learn more about myself, and I’d recommend it to anyone else who’s up for the challenge!
