Adults tend to draw stick figures to represent a human.

Kids tend to draw figures to represent their experiences. 

If you’re up for the challenge, spend 3 minutes drawing a representation of you, right now. This can be a shape, object, or any sense of “self” you visualize. 

Drawing is an example of a recovery activity that can help process sensations and perceptions into meaning. You can also draw to create new mental models and brain pathways. 

There are different functions in the structure of your brain that achieve mental homeostasis or the ability to process all the sensory and other stimuli coming from outside and inside of you. Drawing, role-playing, and experiential learning are explorative ways to see how you think and to understand how you feel about a concept.

Allocating sufficient time to conceptualize on paper how you receive, organize, and respond to experiences is learning about health in a way that memorization or reading can’t touch. Sensory representations drive memory. Incidental exposure to novel situations facilitates quicker learning later and may contribute to category knowledge. 

Categories are something like pre-wired reaction-to-stimuli outputs in the brain. You can tap into the capacity to change those. Rather than a focus on output results, focus on the physical effort to adequately process them. Following are a few practices to experiment with: 

1. Biomimicry concepts use nature to represent novel discoveries to first analyze then practice a behavior or task. Two common concepts are The Iceberg Model and The Kawa Model. GIG uses the Tree Model concept.

2. Illusions are useful to discover how your senses modulate information or to help refine your perceptions. Explore a “flat” or mundane activity as a sensory experience to bust illusions and perceptions of a specific environment or task. Examples GIG consultants have used are sanding wood, shopping, sipping hot and cold liquids with a variety of glassware and methods (i.e. straws, handles/handling a cup, rim textures, etc.)  

3. Incorporate novelty into a frequent situation at home or work.

4. Reach out if I may help explore personalizing this practice with you.