Something I noticed when I started drawing was that I was able to learn new things more easily. And I couldn’t help thinking, is drawing making me smarter? My brain couldn’t leave this question go away, so after some research and experience, this is what I discovered.
Drawing can make people smarter. Scientific evidence suggests drawing creates new neural pathways, which improves visual memory, attention, cognition, and creativity. Drawing also strengthens synapses, making memories stronger and easier to access.
But the exciting part is how it does it and how you can use it to your advantage.
How Can Drawing Make You Smarter?
I first want to clarify that almost any activity that requires your brain to be active and focused can make you more intelligent, including drawing. But there are limits. You won’t understand math or gravity just because you started to draw, but you will find it easier to understand them if you already learned drawing. The primary reason drawing makes you smarter is because your brain develops neural pathways as you do it. But so does speech, music, math, exercise, etc.
You don’t have to take my word for it; there are plenty of studies that show how drawing makes people smarter, like this one from the Cerebrum Dana Foundation and this one from the Department of Neurology of University Hospital Erlangen. Also these other two from Dartmouth College: Taking an Art Course Rewires Your Brain – Visual art learning alters neural structure and function.
Every activity makes a person smarter in different ways, but the reasons how drawing makes you more intelligent are fascinating. We’ll cover them one by one:
- It improves attention. The mental demands of drawing in the brain are so high that it stops restless thoughts, worries, and most conscious thinking to focus on the task. Deep concentration isn’t a common thing to happen to modern humans, but drawing makes it happen as it was the simplest thing ever. This experience helps the brain be more easily focused on other regular tasks, such as reading, having a conversation, solving a problem, or working.
- It enhances how you see. The human brain does not focus on the details of what we see, simply because we don’t have to. We don’t see a building and start counting the number of bricks and windows it has; we only identify it to avoid running into it. But when you draw, you must force your brain to see all these details. With time, the more you draw and get better at identifying the world around you, you become a person that sees what most don’t.
- It improves visual memory. The usual drawing process is looking at your reference image and then stroking a line. Since you cannot perform these two actions simultaneously in the beginning, a very-short-term memory is required. You’re continually forcing your brain to retain information over and over again for short periods, which consequently develops an improvement in visual memory and short term memory. The mental images you can create when drawing anything compared to looking at a picture are immense. Drawing forces you to see every detail, creating a more robust mental image of the photo you see and draw, whereas just looking doesn’t add any important reason to your brain to remember the picture better.
- It makes you more creative. Since your mind has more information to pull from, it is easier to create new things. At the core, creativity is just a combination of ideas. If you know to draw what you think, visualizing your ideas can positively support the process of creating something new. One good drawing practice to improve creativity is to try to draw your thoughts.
- It improves cognition. Although this factor is tough to measure due to all the variables it has, more and more scientific studies provide data that suggests this is a fact. This phenomenon is significantly positive in art creation, including drawing. The graphic below shows how visual art production enhances functional brain connectivity, improving how you analyze information.
- It improves intuition. Repetitive drawing exercises, like drawing circles or lines, can stop your thoughts and make your brain focus on drawing. When this happens, the unconscious part of your brain takes over, and the actions you make are more intuitive. This reaction is also known as drawing with the right side of the brain. The brain then enters a state of relaxation that improves the health of your mental connections, helping you make better quick decisions in general.
- It improves hand to eye coordination. One of the drawing’s physical demands is to have good hand to eye coordination. Otherwise, your lines won’t be as you intended. The more you practice and stroke lines better, you will improve in this matter. I have found this aspect very useful in situations like playing table tennis, dart throwing, and basketball.
How Long Does It Take Drawing To Make You Smarter?
The speed you will get better at any activity you practice depends on your background and the number of hours you put into it. For the average person, seeing significant improvements in their drawing skills start to occur almost immediately. If you draw a line a hundred times, chances are your last line will look a lot better than the first one. You’re then “smarter” because your hand to eye coordination is better, and your brain now understands how to use your hand muscles better.
The improvement would be slightly minimum, but that’s the thing: you’re continuously improving your drawing the more you practice.
Some techniques and concepts will be harder to learn than others, and the more complex a concept is, the smarter you will have to be for your brain to master it. And this happens simultaneously. When learning to draw, you will notice how much we don’t know how things look like, even if you see them several times. Try to draw something from memory, like a horse, and you will see how difficult it is to include all the details to make it look real. And some people can do it easily!
Just imagine the effort and time you would have to invest to achieve such a thing. A brain that can draw a horse from memory, and possibly many other things, has already reached another level of complex thinking, at least in that exact matter. And there’s a somewhat popular guy called Michelangelo that did that for a whole chapel ceiling.
So we can see small and considerable jumps in intelligence when drawing consistently. They depend on how much you like doing it and how much time you practice it.
Does Drawing Make You Smarter Than Someone Who Doesn’t?
Now we know drawing can make you smarter, but does it make you more intelligent than other people? We would have to view this from two different points of view.
- Artistic person vs. a non-artistic person: In the hypothetical case of two people who have the same intelligence/abilities, and one starts to practice drawing while the other one doesn’t, then yes, the artistic person will be smarter than those doing nothing.
- An artistic person compared to a person who is talented in other fields. This case will be the most likely in general, and the answer is simple: artistic people will be smarter than non-artistic people at drawing or performing arts. However, other people may thrive at math, while artistic people may not.
Intelligence has multiple factors. Although you can see general improvements from any activity you practice, you will see the most results in the areas that directly affect what you’re doing. If you practice drawing, you will get better at drawing, and that will make you smarter, but if you want to get better at swimming, you will need to practice swimming. The vital thing to get smarter is to keep your brain learning new things, whether it is drawing or any other activity.
Although drawing has many different benefits, just like getting smarter, there is still so much more than just this. Training your brain is a great motivation to start drawing, but consider not doing it just because of that. When you draw, think about this quote.
“Art washes away from the soul, the dust of everyday life.”
Pablo Picasso.