Synaptic Pruning

Your brain is like a garden. When you are little, you have too many branches called synapses. As you focus on one thing — like drawing or building — your brain prunes away the branches you do not use and makes the ones you do use much stronger. Focusing on a craft helps your brain become a masterpiece. By choosing what you do with your hands, you choose who you become.

By choosing what you do with your hands you choose who you become. The sculptor removes stone to reveal the statue. The brain removes synapses to reveal the skill. Creation is not always addition. Sometimes creation is subtraction. Every hour you spend practicing the guitar is an hour your brain spends pruning away everything that is not guitar. Mastery is not having more. Mastery is needing less.

Synaptic pruning: natural process eliminating extra synapses between childhood and adulthood, increasing efficiency of neuronal transmissions. Mirrors the artistic process of subtraction — by removing the unnecessary, the essential truth is revealed. Crafting is not just adding to the world; it is the disciplined removal of noise to find the signal. The masterpiece was always inside the marble. The sculptor just removed everything that was not the masterpiece.

SOUND: The snip of garden shears: subtraction as creation.

SMELL: A clean organized room: the scent of what remains after the unnecessary leaves.

TASTE: The sharp clear taste of a lemon: pure, undiluted, essential.

TOUCH: The feeling of a sharp clean edge: precision born from removal.

SIGHT: A perfectly organized toolbox: everything in its place, nothing extra.

BODY: Standing tall and focused: the body after the noise has been pruned away.

Music: Clocks by Vitamin String Quartet

Part of Craft & The Hand — ART — Education Revelation