[arthistorymajors] Ending Inattention: Why being an Art History Major is a good thing for future M.D.s

[Cecilia Flanagan]

> ·Description: The Wall Street Journal
>
> ·MARVELS
>
> ·June 1, 2012, 3:48 p.m. ET
>
> How to End the Age of Inattention
>
> /Could a Yale program for doctors help everyone pick up on the details?/
>
> By HOLLY FINN
>
> Description: FINN
>
> Yale Center for British Art/Bridgeman Art Library
>
> Is she putting the flower in the vase, or taking it out? Lord Frederic 
> Leighton's "Mrs. James Guthrie."
>
> It's been a moronic spring. But did it have to be? That J.P. Morgan 
> Chase trader known as the "London Whale"---could he have been caught 
> by a keener-eyed boss? How about the Secret Service scandal---would 
> more astute overseers have spotted the signs? And the Pope's 
> butler---nobody saw that coming? Across the board, our perceptiveness 
> has plummeted.
>
> Today's signature move is the head swivel. It is the age of 
> look-then-look-away. Our average attention span halved in a decade, 
> from 12 to five minutes, according to a study commissioned by Lloyds 
> TSB Insurance. (And that was in 2008.) We miss almost everything; we 
> text while we walk. What makes a person stand out now is the ability 
> to look and keep looking.
>
> But as global competition makes us manic about technology---just to 
> keep up, we spend $2 billion on a new CornellNYC Tech campus---we rush 
> past the humanities, the very fields that teach us how and what to 
> notice. Before lunging for another engineering degree, we should catch 
> our breath, look around. We need an intervention---and not the 
> psychotherapeutic kind.
>
> A "museum intervention" is now mandatory at Yale's School of Medicine 
> for all first-year medical students. Called Enhancing Observational 
> Skills, the program asks students to look at and then describe 
> paintings---not Pollocks and Picassos but Victorian pieces, with whole 
> people in them. The aim? To improve diagnostic knack.
>
> Linda Friedlaender, the curator of education at the Yale Center for 
> British Art, and Irwin Braverman, at Yale's medical school, created 
> the program a decade ago and guide groups through the New Haven 
> museum. Each student is assigned a painting---"Mrs. James Guthrie," 
> say, by Lord Frederic Leighton---which they examine for 15 minutes, 
> recording all they see. Then the group discusses its observations.
>
> There is no redness, no apparent pressure, in Mrs. Guthrie's fingers 
> as she holds a flower. Does that mean she's putting it into the 
> vase---or taking it out? The conclusion matters less than the 
> collection of detail. "We are trying to slow down the students," Ms. 
> Friedlaender told me. "They have an urge to come up with a diagnosis 
> immediately and get the right answer."
>
> Many have been taught that schooling is a race to the finish. Others 
> learned early that equations beat etchings (picture book writers, once 
> considered the "academicians of the nursery," have been trampled on 
> the fast track to pre-K). Ms. Friedlander is realistic: "This is not 
> an aesthetic experience we're providing. The artwork is a means to an 
> end."
>
> Surgeon Richard Selzer, in "Letters to a Young Doctor," wrote: "I have 
> seen sorrow more fully expressed in a buttocks eaten away by bedsores; 
> fear, in the arching of a neck; supplication, in a wrist. Only last 
> week I was informed by a man's kneecaps that he was going to die. 
> Flashing blue lights, they teletyped that he was running out of oxygen 
> and blood." The Yale intervention may not endow students with Dr. 
> Selzer's acute empathy. But a three-year study published in the 
> Journal of the American Medical Association showed that, afterward, 
> they are 10% more effective at diagnosis.
>
> The program has expanded to more than 20 medical schools, including 
> Harvard, Columbia and Cornell. It has also become part of Wharton's 
> executive education. In "Portrait of Dr. Samuel D. Gross (The Gross 
> Clinic)," by Thomas Eakins, "there are people who can only be seen if 
> you are standing at a particular angle," says management professor 
> Sigal Barsade. Participants hear others describing the image and think 
> they're nuts. "It is only when they move, physically, that they see 
> what is being talked about."
>
> Seeing the whole picture, from the specifics up, is a good skill for 
> all of us. Research just published by the MIT Media Lab used Google's 
> facial-feature tracker to gauge our ability to distinguish between 
> smiles of delight and frustration---vital, right? A frustrated smile 
> uses different muscles than a happy one, and it lasts an average of 
> 7.5 seconds, versus 13.8. Yet it's a coin toss whether we can tell the 
> difference. We get it right only half the time. An MIT computer 
> algorithm, by contrast, succeeds 92% of the time. It turns out the 
> machine does what museum intervention would have us do. Rather than 
> rush to a general impression, it zooms in, absorbing every detail. It 
> sees what it needs to. Perhaps the folks at J.P. Morgan Chase, the 
> president, the Pope---all of us---should pop off to an art exhibition 
> once in a while.
>
> /A version of this article appeared June 2, 2012, on page C12 in the 
> U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: A Cure for 
> the Age of Inattention./
>
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