Hacker News Reader

Comment by jschwartzi | Hacker News Reader

Ask people to draw the powertrain or running gear of a car and you'd get much the same result.

Is that a good comparison? How often does the average person actually see either of those things? The reason it's surprising that people struggle to draw bikes from memory is that most of us see them all the time.

The brain doesn't work like a photo camera. It remembers strictly the minimum required to do it's job, in a highly abstract and compressed form.

How a bike fits together it's kind of irrelevant for most people, even if you ride one or if you must dodge one.

Which is effectively the point of the article.

How about drawing faces of famous people then? Presumably those results would be even worse. With these bicycle drawings, even the most inaccurate ones are pretty easy to recognize as bicycles. But I don’t think you’d get very many recognizable pictures of famous faces, except for a few subjects with famously recognizable features (like hairdo or facial hair).

I think that has more to do with being able to draw. As I argued in another comment here, I think sketching a bike has nothing to do with drawing skills. But sketching a face is not enough: the level of detail that goes into a face is much more sophisticated than a bike. On a bike you connect the lines right and you're good, but in a face... there is no logical, mechanical structure to it that you can easily replicate. The proportions all have to be right, the way skin falls... I think that's different.

I don’t know if I agree with the distinction. Both require you to simplify the actual appearance down to something that will be recognizable. For a bicycle, that’s just a few circles and lines, but skilled artists can draw recognizable faces with the same simple elements.

If you're ten percent off with each bike line, it looks almost perfect. If you're ten percent off with each line while trying to draw a specific person, it won't even resemble them.

A caricature is one thing, and might be doable by an average person, but knowing how to do a caricature is a skill all by itself. A portrait is extremely art skill intensive.

I agree with that, but that’s just the difference between drawing a specific person versus drawing any bicycle. I suspect if you wanted to draw a bicycle that was recognizable as a specific type or brand of bicycle, small differences would be important.

That would probably be worse. At least the weird contraptions they drew are (even if only vaguely) recognisable as a bicycle.

This also raises the question of what you'd get if you asked drivers to draw what they see when they're sitting in the driver's seat.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com