It’s Not Me, It’s Barcelona

Shortly after moving to Barcelona, I met an English woman at a book exchange who confessed that even after living here three years, she was still taking beginning Spanish. A woman listening in said that her goal, after living here two years, was to master one past tense. She felt that was all she could manage.

I went home and pronounced them pathetic. How lazy they were, locked away in their expat bubble! I, on the other hand, would surely be fluent within a couple of years.

Fast forward seven years and although I have managed to claw myself to a fairly high level of Spanish, I am far from fluent. It’s embarrassing. What happened to my grand plan of quickly tipping to fluency?

Barcelona, it turns out, had other plans.

Environment matters

Although I didn’t know it when we moved, Barcelona is a notoriously bad place to learn Spanish. The large expat community here means that you are as likely to hear English, Italian, or Chinese on the street as you are Spanish. Locals switch to English at your first linguistic stumble. And because Barcelona is in Catalunya, everything from billboards to the programs at the concert hall are in Catalan – a language that more closely resembles French and Italian than Spanish.

Barcelona doesn’t exactly thwart Spanish learning, it’s just that it doesn't particularly help.

Environment matters. It’s easier to get daily exercise in a city that is designed for walking than one that is designed for driving. It’s easier to eat a healthy diet if that is what’s on the menu. It’s easier to do the right thing when everyone else is doing it.

Even when we think that we are in the driver’s seat and making conscious decisions about how to behave, it is actually a complex series of largely hidden interactions between mind and environment that determines where we go. As James Clear sums up in his book Atomic Habits, “Environment is the invisible hand that shapes human behavior.”

The role of the environment in influencing mind and behavior is especially easy to see when we look at babies. Babies are a bundle of ready-made cognitive systems including an innate capacity for learning language. They also come with built-in psychological drivers, including a strong desire to communicate and socially connect. But language acquisition doesn’t happen on its own. It is fueled by the environment.

Luckily, the immersive language environment into which babies are born is a match made in heaven – and the richer the better. Babies get all the information, structure, and feedback they need to learn how to communicate and connect. In the process, their brains are forever changed as a primary language — or occasionally two or three — takes hold, shaping not only their language center but also the way they perceive the world.

A supportive language-learning environment doesn't necessarily make things easy for these little humans. If you have ever watched a baby learn to do anything — including finding their own feet — you know that learning can be hard. But a rich language environment does make language learning easier.

Adult language learners rarely have such an ideal mind-environment alignment as your average baby. But for the expats I know who have become truly fluent in Spanish, there are some similarities. Most of them came to Spain alone instead of arriving with their English-speaking families. Many of them moved initially to parts of Spain where English was not widely spoken and thus had no option but to use Spanish to figure things out. Many have Spanish speaking partners, giving them entry to Spanish speaking community.

Their environment didn’t make learning Spanish easy, but it did make it easier.

Barcelona doesn’t make it easy

I know that some of my fluent friends not so secretly think that non-fluent expats are lazy. After all, they didn’t have too much trouble learning Spanish. I have also felt that I must be lazy, or that I don’t have a head for languages, or that I’m just not disciplined enough. And while there may be some truth to that, it is only part of the story.

Not only is Spanish immersion near impossible to achieve in Barcelona for reasons I’ve already mentioned, but the city offers up a wide array of ways for me to meet my needs without speaking Spanish. Navigating health care, renting an apartment, getting a haircut? I could try and stumble through those things in Spanish, but in Barcelona I can easily do them in English. Finding a school for my child who is two years away from college? It made sense to optimize academics over language acquisition by putting him in an English-speaking school. Building community? The locals speak Catalan and aren’t necessarily looking to expand their social group. The expat community, on the other hand, is welcoming and easy to access.

Choosing the easy English way out in these contexts is not lazy, it is cognitively efficient. Why risk medical miscommunication? Why feel socially out of place when community is readily available? Why not avoid the cognitive pain that comes from feeling like an idiot?

But taking the easy way out in terms of meeting one’s needs means having to go the hard road in terms of learning Spanish. Without help from our environment, we put a heavier burden on ourselves. We must make do with the artificial structure of grammar rules, vocabulary lists, and flashcards. We need to consciously and continually choose to sustain the work of language learning.

It’s no wonder our motivation flags and we end up in what my former Spanish teacher called, “intermediate hell.” It’s no surprise we find ourselves thinking that one past tense really is enough. 

Riding the environmental wave

If we understand language learning – or whatever else we are trying to do – as an integrated effort between mind and environment, it gives us another way to think about change.

And this is why, when faced with the verb conjugation app that was recently recommended to me, I find myself wondering if I could make my environment work harder for me instead of placing the learning burden entirely on my own waning willpower.

Big changes aren’t always possible. I’m not about to leave my partner in order to immerse myself for several months somewhere in non-Catalunya Spain. I’m not going to drop my English-speaking friends or quit my English-speaking work.

But there are some small tweaks that might make my environment more supportive of my efforts. For the next couple months, I’ve decided to put the flashcards aside and focus on making small decisions that open up immersive opportunities. I want to see how far I can get by consciously deciding to jump and then letting the current pull me along.

Today I began my conversation with my dentist in Spanish even though his English is excellent. Last week I started reading a new murder mystery in Spanish. Mysteries are not necessarily my favorite genre but they are inherently cognitively engaging — I want to know what happens next and so the story drags me along. I am going to try and get over my aversion to watching TV during the day and regularly schedule in some Spanish Netflix — maybe something slightly trashy that appeals to my base interests.

None of these strategies will make bumping up my Spanish easy. But I am hoping that they will make it easier.

Environment matters.

What are you trying to learn, or do, or change? How could you tweak your environment to make it easier?

Anne Kearney is the 2025 ReDirect Artist in Residence. You can read more about her here.

Digesting Art and Other Information

Some Assembly Required. Oil, acrylic, cold wax, collage on wood. Anne Kearney

I was recently working on an abstract collage in paint and fabric and was stumped about what to do next. What else does it need? What should I add? Do I go for the glue gun or the paint brush? In a moment of inspiration I went, instead, for the utility knife. Slicing off a sizable chunk of the piece seemed dramatic but was just what was needed to create a unified whole.

Looking around at my other collages in progress lying on the studio floor, I sought further composition inspiration by thinking back to the two-hour lecture I’d taken a couple years ago from an artist of note. What were those actionable guidelines and strategies? What were those juicy bits of advice? My mind was a blank. Perhaps delusionally, I chose to believe that the absence of useful knowledge was a function not of my aging brain but of the presentation itself.

The lecture felt informative at the time. It was chock-a-block full of compositional rules and guidelines. It ran through long lists of things to keep in mind, like rhythm and balance, contrast and repetition, line and pattern. And it included image after image. Paintings marked up in grids of thirds. Paintings overlaid with the golden ratio. Paintings crisscrossed with webs of lines showing relationships.

There was so much information, in fact, that apparently none of it stuck.

As artists we communicate not just through art but also about art. We talk about our work. We write. We teach. We care about helping people understand. And yet in our excitement to share everything we know, it is all too easy to share too much. This is a tendency that I have to regularly fight against when writing these blog posts.

Just as it is easy to lose sight of the big picture when putting paint to surface, it is easy to lose sight of the big questions when putting words to paper. Am I imparting something with sticking power? Am I helping people understand?

As with painting, guidelines can be useful in the composition of information—not just for artists but for anyone engaged in the creative act of communication.

What are some of those guidelines? Read on – and I will try not to make you cross-eyed with the verbal equivalent of crisscrossed lines.

Organization Aids Digestion

Painters might not care about the neuroscience behind information processing, but effective composition in painting works because it resonates with the way the brain works.

Artists learn that paintings are often strongest if they have one main focal point. They learn to organize the painting along a visual hierarchy by using, for example, color intensity and value, so that viewers aren’t overwhelmed. They organize the elements of the painting to help lead the eye. And they ruthlessly edit, cutting away elements that distract from the whole. Often this editing involves getting rid of the artist’s favorite marks in a process that can be so wrought we call it “killing our darlings.”

There is a parallel here with communication. A good TED Talk, for example, gives the brain a focal point in the form of a central theme. It explains that theme by exploring a hierarchy of related concepts. It guides the listener by effectively leading them from point to point. And it gives enough detail and imagery to be interesting along the way.

Breaking information down into bite-sized pieces and then weaving those pieces together resonates with the brain’s natural system of organizing knowledge. This resonance makes the information easier to digest. If the lecturer on painting composition had given his talk a clearer unifying principle, and then organized his main points into bite-sized concepts with accessible examples, my brain might have something to show for the time I spent.

Don’t Overfeed Me

In my attempt to learn about composition, I would have been much better off learning three useful things rather than forgetting the twenty or so that were presented. Our brains can only handle so much at a time. And if we are asked to simultaneously take in more than we can handle, we get overloaded and often tune out as a protective response.  

How many things are we capable of thinking about at once? The magic number, based on a whole lot of research in psychology, is five plus or minus two. 

Great, you might be thinking, I can talk about seven things in my next presentation. Not so fast.  For complex things or for people who have competing demands on their attention — which is most of us, most of the time — that number is at the lower end.

As the ubiquitous “menu del dia” in Spain attests, a three-course lunch with small portions is digestible on a normal workday. Five courses might be reserved for a special dinner when you have more time. And seven courses comprise an event to which you must be committed.

It is no coincidence that painters often break the canvas into three main areas by value or pictorial space, that major concertos have three movements, and that June Cohen, former executive producer of Ted Media, says that a great talk should clearly articulate a single main idea and have no more than three supporting subpoints. Sometimes three really is the magic number.

Cheating by Chunking

While going broader with the amount of information you try and share comes with risks, you can sometimes go deeper. It is possible to effectively get around the brain’s limited capacity by grouping information into categories and subcategories — or as psychologists like to say, “chunking.” With chunking you are packaging bits of information inside conceptual containers so that they are easy to carry around. It’s a little bit like opening a bento box and finding three or four mini-trays nestled inside.

Painters chunk in a variety of ways, for example by starting with a small number of large shapes and then dividing those shapes into smaller shapes to add more detail. Writers chunk by nesting sub-themes under themes.

How many levels of chunking can you effectively include? That will depend on what you are trying to say, the timing and format you are using, and on your audience. Are you a presenter with limited time to present? Do you have an audience of beginners or people with many demands on their attention? You can probably really only cover three concepts related to your main theme before you start to overwhelm or lose people. Do you have your audience for a longer period of time? Are you sharing information via a long-form essay with people who are interested in what you’re saying? You can probably go deeper. But even then, you need good structure and compelling content.

The painting composition teacher had a group of interested artists for two hours. He could have effectively covered a fair amount of information – though not nearly as much as he tried to pack in – if it had been better organized. Concepts like dynamic symmetry, diagonals, dominance and rhythm, for example, could have been organized under a limited number of compelling themes like how to keep the eye moving or how to achieve visual balance.

Please Don’t Feed Me Bonbons

Often the importance of structure is summed up as “less is more.” And this is not a bad place to start. Keeping to one main theme is important. Sharing a limited number of concepts related to that theme is much more likely to be effective than trying to cram in too much information.

And yet I have noticed a trend toward oversimplification in much of the information that is shared these days. Important concepts are presented as lists – Stephen King’s 20 rules for writers, Diebenkorn’s 10 rules for artists. Politicians stop trying to communicate real information in their efforts to oversimplify and provoke emotion at the expense of understanding. News feeds give us sound bites that grab our attention but often fail to deliver anything of substance.

In our information diet we are increasingly being fed the equivalent of ultra-processed food. Like these foods, this kind of information is hard to resist, goes down easily, but ultimately does not nourish us. 

We are warned of waning attention spans and told to keep it simple. Yet it is the dense informational packages of stories, imagery, and examples that provide the conceptual vitamins, minerals, and flavors that make food for thought worth eating. Detail in information, as long as it sits within a structure and isn’t the equivalent of an overwhelming number of crisscrossed lines, gives us something to cognitively latch onto and explore. It sparks emotions, memories, and associated ideas making the information more likely to stick.

As communicators ourselves, let’s not add to empty informational calories and the collective sugar crash that ensues. Give me information that is easy to digest but please don’t feed me bonbons.

Beyond and Back to Rules

Good composition doesn’t necessarily ensure a good outcome. Many other ingredients go into successful communication. Many examples of communication follow all the rules but still fall flat.

Some works of art ignore compositional rules altogether yet are still captivating. Jackson Pollack’s drip paintings lack structure at first glance. Edgard Varèse’s avant-garde music compositions were sometimes written to deliberately challenge the audience. And the great Russian novels where everyone has at least three different names now need guides to help the modern reader keep everything straight.

One can argue that these works are successful not because they lack structure but because their audiences – typically people with expertise or inherent interest in the genre – are willing to put the mental effort into creating structure. For some people, the challenge of discovering or creating structure from information is immensely satisfying.

A reviewer of a book I recently read — and had trouble navigating — noted that this was a “difficult” book but that pulling out the themes was ultimately worthwhile. An artist I admire deliberately spends time with paintings that aren’t immediately engaging or likable in an attempt to understand what the artist is saying.

You can learn a lot this way. You can also get a headache.

I applaud experimentation. But with everyday kinds of communication most of us simply don’t have enough time, mental energy, or interest to put effort into extracting structure from information in order to more fully digest it.

So please, if you want to reach us, help us. Organize your thoughts. Tell us something rather than everything. Make it interesting.

Paying attention to how you communicate and not just what you communicate will help your information stick.

What do I do I hope sticks with you from this post? Three general guidelines for effective communication:

Share bite-sized ideas – they are easier to chew
Is there a clear main idea? Are the supporting concepts and themes coherent? Would cutting things out bring clarity to the whole even if you – like I have done many times while creating this post – have to kill your darlings?

Respect limited digestive capacity
Are you overwhelming your audience by asking them to think about too many things at once? What information can you cut or chunk to make it more manageable?

Make it nutritious
Is the information nutritionally dense? Are there enough interesting details to engage your audience? Are you giving them meaty things to think about?

If you can do these things, you are well on your way to making the information that you share understandable and impactful. As the French painter Pierre Bonnard said, “A well-composed painting is half done.”

Anne Kearney is the 2025 ReDirect Artist in Residence. You can read more about her here.

Retrospecting My Future

Last week in my dreams, I was visited by the ghost of my future self. In a mist straight out of The Muppets’ Christmas Carol, which my family and I had watched the week before, my ghost proceeded to tell me how badly I had failed to meet my 2025 art practice goals. I railed against my Ghost of Art Practice Future while scrambling through the studio debris thinking surely I could find at least one finished painting. Alas, I could not.

Digital collage from original photo and charcoal drawing. Anne Kearney

When I awoke I found myself, just like Scrooge, thinking that surely this future could be averted. But how?

Enter the premortem.

We all know what a postmortem is. The image that comes to my mind is of a wry and slightly jaded TV murder-series coroner throwing around terms like “trace evidence” and “blunt force trauma” while piecing together the probable cause of death for an unlucky victim. A postmortem is about creating a narrative – a mental model – to help explain what happened and ideally shed some light on how to keep the rest of us safer. This is good information but it doesn’t do much for the victim.

What if, in a recursive reality where time paradoxes were possible, the postmortem could be performed before the person died in order to provide timely information that would avert their death?

That is, in essence, what a premortem tries to do.

Gary Klein, who coined the term premortem in a 2007 Harvard Business Review article, says that, "Unlike a typical critiquing session, in which project team members are asked what might go wrong, the premortem operates on the assumption that the 'patient' has died, and so asks what did go wrong.”

What’s wrong with regular planning?

Why does a premortem work better than just planning the regular way?

One of the reasons is that people tend to be charmingly optimistic. And this optimism can lead to some pretty big planning mistakes. Of course, not everyone is optimistic all the time — depressed people tend to be more pessimistic in general, for example — but being overly optimistic when thinking about the future is a common enough phenomenon that psychologists have coined the term “optimism bias” to describe this human tendency.

Nobel Prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman, who spent decades studying human thought and decision making, sums up this tendency in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow: “Most of us view the world as more benign than it really is, our own attributes as more favorable than they truly are, and the goals we adopt as more achievable than they are likely to be. We also tend to exaggerate our ability to forecast the future, which fosters optimistic overconfidence. In terms of its consequences for decisions, the optimistic bias may well be the most significant of the cognitive biases.”

This bias toward optimism appears to transcend gender, ethnicity, nationality, age, and even species — starlings, for example, have also shown a tendency toward unwarranted optimism. In fact, even if we know about the optimism bias, we have difficulty escaping its pull. Case in point: as I write these words, I am thinking that surely I am less susceptible than others to the optimism bias and thus more capable of realistic planning and eventual success. My future ghost does not agree.

On the surface, a built-in cognitive bias toward optimism seems strange. Why on earth would our brains be wired for optimism? Wouldn’t a healthy dose of fear and pessimism keep us safer?

It turns out that optimism has some distinct advantages. An optimistic outlook keeps us from the paralysis of worrying about things over which we have little or no control. It encourages forward thinking and action. And it can smooth over our interactions with other people. Not surprisingly then, optimism is associated with lower levels of depression, anxiety, and stress — all of which can adversely impact quality and quantity of life. Optimists also tend to work harder and longer which, one can imagine, leads to a range of good outcomes.

A slightly delusional optimism is what allows people to pursue a career in the arts, to say “I do,” and to decide to become parents. Perpetually believing that a painting is almost done is what enables me to keep at it for the twenty hours – or days or months – that it actually takes to finish.

Ignorance, it turns out, really can be bliss.

The problem with optimism

Given the benefits of optimism, I certainly wouldn’t wish this bias away.

And yet while optimism is important, it can be problematic if it comes at the expense of realistic forecasting and planning. One consequence of overconfidence is something psychologists call the “planning fallacy.” This phenomenon describes the very human tendency to underestimate the time, costs, and risks associated with a task. Even worse, studies have shown that these planning errors are not just a characteristic of the inexperienced — on the contrary, the planning fallacy is hard to shake even when we should know better.

College students reliably pull all-nighters and turn in half-baked arguments because they have underestimated — yet again — how long their term paper will actually take to complete. Managers routinely promise more than their team can realistically deliver. Building renovations famously end up taking longer and costing more than even seasoned contractors estimate. And artists are perpetually scrambling to pull together their exhibition even when past experience has told them that it will take longer and cost more than they think. This last example illustrates the recursive Hofstadter’s Law — a corollary of the planning fallacy — which states that things always take longer than you expect, even when you take Hofstadter’s Law into account.

If the ghost of my future self had spoken in my dream it likely would have warned me of the dangers of being overly optimistic, of falling prey to the planning fallacy, and of ignoring Hofstadter’s Law.

To make matters worse

Our problems with planning extend beyond simple optimism. It appears that the mental models that we rely on to understand the world, make decisions, and envision the future are themselves susceptible to optimism bias. Although it’s true that our brains are drawn to vividly bad things in the world — fires, accidents, and other catastrophes, for example — studies have shown that people are more likely to gloss over the abstractly bad and problematic in favor of the positive. This means that positive things are more likely to become solidified in our mental models than negative things. And this, in turn, makes those positive things both easier to remember and more likely to influence our predictions about the future.

And so we happily say, “Let’s go for a second baby! Labor wasn’t too bad and I don’t remember the infant years being all that hard, those adorable moments were many, and I’m sure we’ll be able to afford college somehow.” This is an excellent mindset for ensuring the survival of the species. But it is not so great for ensuring the success of your next project.

Re-enter the premortem.

The premortem sidesteps our problems with overoptimism and skewed mental models by asking not what might go wrong but what did go wrong. It doesn't ask us to make predictions and assess risk — things at which people are infamously bad — but deals instead with absolutes. The project has failed. You can now turn your mind to identifying all the things that led to failure. And then start thinking about what you could have done to keep those things from happening.

The prospective hindsight of a premortem helps one build a useful mental model of a failure without having to actually experience that failure. This model, in turn, can be used to anticipate and mitigate problems for next time which, in the circular world of the premortem, is actually this time.

My premortem

When I started exploring all the causes for my failure to achieve my 2025 art practice goals, I had no problem coming up with scenarios that were dramatic and arguably far-fetched. I suffered a venomous snake bite on the way to the studio — this scenario is vivid in my brain after having just read a New York Times article about the hazards of venomous snakes, albeit mostly in rural India and Africa. I was hit in the head by falling debris while walking under an apartment balcony and ended up in a coma — the getting hit in the head part actually did happen to me recently and that recency makes my brain consider it highly likely to happen again.

I had to dig deeper before I unearthed more realistic scenarios from my murky cognitive depths – things like lack of planning, absence of accountability, and simple procrastination.

Now that I have a better handle on the causes of my own future failure, I get to go back in time, to the present, and correct those things. The future is now.

Why did I fail and what could I have done to prevent it?

I failed because I had no deadlines or accountability to push me. If only I had formed an artist-in-residence relationship with reDirect to make me accountable for getting things done!

I failed because I didn’t schedule and protect studio time. If only I had blocked out studio time in my calendar and defended that time against things that seemed more pressing or interesting but that, in retrospect, were less important!

I failed because my studio space was unwelcoming and that made it hard to get into a creative mindset. If only I had spent a bit of time at the beginning of the year making my space nicer! But note: although it’s true that one’s workspace can have a tremendous impact on well-being and productivity, the promise of effortless workflow and creative bliss that the ubiquitous studio-porn dangles in front of artists is an empty one. I do want my space to be more inviting – curtains, for example, and a bit more storage would help – but I know from past experience that the siren call of design and organization can end up shipwrecking my creative voyage.

I failed because every time I picked up a paintbrush I was paralyzed by overthinking and indecision. If only I had reminded myself of the tricks I already know for encouraging creative flow! It’s not that I necessarily want to make things easy – in fact I do some of my best work when the process is hard and fraught – but I do want to keep myself moving.

I failed because for every hour I spent on my own work, I spent five hours scrolling social media and getting caught up in cute baby videos. If only I had taken my own advice on limiting these sink holes of time!

There’s more, but you get the idea.

Putting my premortem where everyone can see it is a bit daunting. It shines a public spotlight on my intentions. But as I’ve just identified, the accountability that this spotlight brings is one of the things that will increase my chances of following through on those intentions.

This year, instead of succumbing to optimistic ignorance and hoping for the best, I’m looking 2025 squarely in the eye. I reject Rizzo the Rat’s aversion to thinking about the future, manifested in his cry upon seeing the Muppet’s Ghost of Christmas Future: “Oh, this is too scary. I don't think I wanna see any more!”

Instead, I’m following the path of Ebenezer Scrooge who, according to Charles Dickens, said: “Ghost of the Future! I fear you more than any spectre I have seen. But, as I know your purpose is to do me good, and as I hope to live to be another man from what I was, I am prepared to bear you company, and do it with a thankful heart.”

Anne Kearney is the 2025 ReDirect Artist in Residence. You can read more about her here.

Introducing reDirect’s 2025 Artist in Residence

I am delighted to be the reDirect Artist-in-Residence for 2025!

I have long been interested in both art and people. My earliest memories are of “making things” — playing with pipe cleaners, cardboard, glue, and whatever else I could get my hands on. As the years have passed the materials have changed, but the common root of what drives my art is a love of exploration and discovery. How do these materials work? What can I do with them? What can I learn?

My interest in people — particularly in human psychology and behavior — blooms from this same root of curiosity. How do people function? How can we influence them for the better? What experiments can we do to learn more? These interests eventually led to a degree in cognitive science from Stanford and a PhD in environmental psychology from the University of Michigan where I had the great fortune to meet many of the people currently on the reDirect board.

My environmental psychology career has taken me from academia to consulting to working with NASA where, as my daughter once explained to a friend, I “helped design spaceships so that people don’t go crazy.” Art was often relegated to the backseat during those years but it was always along for the ride.

When I embarked on my adventure as a full-time artist about seven years ago, I assumed that the choice to embrace art was a de facto choice to leave the world of psychology behind. But as I developed my art practice and artistic voice, I realized that my background in cognitive science and environmental psychology was the primary driver of my artwork — not only pointing me towards particular ideas and themes to explore but also helping me see how to keep working at my best. Like many epiphanies, this one seemed obvious in hindsight.

My years studying human cognition and psychology have shaped the way I look at the world. And as I create and struggle as an artist, I have become increasingly aware of the focus and insights that this particular lens brings to the creative process. When I started a blog that explores these connections and insights, it felt like coming full circle.

As a reDirect Artist-in-Residence, part of what I will be doing is continuing my written explorations of art, life, and environmental psychology as a way to help bring reDirect’s SEE Framework to life. This writing will take the form of blog posts — personal essays flavored with science — that I hope will resonate with readers not only because we are all creative (and we are) but because we are all human.

I welcome the structure that this Artist-in-Residence will bring and I look forward to the opportunity to dive deeper into the ideas embedded in SEE!

            - Anne

Anne Kearney is an artist and writer who currently lives in the vibrant city of Barcelona. Anne’s artwork is inspired by her decades of experience as an environmental psychologist working for universities, non-profits and NASA. She is energized by the struggle of finding ways to communicate the essence of abstract ideas through simple art materials. Her writing explores what cognitive science and psychology have to tell us about creativity, making art, and functioning at our best in this complex world. Anne has a BA in Psychology/Cognitive Science from Stanford University, a PhD in Environmental Psychology from the University of Michigan, and has studied art throughout her life.