These were my very first drawings in the summer of 2019. Through daily meditation and feeding my mind with information about how the brain actually works, I was inspired to keep repeating the same shape. This is what happens in our heads too, until something has once become ‘unconsciously competent’. Then it has become part of our (subconscious) automatic pilot – the Default Mode Network.

A synapse is really nothing more than a connection of neurons in your brain. A pattern. The more times you have “finished” the same pattern, the deeper it is engraved into the brain, and the more unconscious the pattern is. A good example is addiction. There is a trigger, you feel like a cigarette, your hand automatically goes to your pack of cigarettes and lights the cigarette on automatic pilot. It is only when you burn your finger while you are smoking that you realize very consciously that you have smoked a cigarette. The same goes for driving. Often when you arrive somewhere, you can no longer remember where you have been. Such a deeply engraved synapse is actually a thought, emotion, and / or behavioral pattern that is fully automatic, your body actually takes over from your brain (your body knows what it is going to do 7 sec before you become aware of it).

It is said that from the age of 35, 5% of all your thought, emotion, and / or behavior still happens consciously, so 95% runs on automatic pilot. So your brain is full of deeply ingrained unconscious patterns or “synapses”, which are “triggered” by the environment. Fortunately, by learning new things, you create new synapses, which are not yet engraved in your body, only with sufficient repetition. You have then again become “Unconsciously Able” and the thought, emotion, and / or behavioral pattern has become “automatic”. The more you learn or do new things, the greater the neuroplasticity of your brain. The neuroplasticity allows the brain to repair and restructure itself. And so it is these synapses – and the shape of them – that started my drawings. Continuously repeating the same shape with a black pen on paper. Until a different shape arose or until the paper became almost completely black. I really did my best to get the whole paper black just by “going on.” Still, little white dots remained between all those black lines. “These negative spaces in our brain” – as I call them – symbolize to me pieces of “free will” or possibilities to change yourself. And these white pieces – have turned into black dots or dots or circles, as you will see in other posts.