Familiarity Junkies

For any productive creative person, at least initially you're not concerned about familiarity. You're focused on exploring the novelty of a new discovery and building something on that dopamine rush.

I love new ideas and have had the habit of seeing what they can become--even based on a one-word title or a few lyric lines, or a chord change. But people run on familiarity because it's the primary pathway to absorbing something new. That saturation process requires lots of repetition. Artists don't have a problem with repetition and saturation because it's a requirement for making something. Artists take time but others won't.

Consider the usual art-viewing experience in a museum: a glance at the work, a zoom in on the caption card, maybe another glance, then on to the next painting. The brain is seeking its next shot of dopamine in either the artist or viewer/listener. But the viewer/listener has the buffet experience whereas the artist has to focus on one thing. In 3 hours someone could zip through the Louvre, but the artist might have done one part of a painting or recorded tracks for one song. It's really a matter of time investment based on rewards. For me, just finishing something to some degree is a reward in itself, which starts the process again. I'm moving from painting to painting but it's much slower. Imagine they had art studios at museums allowing visitors to try out ideas that were inspired by something they saw. Would people spend three hours on it, let alone one hour, or half an hour, and would they continue to be interested after they left the museum?

We all have routines and habits as makers and viewers which are constantly reinforced by dopamine and serotonin hits which come more easily with familiarity:

From the book Habits Of A Happy Brain:

"The book Flow explained that music gives pleasure because your mind keeps predicting what's next. Each correct prediction triggers dopamine. You can't make good predictions for unfamiliar music, so you don't get the dopamine. But when music is too familiar, something strange happens. You don't get the dopamine either because your brain predicts it effortlessly. To make you happy, music must be at the sweet spot of novelty and familiarity." (164)

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[8/28/2024: Very often familiarity with something has to do with where we place our attention–or has always been where we typically place our attention. Sometimes it’s a peripheral element that isn’t the primary focus. I recall a lecture by Ellsworth Kelly where he was talking about his inspiration for Window, Museum of Modern Art Paris, which was based on his fascination with a window in the museum. You might think that an artist would be looking at the art, but they’re usually looking at something that no one else even thinks of paying attention to. They’re focused on exploring the novelty of a new discovery.]