La Voz de Galicia – February 22, 2026 →
The exercise is simple: one person, with their back to the other, observes a work of art for a while and begins to describe it so that the other person, equipped with a paper and pencil on a clipboard, can draw the artwork in as much detail as possible without seeing it. In other words, one person describes something they see, and the other tries to reproduce it by listening alone. My colleague Lisa M. Wong, co-director of the Arts and Humanities Initiative at the Harvard Medical School, has been integrating artistic practices like this into medical education for years. Her goals are related to the ways the arts affect our lives and to the science that emerges at the intersection of art and medicine.
Every time I see her lead this exercise, I am fascinated by the space between how we see things, how we describe them, and how we perceive them. Our ability to translate into words what we see or feel is limited and influenced by our life experiences and social circumstances. The way we describe depends on many factors, just as the way we receive that same information to then translate it (in this case into a drawing) does.
Through this activity, Wong illustrates the gap that exists between the pain a patient describes and a physician’s ability to translate it into their own language. I have to admit that seeing students reflect on this, through the arts, is a life lesson, because when we listen—filtered through our biases—most of the time neither we nor the physicians are aware that, in reality, we do not fully understand what someone is trying to tell us, with all that this implies.
