When the art in question involves physical activity, painting, drawing, some types of sculpture, you can think plan out ahead of time, in the same way someone in sports might envision a game, the pregame, warm-up etc. (Another half-remembered anecdote, two basketball players, one practices free-throws in his mind the other practices on the court and the one practicing in his mind improves more.) Point being, the actual act of painting is like a performance, for which you can prepare mentally before hand… so you can “think” less while you are performing. This pre-thinking involves everything from body motions to aesthetic decisions.

Of course, there is also a broader aesthetic, philosophic/aesthetic decision making that can affect the type of end product you wish to make, hence the mental preparation for the “performance.”

Also, depending on the art form there are variations on the freedom you allow yourself for accidents, improvisation while you are performing. In a Sol le Witt piece, for instance, the accidents would be left to the “fabricators”. Many other artists might work in this way, with the design divorced from the execution.

As for what goes through my brain when I’m working, well, I find a lot of my decisions have been made before hand, and the more comfortable I am with what I’ve thought through ahead of time the more easily the work goes. Or I hit a snag and go “back to the drawing board”(drink a beer).

Discussing neuroscience, in our spinal cord development, semaphorin (secreted by the anterior horn) repels sensory axons encoding pain. This restricts pain afferents to our dorsal horn, preventing them from directly accessing ventral horn motor neurons. In invertebrates, semaphorin similarly restricts access .

The real credit for the term appears to go to Edsger Dijkstra:

semaphore is a protected variable (or abstract data type) and constitutes the classic method for restricting access to shared resources (e.g. storage) in a multiprogramming environment. It was invented by Edsger Dijkstra and first used in the THE operating system.

The semaphorin entered this discussion in response to a link posted by Birgit on her blog. The link was in response to a brief discussion about the coast of Corsica.

I’m running up a phone bill here, but finally I must say that my chewing action is more languid when I dine to Carnatic at Bombay Gardens than at that Elvisy joint down by Akron.