On Automatism

[holland]

While automaticity relates to your ability to perform technical tasks accurately without them noticably contributing to your cognitive load, automatism instead has to do with performing tasks at any level of skill or accuracy without engaging consciously with them. They are closely related, because achieving automaticity in a skill can enable a higher-quality outcome when performing it automatically, but you don't technically need to reach automaticity to remove your conscious control from a task.

In art, some common forms of automatism are automatic drawing and automatic writing. You set yourself up to work with a writing or drawing instrument and surface to use it on, put the first few lines down yourself or hover the instrument over the page miming those lines, then zone out and see what is on the surface at the end.

In the most extreme presentation of automatism, you might not even remember the process of putting pen to paper, but it's a mental health concern at that point... The more practical application has us remaining consciously aware but choosing to not take direct control over our own hand. It's left to run on autopilot. Maybe you give it a nudge here or there. Make a decision when it's completely suck. But it's mostly doing the drawing without your input.

There are also forms of automatic speech, automatic singing, automatic playing of instruments, automatic playing of sports, etc. Any task you might perform could become automatic. This kind of zoned-out action can actually become a problem, such as in the case of highway hypnosis, where you end up following the car in front of you far past your destination without consciously realizing your goal destination has changed, and are not alert enough to respond to hazards in the road. While zoning out on a walk could result in you not noticing a predator, tripping hazard, cliff, etc.

Because of the dangers involved, we have evolved all kinds of mechanisms to keep automatism to a minimum and stay alert. This can make it very hard to get into an automatic state when we genuinely want to as creatives.

There is also a lot of cultural baggage around automatism that can cause us to have hangups about even trying it. Some religious communities see automatism as something inherently holy -- your god speaking or acting through you. Other religious communities see it as something inherently evil -- a demon speaking or acting through you. Others think it can go either way, or that it doesn't mean anything, or just don't care. It's a bit unsettling to do something without direct control over your own actions, so it's understandable that superstitions developed around them. But it's ultimately just an exercise in metacognition regulation.