The eye speaks

Revenge of the Visual Thinkers

By Jesse Alexander

Remember kindergarten? Remember the starchy-sweet smell of the finger paint? Remember the crunchy sound the blunt scissors made as you cut suns, moons and assortied animals from the stiff, brilliant construction paper? Remember story-time sitting in front of the teacher who read those beautiful books with brilliant pictures that filled your imagination with kings and queens and monsters? Remember when it was safe to imagine and create visually?

But once you entered 3rd grade and they took the crayons, construction paper and paints away. And slowly, almost imperceptibly, words began to march across the pages in your books and the pictures lost their brilliant colors, began to shrink, and eventually dissapper. In this new environment, you learned that the words goose-stepping across the page were for grownups and that pictures were for "babies". Remember how hard it was the make the transition to this new, linear, "correct" thinking?

Do you remember struggling with the concept left-hand vs. right-hand concept? The "linearness" of Standard English didn't help. Remember the teacher standing at the front of the class, pointing with her right hand, and saying something like "All right class, please pass your assignment to the person on my right and your left?" Huh? Unless you were lucky enough to have a seat near the windows or along a wall, you felt like a Martian that just beamed into the middle of the Electric-Slide.

All the teacher had to do was give you a simple visual queue. With her back to the class, she could have shown you how your left hand always forms a capital letter "L" with the index finger and thumb when your palm is facing away from your body. Like this:

As the years passed, you adapted to the classroom's linear world by translating the words into pictures in your head. You probably did well in science, algebra and trigonometry because visualizing was part of the learning process in these classes. But you may have had problems with English (unless you were lucky enough to have a visual thinker as an English teacher) because you were not allowed to draw or use images in that class. (How do you translate a concept like "the main idea" into an image?)

In college, you probably chose architecture, science or engineering as a major because you were allowed-indeed, required-to create and process images, and you quickly learned to manipulate schematics, graphs, charts, and mechanical drawings in your head. You had a blast-until you had to write the prose, equations, or computer programs that described the behavior displayed in the images. Again, if you had visual thinkers as professors (which is probably the case given the subject matter), you were able to cope.

Fast forward to today. You've been out of college for almost 20 years. You've probably written thousands of lines of code in linear, "procedural" computer languages like FORTRAN, BASIC, Pascal, and "C", and you discover that to stay viable (as in "employable") you have to learn object oriented (OO) programming languages like "C++" and Java™. You struggle with the OO concept as you slog through books written by authors who apparently still believe that diagrams are for whimps. (Although the stated aim of OO programming is to model the real, and often visual world, most of the OO language books do not have any diagrams.) So you plod along making slow progress until you stumble upon a slide in an online Java presentation that has a picture of what an object "looks" like:

In essence, the picture says, "if you want to mess with an object's data, you have to use its member functions." Aha! All you needed was a picture.

Through your studies of OO languages you run into the Universal Modeling Language (UML) and Specification and Description Language (SDL)--two picture-based languages used to describe software structure, design and implementation. And you fall instantly in love because the diagrams remind you of Medu Netur (the historically correct name for the Egyptian hieroglyph language). Now all you need is a visual language to help you prepare presentations and documents.

One day, while surfing the Internet you discover a program called MindManger. MindManager, you learn, is based on a technique called Mind Mapping (Buzan, Tony and Barry Buzan. The Mind Map® Book: How to Use Radiant Thinking to Maximize Your Brain's Untapped Potential. New York: Penguin Books USA Inc., 1993. ISBN 0-452-27322-6) that allows you to organinze ideas visually. And you quickly learn to use this tool to organize your presentations, documents, and life in a natural, non-linear, visual fashion-just the way you think. Aha again!

Click for a close up of Mind Map grocery list.

Now, imagine. After being made to believe for most of your childhood that your way of thinking-visual thinking-is primative and stupid, you find yourself at the dawn of a new millennium literally swimming in tools, techniques, methodologies, and languages that all have the modifier "visual" in their descriptions. What's the first thought that comes to your visual thinking mind in this visual thinking future? Duh.