Visual Thinking: A Look into How We Process Information
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Senses & Sensory Information
Surprise, surprise! As a proud book nerd, I don’t read many fictions - I prefer listening to them.
Knowing some of my quirks in acquiring and processing information, I’ve spent a lot of time trying to understand how people learn differently. As a typical visual thinker, I make diagrams to help me process things. Here’s a diagram I made to explain our senses and the sensory information we receive:
Senses and Sensory information
The three circles in the center represent our human senses, corresponding to what is thought to be the top three ways of learning and thinking: visual sense, auditorial sense, and kinesthetic sense. (I’m sure the sense of smell and the sense of taste is just as crucial, especially if you are training to be a chef or a herbalist, but they are beyond the scope of this article)
The phrases floating around the senses represent different sensory information. Information comes at us in all kinds of forms, and it is we, the sensing beings, who attach meaning and significance to the information out there.
This is where things get interesting. In pedagogy, educators might say someone is an auditorial leaner, meaning this person would prefer listening and talking to reading and writing.
Based on this definition, I’m well qualified to be an auditory learner. But I’m not.
I struggled in school to sit still in the classroom and just “listen” to what the teach had to say. I was always flipping back and forth the textbook, and doodling on the margins of the pages. If I really enjoyed an subject, by the end of the semester, my textbook would be severely worn, decorated with scribbles and doodles, pages rolled.
I find what Jessica McCabe described in her book, How to ADHD, quite accurate in presenting my reading experience:
ADHD brains often struggle to read books. We tend to get distracted (or bored), forget what we just read, lose our place, or stare at the same wall of text for five minutes, unable to actually read it.
Not that I can concentrate on audiobooks more easily either, I just find that my brain grasps the text information better when I am physically occupied with jogging, painting, or doing house chores. This is a typical experience adult ADHDers have, according to what I heard in the ADHD community. I’d like to write a separate article to explore the relationship between ADHD and visual thinking in the future, but first, let’s dive into different kinds of visual thinking.
Three Types of Visual Thinking According to Dr. Temple Grandin
As we see earlier, describing someone simply as a “visual learner” or a “auditory leaner” missed the mark on what exact information is being seen or heard, and why one form of sensory information is processed more effectively than the other.
To begin with, let’s be clear that information doesn’t just come as text, as suggested in the word “textbook” in our school system, but through many other forms. Our society’s current bias toward text over other forms of information is a problem in and of itself.
In Dr. Temple Grandin’s work on Visual Thinking, she elaborated on three different types of thinking with visuals:
Photo Realistic Thinker (Object Visualizer): people who excel at this kind of thinking often have a knack for drawing and photography, and they tend to struggle with algebra
Spacial-Relational Thinker (Pattern Visualizer): people who excel at this kind of thinking often expresses their gift in music and math, and they tend to be poor in reading
Verbal Facts Language Translation (Verbal Visualizer) - very abstract thinkers who excel at words. Lawyers and historians of sorts, they tend to be poor at drawing
How can a visual thinker be poor at drawing? Dr. Grandin’s explanation was that these people think in words. She was surprised when she learned that when some people saw a truck, they literally saw the word “truck” in their mind! When she saw a truck, she saw the entirety of its material, texture, dimension, and build. She intuitively understood how its mechanism might work. She had took it for granted that her mind processed photo-realistic information, and thought she was the oddball who struggled to find words!
Text is a linear form of information that trickles in one direction. Unlike a photo-realistic thinker whose perception extends in all directions of the physical space, a verbal thinker’s mind is orderly, and logical.
In other words, the photo-realistic thinker has a cognitive ability to connect the dots, whereas the verbal thinker has a cognitive ability to read the lines. They could both be visual thinkers, but they think in different dimensions.
Of course everything is a spectrum, and most people have a cocktail mixture of all three abilities.
Here’s my interpretation of Dr. Grandin’s categorization of the three types of visual thinking
Dr. Grandin strongly advice that schools shall provide hands-on project-based courses to help kids who think differently to prosper, instead of hyper-focusing on the standardized test. It’s not only good for the kids, allowing them to exercise their strength instead of masking their weaknesses, but also good for the greater society.
Can Books Become A Multi-Sensory Experience for Leaning?
I’d like to expand on Dr. Grandin’s theory though. Like I said in the beginning of this article: There are sensors, and there is information. “Thinking” is the event that happens in the brain when we make sense of the information received from our sensors.
Can there be different dimensions of information perceived by different sensors?
If we consider text (words and logic) as a linear form of information, we can surely experience it through seeing it, hearing it, or touch it if you learned Braille.
If we consider imagery (pictures, patterns, objects, and space) as the only divergent form of information, we can only rely on our eyes to perceive it. However, think about chords and symphony, aren’t they a divergent form of information perceived by our ears?
I’ve heard that some extremely gifted people can listen to two concerts at the same time. To me, that’s an ability to process multi-dimensional auditorial information.
A hypothetical multi-sensory model for different processing capabilities
I don’t have any research data to back up this model yet, but I want to make the point that we are all equipped with different sensors all over our body. Some sensors might be more capable than others, and we each gets a unique combination of sensors and their respective sensibility.
When I think of my own experience, I’d say my strongest visual ability lies in the linear and divergent levels, and I’m weaker in multidimensional-dimensional visualization. Pattern recognition above the 3rd dimension (advanced math) is simply beyond me.
But since vision is not my only sensor, I can recruit other sensors to help help. When reading text visually failed, I leaned on audiobooks for rescue.
That’s why to me books are never just the fictions printed in a paperback. The information I process most effectively is either presented in picture books or as audio books.
When I think about book design, naturally, it’s also never just laying out the text page after page. I consider what kind of learning experience we can provide to a reader, and what the best way is to present this information the author tries to convey.
