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July 2 - August 18, 2024
Specifically, Descartes claimed that it is language that separates us from “beasts”:
The first step toward understanding that people think in different ways is understanding that different ways of thinking exist.
hardwired for language may be why it took me until I was nearly thirty to understand that I am a visual thinker.
This is the spatial visualizer who sees in patterns and abstractions.
there are object visualizers like me, who think in pictures, and, as I suspected, a second group of mathematically inclined visual-spatial thinkers, an overlooked but essential subset of visual thinkers, who think in patterns.
Think of it this way: the object thinkers build the trains, and the spatial visualizers make them run.
“We don’t make it anymore!” This is the price we have paid for removing most hands-on classes from our schools, such as shop, welding, drafting, and auto mechanics. The kids who should have grown up to invent this equipment are often considered poor performers, academically or behaviorally, and are shunted into special education. But many of them are simply visual thinkers who are being screened out because the current curriculum favors verbal, linear thinkers who are good at taking tests. The hands-on classes where some of these “poor students” might have shown great ability are now gone.
We are losing essential technical skills, for three main reasons. First, the people who had manufacturing expertise are not being replaced at the same rate at which they’re leaving the job market. Second, we’ve ceded the manufacture of not only volume goods such as clothes and toys and appliances to foreign companies but high-tech goods as well (about 30 percent of iPhones are made in China). Last, and this is my main area of focus: we’ve screened out visual thinkers.
Imagine a world with no artists, industrial designers, or inventors. No electricians, mechanics, architects, plumbers, or builders. These are our visual thinkers, many hiding in plain sight, and we have failed to understand, encourage, or appreciate their specific contributions.
It turns out that algebra is a barrier that keeps some students from completing high school or a community college technical degree. These are the visual thinkers who can invent machinery but can’t solve for x, and we are screening them out.
How can you tell if you’re a visual thinker? You probably know if you are musical, good at art, or good at putting mechanical things together, or if you’d rather draw than write.
By default, verbal people tend to be the ones who dominate conversations, and are hyper-organized and social. It makes sense that they are drawn to and tend to succeed in the kind of high-visibility careers that depend on facility with language: teachers, lawyers, writers, politicians, administrators.
Visual thinkers, on the other hand, see images in their mind’s eye that allow them to make rapid-fire associations. Generally, visual thinkers like maps, art, and mazes, and often don’t need directions at all. Some visual thinkers can easily locate a place they’ve been to only once, their internal GPS having logged the visual landmarks. Visual thinkers tend to be late talkers who struggle with school and traditional teaching methods. Algebra is often their undoing, because the concepts are too abstract, with little or nothing concrete to visualize. Visual thinkers tend to be good at arithmetic
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we generally assume that the organized kid is the better student and is smarter.
But if I look at the drawings, my mind will start associating all the things I have put together in the past, and I’ll know how this piece of furniture is supposed to look.
You may have noticed that IKEA instructions come as a series of illustrations—no written instructions at all. I wasn’t surprised to learn that the man who created the company was dyslexic, privileging pictures over words.
That must be why IKEA partnered with TaskRabbit, employing visual thinkers to help English majors assemble their bookshelves.
were treating soldiers with head injuries and figured out what part of the brain produces voluntary movement by prodding the back of their heads with electrical stimulation.
Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI).
high-definition fiber tracking (HDFT)
In an older study, a man in his early thirties had a head injury that destroyed his ability to recognize common objects, though he could visualize them in his imagination. When he was given a cup of coffee, he did not drink it because he could not recognize it among all the other objects on a desk. When he visited a buffet, he was not able to recognize the array of different foods.
suggesting a genomic trade-off: higher intelligence at the cost of some social and emotional skills.
About 25 percent of blind people learn to echolocate using mouth clicks, finger snaps, or cane tapping to “see” with both the auditory cortex and some repurposed visual cortex. A skilled echolocator can detect the shape, motion, and location of large objects.
Visualizer-Verbalizer Cognitive Style Questionnaire (VVCSQ),
“Spatial visualizers” see the world in patterns and abstractions. They are the music and math minds—the statisticians, scientists, electrical engineers, and physicists. You’ll find a lot of these thinkers excel at computer programming because they can see patterns in the computer code. Here’s a way to think of it: The object thinker builds the computer. The spatial thinker writes the code.
The test initially asks you to choose between pairs of images, identifying the one with the superior construction—for example, a bolt cutter with long or short handles.
Rapidly delivered verbal information is even more challenging for object-visual thinkers like me. Standup comedians often move too quickly through their routines for me to process.
Math geeks are often bullied or shunned. It’s only when the geeks become brilliant coders, mathematicians, entrepreneurs, and rocket scientists that we appreciate the way they see the world.
His photographic memory of facts and his proclivity for sharing them did not win friends and influence people. Instead, he was thought of as a “fact factory” and came off as a classic know-it-all. I think it’s fair to wager that Musk is off the charts.
I worked with a guy who was extremely socially awkward and had no college degree. If he were a child today, I’m convinced he’d be diagnosed with autism.
The art students (object visualizers) created vivid, fantastical planets. One was a square shape with pictures that spanned the globe, from pyramids to penguins. Another drawing was of a unique crystal planet, and a third had a fantastic building sticking out of it. The scientists (visual-spatials) had clearer concepts about the nature of their planets, which they rendered as spherical and lacking color, more like conventional depictions of planets.
The drawings from the humanities students (verbals) lacked imagery and looked like splotchy abstract paintings. They had put words on their drawings but then had painted over the words because they thought they should not use them. (Word-based thinkers are often rule followers.)
The object-visualizing art students discussed their planet’s appearance. The more visual-spatial science students discussed functions such as gravity, chemistry, and types of life. The verbal humanities types named the objects they had drawn but were unable to describe much planning that had gone into drawing them.
In a program called Innovation Boot Camp, the Marine Corps demonstrated their superior ability for improvising. Brad Halsey, the originator of the program, created a hell week to weed out the scientists and engineers who wouldn’t be able to contribute under high-pressure conditions. He found that truck mechanics and radio repairmen from the Marines were better than engineers with degrees from Stanford or MIT at improvising rapid-fire solutions to problems such as making a rudimentary vehicle out of a pile of junk, creating a device to track cars, and devising grenade sensors.
Halsey explained that “engineers tend to overthink” and do poorly when an innovative solution needs to be determined quickly.
When we say people are good with their hands, it’s this exact melding of skills: it’s as if they see with their hands. The engineers are abstract spatial thinkers, essential for developing certain systems, but maybe not the best folks to share your foxhole.
“Schools with the most limited resources have been most likely to cut back on history, art, music and physical education, simply because they aren’t covered on standardized tests.”
She credits their dexterity to hands-on activities in their early years. But lots of kids no longer have experience working with their hands.
Grades may not be the best way to choose doctors who will specialize in complex surgery.
Fixing real cars and learning about engines became more interesting than racing simulated cars. I’ve heard many parents complain that they can’t get their kids off their screens. That might be in part because the parents themselves are glued to their screens. And they may be afraid to exert their authority.
Every minute a child is on a video game is a lost opportunity to learn about cars, planes, working with tools, getting out in nature. Most students never have the chance to learn what they might be good at. Restoring shop, art, music, and home economics to schooling would help.
One of the most useless questions you can ask a kid is: “What do you want to be when you grow up?” It’s one of those vague verbal-thinker questions. The more useful question is concrete: “What are you good at?” That’s a real starting place to develop interests.
We need future generations who can build and repair infrastructure, overhaul energy and agriculture, create tools to combat climate change and pandemics, develop robotics and AI. We need people with the imagination to invent our next-generation solutions.
This chapter is about the high cost of screening out kids in school and, as a result, denying them a satisfying future. Screening out kids virtually extinguishes their chances at success, whether they’re shunted off to special ed or denied the opportunity to advance because of learning orthodoxies that are based on a one-size-fits-all model.
It may sound simple, but it’s true: I was screened out in school because I couldn’t do math. Actually, that’s not quite true. The traditional arithmetic I learned in the early grades made sense to me because I could relate it back to real-world things.
I had to choose majors with lower math requirements, such as psychology and animal science. Today I would probably be screened out of those majors as well, because they now have even higher math requirements.
A 2012 op-ed by political scientist Andrew Hacker, “Is Algebra Necessary?” landed like a bombshell in the education world. Hacker assailed the insistence on algebra in schools, pointing out that the math taught there was nothing like the math people use at their jobs.
“Making mathematics mandatory,” writes Hacker, “prevents us from discovering and developing young talent. In the interest of maintaining rigor, we’re actually depleting our pool of brainpower.”
Two-year colleges have traditionally required students to take algebra. According to Hanford, some policy makers are finally beginning to question the logic.
It is essential for students to learn basic skills such as being able to write clearly. Some of my recent graduate students have terrible writing skills. When I questioned a few of them, I discovered that they’d seldom been required to write a term paper, and that their teachers had never corrected their grammar or given detailed comments on their writing. This is clearly not acceptable. In any profession, a person must be able to explain things clearly in writing. To improve their writing skills, I have corrected the grammar in students’ journal articles and then had them rewrite them.
