Visual Thinking: The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns, and Abstractions

by Temple Grandin

When teachers apply math to real-world work or personal interests such as sports, shopping, and even video games, kids see the sense in learning.

On average, the students who studied chess improved their math scores. For some children, chess can evidently be a gateway to grasping math.

For another kind of child, chess wouldn’t help at all. I would have been one of the students who was not good at chess. For an object visualizer like me, the patterns were too abstract to remember, but it is easy for me to visualize what a remodeled building will look like.

For any type of learner, a key question is brain development: When are a child’s cognitive skills able to handle abstract reasoning? Piaget believed children become capable of logic by age eleven or twelve.

Their research suggests that, at the very least, we’re teaching algebra too early and too fast, that the road from concrete to abstract reasoning takes more time. It’s not a switch you can turn on in the summer between seventh and eighth grade. A researcher at the University of Kansas raises the possibility that abstract reasoning is developed through experience, which is a good argument for keeping all those extracurriculars.

The subjects fell into three categories. First, students who used arithmetical methods that were not based on imagery to find solutions. Second, students who relied on charting methods. And third, students who used algebraic methods. Her research clearly shows how each group problem-solved, but it doesn’t say why.

The student who didn’t use any visual tools is the verbal thinker. The student who transfers the problem to a chart to visualize (but still can’t make the algebraic leap) is the object thinker like me. And the student who used algebraic methods is the spatial visualizer.

The 2019 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP)—known as the “Nation’s Report Card”—showed that only “37 percent of 12th-graders have the math skills needed for entry-level college course work.”

“Why Science Majors Change Their Minds,” Christopher Drew writes, “Freshmen in college wade through a blizzard of calculus, physics and chemistry in lecture halls with hundreds of other students. And then many wash out.”

In math, American students don’t measure up to peers in other wealthy countries, and even struggle against peers from less wealthy countries.

Gardner looked at research on the brain, human development, evolution, and cross-cultural comparisons to arrive at his eight categories of intelligence: musical, logical-mathematical, linguistic, spatial, interpersonal, intrapersonal, naturalistic, and kinesthetic.

we are in agreement that our educational system fails to recognize different types of intelligence. “How to educate individuals so that each develops his or her potential to the fullest is still largely a mystery,” he wrote. But, he was certain, “we cannot afford to waste any more minds.”

It takes a village to raise a child. It takes a village and a whole lot of support to raise a child with autism.

There’s another way we screen out kids via schooling. Standardized curricula assume that all students develop at the same rate. Even when a child is seriously underchallenged, many parents discover that educators insist on restricting them to so-called age-appropriate materials.

Johnson’s genius was put to the test when NASA needed more “manpower” and turned to the female workforce. She started working at NASA in the 1950s, when overt racism and sexism were pervasive. The women were referred to as “computers who wore skirts,” and Black employees were segregated in every area, from where they worked and ate to what bathrooms they used.

Students who would have screened themselves out based on test scores now have an opportunity to showcase their public service, hobbies, recommendations, work experience, and personal essays. This is progress, especially for visual thinkers.

Why do students who score well on traditional standardized tests often perform so poorly in more complex “real life” situations where mathematical thinking is needed? Why do students who have poor records of performance in school often perform exceptionally well in relevant “real life” situations?

In a piece titled “Do Grades and Tests Predict Adult Accomplishment?” Leonard L. Baird, professor of educational policy and leadership at Ohio State, reviews the literature measuring the relationship between academic ability and high-level accomplishment. He looks at studies on a range of professionals, from scientists to middle managers, along with research on both high school and college students, including gifted students. It’s clear that academic ability will get you into good colleges and open doors to high-paying jobs. It’s also assumed that high-achieving students will be high achievers in life. But Laird concludes, “It should be noted that high academic ability is no guarantee of high-level attainment.”

Success in jobs may be correlated with many qualities not captured on tests, including resilience, creativity, working well with others, good communication skills, and work ethic. Success also happens when a person marshals their resources and creates something people need or want.

nondisclosure agreement,

I’ve seen throughout my life, first as a student and then as a professor, that when a student fails to grasp something, the student is usually blamed. But not everyone learns the same way.

“is that for a certain group of people the handicap itself may be fundamentally and essentially associated with a gift . . . too often the gift is not recognized and is regarded only as a problem.”

In retrospect, failing algebra may have been one of the best things that ever happened to me.

The US Patent Office came into being in 1790. Until the 1870s, inventors seeking a patent had to include a model or prototype with their application.

Where have all those tinkerers gone? Why has the United States fallen behind other countries in manufacturing? If we zoom out, the bigger global picture shows a conflagration of complex political and economic forces. My focus is on something more tangible—the loss of essential technical skills, for the reasons I’ve mentioned: our failure to replace people with manufacturing expertise as they leave the job market, our ceding the manufacture of not only cheap volume goods but high-tech products to foreign companies, and an education system that screens out the very people most suited to perform the skilled work we’ve lost.

But long before patents, clever people were figuring out how to make and fix things, not necessarily for profit but just because it would make life easier or make something possible. Civilization would not have progressed without the mechanical inventions—starting with the humble lever and the simple pulley—that enabled people to dig wells, erect dams, or build the roads that gave access to clean water, allowed agriculture to flourish, and made possible the transport of goods.

The six-shooter pistol invented by Samuel Colt had a revolving cylinder, whittled out of wood, that automatically rotated the next bullet into position and allowed the gun to be fired multiple times without reloading, something that changed the face of warfare.

He warns that an engineering education that ignores visual, nonverbal thinking will produce engineers who are ignorant of how the “real world differs from the mathematical world their professors teach them.”

Henry Ford didn’t invent the car, but he figured out how to build a transmission mechanism that made driving easier, and he introduced improvements along the assembly line that would change the face of transportation.

“Quirky,” of course, is a euphemism for people who don’t exactly “fit in.” Many I’ve worked with have been socially awkward and intensely focused, with a preference for working on their own and often a disregard for hygiene.

According to Market Research Reports, the top five manufacturers of industrial robots are located in Switzerland, Japan, and Germany. In addition to making most of the world’s iPhones, China builds the clever machines that put the popular chocolate swirls in soft-serve ice cream cones.