More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
April 12 - April 24, 2024
When I figured out that not all people think in pictures, it became my personal mission to discover how people do think, and to find out if there were other people like me.
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.
Verbal thinkers are the kids with perfectly organized binders and the adults whose computer desktops have neat rows of folders for every project.
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.
The fact is, we live in a talky culture. Verbal thinkers dominate the national conversation in religion, media, publishing, and education.
His book The Voices Within describes the pervasive and multiple ways and reasons that people talk to themselves: to motivate, self-focus, regulate mood, direct attention, change behavior. In essence, to become conscious.
found that until five years of age, children rely heavily on visual short-term memory (STM). From six to ten, they start using more verbal processing, and from age ten onward they resemble adults with respect to verbal STM. As their verbal and visual systems develop, children become more inclined to verbal thought.
Psychologist Linda Silverman of the Institute for the Study of Advanced Development and the Gifted Development Center in Denver has been working with gifted individuals, including many on the spectrum, for more than forty years. Their cluster of traits includes difficulty with reading, spelling, organization, and sequencing. Yet many of these kids could readily take things apart and put them together and solve complicated equations, though they would not be able to tell you how they did it.
Silverman also correctly notes that if you made the person with the messy pile organize those papers, he or she would never find anything again. Such people know where everything is. For them, the “mess” is organized. They see it in their mind’s eye.
The propensity for visual and spatial thinking will turn up in the activities they gravitate toward. Often, they create beautiful drawings that are highly detailed and realistic. They also like building with toys like blocks, Legos, and Erector sets, or putting things together with materials they find around the house, such as cardboard or wood.
“Fitting in” is a complicated business. I didn’t realize it then, but in searching for fellow visual thinkers through my survey, I was also searching for my tribe.
One example: Your eyes are always moving but the words on the page don’t jump around when you read. That’s thanks to the stabilization circuitry in your brain that keeps words from jiggling.
Magnetoencephalography (MEG) showed that visual thinkers created images during these tasks, while the verbal thinkers relied more on self-talk. This method makes it possible to measure rapid changes in the areas of the brain that are activated.
The right-brain hemisphere is associated with creativity, while language and organization are associated with activity in the left brain.
Roger Sperry, the American neuropsychologist and neurobiologist whose split-brain experiments earned him a Nobel Prize in physiology, recognized the bias toward left-brain thinking, acknowledging that we tend to “neglect the non-verbal form of intellect. What it comes down to is that modern society discriminates against the right hemisphere.”
The genetics of brain science are even more complex. Some researchers have hypothesized that the genes that make the brain large are related to the genes that contribute to autism, suggesting a genomic trade-off: higher intelligence at the cost of some social and emotional skills.
Other such trade-offs have been observed in people who are blind from birth; all that valuable brain real estate can get repurposed for other functions.
The brain will not allow valuable real estate to sit vacant. This research also suggests that the brain is designed to create images. When the eyes stop providing information, the brain learns how to create images by using the other senses.
The new generation of scanners can detect activated brain areas more quickly and accurately. That said, the next generation of MRI testing can still produce skewed results due to inaccurate or incomplete methods sections that make it difficult to replicate the studies accurately.
Neurotypicals are generally described as people whose development happens in predictable ways at predictable times. It’s a term that I shy away from, because defining what is neurotypical is as unhelpful as asking the average size of a dog. What’s typical: a Chihuahua or a Great Dane?
When does a little geeky or nerdy become autistic? When does distractable become ADHD, or when does a little moody become bipolar? These are all continuous traits.
dreaming is a “bottom up” process that comes from the brain stem, whereas seeing images when you’re awake is “top down” from the cortex. In other words, “What the brain is doing in wakefulness and dreaming are different.”
Visual thinking is the ability to see associated images from your “visual memory files” and access them in different ways to problem-solve, navigate, and interpret the world.
In my job as a professor, I’ve noticed that the biggest mistake my students make is waiting too long before they ask for help.
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. He questioned why we subject students to an “ordeal” so many are likely to fail, reporting that most of the educators he talked with “cite algebra as the major academic reason” children fail to finish high school.
“25 percent of college graduates now earn no more than does the average high school graduate.”
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?
The research affirms the difference between the kind of computations students can ace in a classroom and what they accomplish in the real world.
High school success did correlate with college success, but after that, things got dicey. “Scholastic performance is at best an indirect predictor of eminent career achievement,” Arnold observed. One quarter of the valedictorians worked in top professional careers. Three quarters were “solid but not outstanding career prospects.” Most worked in traditional fields (engineering, medicine, science), but few pursued creative careers.
You can’t learn the value of something, and you certainly can’t gain any independence if other people do everything for you.
Snowplow parents are not doing their child a favor, either, because a child raised with this kind of constant intervention will never learn to solve problems.
To me, it is ridiculous that adults who cannot dress themselves have the same label as people with undiagnosed mild autism who work in Silicon Valley.
