Visual Thinking Quotes

“Different types of thinking provide strengths in one area and deficits in another. My thinking is slower but it may be more accurate. Faster thinking would be helpful in social situations, but slower, careful thought would enhance production of art or building mechanical devices. 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. By the time I have visualized the first joke, the comedian has already launched two more. I get lost when verbal information is presented too fast. Imagine how a student who is a visual thinker feels in a classroom where a teacher is talking fast to get through a lesson.”
― Temple Grandin, Visual Thinking: The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns, and Abstractions

“Campbell’s Law, which says that any metric used to determine social decision-making will become corrupted by people who want to affect those decisions.”
― Temple Grandin, Visual Thinking: The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns, and Abstractions

“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 that is directly related to practical”
― Temple Grandin, Visual Thinking: The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns, and Abstractions

“Think of it this way: the object thinkers build the trains, and the spatial visualizers make them run.”
― Temple Grandin, Visual Thinking: The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns, and Abstractions

“Most of us were required to take three or four years of coursework in high school, starting with algebra and working up the chain: geometry, algebra 2, trigonometry, precalculus, calculus. Lockhart writes, “If I had to design a mechanism for the express purpose of destroying a child’s natural curiosity and love of pattern-making, I couldn’t possibly do as good a job as is currently being done—I simply wouldn’t have the imagination to come up with the kind of senseless, soul-crushing ideas that constitute contemporary mathematics education.”
― Temple Grandin, Visual Thinking: The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns, and Abstractions

“Kozhevnikov, a lecturer at Harvard Medical School and a researcher at the visual-spatial cognition lab at Massachusetts General Hospital, is one of the first scientists to differentiate between two kinds of visual thinkers: spatial visualizers and object visualizers. In her 2002 landmark”
― Temple Grandin, Visual Thinking: The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns, and Abstractions