Writing for Visual Thinkers

Just found Austin Kleon's blog posts on Visual thinking for writers and we're hooked. We can't tell you how many times a child's referred to us for writing problems, but really he or she is a gifted artist with a strong visualization style of thinking and expression. A glance at the school notebook shows a treasure trove of doodles and images. Most schools aren't really made for visual thinkers.

What is visual thinking? The first thing that comes to mind is that it's usually not just visual - most people we ask describe it as multisensory -feeling, images (vivid or vague), sound, touch, even smell or taste. No wonder it's so difficult to put into words - and even harder to put into words quickly. The importance of feelings - you can really see it in Kleon's mindmap at left - is why visual thinkers make such good novelists, impassioned CEOs, and filmmakers - and why they may struggle in schoolrooms and business relationships if they can't connect with a teacher or colleague on some emotional level.

Since Gerald Grow's The writing problems of visual thinkers, there's been disappointingly few practical resources to to specifically help visual thinkers put their ideas into words. Because visual thinkers also tend to be immersive in their thinking style, they have particular trouble sequencing and narrowing ideas.

We hope to get a chance to read Deleon's book - but it's not yet available on Amazon. In the meantime, check out Deleon's posts ideas such as:

- Lay it all out where you can look at it
- Get yourself a calendar
- Mind maps
- Comics without pictures
- Writing the Fibonacci sonnet
- Tools
- How to books
- Graph a story with Mr. Vonnegut
- Maps of fictional worlds
- Writing on Walls

And speaking of writing on walls, if you haven't seen it, check out this link to a 360 degree video of what one man and $10 of sharpie pens was able to do to redecorate his bedroom.

We'll take a short break from the blog for the Christmas holidays. Blessings and have a great time with family and friends



Eide Neurolearning Blog: Visual and Dyslexic Thinking

Mind Over Matter: Imagery at Work and in the Classroom

Kosslyn posted a book chapter on Mental Imagery and Implicit Memory. Some interesting take-home points:

- mental imagery can be used to access implicit (or not conscious) memory
(hands-on learning and experiences can fall under this category for instance)

- during visualization, "not only does one 'see oneself' perform an action (a visual image), but also one is aware of the spatial relations of objects and their parts (spatial images), the sounds associated with an action (auditory images), and the bodily sensations that accompany movements (kinesthetic images)

- mental practice works, but best if combined with physical practice, and more likely to benefit if there is a lot of 'cognitive' component associated with the task...for instance if a task is demanding in terms of multiple steps, organization, and decision-making, mental practice is especially valuable

The article also has interesting tidbits about the importance of positive imagery (e.g. test subjects who visualized successful golf puttts improved their putting accuracy by 30% vs. those who visualized missing their puts decreased their accuracy by 20%) and excerpts from spatial experts engaged in high stakes one-shot events like surgery to remove conjoined twins - and imagery was critical in their preparation.

"When I do a real operation, I play the videotape ahead of time in my mind, Dr. Shapiro said..."I do the case in my head," said Dr. Maria Ortega, an anesthesiologist. "I must have done it 100 times. Everytime, a problem would come up and I would find a solution and do it again. Every time i ran it in my head, it went faster."

The need for imagery to be integrated probably accounts for why kids with sensory processing disorders have so much trouble with procedural and automatic learning (and activities like handwriting). It also explains why they are so disadvantaged on heavy cognitive load tasks like multi-stepped mathematics or writing to an open-ended prompt. The positive imagery tidbit reinforces the importance of optimism on performance outcome.

For more on imagery in the classroom, check out this article on Mental imagery in classroom reading. Some key points:

- 60% of 5th graders reported imagery at 'think-aloud' pauses during read aloud sessions

- imagery, emotional points in stories were remembered better and over a longer period of time than 'important' information

- after more than 48 hrs after a story reading, students tended to remember visual, affective, and reader-originated imagery

- language concreteness (for example sensory details), because of its ability to trigger imagery, was one of the most important factors for determining comprehension and learning

Reading in the Brain and Mirror Writing

Stanislaus Dehaene has a new book entitled Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention and he has been kind enough to publish chapter summaries and all color figures here.


From Chapter 7, a discussion of how mirror reading is thought to be a loss of generalization ability (recognizing that b is related to d, for instance) that occurs as children grow older. At left, Orton's original thought that mirrored letter mistakes resulted from a failure to inhibit the perception in the opposite hemisphere; at right, the current theory that mirror 'mistakes' occur from the retention of a generalization ability rather than a real mistake. The generalization ability is a good thing for young children because it helps them recognize their parents and their world from different angles.

In our own family, I remember being surprised when our then young son brooded over how to write the letter "f"... he said, "f, f, f,... oh that's right, it's a flipped over 'j' with a line through it." Huh? I hadn't even thought about the relationship between the letter 'f' and 'j' before that. To this day both he and Brock are able to read words backwards more quickly than me. There are advantages to this mirror ability (as well as disadvantages of course) - usually in the ability to rotate objects and perceive from different angles (like Tesla turning an apparatus around in his mind), and not surprisingly, we often see this talent among the spatially-talented dyslexics that we see. Our loss of mirroring ability is therefore more of a 'mistake', likely reflecting the same process that we discussed in The dark side of expertise.


In the figure at right, the bar graph shows how mirroring is common condition in children below the age of 8 years. Above the graph, the writing observations of Cornell that 5 year old children are more like to write their name backwards when not given enough room for left-to-right writing. Lissie and Meggie were sisters. Lissie was 5 and Meggie, 6.

Below, an example of Leonardo Da Vinci's mirror writing.

For more from Dehaene on mirror writing: Why do children make mirror errors while reading? pdf