Throughout history, some of the greatest minds, artists, scientists, and inventors of humanity have been visual thinkers. Some of them realized this and talked openly about their thinking style. In the case of others, we must deduce their primary thinking patterns from the evidence that they left behind concerning their thought processes. In the presentation of my case, I would like to call three witnesses.
My first witness is Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci. Leonardo was born in 1452 and died in 1519. Even though only 15 of his paintings have survived, for centuries Leonardo has been considered one of the greatest painters who ever lived. He was also a superior sculptor, mathematician, engineer, scientist, botanist, anatomist, and musician. He has been labeled the archetypical Renaissance man.
Since we can’t ask Leonardo any questions in person and he never spoke directly about his thinking processes, we must rely on his personal notes that have been preserved in codices for his testimony. The following example is a page from one such codex.
Leonardo’s codices are dominated by sketches with writing intermittently spaced throughout the work. This seems to indicate that Leonardo’s creative process began with visual images of his paintings and inventions. I have no further questions of this witness.
For my next witness, I would like to call Albert Einstein. Einstein was born in 1879 and died in 1955. He was a world famous physicist known for his work on relativity theory and quantum physics. He was awarded the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics. Time Magazine named him the Person of the Century on December 31, 1999. In the introduction to their article, they described Einstein as “… the embodiment of pure intellect, the bumbling professor with the German accent, a comic cliche in a thousand films. Instantly recognizable, like Charlie Chaplin’s Little Tramp, Albert Einstein’s shaggy-haired visage was as familiar to ordinary people as to the matrons who fluttered about him in salons from Berlin to Hollywood. Yet he was unfathomably profound — the genius among geniuses who discovered, merely by thinking about it, that the universe was not as it seemed.”
Einstein may be best known for his famous equation: E = mc2. This equation indicates that mass and energy are two sides of the same coin. They are directly related to each other via a natural constant which is the speed of light squared.
Since Einstein is dead, we are no longer able to ask him about his thought processes. However, many times during his lifetime, he was asked what was the secret to his genius. The answer that I found most enlightening came from a private conversation with an unnamed friend. Alice Calaprice later included snippets from this conversation in her book, The Expanded Quotable Einstein. Consider the following example: “All great achievements of science must start from intuitive knowledge. I believe in intuition and inspiration…. At times I feel certain I am right while not knowing the reason…Imagination is more important than knowledge”
The most direct answer to whether Einstein was a visual or verbal thinker came from the professor himself. His answer to this question was referenced in Abraham Pais’ book Subtle is the Lord: The Life and the Science of Albert Einstein. At a physics conference in 1922, Einstein told the audience that he used images to solve his problems, and only later he sometimes found the words to explain those solutions. I believe this indicates that Einstein was primarily a visual thinker.
For my third witness, I call Temple Grandin to the stand. She is still very much alive. Grandin has a Ph.D. in animal science from the University of Illinois and is a professor at Colorado State University. She is a very vocal spokesperson for visual thinking, so I am sure that Grandin agrees with this position. After growing up with autism, Grandin became a highly functional and accomplished adult. She is the author of six books, including the national bestsellers Thinking in Pictures and Animals in Translation. In the publicity blurbs for Thinking in Pictures, Grandin stated, “Rigid academic and social expectations could wind up stifling a mind that while it might struggle to conjugate a verb could one day take us to distant stars.” Temple delivered a February 2010 TED talk entitled The World Needs All Kinds of Minds.
In the first post, Education’s Big Lie, Part I: Introduction , of this series, I began with an example where words failed children. However, we know that words not only fail children. They often fail adults with physical and mental challenges, to which I can well attest. At times, words can also be insufficient for well-functioning adults. In my next post, Education’s Big Lie, Part IV: Human Arenas Where Words Often Play Second Fiddle, I will deal with a number of areas where words can easily be in second or third place to other means of expressions.