VISUAL THINKER PROFILE Print
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Wednesday, 11 October 2006 04:22

PROFILE : VISUAL THINKER

Source Encyclopedia of Psychology

Research has confirmed that both hemispheres of the brain use high-level cognitive modes. That of the left brain is verbal and analytic, while right brain thought processes are rapid, complex, whole-pattern, spatial, and specialized for visual imagery and musical ability.

The general characteristics of right-brain thought processes include the tendency to synthesize rather than analyze, and to relate to things in a concrete rather than a symbolic fashion. Where left-brain thinking tends to represent wholes by abstraction (using one piece of information to represent something larger), the right brain is more likely to interpret data through analogies ó -seeing relationships between wholes. Right-brain functioning is nontemporal, non sequential , holistic - gestalt , and intuitive, relying on leaps of insight, hunches, or visual images. Discoveries about the right- and left-brain hemispheres have led some researchers and educators to advocate educational reforms that would allow right-brain modes of thought a greater place in the current educational system, which reflects society's overall tendency to reward the verbal, analytical left-brain skills. As split-brain researcher Roger Sperry winner of the 1981 Noble prize for Medicine , notes, our educational system "tends to neglect the nonverbal form of intellect. What it comes down to is that modern society discriminates against the right hemisphere "


' Verbal and nonverbal conceptualizations are regarded as the two kinds of thinking. Verbal conceptualizations are linear and results from "thinking with the sounds of words" . A person composes mental sentences one word at a time at the same speed as speech, which is about 150 words a minute. In contrast, "picture thinking is estimated to be, overall, 400 to 2000 times faster than verbal thinking. Once information has been encoded picture thinking is all at once , it exists outside of time . Visual thinking is spatial existing in 3 Dimensions and not the 2 Dimensions of language '



Visual conceptualizations are regarded as evolutionary thinking superior to verbal conceptualization because a visual thinking style can be both faster and more complex .Auditory sequential thinkers are born to excel at procedural tasks like reading , spelling and short term memory . A visual spatial thinker will if equipped with the right tools excel with ideas , innovation , long term memory and an ability to handle complexity .


“It’s not that you have a special math module somewhere in your brain, but rather that the brain’s particular functional organization…predisposes it towards the use of high-level imagery and spatial skills, which in turn just happen to be very useful when it comes to doing math reasoning,” Michael O’Boyle, a psychologist at the University of Melbourne, Australia, in a public statement through the American Psychological Association .



The auditory sequential model is implemented in the classroom , listen and learn . While this model is very effective for the AS , the visual hands on learner is effectively excluded .Drill and repetition , step by step instruction will not work well for visual thinkers who not only think in pictures but also learn all at once , visual thinkers are system thinkers who need an overview .Information needs to be organized spatially and not temporally , not sequentially .


To the lecturer and the AS this means nothing more than thinking in cartoons , to a VS thinker like Faraday this means seeking understanding . Michael Faraday talked of seeing lines of force . radiating outwards . Einstein talks of using the imagination as an experimental lab . This visualization of language to some extent bridges the gap but is no substitute for actually constructing mental models . Auditory Meta models & Mental models allow the visual mind to fully function in an auditory sequential world .!! .



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Last Updated ( Friday, 30 July 2010 16:30 )