Visually thinking and different types of minds

Temple Grandin talks about thinking in pictures. I am so grateful that she has been able to find a way to verbalize how she visually processes things. There is no way I could possibly match her explanations. I straddle verbal and visual processing, but that doesn't mean that I totally understand a visual mind that doesn't has the access to the verbal skills I have. I know that I use visual processing. I also know that there I have not fully developed my visual processing ability. Verbally and mathematically, I had the training. I've been writing poetry since I was seven years old, thanks to my second grade teacher, who introduced poetry writing as part of an English/spelling lesson.

In this world of internet videos, I hope that more people like Temple Gardin are able to show us how to visually think - not only for those like me who intuit its power extends further than we see, but for everyone's benefit.

Visual Processing

I am a very visual person. I was raised by an artist and a computer programmer. This gave me access to artistic and flow-charting techniques. My dad used give my siblings and I flow chart templates to make art when we were young. When I became older, he explained what some of the shapes meant and then made a game for me. He'd give me a simple task and I would diagram the steps to do it, using those shapes properly.

As a family, we made almost weekly trips to the public library, bringing home art and music in addition to a multitude of books. Our home library sometimes had better references than my school's library. Arguments between myself and the sister just younger than me were usually solved by encyclopedias at ten paces. My mother made sure we had art classes. My dad made sure we had science lab kits. As a family, we made candles, leather and other crafts. Dad would also print out wall-size mazes which we kids and my mother would solved together. When I learned how to process information, it was not only through the verbal and mathematical means, but also visual and kinetic means.

I'm right handed, left eyed, and I have no dominant foot preference. I have taken math courses up to and including partial differential equations and I have about the same amount of credit hours in studio art as I do math. It probably follows without saying that my favorite math class was analytical geometry. I feel that this makes me qualified to make the follow statement:

Calculations can be done visually as well as mathematically.

Anecdotal evidence: When I was in high school, my mother took one of my classmates and I to an UIL science competition. Between the tests, the contestant schools could work on brain teasers. One of them was a word problem about how much material a sculptor would need if they made a bust twice as large in every dimension. While my extremely intelligent classmate began to do the mathematical calculations, my mother read the problem and immediately gave the correct answer. After verifying it with math, my shocked classmate asked my mother how she did the calculation. She used pictures and hand gestures to explain her thought process. He was totally lost by her explanation, so I gave him an interpretation he could understand. For the rest of the problems, my classmate and mother answered them with their own methods, while I translated between the two of them. In every case, both methods gave the same answers.

Historical evidence: All those wonderful geometry and trignometry relationships started out as a function of the relationships between visual elements such as lines, points, angles, planes and solids. M. C. Escher discovered several crystallography relationships years before the mathematical models, through purely graphical means. While many mathematicians hold Escher in the highest regard and consider him to have had an exceptional mathematical mind, he actually did very poorly with math in school and struggled to understand the mathematical treatises sent to him when he was older.

So, having made put that pet peeve to rest, I will share with you a diagram I made a few months ago showing visual processing as part of the problem solving process. While I do not detail how to do math visually (perhaps I will do that in another post), the diagram does show some of the ways visual processing has brought about solutions -> http://cosmicsiren.blogspot.com/p/diagram-of-visual-processing.html



O’Connor, J. J. & Robertson, E. F. (2000). Maurits Cornelius Escher. MacTutor History of Mathematicians. Retrieved February 28, 2010, from http://www.gap-system.org/~history/Printonly/Escher.html

Research on Learning Styles

There have been a major paper on learning styles in the months since I finished my capstone paper. Neurologically, the empirical research is not good for those who ascribe to them. I refer you to the following sources that pretty much shred the idea that learning styles have an actual brain structure foundation:

Springer, S. P. & Deutsch, G. (1998). Left brain, right brain: perspectives from cognitive neuroscience. 5th ed. New York : W. H. Freeman and Company.
Smeets, G., & Merckelbach, H. (1997, November). Panic disorder and right-hemisphere reliance. Anxiety, Stress & Coping, 10(3), 245. Retrieved December 1, 2008, from Academic Search Premier database.
Zalewski, L., Sink, C., & Yachimowicz, D. (1992, January). Using cerebral dominance for education programs. The Journal Of General Psychology, 119(1), 45-57. Retrieved December 2, 2008, from MEDLINE database.


The paper referenced in the article, "Matching Teaching Style to Learning Style May Not Help Students", has caused quite a stir with many educators. However, from what I've read of it (being that I am too poor to go around and subscribing to all these journals to see the full paper), it is quite correct about the lack of solid research and validity on the matter. Based on my own research into the subject, the styles don't really map onto the cognitive functions in a clear and concise manner.

The crux of the matter is that the theory of learning styles does have some usefulness in practical application, just not necessarily to the degree many people want it to have. The main author of the paper is quite right to compare it to the Myer-Briggs stuff - the two theories are very similiar in many ways. They work well in clear cut and dry situations, but most humans are not like that. If you try applying them religiously, you will start having to make exceptions to the point that you have something that resembles the rules for spelling English words.

For me, I see the Myer-Briggs Temperment Indicator (and to some extent learning styles) the same way I see the Lewis Dot]Electron Dot diagrams in chemistry. They can only describe things on the simplest level. Get into more complex personalities (which doesn't mean "unhealthy" ones, many healthy personalities can actually be quite complex and some of the simplest personalities can be very unhealthy) and everything starts falling apart, like working with transition metals. Which makes complete sense to me, because healthy individuals actually change in personality traits over time, due to maturation, mental and emotional stresses, illness/health and other developmental process affecting agents. Some MBTI experts do take this into consideration and adjust for it. It is also possible for chemists using metals to use electron dot diagrams with metals, by keeping a reference of possible electron charges near them. However, there is a great danger on relying on any of these methods for more than a cursory beginning. They only briefly describe the surface situtation. Their premises for the deeper levels have no validity on the scientific level.

It's sort of like knowing that tornados in the middle of the United States usually come from the southwest and go to the northeast. You know that is what normally happens by looking at the destruction afterwards, however, that never stops a tornado from going the opposite direction for a little while, before going back to the normal track. Nor can you really know what path it will travel. And when it comes to personality, learning and cognition, there is no such thing as a straight line between points A and B.

Education

© Universal Press Syndicate

In his TED talk, Sir Ken Robinson talks about how current education "stripmines" the minds of our youth. While I wholeheartedly agree with him about the need to change this, I also think we need to find ways to reclaim those older minds who have gone through this system and are now stuck in a changing world, in dire need of those skills that were not developed earlier. For both scenarios, I recommend the following:


Teaching for the Two-sided Mind by Linda Verlee Williams

It's an excellent book for the teacher and the adult learner. Instead of trying to divide people into left and right brain thinkers (which really doesn't have much validity according to neurological studies), Williams comes from the angle that we are ALL left and right brain thinkers. Not only can this book help you refine how you learn information and analyze problems, it also invites you to try other ways of learning. You will be surprised at how much you actually do use both sides of your brain.