In the Blink of an Eye

In the Blink of an Eye The Power of Visual Learning

For millennia, humans have told stories with pictures.

Ancient Mesopotamian Carving

Paleolithic Cave Art of Spain

Egyptian Temple Carvings

Korean Tomb Mural

Early written languages used pictographs,

symbols that represent words.

33rd Century BC Egyptian hieroglyphics

26th Century BC Sumerian

These evolved into the modern logographic languages of today

Chinese Hanzi

Japanese Kanji

Why do we communicate so well with pictures? Cognitive psychologists estimate that half the human brain is used directly or indirectly in processing visual information.

In comparison, the areas of the brain used primarily to process language are quite small.

We also process visual information very quickly. For example, people can determine in as little as 100 milliseconds whether a picture contains an image of an animal or not.

That's about as fast as a blink of an eye.

Does this affect how we learn? Given a list of words to memorize, children find them hard to recall if they only repeat the words.

But tell them to picture the items the words describe, their recall increases greatly, especially if the image they create is unusual.

Is a picture really worth a thousand words? You tell me. There are about 250 words on this page, but less than 20 pictures. Which will you remember tomorrow?

Appreciate

Credits:

Created with images by almadin02 - "bird feather nature" • janeb13 - "bison cave of altamira prehistoric art upper" • DEZALB - "egypt kom-ombo temple" • awsloley - "egypt ancient hieroglyph" • Niketh Vellanki - "Kanji" • Dakota Corbin - "untitled image" • Couleur - "swan animal white swan" • Oldiefan - "nature tree apple tree" • Joshua Hoehne - "Lion Yawn" • Yvan Musy - "Landing au coucher de Soleil" • MabelAmber - "little girl child girl child" Visual Streams By OpenStax College [CC BY 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons