Visualization

Visual communication is important in every industry and area of study. Complex ideas and processes are often communicated best in a visual format. Visual symbols often bridge language and cultural barriers. Visuals can help to provoke insights, and communicate those insights to others.

Visual thinking or visual/spatial learning is the phenomenon of thinking through visual processing, as opposed to thinking with linguistic or verbal processing. Visual thinking is nonlinear, drawing from and combining information from diverse sources simultaneously. Visual thinking enables insight into complex systems, which would be impossible through language alone. Many people are primarily visual thinkers, and share some common characteristics:

1. They use parallel and holistic categorization of concepts.
2. They often have a photographic memory - or access memories primarily through image cataloging.
3. They often think at a subliminal rate of 32 concepts per second, as opposed to the 6-7 words per second experienced by verbal-sequential thinkers.
4. Unlike reasoning with language, they come to conclusions in an intuitive way. They “see” the answers to problems.
5. May think of the meaning of language as multidimensional scenarios of ideas and concepts. Natural ability to assimilate the meaning of whole sentences quickly, instead of reading word for word.

Visualizing information is often crucial to informed decision-making in many industries, such as x-rays in the medical field, or analysis software for the semiconductor industry. In the next few sections we will explore some of the uses of visual communication. •

Virtual frog image credit: Kitware Inc.
Semiconductor image credit: Spotfire, Inc.