Notes
1. I was not familiar with Thomas West's excellent
book, In the Mind's Eye, until after this paper was accepted for
publication. He shows that many visually gifted creative thinkers (Faraday,
Maxwell, Einstein, Yeats, Patton, and others) had difficulties in school
because of problems with 'easy' tasks like spelling, speaking, getting organized,
and writing. He argues that such visual thinkers will be crucial to the
creative solution of many complex problems in the future and we must revise
education so it does not discriminate against them. Back.
2. Olson (1977a) suggests that Piaget's "stage
of formal thought," reached around adolescence, is actually a byproduct
of the logic of fully-explicit "school" essays, and not an inevitable
stage of intellectual growth. Back.
3. All assertions in this paper are tentative
and exploratory, but in order to keep the prose uncluttered, I have removed
most qualifying terms. As you read, add "perhaps," "sometimes,"
"for some people," "in some way whose limits are not yet
clear," and similar qualifying terms. All the examples come from the
student papers mentioned in the introduction. Back.
4. A Beetle Bailey cartoon recently parodied
the power of the visual over the verbal for such people. To the increasing
perplexity of his staff, General Halftrack says, "Gentlemen, there
are legs in our manuever plans. Several hips have developed. We must work
on the hair before the launch date." Then the lieutenant gets up to
close the door, through which the General can see the legs, hips, and hair
of his pretty secretary. (Mort Walker, Dec. 10, 1989). Back.
5. You sometimes find these analytical relationships
called "hierarchical," but I suspect the relations among them
are much more intricate than a hierarchy. A thesaurus, however, is probably
a good map of the kind of mental organization underlying expository prose.
Back.
6. Ong's important summary of the characteristics
of oral thought and expression appears in Orality and Literacy, chapter
3. Back.
7. Olson (1977a) traces the origin of logical,
expository, fully-explicit "school" prose to Locke, 1690. Back.
8. The debate over the effects of literacy is
covered in Kintgen, et al. (1988). Back.
9. Some of the characteristics I attribute to
visual thinking bear a strong resemblance to the networks of hypertext described
by Bolter (1991). Back.
10. Ong attributes this "additive rather
than subordinative" use of language to orality (1982, p. 37), but I
posit that visual thinkers use language that way, too. Back.
11. Some of Sinatra's excellent exercises are
specifically directed to the writing problems attributed in this paper to
visual thinkers. Back.
12. Has anyone tried training a group of poets
to use the the typographic power available in a good page layout program?
Back.
13. I have avoided using the terminology of "right
and left hemisphere" in this paper, partly because "right hemisphere"
is a "left hemisphere" term. What does the "right hemisphere"
call itself? Back.
14. Linda Hecker reports that some dyslexic students
have difficulties finding words or sequencing thoughts without having difficulties
thinking visually (personal communication). Back.
15. The nonverbal, even non-imagistic nature
of his specialized thought process is emphasized by the title of one of
his books: Beyond Words and Thoughts. Back.
16. The approach taken in this paper--which could
be said to consist of a constellation of poorly-defined terms, hunches developed
beyond the evidence, a lack of building blocks based on solid empirical
studies, top-down thinking, and faith in the value of working out an intuition--is
maddening to some researchers. Others, I hope, will find this kind of exploration
exhilerating. Back.