Thinking visually

I am fascinated by visual cognition. In 2015, I wrote an editorial for Museological Review (University of Leicester's Museum Studies PhD Department's peer reviewed journal) about it. I quoted Temple Grandin, Nick Sousanis and from Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences. My doctoral dissertation utilized a visual methodology based on the photo-voice work innovated by Claudia Mitchell. Not only does this subject fascinate me from an academic perspective, it has been important to my relationships with an assortment of people who are important to me and who, because they have been diagnosed to be on the Autism Spectrum, as Temple Grandin explained her own meta-cognitive processes, "think in pictures". Then I had a stroke and was recommended to read the experiences of a neuro-scientist, PhD, Jill Bolte Taylor, whose book, My Stroke of Insight, documents her own severe brain-bleed that disabled the left hemisphere of her brain for some time. That is the area of the brain used for language. I was surprised to read her description of how thinking in pictures slowed her ability to understand and respond to people and to see that it matched how Grandin explained how her visual thinking worked. Taylor wrote: "Since I was thinking in pictures, I had to start with a single image and then expand upon it. I could not start with the general and then find the more specific without exploring the billions of possibilities - which was draining...When using pictures to navigate my way back into language, it was impossible to go from a general file to a specific detail..." (Bolte, 2009. My Stroke of Insight. Penguin Books. p.80). There is so much more to explore, learn and experiment with how visual thinking works. I am excited at the prospect of making more contributions to what can be understood and, by means of visual research methodologies, to what it can teach us about our world and ourselves.