There is no doubt that visualization is in trend today. Texts without illustrations scare the modern reader. In social networks, posts without pictures attract less attention. Video content is becoming more and more popular.
But for visualization to really convey meanings and help in understanding, you need to know how human visual perception works and learn to consciously visualize. For example, a good working illustration is not just a picture inserted to dilute the text. An illustration should help in understanding the text, participate in delivering its meaning.
Visual thinking is just one model of thinking. To explain the approach to practicing this kind of thinking, let’s look at one interpretation of the description of the thinking process.
What goes on in our minds can be divided into two main processes: unconscious and conscious. What happens in the unconscious is not always clear, but it certainly works. Scraps of knowledge, images and many other things wander there. Let’s call this part of thinking Kishmish in our model.
In the conscious part, already conscious thoughts appear, so the second part of the model is called simply – Thoughts. Since we are used to thinking with words, thoughts can appear in the form of thought-words. And also, in the form of other various thought-forms. For example, artists and architects can think in images, and mathematicians have thought-forms appearing at once in the form of mathematical formulas. It turns out that in our head there is a constant interaction of unconscious and conscious.
But no matter in what kind of thought-forms our thoughts appear in the conscious part, there is always a problem – to keep them in the head, to build logic, to connect them into some structure. To do this, we need to fix them outside the head in some way. This is where the third part of the model called Structure comes in. Working with the Structure also triggers some processes in the unconscious.