4If you are anything like me, you can remember people’s faces but cannot remember their names to save your life. Don’t worry, you are part of the 60-65% percent of the population who are visual thinkers. As a visual thinker, pictures and visualizations help you make sense of the world rather than words.
What Is Visual Thinking?
As a technique, visual thinking allows you to organize your thoughts and ideas through images, drawings, pictures, graphs, and the like. It provides a more powerful and memorable learning experience than spoken or written words. Also, visual thinking helps you improve your critical thinking, problem-solving, as well as communication skills and makes your thinking processes explicit and actionable.
Why Use Visual Thinking?
Visual thinking is part of our daily lives even if we do not think about it, as we are constantly using maps, app icons, or street signs. We use visual thinking at work when we make presentations, organize data in pie or flow charts, or create infographics for our website.
Organizing information in images can help us gain a different perspective on a problem. When you express your idea through pictures, for example, you filter out all the noise and distill the essence of that idea. Besides, it goes to show that communication need not be formal.
This technique is very useful at work, especially for teams of creatives, because it helps communicate ideas more efficiently than speech or text. Besides, a study showed that visual aids make presentations 43% more persuasive.
The Advantages of Communicating Ideas Through Images
According to science, the human brain favors images over the written word and processes visual data 60,000 times faster than text. Besides, images can help us discover relations between objects that we missed and come up with innovative solutions. Our Points of You® language workshops help our students achieve this. The good news is that you do not have to be an artist; basic drawings are enough to represent concepts that others can interpret and understand.
Equally important, visual thinking techniques help create a more inclusive company culture. Neurodivergent people who suffer from dyslexia, ADD, or autism may struggle to keep up in meetings where the information is conveyed verbally. Therefore, visual thinking brings clarity to your meetings and helps you tap into the potential and natural abilities of the neurodiverse in your team through visuals.
When you struggle to find a solution to a problem, or when the tried-and-tested solutions do not work, visual thinking comes to the rescue. Using images as metaphors will stimulate your creativity and improve your problem-solving skills.
Visual aids like flow charts or mind maps help you organize your thoughts and stay on track because you can create categories, prioritize, and collate information and ensure that you do not leave out anything important. As a result, visual thinking brings the team’s vision alive.
Similarly, visual thinking techniques help you learn more effectively and remember the information for longer. Mind mapping is a visual aid that captures and organizes information related to a single concept in a structured way. Our language projects include mind mapping as an effective learning tool that the students can also apply at work to brainstorm ideas and plan and manage projects.
Visuals in Our Language Courses
We use different visual thinking techniques in our lessons, like mind mapping, Points of You®, or LEGO® Serious Play, because we believe that they are highly effective. Students work on projects based on topics that are relevant to them and learn grammar and vocabulary as well as soft skills, like making presentations and using real material and elements of gamification to make learning fun.
Get in touch to learn more about our language courses.
