Blah Blah Blah

by Dan Roam

  Given the extraordinary impact this test has on young people’s future (and the future of the country), you might think that the SAT would include sections on logical deduction, multidimensional problem analysis, creative problem solving, mechanical-conceptual-physical reasoning, and visual-spatial processing. You’d be wrong. The SAT contains none of these.

  What does the SAT actually test?

  What the SAT does contain is three sections, one each for math, critical reading, and writing. That’s all. Our student’s future is determined 66 percent by his or her ability to read and write and 33 percent by his or her ability to correctly answer structured math questions. For the test creators and college acceptance boards, that makes sense: These are all critical skills that can be taught, tested, and, most important, measured. But for the rest of us, that’s absurd: None of these sections actually proves our ability to solve anything.

  A Tale of Two Studies

  That the SAT remains the critical deciding factor in the lives of so many young people tells us more about the conceptually impoverished nature of our educational system than it does about our future leaders’ abilities to meet the challenges of today and tomorrow. We used to know that a solely verbally taught and verbally measured mind is missing half its thinking capability. Today we know more than that: We know that a solely verbally taught and verbally measured mind is in many ways worse.

  That’s right: Using words alone to discover, develop, and share ideas blinds us to entire worlds of possibilities. All fox and no hummingbird does not a great problem solver create.

  Two studies give a glimmer of what does. (Note the ages of these studies: Both are more than twenty years old. Hey, educators: This is not new stuff.)

  STUDY NO. 1: THE PICTURE SUPERIORITY EFFECT

  In 1984, two business scholars conducted a series of tests aimed at understanding what makes consumers remember brands. The result was what they called “The Picture-Superiority Effect on Consumer Memory.” In their studies, Terry Childers and Michael Houston verified that “visual imagery is a rich mnemonic device that enhances learning and retention of material over such techniques as sentence elaboration or rote rehearsal.”

  If the purpose of education is to “enhance learning and retention of material,” that finding by itself is a pretty damning commentary on tests like the SAT. But that’s just the beginning. Childers and Houston’s study revealed three ways in which images provide a richer and more memorable experience than words:

  (1) Incidental Redundant Cues. “When imaging a stimulus, a large number of incidental cues are contained within the image . . . The redundant cue explanation argues that imagery involves a form of elaboration that yields stored semantic information beyond that contained in the original stimulus. Thus for verbal material to be remembered as well as pictures, it would have to be processed at a semantic level and be of a form that generated additional information that resulted in multiple retrieval paths.”

  (2) Relational Organization. “Imaginal processing of paired items [such as can be seen in a picture] allows the individual to find a connective relationship between the items. [This] suggests that for verbal-only material to be learned as well as pictures, proc j"1"> toverbal-onessing at a semantic level is necessary. Furthermore, the verbal material should be of a form that promotes cohesion within it.”

  (3) Stimulus Differentiation. “The stimulus differentiation argument suggests that imagery results in a more distinctive, more isolated single memory code . . . The essence of the stimulus differentiation hypothesis is that imagery is a more reliable encoding process than verbal encoding.”

  Childers and Houston conclude their study with two hypotheses:

  H1: “Pictorial material conveying brand-product-class associations is recalled better than corresponding verbal-only material when each is processed at a sensory level.”

  H2: “Greater sensory discrimination of pictures improves their recall over corresponding verbal-only material when each is processed at a sensory level.”

  What does all this tell us? When we want to remember something, a visualized picture is more useful than a bunch of memorized words.

  STUDY NO. 2: VERBAL OVERSHADOWING

  In 1990, two cognitive psychologists conducted a study that looked at the visual-versus-verbal balance from another direction—and came up with the same answer. In their study “Verbal Overshadowing of Visual Memories: Some Things Are Better Left Unsaid,” Jonathan Schooler and Tonya Engstler-Schooler used six experiments to determine whether talking about a visual memory improved the accuracy of the memory. They found the opposite: Their studies consistently showed that when we talk about something we’ve seen (faces and colors were the objects used in the tests), we actually lose our ability to accurately remember what the original object looked like.

  In other words, when our verbal mind processes something seen by our visual mind, our verbal side not only takes over; it distorts our recollection of what we saw. Our verbal mind overshadows our visual mind to the point that it blinds us to what we saw.

  In the words of Schooler, “the verbalization of a visual memory can foster the formation of a nonveridical [non-reality-based] verbally biased representation. Access of this verbally biased representation can then interfere with subjects’ ability to make use of their intact visual code. Verbalization impairs memory for a variety of different nonverbal stimuli; in each case the nonverbal stimuli cannot be adequately recalled in words.”

  In plain English, that means that a witness to a crime who is asked to verbally describe the perpetrator is less likely to identify the real criminal in a lineup than the witness who said nothing.

  Two studies, complementary results. First: Pictures are a better way to remember a sensory stimulus. Second: Applying words degrades our ability to accurately recall the reality of that stimulus. The SAT mostly measures our ability to think with words. What truth is that test really jonal h wensomeasuring?

  What Happened on the Way to the SAT?

  How has it come to pass that we have so successfully purged our visual mind from our understanding of intelligence? No matter where we look in human history, recorded language started with pictures. What happened? (And what have we lost along the way?)

  THE CLAN OF THE CAVE BULL

  Long, long before any words were ever written, people believed in the power of pictures. Thirty-two thousand years ago, Oog and Aag94 walked into a cave in what is today southern France. They picked up a couple of pieces of charcoal and started drawing a bull. We don’t know anything about Oog and Aag except that they could draw beautiful bulls, horses, and rhinos. We don’t know why they chose to draw these animals, whether they were spiritual leaders among their people or bored loners, or whether their pictures were part of a language or were purely decorative—we don’t even know why they chose to draw their animals in the darkness of a cave.

  What we do know is that their pictures are the oldest discovered images ever made by a human hand. In the entire sweep of history, Oog and Aag’s bull is the beginning of the whoosh. When we look back from our vantage point today and try to imagine who might have been the first person to pick up a pencil and record a vision of the world, we end up with Oog and Aag and their bull.95 And what a beautiful bull it is.

  Oog and Aag’s bull. As far as we know, this is the oldest drawing ever made.

  THEN CAME THE EGYPTIANS

  Now we jump forward in time twenty-seven thousand years. (Yes, this is a sequence—we’ll get to the timeline that makes it vivid in a moment.) Five thousand years ago, another group of people, thousands of miles away from Oog and Aag’s cave, also started to draw bulls. In the cliffs along the Nile River in what is now Egypt, a scribe named Heptep96 picked up a stick and on a wet mud brick drew his version of a bull. It looked a lot like Oog and Aag’s.

  Heptep’s bull: Although drawn twenty-seven thousand years later and thousands of miles away, it looks a lot like Oog and Aag’s.

  At first, Heptep and his
people drew the bull to represent . . . well, a bull. Bulls were important to the commerce of ancient Egypt, and drawing them gave traders a way to record transactions. Before long, Heptep’s drawings evolved to become a complet jplyinswele visual system useful for recording economics, politics, and history—as well as the sacred texts for keeping track of the hundreds of gods that ruled life along the Nile. Thus, hieroglyphics were born—the world’s second writing system.97

  The problem for Heptep and his fellow scribes was that people said a lot more, a lot faster, than they could record with their elaborate pictures. (Look at that: Just a few centuries after introducing the first language-recording system, it was already overwhelmed with blah-blah-blah. Let this be a lesson to us all.) So Heptep decided to make some of the pictures represent sounds. For example, when Heptep drew an owl, he didn’t mean the bird (although owls existed along the Nile, they did not figure prominently in Egyptian life); he meant the sound “M”—which sounded like the ancient Egyptian word for “owl.” This was huge. Not only was there now a written way to convey ideas; there was a written way to convey words.

  Pictogram versus phonogram: Heptep’s bull means “bull,” but his owl stands for the sound “M.”

  That proved to be the great puzzle of hieroglyphics. Sometimes the “words” in hieroglyphics are pictograms, meaning that the pictures really do represent the things they look like. But sometimes the “pictures” in hieroglyphics are phonograms, meaning they represent sounds that have nothing in common with the picture.

  The fact that hieroglyphics are both pictorial and phonographic is precisely the reason it took so long for Europeans to decode their meaning. For a thousand years, word-centric European scholars could not believe that a language as visually resplendent as hieroglyphics was really a written language at all. It took a self-educated (and probably dyslexic) Frenchman to prove them wrong.

  After years of laborious effort, Jean-François Champollion, a man who himself struggled to distinguish the difference between pictures and words in his native French, discovered the binary picture-and-sound structure of hieroglyphics. The key lay in not only comparing the parallel hieroglyphic and Greek texts found on the Rosetta Stone98 but in recognizing that the same pictures appeared to represent both objects and sounds. Ironically, part of Champollion’s revelation was triggered by a contemporary’s insights into the world’s other great pictographic language, Chinese.

  Through Champollion’s work, Europeans finally came to recognize that a language could be both pictorial and verbal. In other words, the first written languages were vivid.

  THEN CAME PHONETICS

  But that’s not the end of the story. Around two thousand years after Heptep drew his bull, seafaring merchants from the far eastern shores of the Mediterranean saw his pictures and liked them. As the world’s greatest traders, these Phoenicians also needed a written language to keep track o j">Kimeedy in notf who owed whom what. They adopted Heptep’s picture for use in their own writing and for a brief time used his bull’s head to represent alf, the Phoenician word for “ox.”

  But the bull didn’t last long. These Phoenicians had a different idea about writing. They weren’t interested in using pictures to represent things the way the Egyptians often did. The Phoenicians wanted their picture to represent only sounds.99 This is the crucial turning point in our story, because it marks the beginning of the end for pictures in European languages. There are many possible reasons why the Phoenicians dropped pictures—maybe drawing took too long or was too difficult for the rapidly growing population of writers; maybe drawings weren’t specific enough or flexible enough for the countless details the Phoenicians needed to document. We’ll never know exactly what this new generation of scribes was thinking, but we all live with the result.

  Sometime around 1000 b.c.e., by simplifying and rotating the bull (perhaps to make it easier to draw quickly), the Phoenicians created a letter that no longer meant “ox” but represented only the sound “alf.”

  The Phoenicians called this new letter aleph and made it the first

  letter in the alphabet they were creating. (And this is why today we call any language that uses symbols for sounds “phonetic.”)

  It only took another six hundred years for another Meditteranean seafaring people, the Greeks, to pick up that symbol, further simplify it, rotate it again, and make it their own. Thus arrived the Greek letter A, and the rest, as they say, is history.

  Thirty-two thousand years of writing: a long road from pictures to words.

  There we have it: the thirty-two thousand years of European writing history, a straight line from Oog and Aag to Heptep to us; from our original cave pictures to the “vivid” writing system of ancient Egypt to our purely verbal system today.

  While the sound-based writing system we Westerners use today is efficient, straightforward to learn, and easy to duplicate, the long road to get here has taken its toll on our visual mind. Our hummingbird, once central to all thinking, is no longer called upon when writing. For all educational, political, and practical intents, she has died. Our words killed her.

  APPENDIX B

  Connections Back to The Back of the Napkin

  ’ve always been a believer in the power of pictures. Whenever I speak with clients, colleagues, friends, or family, I encourage everyone to draw. On napkins, whiteboards, book margins, dusty tabletops, and frosted windows, our pictures appear. It doesn’t matter what surface we draw on, nor does the “quality” of our pictures matter; what matters is that we draw. The more we draw, the more our ideas become visible, and as they become visible they become clear, and as they become clear they become easier to discuss—which in the virtuous cycle of visual thinking prompts us to discuss even more.

  When I began The Back of the Napkin five years ago, I started by asking myself, “If simple visuals are so powerful, why don’t more people use them?” I assumed the answer was a lack of tools and instruction, so my goal in that book was to provide a handful of well-structured yet simple ways for anyone to become a good visual problem solver.

  The book was a hit. Published by Portfolio in 2008, The Back of the Napkin won many business innovation and creativity awards and became a bestseller in twenty languages. Yet something unexpected happened amid all that success: I realized my starting question was only half-right.

  The question isn’t “Why don’t more people think with pictures?” We do think in pictures, all of us, all the time. The real question is “Why have we forgotten that?”

  Blah-Blah-Blah is my answer. The tools in this book—the Blah-Blahmeter, Vivid Grammar, and the Vivid FOREST—serve the same purpose as those in The Back of the Napkin: they make it easier for us to think about and share complex ideas. But where the Napkin tools focused almost entirely on the pictorial, the tools in this book work to help us combine our visual and verbal minds.

  To me, it’s the differences between the two sets of tools that make them interesting, but it’s the parallels that make them fascinating.

  The 6x6 Rule

  I wrote the core of The Back of the Napkin around one essential visual-thinking tool: the 6x6 Rule.100 This rule says that since there are six essential pathways along which our brains process imagery, there are six equivalent essential pictures we can draw to visually explain anything.

  In other words, our brain has evolved to become a highly efficient visual processing machine. To handle the overwhelming amount of information coming in through our eyes, our brains break the visual world into a set of six discrete types of information. These types map almost directly to the old “six W’s” ksigh our eye taught in English composition class: who and what, how much, where, when, how, and why. (Yes, there are actually seven—I combine who and what into a single common information type—and how ends with w rather than starts with it, but that’s close enough.)

  There are six discrete types of visual information that we process: who and what, how much, where, when, how, and why.

  My 6x6 Rule
simply adds another step to this internal processing system: If our brains see the world in six ways, then it stands to reason that we can draw just six pictures (one for who or what and one each for the remaining five W’s) to create an illustration of any idea our brain can conceive of.

  Put in pictures, the 6x6 Rule looks like this:

  The 6x6 Rule: six ways we see = six pictures to explain anything.

  To me, the beauty of the 6x6 Rule is that it is both immediate and comprehensive. The immediacy part is important from a survival perspective. Let’s say we’re suddenly faced with a new problem or idea. Instead of panicking, we simply do what our visual brain is hardwired to do: We break the idea into its essential component elements, process them individually, and then stitch them together to create the richness of the whole. Presto: instant visual problem solving.

  The comprehensive part of the 6x6 is equally important. Because the six essential questions map to the major rational101 processing capabilities of our higher brain, if we can address all six, we can be pretty sure we’ve covered just about everything there is to know about an idea.

  The Origins of Vivid Grammar

  The 6x6 Rule is the original genesis for the Vivid Grammar I describe in this book. How the one became the other is, in hindsight, blindingly obvious. One day about a year after the publication of The Back of the Napkin, I gave a presentation on visual thinking to a roomful of middle school teachers. Knowing from experience that most of them would not rely on pictures in their teaching (primary teachers do rely on pictures to describe ideas, but by middle school most of the pictures have been banished in favor of written descriptions), I thought it might be useful to make a parallel between the pictures of the 6x6 Rule and verbal grammar.