|
|
|
|
'The words of language, as they are written and spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought.'........Einstein
It is often suspected that spatial skills are critical in fields other than those of the engineering and design domains. Researchers have identified over 86 different careers where spatial visualisation skills are essential for success. The lack of complete clarity regarding the workings of the mind and the nature of intelligence and thought still perpetrate a situation where educators have largely ignored the need for visualisation skills.
It is within spatial intelligence that Gardner locates the "ability to discern similarities across diverse domains." He praises Lewis Thomas's expressive analogies between biological phenomena and human concerns. He connects this to the "images" underlying many scientific theories, such as "Darwin's vision of the tree of life, Freud's notion of the unconscious as submerged like an iceberg, and John Dalton's view of the atom as a tiny solar system."
Cooper and Shepard considered the nature of thought in 1984 and proposed it as a form of silent talking to ones-self sometimes in the form of images. All of the greats were highly visual thinkers in their own terms, Einstein, Da Vinci, and Edison to name but a few. Faraday always conceived his problems in spatial terms e.g. Lines of force. Kekule (who was trained as an architect) discovered the structure of benzene when in a dream like state in front of the fire. He visualised the carbons moving around within the flames and was reminded of a snake chasing its tail. He referred to his work as molecular architecture. Spatial skills can be remarkably developed in certain individuals, consider the case of the inventor Nikola Tesla who could project before his eyes a picture complete in every detail of every part of a machine, pictures more detailed than any blueprint. Additionally he claimed to be able to mentally test out his inventions.
Thurstones creative thinker’s performance runs well ahead of their ability to provide verbal justification, so too was Einstein word-weary. He had a definite vision of solutions and words were sought for laboriously in a secondary stage, when the associative play was sufficiently established and could be reproduced at will.
Bruner asserted that the principal creative activity was the combination of different systems into new and more general systems that permit additional perception. This notion of progress occurring on the margins between fields accounts for the visual nature of the creative process of the above engineers and scientists. The nature of this progress is what is interesting; it points to high human capabilities and processes as image or at the very least picture based. We think in pictures? Imagine the input of the spatial brain into such a process? Remember that some of the greatest thinkers of all time were visual thinkers in the context mentioned. It suffices to but mention the likes of Einstein as a visual thinker and render the masses convinced of the value of Spatial Intelligence.
|
