flwyd: (mathnet - to cogitate and to solve)
At the end of December I read Visual Thinking by Temple Grandin. Grandin is one of the most famous people with autism, or perhaps it would be better to say that she's one of the people most well-known for having autism. Grandin thinks in pictures, and Visual Thinking draws on her own mind, her experience working with others, and psychological research to talk about three different types of thinking.
  • Object visual thinking involves mental images of specific things or scenes. Thinking about airplanes involves recalling mental images of specific airplanes the person has seen, in person or in a photograph: perhaps a Boeing 737 or a Cessna 182. Temple Grandin is an object visual thinker, and famously designs livestock handling facilities by visualizing what an animal would see from a particular location.
  • Visual-spatial thinking involves thinking in relations, abstractions, and patterns. Thinking about airplanes might involve thinking about the general structure of an airplane—the fuselage connects to wings, the cockpit, tail, etc.—without thinking about any specific plane.
  • Verbal thinking involves words and sequences rather than images. Thinking about airplanes might involve the process of flight: boarding, taxiing, acceleration on the runway, liftoff, and so on.

The book's focus is on visual thinkers, people whose main mode of thought is either object-visual thinking or visual-spatial thinking, particularly the former. People on the autism spectrum are often visual thinkers, though not all visual thinkers are autistic or vice versa and neither has a bright-line diagnostic. As an autistic child, Temple Grandin didn't learn to speak until later than many children, and she struggled in many classes in school because the material was presented for verbal thinkers and folks who could do abstract reasoning. She talks about finally connecting with coursework that made sense to her when she got to shop class, which is about working with physical objects. Another key educational experience was going to a boarding school which involved chores like caring for animals; lacking language, animals are naturally visual thinkers.

Grandin talks about the kinds of work that the three types of thinkers do well. You'll often find object visual thinkers in roles that require hands-on work: mechanics, machinists, drafters, builders, equipment operators, repair people. They're excellent at troubleshooting machinery, and they're able to tinker and build things with whatever supplies may be at hand. Visual-spatial thinkers are often drawn to engineering, mathematics, and computers; they design complex systems and find patterns in the world. Verbal thinkers are, naturally, drawn to work that's focused on words or sequential thinking. Lawyers, politicians, authors, and journalists are often verbal thinkers, and project managers can apply sequential thinking to make sure things happen on time. Grandin likes to talk about how the two types of visual thinkers are complimentary when designing something. Abstract visual thinkers can do all the modeling and calculations to ensure a factory building will be sturdy and that the machinery runs reliably. But a factory designed only by abstract thinkers likely won't run very effectively because they tend to overlook problems in the specific details of things work on the factory floor: the awkward movements a worker needs to do at the assembly line, or poor lighting of a workbench because something's blocking the lamps. Visual-spatial thinkers can make great electrical engineers, but you might want an object visualizer as an electrician. In the software space you might want an object visual thinker for a UI designer, a visual-spatial thinker writing code, and a verbal thinker as product manager, figuring out the user journeys the system will support.

A lot of the book talks about how modern American society is letting object visual thinkers down. A lot of schooling is designed for verbal or abstract thinking, and object visualizers struggle. Grandin reports that object visual thinkers often have a very difficult time with algebra, which they find too abstract and this challenge prevents many people from graduating from high school. However, many of these same people excel at geometry and trigonometry because their visual cortex can make sense of the relationships. "Let students take trigonometry if they fail algebra" might sound weird to folks used to the traditional progression of high school, but it might result in having a lot more Americans who are good at math, at least some parts of it. Grandin highlights George W. Bush's No Child Left Behind Act for making this problem worse: schools are graded and funded based on students' standardized test scores, so the incentive is to focus instruction on what will be tested. There's no standardized test that gives subjects a pile of lumber and a box of tools and asks them to assemble a chair, so when budget cuts come, classes like shop and music get taken away. Colleges and universities tend to make things even more abstract and more verbal, and the availability of trade schools, apprenticeships, and other hands-on education has been dwindling. Companies often have a college degree requirement, not realizing they may be cutting object visualizers out of the employment pool. Grandin decries that the result is an America where we're losing the ability to fix things.

This has political implications, too. (Here I'm building on Temple Grandin's foundation, she doesn't frame the book this way.) There are fewer narratives in American politics stronger than the middle class dream of success. After World War II, a man with no education beyond high school could get a good-paying job as a factory worker, a miner, an auto mechanic, doing appliance repair, or many other roles that object visual thinkers do well. These jobs offered the chance to own a home, raise a family, and enjoy leisure time; a combination that was uncommon for their parents' generation. As the 20th Century drew to a close, and accelerating in the 21st Century, the American economy shifted strongly to jobs that reward abstract or verbal thinking. Globalization sent a lot of the manufacturing jobs to lower-cost countries while domestic production became increasingly automated. (Fun fact: the U.S. is still the world's leading manufacturer, even though we employ a fraction of the manufacturing workforce we once did: American manufacturing is mostly done by machines.) Computers and the Internet gave powerful tools to abstract and verbal thinkers who are able to thrive in a service and information economy. High-tech manufacturing also made hands-on work more difficult: in the 1960s and '70s, buying a Heathkit stereo system and assembling it yourself could save significant money and teach you something useful at the same time, and you could easily fix it if a component failed. Today with high-tech automated assembly and microprocessors running everything, the cost to pay someone to fix a damaged Sonos speaker system is probably higher than the price of buying a new one. Starting in 2015, America saw Donald Trump's messaging resonate with older voters who work in these object visualizing jobs, and especially among voters who identify with such work that's been in decline like coal mining and assembly lines. Should it be any surprise in 2024 that Harris outperformed Trump by 13 points among college-educated voters, but Trump was up 24 points among men without a college degree? Millennials living in their parents' basements and playing video games all day was something of a running joke in the late aughts, but that also describes visual thinkers who've been left out of the modern American social structure and have grown to resent folks who were able to follow the abstract and verbal path through college and the modern hands-off economy.

I'd watched Temple Grandin talk about this book at Google, so I was curious how the ideas of a highly visual thinker would come across in a book, a naturally verbal and sequential medium. At times reading the book felt like listening to Temple Grandin give a talk; she often communicates in specific anecdotes, and related stories recur throughout the book. One of the big themes of the book is how people with different thinking styles can collaborate, and in the book she gives praise to her editor who's able to apply strong verbal thinking to organize the scattered notes and fragments that Temple gives her. This is certainly helpful in making this information about visual thinking accessible to verbal thinkers and readers. I found it interesting, though, that a book which is all about thinking in images and spatial relationships contains 400 pages of words and no photographs, illustrations, or diagrams. As a visual-spatial thinker, I was hoping to see some kind of 2D representation of how a visual thinker might operate. I wonder how many visual thinkers would benefit from learning this information, but get turned off by a book that's nothing but words.

I think I first heard about visual-spatial thinking, as distinct from object visualizing, from a previous Temple Grandin talk. I've considered myself on the autism spectrum for over 20 years, since I learned about Asperger's syndrome. When I heard Temple Grandin explain how her brain works I said "that's definitely not how mine works." While I can build intricate and elegant software systems, I'm perennially bad at building physical things. Cognitive tasks like mentally rotating a cube are challenging for me, but I can visualize a map of the whole world or specific areas, and at talent shows I like to recite every country in the world in geographic order. Unlike many kids with autism I didn't have any trouble learning language, and I always read above grade level. But I think my language use shows signs of spatial and abstract thinking: I've always loved puns, which feel to me like I'm demonstrating a multi-dimensional linkage between words that aren't present in the normal linear version. As a kid I often focused on the literal meaning of a set of words, much to the consternation of verbal thinkers who would say "you know what I mean!" (I still do this as an adult sometimes, but I have four decades of building a database of what people actually mean when they say something that a program would interpret differently.) I also tend to be very long-winded: an excellent verbal thinker can convey an idea without using a lot of words, while I tend to say or write down every sentence that comes to my mind related to a topic. Someone might mention a topic at lunch and I'll spend three minutes talking about all the things I learned from Wikipedia that are tangentially related. This is a bit like reading a map out loud: the river we were talking about touches another river, so let's row up stream and see where that one goes.

It's important for people creating tools and products to design with the different modes of thinking in mind. Much as a product that was designed and tested entirely by right-handed people is likely to be awkward for lefties, a product or process that was designed around the way verbal thinkers operate is likely to be frustrating to visual thinkers. Google Maps is an interesting example here. At the core, the data is inherently spatial: where is everything? But there are ways to expose that data that fit different thinking patterns. If someone wants directions from one place to another, Maps could show a path on a map and instructions like "take 6th Avenue to Broadway and turn south, then turn west on Alameda." This is great for spatial thinkers like me; I might ignore the written instructions entirely and just look at the lines on the map; if I take a different turn I can still reach the destination because I've formed a mental model of the space between here and there. Verbal thinkers might focus on the step-by-step instructions, but when they come to each intersection they'll have to figure out "which way is south?" So instead of cardinal directions, let's use left and right turns. Object visualizers still might have trouble, though: the map is an abstract set of lines and rectangles that can be hard to turn into 3D space, and the turn-by-turn instructions are a bunch of street names and numbers that need to be kept in order: "do I turn on Alameda before Broadway, or is it the other way?" So Google Maps recently added navigation by landmarks: "turn right after the McDonalds" and "turn left at the second traffic light." To get even more context, object visualizers can drop into Street View and see what all the buildings look like at an intersection. This multi-modal approach to directions is a big win over paper maps, when everyone but the spatial thinkers was faced with a daunting puzzle. The old stereotype of a woman in the passenger seat complaining that the man in the driver's seat didn't pull over and ask for directions might have been a conflict between verbal and visual thinking…

I was pleased to learn that object visual thinkers do share a trait with visual-spatial thinkers: we organize things by keeping track of their physical location. It might look like a random pile of papers on a desk to a verbal thinker, but ask a visual thinker to retrieve a particular document and they can probably find it quickly. But if a verbal thinker comes in and tries to be helpful by organizing all the papers into an efficient filing system the visual thinker will be unable to find anything, because it's not where they last put it. These two organization approaches are "piling" and "filing." My coworkers are often confused about how I can manage having 20 browser windows open with 50+ tabs in each. I find it quite easy: each window has a loosely-related theme, and I remember where on the desktop each window sits. When my workstation switched to Wayland, Chrome was unable to restore windows to their original locations when it opened and I was completely flustered; I had to spend 20 minutes a week figuring out which window was which and moving them back to their original location. On the other hand, I always wonder how someone who's only got one browser window open can keep track of what they were working on :-)
flwyd: (farts sign - Norway)
When you die, they should offer an option to donate your body to science, except the science isn't biology: it's physics. They'll shoot your corpse out of a canon in an auditorium full of freshmen.
flwyd: (darwin change over time)
The scientific community assumes the same rules of communication are always applicable and rational, that people are attentive, open minded, persuaded by facts and believe that those who are presenting information are people of goodwill, and not deliberately trying to manipulate them. But none of those things are true.

Yankelovich and Rosell have identified a process that they call the public learning curve that describes maturing public opinions, where people's views evolve from poorly informed reactions to more thoughtful conclusions. The three-stage process begins with building awareness and consciousness (where advocates and the media typically do a good job). The seecond stage involves working through wishful thinking and denial, resistance to change and mistrust, grasping at straws, deliberate obfuscation and lack of urgency (which is where dialogue comes in). The third part of the learning curve is when people come to resolution (which is handled by decision-makers and government institutions). "Much of our work focuses on improving the 'working through' stage, which our society does not handle well and where critical issues like climate change can get stuck for years or decades," said Rosel.
– James Hoggan, I'm Right and You're an Idiot: The toxic state of public discourse and how to clean it up, chapter 1 with Daniel Yankelovich and Steve Rosel

It is not a wise strategy to define a situation as inevitable or out of control. "This is a negation of politics–because you don't do politics with inevitability," explained Latour. If you send a message to people that there's no other possibility, that it's too late–the result is inaction. Latour suggested that the message must give them the will to find a way out of the dilemma.
– ibid., chapter 7 with Bruno Latour

Particle Meme

Monday, July 2nd, 2012 11:35 pm
flwyd: (darwin change over time)
Physicists announced that Fermilab almost found the Higgs boson and CERN will be holding a press conference on Wednesday which might have some Higgs boson news from the Large Hadron Collider. Of course, with bosons and hadrons, it's hard not to giggle at elementary particles.

Originally posted by [livejournal.com profile] rufushonkeriv at post
flwyd: (red succulent)
Via [livejournal.com profile] cheetahmaster, a New York Times article about folks who recently published an explanation of colony collapse disorder among honeybees, using homeland security biological weapon analysis systems among other things. The article is a little odd, working in a reference to the atom bomb, but seems to faithfully describe the research. We got a bag of bees and just started smashing them on the desk… It was very complicated. The article, on PLoS ONE: Iridovirus and Microsporidian Linked to Honey Bee Colony Decline

As I've said before, if we lose the bees, we're fucked.

Supersize Me

Wednesday, November 21st, 2007 06:12 pm
flwyd: (bug eyed earl)
I don't know if I've talked about my favorite phylum on this journal, but let me state for the record that arthropods are awesome.

Evidence.

Kids science shows were fond of pointing out that you couldn't have an invasion of giant spiders because they would collapse under the weight of their exoskeletons. But a 2.5 meter scorpion is an arachnid that could serve many sci-fi needs.

2D Gender Graph

Monday, May 14th, 2007 09:20 pm
flwyd: (Vigelandsparken heels over head)
In the shower last night, I came up with an interesting idea. Partly it's about using scientific techniques in humorous ways, but there may be something worthwhile. I don't claim it's anything resembling a perfect model of the world, but hopefully it's at least entertaining.

People often talk about a "sexual orientation continuum" where gay is at one end, bisexual is in the middle, and straight is at the other end:

Gay                                Bisexual                                Straight
One can then use fuzzy logic to talk about attraction: "I'm 90% gay," "I like guys about as much as girls," "I'm not as straight as I act." Not a perfect representation of reality, but hopefully more accurate than three words and the instructions "circle one."

We can apply a similar idea to gender and style:

Feminine                                Androgynous                                Masculine
and to physical features and hormones:
Female                                Intersexed                                Male

Suppose that we put the latter two continua in a two-dimensional coordinate system:

FemaleIntersexedMale
Masculine12345
678910
Androgynous1112131415
Feminine1617181920
2122232425
(I've put numbers to allow convenient reference and because I'm displaying this with HTML tables instead of gnuplot, but the axes are intended to be continuous, not discreet.)

In this graph, "type 1" people have very female physiology and very masculine behavior. "Type 4" people have moderately male physiology and very masculine behavior. "Type 15" people have very male physiology and androgynous behavior. "Type 18" people have intersexed physiology and moderately female behavior, and so on.

We can use this graph to determine a person's gender empirically. Have them consider a wide variety of people and assign an attraction level to each; let's suppose attraction ranges from -1 for completely repulsed to 0 for no strong feelings to 1 for total infatuation. By plotting each person on the above graph with attraction level in the third dimension we can infer a model of a person's attraction patterns.

Claims like "I'm only attracted to girls" can thus be finessed: does the speaker have a single peak centered in type 6? Does it slope from 0.25 somewhere in type 13 to values near 1 in types 16, 21, and 22? Are there local maxima scattered about the left half of the graph? The claim "I'm not in to guys" could show as a value around 0 on the right half of the graph ("naked men don't turn me on, but they don't weird me out"), the right side might have an average value very close to -1 ("gross! a penis! get it away from me!"), or it might turn out that it's just stereotypical men (e.g. type 5) that turn the speaker off.

Do I have something interesting here? Have I independently discovered a common technique in Gender Studies classes? Does your attraction graph look interesting? I'd like to hear about it. If it's a helpful way of thinking about gender I might be sufficiently motivated to make an interactive version. For now, here's a convenient copy/paste fill-in-the-boxes version for those whose table-fu is not strong:

<pre>
+0.0 -0.0 +0.0 -0.0 +0.0
-0.0 +0.0 -0.0 +0.0 -0.0
+0.0 -0.0 +0.0 -0.0 +0.0
-0.0 +0.0 -0.0 +0.0 -0.0
+0.0 -0.0 +0.0 -0.0 +0.0
</pre>

Feel free to suggest graph locations for famous people, fictional characters, or folks you know personally. You can express them as quantized types from the table above or as [-1, 1] valued <sex, gender, attraction> triplets like "I think Arnold Schwarzenegger is a 1, 1, -0.3" (a somewhat repulsive type 5) or "I saw a hot drag queen last night... I'd say Mary was 10%, -90%, 75%" (a rather attractive type 23).


Incidentally, I've oriented the continua and axes such that female and feminine are in the positions traditionally assigned to negative values. My intent is not to imply that female and feminine are "bad" and male and masculine are "good." Like electron and proton charges, the assignment is arbitrary and graphs with axes reversed are just as valid when compared with like-oriented axes. I put female and feminine on the negative side in part because that's the yin-yang association and partly because "F" comes lexically before "M" and English associates "before" with "left." The cultural-linguistic challenge is to disassociate "positive" with "good" and "negative" with "bad." People threatened by flood feel that negative change in the river level is good while people threatened by drought feel that positive change in the river level is good.

fortune on... sicence

Tuesday, May 30th, 2006 12:57 pm
flwyd: (mathnet - to cogitate and to solve)
In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. Therefore ... in the Old Silurian Period the Mississippi River was upward of one million three hundred thousand miles long ... seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long. ... There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesome returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.
-- Mark Twain
flwyd: (fun characters)
Smegging grrfurgenama. I just typed a long post and then, instead of hitting the Done button, remembered a note I was going to add to my previous post and selected it to edit, which replaced my text without asking me if I wanted to save. That is so not a feature. Let's see how much I can reproduce.

A few days ago I finished reading The Alphabet Versus The Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image, by Leonard Shlain. The book's thesis is that literacy, and especially alphabetic literacy, hypertrophies the left brain's masculine hunter-killer traits and values of abstract serial linear thought at the expense of the right brain's gatherer-nurturer traits and values of concrete holistic gestalt thought. As alphabetic literacy enters a culture, the society is rocked with violence, religious intolerance, destruction of images, suppression of women, and the overthrow of concrete polytheist goddesses with abstract monotheistic gods. This is seen in the Hebrews, Greeks at the time of Aristotle, Orthodox vs. Gnostic Christianity, the Reformation, the Marxist revolutions of Russia, China, and Southeast Asia, Sunni vs. Shi'ite Islam, and modern Islamic fundamentalism like the Taliban. On the flip side, in the agrarian period before the appearance of writing, most cultures' central deity was a powerful Earth mother, represented by copious images, whose lesser consort/child died and was reborn every year. Men and women both worshiped goddesses, and society was fairly egalitarian (this remains the case in many hunter/gatherer cultures today). Major thinkers who spoke rather than wrote (Laozi, Buddha, Socrates, Jesus, Mohamed) tended to have fairly tolerant and pro-female attitudes. And these values as well as images tended to appear in cultures where alphabetic literacy was not widespread (including those cultures who passed from literacy to illiteracy, those near to violent literate cultures, and those who have yet to attain literacy). Furthermore, as photography and electromagnetism (with all its feminine metaphors) appeared in the forms of photography, movies, television, and computers, the West's laws, attitudes, and culture has shifted from excessive yang to a fairly balanced state. In a nutshell, a culture's communication media, perhaps more so than its content, determines the values, actions, and trends of society. For some more data, see my CWA post (about two thirds of the way down).

The book is written for the general public, so it lacks the flurry of citations found in scholarly works. It is far from New Age pseudo science, though; Shlain's bibliography spans 9 pages and ranges from Augustine and Virgil to Will Durant and Bertrand Russell. His data is the "generally accepted" story; exploration of various views of, say, ancient archaeological data is not in his scope. The events Shlain describes are large-scale and very complex, and doubtless arise from many factors and can be explained in many ways (which he acknowledges); his goal is to provide a unifying theory linking the counterpunctual rise and fall of the written word, masculine values, images, and feminine values. As a brain surgeon, Shlain's division of traits, values, and modes of thought rests on sound neurological data (and he acknowledges that the hemispheric split is more metaphorically accurate than physically accurate).

The book is excellently written, using both left hemispheric literalism and right hemispheric metaphor. Shlain doesn't claim to have proved anything, but rather to have demonstrated a correlation, from which the reader is to draw conclusions. His argument is cogent and well-documented, unlike many writers on male/female cultural interplay. He only once "falls" into "rhetorical" "damning" "quotation" marks. His language flows well and is graced by many words he has selected in the hopes that they don't fall out of the lexicon. The paradigmatic and specific ideas expressed in the book lead me to recommend it to almost everyone, from literalistic Protestants to open-minded Pagans to feminists who rail against cultural images. I can't think of many of my friends who wouldn't enjoy the book, and even fewer who would not benefit from reading it. I have found its modern perspective on yin/yang quite helpful in examining my own tendencies, beliefs, and development. (In the past, I've been big on literal interpretation, against photography and GUIs, and down on lots of right-hemispheric modes of perception. In recent years, I haven't read as much, I've watched more movies, and have adopted a more benign view of many Christians.)

I think I'll be able to use a bunch of what I've learned from this book in my review of Origins of the Modern Mind. I'm impressed by my memory abilities in rewriting this entry after writing it once and not reading it.

Edit 2/15/2009: In the intervening years, I've become less enamored with Leonard Shlain's work. He tries a little too hard to cram the entirety of human history into some simple ideas of the brain. His books and presentations are very enjoyable and informative, but they need a heavy dose of salt. He points out a lot of connections between elements of the zeitgeist that are worth chewing on, but I think the story he tells about their unification is a little simplistic. I still think The Albphabet vs. the Goddess is a book worth reading, but readers interested in the subject should read widely; there are a lot of cognitive scientists with interesting theories who also write well "at the Scientific American level" as Prof. Paulson would say.
July 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 2025

Most Popular Tags

Expand Cut Tags

No cut tags

Subscribe

RSS Atom
Page generated Thursday, July 10th, 2025 04:24 am
Powered by Dreamwidth Studios