I don't even have an internal dialogue so it goes without saying that I'm not a verbal thinker. Although organic chemistry and biochemistry lectures, they show slides with pictures, my other classes such as spectroscopy and maths are of no use to me because the slides consist of nothing but words. I can learn in those classes if I translate every word into pictures but this requires 10 times the effort for me and if I'm unsure of what is being said then its impossible for me to make an accurate picture.
I use pictures to represent even the most non visual concepts and it would save me mass amounts of time and effort if they could provide decent pictures in college. An example of my mental pictures: I just learned the concept of variance in statistics and how I think about it is I see a series of vertical lines along a horizontal axis with the mean in the middle. The further away the majority of the lines are from the mean, the greater the variance. Theres a bit of motion in there which I can't explain with words but someone who knows the concept could surely come up with a good static picture to represent the concept. What would it take to get visual learning implemented into universities? I bet lots of great minds are kept out of the scientific community simply because their minds aren't geared towards the mainly word based learning style used by universities these days. Great minds that think differently to those whos minds are geared towards it.
11 Nov 2010, 3:19 pm
