Why post-it notes work - I knew there was a reason!
(Pam) at the conference this week I also saw a great presentation by this guy called Tom Wujec on the importance of using the visual medium in innovation. He's an author on several books on innovation, and works in the graphic field producing graphic images for movies like Spiderman, Lord of the Rings, etc.
He explained how the brain processes verbal messages and aural messages very differently from spatial and visual ones - where spatial/visual messages go through the brain in a much deeper way. An example is you can remember where your salt is kept in the kitchen you lived in a year ago much more easily than you can remember a conversation from a year ago. So for the brain to truly engage in and integrate an argument or idea into action, we should ensure that it is spatially represented.
Which is why when we use post-it notes, big flipcharts, and wall space to stick up separate thoughts, group them together, transfer them onto new pages, visualise them in pictures, create collages, attach them to each other - it's actually helping people to think a whole lot more clearly and a whole lot more deeply. so much so that we really remember and understand those thoughts and ideas much more than if we just talk about them or write them in a note book in a linear fashion.
Tom's company have centres now which visually record a discussion or a meeting all over the walls (electronically), which you can move around and link to each other (like on Minority Report), and store them for later meetings in the same fashion. It helps teams to recall not just the facts but the situation and emotion of the meeting that they attended even months or years later.
He explained how the brain processes verbal messages and aural messages very differently from spatial and visual ones - where spatial/visual messages go through the brain in a much deeper way. An example is you can remember where your salt is kept in the kitchen you lived in a year ago much more easily than you can remember a conversation from a year ago. So for the brain to truly engage in and integrate an argument or idea into action, we should ensure that it is spatially represented.
Which is why when we use post-it notes, big flipcharts, and wall space to stick up separate thoughts, group them together, transfer them onto new pages, visualise them in pictures, create collages, attach them to each other - it's actually helping people to think a whole lot more clearly and a whole lot more deeply. so much so that we really remember and understand those thoughts and ideas much more than if we just talk about them or write them in a note book in a linear fashion.
Tom's company have centres now which visually record a discussion or a meeting all over the walls (electronically), which you can move around and link to each other (like on Minority Report), and store them for later meetings in the same fashion. It helps teams to recall not just the facts but the situation and emotion of the meeting that they attended even months or years later.
posted by ROInnovation at 12:37 PM
5 Comments:
This is a great post - I used Wujec's comparisons right away in a company meeting.
It reminds me of an article I just read about Gordon Bell, a Microsoft researcher who is cataloguing every moment of his life via voice recorders, cameras, etc. Essentially, he'll never forget anything again... any idea, face, email, document, etc because it is logged in his own personal database. http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/110/head-for-detail.html
I wonder how a more visual database such as that described in the article could encourage new connections / combinations... and thus new ideas. Have a read - it's thought-provoking.
Hey Scott
I often wish I had a recording of my whole life...mainly for use in arguments with my husband ("you said this" "no I didn't, I said that!" " no you didn't!" etc.etc...
he he he. I think his idea to record his life is incredible - but scary too. (and maybe a bit boring having all that data on yourself, lots of it sleeping or on the loo?).
Might be interesting to use for medical reasons - do a search on the amount of cigarettes or red meat you have had over time and see your likelihood of cancer.
The foundation for this is the way the brain disassembles information so as to store it, and researchers do not understand this at all well right now. We DO know that visuals are disassmbled into "primitives", i.e. basic shapes, and that their existence and relationship get stored. Think of encoding a jigsaw puzzle this way: it costs just a few hundred bytes, rather than the megabytes that the image would cost.
Look at it the other way around: if you assume that the brain has 100 billion storage units (synapse/neuron elements) and you assume that each can store exactly one bit (which computers do, but this storage element would in some way exceed in real life), then: eiditically recording a PAL TV picture (which is say 100 times less detailed than what we actually see) would completely saturate your brain in under 9 minutes.
As with vision, which is the computationally most demanding, so also with other senses.
And this is just the front end. Your brain has a number of more back-end type functions to do with abstracts like emotion and relationships, and these need recording and linking too. It is a miracle that we are able to function at all.
So now let us return to memory and recall: the first general rule is therefore that the more tags we have to an item to be recalled, and the easier it is to recall. The second is "know thyself" - preferentially tag things according to the way your experience tells you that your brain works. The third is "train thyself" - consciously exercise your different recall modes, keeping the neural pathways strongly connected at the synapse level. This tags into the multi-modal approach that Wujec recommends: by deploying a greater variety of tagging opportunities, he provides people with the greatest possible repertoire to use. That is enriching in itself: it provides the basis for a richer cognitive life.
And a further payoff to Wujec: associational creativity. A well-functioning repertoire of strong tags will tug that memory into your conscious(or even preconscious) and might just spark that creative insight for which you were struggling, enriching your imaginative life too.
A final note: load and overload again. With how much can our brains cope? The data-flow through the front end visual system absorbs about a quarter of our total brain capacity, and in some cases more. And the first thing the brain does is convert the data into symbolic primitives and their relationships. In other words, we are seeing the data being transformed into information. That's easier to cope with.
The next step is to tranform this further into knowledge, and, possibly, wisdom. It is only at this stage that we humans get into our stride, and that may be the next challenge for your blog.
Seeing visuals transformed into information, then "knowledge and possibly, wisdom" made me think of Gerald Zaltman's ZMET (Zaltman Metaphor Elicitation Technique).
Basically, as I understand it, Zaltman has your customers draw images (or create collages) as metaphors of your product or service, then interprets them - telling you what your customers "mean".
My question is: Is this really possible? Can you truly understand the complexities of my thoughts and emotions from looking at one (or many) image(s) that I have created or collected?
Gerald McCracken wonders whether visuals can be so simplistically interpreted (or whether culture distorts our ability to draw insight from images) here: http://www.cultureby.com/trilogy/2006/10/the_zaltman_met.html
hey Scott and Eric, thank you so much for throwing more light on this topic.
It seems like such fundamentally important learning for life, education, business, knowledge, motivation - and intuitively makes sense to me. I will use this as a segment in the training programme I am setting up - but may need to refer to your comments for better understanding! As you say, Eric, it's a wonder we are able to function at all.
Sometimes when discussing hig conceptual ideas such as this topic, I see the argument, flow and information visualy in my brain. I can't verbally tell you how they look, but somehow they spatially make sense to me and I feel like I understand the paradigm being discussed in basic terms, without needing to fillin the blanks. I think your post goes some way to telling me why my brain does this.
Does anyone else get that kind of feeling when thinking hard?
Pam
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