Introduced by Alexandros Sainidis
This put up is a part of the Jigsaw collection the place we share enlightening excerpts we discover in books. Some phrases and concepts are extra impactful when expressed by their writers, as they’re.
Once I was a toddler, my mom would usually say that arithmetic is the worldwide language – not English. This comment had an affect on me, as I understood that there’s extra to a language than phrases. The notion of a language can have a broader definition.
I grew up and located myself in a scenario the place I needed to clarify microeconomics to a pupil who got here from Norway, half-Greek. He missed all the lectures. He was bedridden for fairly a while. He had a behavior of underestimating the chilly temperature of the Greek sea within the autumn. Whereas his data Greek was satisfactory, he was fighting among the tutorial terminology. That is the place sketching got here in hand. By utilizing our mutual understanding of crafting in video video games (armour, weapons, tools and objects), I drew an anvil and began explaining all the pieces round it.
No matter couldn’t be defined in phrases, I drew, drew and drew, till I made it comprehensible. In three hours earlier than the exams, he absorbed sufficient and he really handed. This entertaining story is the explanation why I write and draw the best way I do. It gave me the arrogance to take action. Solely later did I realise that my “methodology” labored due to how sensible that Norwegian is. The end result, nevertheless, is an identical; I began creating my very own type. Now, I’m bringing this story up, as I lately began studying Doughnut Economics, the place I stumbled upon this fascinating excerpt:
The ability of images
Everyone’s saying it: we want a brand new financial story, a narrative of our shared financial future that’s match for the twenty-first century. I agree. However let’s not overlook one factor: essentially the most highly effective tales all through historical past have been those instructed with photos. If we need to rewrite economics, we have to redraw its photos too, as a result of we stand little probability of telling a brand new story if we persist with the outdated illustrations. And if drawing new photos sounds frivolous to you – like mere youngster’s play – imagine me it isn’t. Higher nonetheless, let me show it.
From prehistoric cave work to the map of the London Underground, pictures, diagrams and charts have lengthy been on the coronary heart of human storytelling. The rationale why is straightforward: our brains are wired for visuals. ‘Seeing comes earlier than phrases. The kid appears and acknowledges earlier than it speaks,’ wrote the media theorist John Berger within the opening strains of his 1972 basic, Methods of Seeing. Neuroscience has since confirmed the dominant function of visualisation in human cognition. Half of the nerve fibres in our brains are linked to our imaginative and prescient and, when our eyes are open, imaginative and prescient accounts for two-thirds of {the electrical} exercise within the mind. It takes simply 150 milliseconds for the mind to recognise a picture and a mere 100 milliseconds extra to connect a which means to it. Though we’ve got blind spots in each of our eyes – the place the optic nerve attaches to the retina – the mind deftly steps in to create the seamless phantasm of an entire.
Consequently, we’re born pattern-spotters, seeing faces within the clouds, ghosts within the shadows, and legendary beasts within the stars. And we study greatest when there are photos to have a look at. Because the visible literacy knowledgeable Lynell Burmark explains, ‘except our phrases, ideas and concepts are hooked onto a picture, they’ll go in a single ear, sail by means of the mind, and exit of the opposite ear. Phrases are processed by our short-term reminiscence the place we will solely retain about seven bits of data … Pictures, then again, go immediately into long-term reminiscence the place they’re indelibly etched.’ With far fewer pen strokes, and with out the burden of technical language, pictures have immediacy – and when textual content and picture ship conflicting messages, it’s the visible message that almost all usually wins. So the outdated adage seems to be true: an image actually is value a thousand phrases.
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Assume, then, of the circles, parabolas, strains and curves that make up the core diagrams in economics – these seemingly innocuous photos depicting what the financial system is, the way it strikes, and what it’s for. By no means underestimate the facility of such pictures: what we draw determines what we will and can’t see, what we discover and what we ignore, and so shapes all that follows. The pictures that we draw to explain the financial system invoke the timeless truths of Euclid’s maths and Newton’s physics of their geometric simplicity. However in doing so, they slip swiftly into the again of our head, wordlessly whispering the deepest assumptions of financial idea that want by no means be put into phrases as a result of they’ve been inscribed within the thoughts’s eye. They current a really partial image of the financial system, smoothing over financial idea’s personal peculiar blind spots, attractive us to seek for legal guidelines inside their strains, and sending us in pursuit of false targets. What’s extra, these pictures linger, like graffiti on the thoughts, lengthy after the phrases have pale; they develop into stowaway mental baggage, lodged in your visible cortex with out you even realising it’s there. And – identical to graffiti – it is vitally onerous to take away. So if an image is value a thousand phrases then, in economics at the very least, we should always pay an amazing deal extra consideration to the images that we train, draw and study.
Kate Raworth, Doughnut Economics: Seven Methods to Assume Like a Twenty first-Century Economist, Penguin Random Home Enterprise Books, web page 18-21
Hopefully our sketches will sometime type lingual patterns as nicely. The fantastic thing about a language originates from its energy to assemble and mix thought. To ship the message. This requires a level of predictability, the place a reader following this type of content material, for a time frame, may very well foresee and anticipate among the pictures utilized in mixture with the textual content. Even when this isn’t an correct assertion, nevertheless, at the very least it’s enjoyable for the editor.
