vizthink, thinking in pictures

Wish I could go to this VizThink conference in San Francisco later this month, it sounds interesting, quite a few leading cartoonists and illustrators will be there, it seems:

Who are visual thinkers anyway? Visual thinkers are people who use any form of the visual arts such as graphic design, illustration, photos, video, animations, sketches, 3D, etc. for communications and learning. VizThink's goal is to bring together the best of the best in our industry with participation from trainers, marketers, presenters, executives, planners, strategists, and managers, just to name a few. While each approach and application may be different, the community members all share the same philosophy in the power of visualization for learning and communication. We believe that by bringing these diverse groups together, we'll create a community that can take the industry to a new level and invite you to take part.

There's a VizThink blog, too.

What's visual thinking got to do with nonhuman communications? Obviously this conference focuses on human-to-human communication, but I keep going back to the notion that I encountered first in the writing of Temple Grandin, that animals and autistic people think in images. In fact, she wrote a book called Thinking in Pictures and Other Reports From My Life With Autism. Here's the first paragraph of the first chapter from that book, free to read at her web site, here:

I THINK IN PICTURES. Words are like a second language to me. I translate both spoken and written words into full-color movies, complete with sound, which run like a VCR tape in my head. When somebody speaks to me, his words are instantly translated into pictures. Language-based thinkers often find this phenomenon difficult to understand, but in my job as an equipment designer for the livestock industry, visual thinking is a tremendous advantage.

That "livestock industry" is a big, hot-button issue of course, we'll leave it for another time.