He starts out by talking about the 'Big Viz', which was a project from
TED 2008 which attempted to clarify the complexity of the entire conference
and every speaker's work into a combination of 650 sketches by two visual
artists. The surprising finding from that experiment was that it really
worked: it really helped attendees keep the presentations and the technologies
crisp in their minds.
From that the talk launches into a discussion on why that works. What
is it about graphics and illustrations that create meaning? He attempts
to answer that. As he says, the more we understand about the creation
of meaning, the more we understand about communication and the better
we can communicate with one another.
We take a look at a 3D model of the brain and step by step describe
how the visual information collection process works, beginning with
the eyes and their overlapping field of vision. From there, it goes
to the primary visual cortex, which recognises only simple shapes. These
shapes trigger relays that move to other parts of the brain, each carving
out meaning from the specialised information.
Up to 30 other processing regions may be involved, who then pass their
discoveries on to further regions. Three of these areas are discussed.
The first is the ventral stream, on the left of the brain. It deals
with object recognition: Taking a given object and pattern matching
it to the internal database, to find a match and stick a label on it.
The second is the dorsal stream, located at the back of the brain.
It deals with spatial locations. Ventral identified what the object
was; this now works out where it is.
The third is the limbic system, deep in the reptilian hindbrain. An
ancient part of the brain, it triggers gut reactions.
These three segments he singles out, because information bounces from
one to another and it is a very well defined pathway. This becomes the
focus of the remaining two and a half minutes of the presentation, to
discuss how to set up visual information to best trigger this particular
One major problem with this approach of course is that it completely
ignores and even dismisses out of hand, any non visual method of processing
data, as well as the other 27 visual sensory pathways. View with a pinch