The Back of the Napkin Part 4

To represent the three-dimensional s.p.a.ce that the box occupies, we can draw a three-dimensional grid around it, where the coordinates are called x (length), y (height), and z (depth).

When we represent the box in a coordinate system, we label the axes x, y, and z.

Now imagine that the box is a room that we're inside. Even though it looks a little different because we're inside it, the underlying coordinates are the same, and we're still looking at length, height, and depth.

Any room that we're inside can be drawn on these same x, y, z coordinates.

Red Pen people might find this idea confusing, but no worries, our vision system does not. After all, this is exactly what our system is doing a hundred times per second-looking for visual cues to help determine the x, y, and z of the world around us.

Fine, but How Can We Look at an Idea?

But what happens when we're looking at things that don't exist in three dimensions, things such as the price of tea in China, Daphne's industry data, or Ken's funding information? How can coordinates help us find the underlying shape of an idea?

How can we find coordinates that frame raw data, information, and ideas?

The trick is to find a coordinate system that doesn't rely on length, height, or depth, and guess what? We've already got one, six, in fact.

We've encountered this new coordinate system several times already in this book: the 6 W's. Perhaps we've never thought of who/what, how much, where, when, how, and why as a coordinate system, but that's exactly the way we're going to use them for the rest of this book.

WHO/WHAT, HOW MUCH, WHERE, WHEN, HOW, WHY.

The 6 W's aren't just a set of questions we ask to define a problem. They're also the source of every pictorial coordinate system we're going to use from now on.

Here's how it works: Think back to the picture we drew for Daphne. It was a chart that compared who to how much to where. Think back to Ken's picture: It was a chart that compared what to how much, then plotted in who.

Daphne's picture: who versus how much versus where.

Ken's picture: what versus how much.

A stock price chart compares how much to when. A table of the winning times in a race compares who to when. Even a world map is really just a where (N-S) superimposed on another where (W-E), with some what (continents) placed on top.

The 6 W's are used as coordinates for almost every descriptive picture we're likely to face.

Think about any movie or television show you've watched that includes scenes of an emergency room: M*A*S*H, ER, Pearl Harbor, Band of Brothers. Now think about the scene where the big crash/accident/battle has just taken place, and the wounded are piling up faster than the doctors can help them. What happens every time? A senior nurse runs out into the chaos and starts making instant, intuition and experiencebased decisions about who has enough chance of survival to be admitted, and who must be left out in the cold. This is called "triage," and our eyes do it all the time.

Here's why: There is always far more visual information out there than we can process, so our vision system needs to be picky about what it lets past the front door. Although most of this process remains a mystery, our brain's higher processing centers benefit from the end result. It is as if our eyes have some kind of experiential intuition-just like the triage nurse who has seen it all-that helps them make instant judgment calls about what is important to look at and what is not.

What Do We Look at First?

This "intuition" is actually the result of many "low-level" cognitive processes. These are the activities that take place when we first receive sensory inputs and react to them without putting demands on our brain's more complex capabilities. When we look up to watch a plane fly by and instead squeeze our eyes closed to avoid the sun, we're experiencing a "low-level" mental process-in this case a simple instinctive reaction. Because we act before we even think about it, such actions are called "precognitive responses" and the sensory inputs that cause them-in this case the bright intensity of the sun-are called "precognitive attributes."

As visual signals enter our eyes, our visual processing centers take a quick glance at everything, make a rapid decision about what's really worth looking at, then pa.s.s that signal on down the line, rejecting everything else. This visual triage works because visual precognitive attributes are everywhere, and our eyes know exactly how to recognize them, without even thinking about it.

PRECOGNITIVE VISUAL TRIAGE.

Neuroscientists and psychologists have discovered evolutionary reasons why we're so well adapted to rapidly recognizing and processing many precognitive attributes. We're good at distinguishing vertical from horizontal lines because they help us keep upright in a vertical and horizontal world; we're good at interpreting shading and shadows because they indicate where the sun is, telling us which way is up; we're good at picking up subtle differences in visual textures because they help us find the edges of objects, etc.

Precognitive visuals are those that we process long before we even know that we are processing them.

Knowing about these precognitive cues is useful because it helps us identify which kinds of pictures (or pieces of pictures) we're going to understand without any conscious mental effort. If the goal of our visual triage nurse is to let in only those visual signals that provide the greatest meaning but have the lowest impact, she is going to look kindly at these kinds of visual signals and let them come right in.

The point here is that the more precognitive cues there are in a picture, the more likely we are to move the picture to the front of the line and process it quickly, saving our "high-level" mental capacity for deeper a.n.a.lytic processing: the kind that we'll see in the next chapter.

Proximity: Our eyes a.s.sume that things closer to each other are related.

Proximity Color: Our eyes immediately notice differences in color and a.s.sume groupings based on like coloring.

Color Size: Our eyes perceive differences in size with essentially zero effort, again allowing the a.s.sumption that the odd one is the one worth noting.

Size Orientation: Our eyes instantly distinguish between vertical and horizontal orientation (but have a much harder time with angles other than 90 degrees).

Orientation Direction: "Fate" is another word for perceived movement, something that we also pick up on without any conscious thought (and which will become key in the next chapter).

"Fate" (Direction) Shape: Our eyes notice differences in shapes somewhat less well.

Shape Shading: But our eyes immediately detect differences in shading as a way of distinguishing between up and down or in and out.

Shading * If you're interested in the scientific rationale for much of what I'm about to say, see Appendix B: The Science of Visual Thinking.

CHAPTER 5.

THE SIX WAYS OF SEEING.

While looking is about collecting the raw visual information that is in front of us, seeing is about selecting what's important. Here's the difference: Imagine that you're driving along and suddenly your car's engine gives a heave and starts hammering. You pull over and turn off the key. The engine dies with a shudder and a puff of blue smoke. * You climb out, pop the hood, and lean in. Your eyes begin roving over the engine compartment from front to back, and side to side, taking it all in: hoses, headers, manifolds, cables, wires, filters, dipsticks, fan belts. There's a lot of stuff in there, some of which you may recognize, some a total mystery. You know something is wrong, but you don't know what. So your eyes just roam. That's looking.

Then your eyes catch on something over to the left, where a group of thick wires emerge from a black plastic cap, like spaghetti from a pasta maker. All the wires flow out and attach to the side of the engine... except one. That particular wire isn't going anywhere-unlike the others, it's just hanging there. Your eyes pick up on this broken pattern, and although you might not know anything about engines, you do know that it just doesn't seem right. Then you notice a place on the engine where it appears that it should attach, just like the others. Hmmm... perhaps attaching the noodle there would fix the problem? That's seeing.

The differences between these two go beyond semantics. Our eyes do very different things when we look and when we see, and both are necessary for visual problem solving. Depending on our level of familiarity with auto mechanics, we may have known exactly what we were looking at when we popped the hood, or have been completely lost. But even if we were lost, there was still a very good chance that our eyes might pick up on something wildly out of place. That kind of contextual pattern recognition is what seeing is about, and our eyes do it extraordinarily well.

Looking at a problem is how we start, but just looking doesn't present any solutions. In order to know what to fix, we need to be able to see what's broken.

Seeing is the flip side of looking: Looking is the open process of collecting visual information, seeing is the narrowing process of putting the visual pieces together in order to make sense of them. Looking is collecting; seeing is selecting and identifying patterns. And really good seeing is even more than just pattern recognition; good seeing is problem recognition.

One of the reasons that pictures are such a great way to solve problems is that many problems are hard to see clearly, and a picture can help us see aspects of the problem that might otherwise be invisible. Visual thinking helps by giving us a way to see problems not as an endless variety of things that go wrong, but as a small set of interconnected visual challenges, each one of which can be pictured more clearly on its own.

Seeing the Whole Picture Over the following several pages, we're going to complete a visualization drill that will show us something new about how we see. In this exercise we're going to conjure up a series of simple mental images, mentally animate them, and then watch them come to life-all in our mind's eye. In order for this to work, it will be helpful for you to sit in a quiet place where it's possible to read a few lines and then look away from this book for a moment while you mentally conjure up what you've just read.

I call this the bird-dog drill, and when it is complete, you will see that we don't see in just one way at all. Depending on the problem in front of us, we can see in several different ways: up to six different ways, in fact... which just happen to map exactly back to those same 6 W's.

So find a quiet spot for the next ten minutes, and let's do the bird-dog drill.

THE BIRD-DOG DRILL.

1. Picture someone you know who makes you feel good.

We're going to start with something easy to visualize, namely a person, someone familiar to you. In your mind's eye, I want you to picture someone who you know personally, someone who just the thought of makes you feel good. If you're a parent, it might be your child; if you're married, perhaps your spouse; if you're unmarried, your boy- or girlfriend; if you don't have a boy- or girlfriend, perhaps your best friend. It doesn't matter who it is, but it does matter that thinking about them makes you feel happy.

Once you've come up with who the person is, I'd like you to picture them in your mind's eye, even in just a general way. Don't worry about seeing every detail of their face, don't worry too much about what they're wearing-just say their name to yourself and see what image comes to you.

2. Picture your favorite dog.

While keeping that image filed away at the top of your mind for quick retrieval, I want you to think about your favorite dog. Be specific: Think about the first dog you ever had, or the one you have now. If you've never had a dog, that's OK, just think of La.s.sie. In any case, see again if you can create a general image in your mind that shows "dog."

3. Picture someone pushing a baby carriage.

A few more characters to go: Next, I want you to picture a couple pushing a baby carriage. In this case, we don't need any details of the people or the baby carriage, just a rough image of what two people pushing a baby carriage look like. Now, file that one away for a moment while we create our last character.

4. Picture a bird.

Last character: I want you to think of a bird. A seagull, an eagle, a crow, a robin, a pelican... just name a bird and think for a moment about what it looks like. Got it? Good.

OK, we've got our cast of characters.

Someone who makes you feel good Your favorite dog A couple pushing a baby carriage A bird 5. Picture an outdoor place where there is a bench you can sit on. Sit on it.

It's time to make a little scene. Picture a place in your favorite park, someplace where there is a bench you can sit on where you can relax and just watch the people pa.s.sing by. I often think of the Marina Green in San Francisco: a sandy path along the gra.s.sy edge of the Bay, water behind framed by the Golden Gate Bridge, a paradise-on-earth kind of place. Find your own place and, in your mind's eye, put yourself on that bench.

6. See your full scene.

Now we're going to populate this scene with your cast of characters. First off, just a little way in front of you is your friend, walking the dog on a leash. Coming from the other direction toward your friend and your dog is the baby carriage couple. Somewhere a little ways away, beyond the baby carriage, the bird is sitting on the gra.s.s.

Let the scene play along for a moment. Perhaps your friend pets the dog, perhaps the dog sniffs in the dirt, perhaps the couple with the baby carriage slowly moves along this way, perhaps the bird is pecking at the ground-lots of little things are taking place as the scene comes alive.

Then... uh-oh, what's this? The dog spots the bird. The dog stops, looks, sniffs the air. Now what? Does the dog move toward the bird? Does your friend see the bird? Does the carriage keep rolling? Does the dog dart forward? Does the leash pull tight? Watch for a moment and see what plays out. Let it go for a few seconds....

Stop the scene right here. Game over: Freeze things in your mind as much as you can and try to lock down what's what and where's where. We're going to talk about what you just saw, but before we do, one question: Is the bird still on the ground, or did it fly away?

The Six Ways We See As you think about answering the question, let's take a look at what just happened. By creating this scene based on a few simple images, we built a scale model of how we see. Granted, it was completely artificial and consciously forced, but the basic mental methodology and mechanisms of seeing all took place.

As we went through that drill, whether our eyes were closed or open, whether it was easy to complete or a real struggle, we did see a lot. A bunch of events took place throughout our vision system, many simultaneously, some just split seconds apart, some over the entire duration of the exercise. Broadly speaking, what follows are the six ways we see.

1. WE SAW OBJECTS-THE WHO AND THE WHAT One of the first things that happened as we created this scene was that we saw several objects: There was our friend, there was a dog, there was a bird, there was a bench. They are all objects we know, that have names, and that are visually distinct. I doubt that anyone had a hard time visually distinguishing the dog from the baby carriage, for example.

There could also have been a whole lot of other objects that our minds also placed in the scene, whether we intentionally conjured them up or not-perhaps some trees, water, gra.s.s, clouds, other people and dogs-most anything that we'd expect to see in such a scene is possible.

The way that we created and recognized these objects was by seeing their measurable aspects and their qualitative attributes. Whether we were aware of it or not, we knew our friend through recalling countless measurements of facial feature size, proportion, and placement: Our mind's eye created a visual shorthand version of our friend's face based on countless such measurements stored away in our brain's neocortex.* The dog showed similar visual specifics depending on the breed we chose: size, color, hair length, etc., all of which we saw to a greater or lesser degree in our mind's eye. The baby carriage was round or square in shape, pink or orange or blue in color; the bird was white, black, blue, long neck, short neck-the list is endless. The point is that we recognized who and what we were seeing because we saw them as discrete objects exhibiting known measures and attributes.

2. We Saw Quant.i.ties-the how Many and how Much While part of our mind was occupied with visually identifying objects, another part was seeing numbers. We saw one dog, one bird, and at least three people. The baby carriage had four wheels (or maybe three, if it was one of those sporty tricycle jobs seen in places like the San Francisco marina). The bird had two wings, the dog had four legs, and who knows how many trees there might have been. If we saw ourselves in a park, probably too many to even attempt counting.

Recognizing these how manys and how muchs was also near instantaneous, and again, we didn't confuse the number of objects with the objects themselves. We didn't mix up "four" and "legs on the dog," for example. The point here is that our minds didn't have any trouble simultaneously seeing things as well as quant.i.ties of those things, and we didn't have to get hung up on the individual qualitative details of the objects in order to see how many of each there were. So far then, we've got two distinct ways of seeing: objects (who/what) and quant.i.ties (how many, how much).