The Case for Visual Thinking

The Visual Thinking Workshop is designed to complement your existing verbal and textual skills by enhancing your visual toolkit. Over millennia, our brains have evolved to process spatial and visual information efficiently. These skills help organize thoughts, ideas, and concepts in ways that purely abstract, textual approaches often cannot. Visual thinking isn’t meant to replace verbal thought—it’s a tool to enhance and complement it. As I’ve shared in the workshop, spatial-visual thinking enables us to structure complex ideas in ways that verbal thinking alone often struggles to achieve.

2. Aren’t we losing important elements of thinking by only using visuals?

This concern came up during my conversation with Adrian. He argued that thinking isn’t limited to visuals and that by focusing solely on visual tools in the workshop, we might miss out on other important forms of thinking. I completely agree that thinking should not be reduced to only visual processes. However, the workshop does not advocate for replacing verbal or abstract thought with visuals—instead, it encourages the strategic use of visual tools to complement and deepen your thinking.

In fact, the idea of combining visuals with text is central to how I think and what I teach. After all, if you think about it, I did not build a separate illustration app, but integrated a powerful illustration tool, Excalidraw, into a predominantly textual thinking tool, Obsidian. Diagrams, concept maps, whiteboards with sticky notes, tables, and illustrations are all forms of visual communication that add a spatial layer to our thinking process. When you pair them with textual elements, you create a powerful cognitive framework that enhances understanding and communication. Annie Murphy Paul’s The Extended Mind highlights this—thinking happens not just in our heads, but in loops with our environment, our social interactions, and our external tools like whiteboards and illustrations.

3. Can visuals really improve my thinking? Why is most of the workshop about communication?

Visuals do much more than aid communication. Visual thinking is about structuring and externalizing your ideas to improve cognitive processes. Research supports this. The Extended Mind emphasizes that externalizing ideas—whether through doodles, diagrams, or notes—allows us to make new connections and see relationships that remain hidden when ideas are kept inside our heads. Visual thinking isn’t about pretty pictures; it’s about creating cognitive loops that engage our full mental capacity.

Think about it this way: when you create a book-on-a-page visual summary, you’re not just communicating to someone else; you’re creating a spatial structure that helps you organize and deepen your own understanding. Visual thinking tools, like the ones we use in the workshop, offer this structure, helping you visualize connections between concepts that are hard to grasp through text alone.

4. Is visual thinking about making everything visual, like "hieroglyphics"?

Definitely not! Visual thinking is not about reducing everything to symbols or hieroglyphs. During the workshop, I brought up Xu Bing’s Book from the Ground as an extreme example of visual-only communication. It’s an incredible achievement that tells a story using only emojis, but it’s not what I advocate for in this workshop. My approach emphasizes balance—strategically using spatial-visual elements to complement text and vice versa.

Visual thinking is about using both visuals and text together to create a deeper understanding. For instance, when you create an illustration alongside notes, you use the visuals to reinforce abstract concepts, giving them a tangible form. This blend of visuals and text allows for better cognitive processing and communication.

5. Why do visuals work better for some ideas, but not others?

Visuals work best when they help to spatially arrange and structure information. Not every concept is easily translated into a visual, but many complex ideas benefit from visual representation. Think of a concept map, where ideas are connected in a web of relationships. Visual tools allow you to see these connections, which are often hard to grasp when presented in linear text.

One of the ideas we discuss in the workshop is 4D thinking—the concept that visual thinking adds a new dimension to how we process information. While text forces us to process ideas sequentially, visuals let us absorb information holistically, all at once. This is a fundamentally different mode of thinking giving us the ability to see the bigger picture while still understanding the details. If you are interested to read more on this, check out my visual summary of Mastering Visual Literacy.

As mentioned earlier, throughout our education there has been a massive imbalance in nurturing our abstract and verbal/textual skills while neglecting to teach visual thinking. Given the prominent role our eyes play in gathering and processing information, one could argue that we are all, to a great extent, visual creatures. Consider this: Even something as abstract as language finds its roots in spatial metaphors. We speak of “reaching goals,” “looking forward” to the future, or ideas “falling into place.” Our brains are naturally wired to map out concepts spatially. Of course, for those of us with visual impairments, the mind and body compensate with other senses and tools. While it's certainly possible to think without visuals, I maintain that for most of us, vision is the primary source of understanding.

Even if you don’t typically think in visuals, spatial-visual tools still offer immense benefits. By externalizing your thoughts into diagrams, maps, or sketches, you create loops with your environment that engage your brain in new ways. Whether it’s a flowchart, a concept map, or even a simple table, visuals add structure that can enhance clarity and improve decision-making.

7. Isn’t education already designed to help us think well? Why do I need visual tools?

Traditional education, at least in the way most of us experienced it, places a heavy emphasis on verbal and textual forms of learning. We spend years learning how to write, read, and think verbally. But as Adrian pointed out, this often leaves the visual aspect of thinking underdeveloped. At best, we may have had art classes or used visual aids in math or science, but the skills to think visually were not systematically taught.

The Visual Thinking Workshop seeks to redress that imbalance. We are spatial-visual creatures by nature. Using visual tools can help us engage with information differently, providing a way to see the big picture, identify connections, and uncover insights that text-based thinking alone might miss. By incorporating visuals into your workflow, you tap into a form of thinking that has been underutilized in most educational systems.

The workshop is about embracing both verbal and visual thinking. It’s designed to help you develop tools that enhance your ability to think, organize, and communicate complex ideas. If you’re ready to explore the power of visual thinking, this workshop will show you how to balance text and visuals in a way that deepens your understanding and enriches your cognitive processes.