Visual Thinking: for Design (Morgan Kaufmann Series in Interactive Technologies)

Visual thinking tools are especially important because they harness the visual pattern finding part of the brain.

Visual thinking consists of a series of acts of attention, driving eye movements and tuning our pattern-finding circuits.

hallmark of visual thinking is that it is often easier to redo some cognitive operation than to remember it.

What we end up actually perceiving is the result of information about the world strongly biased according to what we are attempting to accomplish.

Indeed it is possible to think of intelligence in general as a collaboration of pattern-finding processors.♦

is more accurate to say that we are conscious of the field of information to which we have rapid access rather than that we are immediately conscious of the world.

A useful way of describing the way the brain operates to solve problems is as a set of nested loops. Outer loops deal with generalities. Inner loops process the details. In the outer loop, the brain constructs a set of steps to solve the problem and then executes them:

Often to see a pattern is to find a solution to a problem.

According to this new view, visual thinking is a process that has the allocation of attention as its very essence.