Picture an apple in your mind. The reds and yellows of the skin and the stem poking out the top. Can you see it in your head? If you can, you are likely a visual learner like author and animal science professor at Colorado State University, Temple Grandin.
“When I think about something, I have a picture. Now I used to think everybody thought that way until I was in my late 30s. Some people are visual learners, they're the ones that’ll be very, very good at building things, art and all kinds of mechanical stuff because they can see how things work. Then you have people that are more mathematical — they think in patterns. And then there's some that think pretty much just in words,” she said.
She explored this idea in her 2022 book titled Visual Thinking. In November, she released an abridged version of that book for kids called Different Kinds of Minds. She says we need all sorts of different kinds of thinking to solve modern problems but she is concerned our education system isn’t serving visual thinkers.
“We’ve got just a one-size-fits-all in education. I’m very concerned that our educational system is screening out a lot of the visual thinkers because we’re really terrible at abstract math,” she said.
Grandin said there are ways to teach visual learners to do complex math more practically.
“What they ought to do with people like me is replace algebra with something else. Accounting or business math or maybe let them jump to geometry,” she said.
Different Kinds of Minds, Grandin said, is meant to help kids figure out what they’re good at and help them choose a career.
“I hope it may give an idea with some of the things they might be good at doing because you’re gonna have some kids that are going the mathematics route - they think in patterns. But my kind of mind will be good at art, anything to do with mechanical stuff, animals and photography," she said.
She said different types of thinkers are suited to different problems but they can have complementary skills that work together to solve problems.
