Visualization: It's Timeless.

Those famous cave paintings in France weren't to-do lists, sentences, words, or even letter forms. They were images. Thousands of years ago, hieroglyphics held images in each character. Written Chinese does the same today. We understand smiles before we understand words. As powerful as language is, it's not as instinctive or primal as visualization (Figure 20-7).

When we see a photograph or a painting, or the map on the weatherman's green screen, we learn a lot more a lot faster than we would if such an image were described in words. We can listen to an hour-long description of abject poverty, or we can look at an image of a vulture hovering near an emaciated child for a fraction of a second. No matter how compelling the verbal argument is, the image shares its story faster. While we may have advanced as societies to employ complex vocabularies and languages packed with idioms and metaphors and grammars that vicious nuns teach us as children, we are still able to communicate without our l....Figure 20-8