The saying, “A picture is worth a thousand words” is often used to describe how powerful an image is in terms of its capturing power. Images are used by human in a lot of different ways. The most common usage is to capture information. Aside from capturing information, it is also used to compute, compare and recall. With its vast abilities, imagery, especially visual mental imagery, is vital to human intelligence. It is a good complement with other mind based system to enhance human intelligence. It provides a different approach in representing and computing. However, images are limited to only storing limited information and are not efficient in representing abstract ideas.
Human intelligence is the ability to learn and solve new problems. As human, we all learn and solve problems differently but the method in learning and solving problem can often be generalized and classified. Our mind can be classified as a combination of logic, rules, concepts, analogies, images and connections based system. Each of these systems has its own advantages and is used in different scenarios. For example, rules are used to induce logic flow. Concepts are used to generalize knowledge so it can be compared in a new scenario. These systems are used to represent our knowledge in different symbols and representation and allow us to easily apply it in new scenarios. Therefore, without the ability to generalize patterns and recall knowledge from our memory, we will never be able to link our knowledge to specific situations and hence we will unable to build on human intelligence.
Image provides another way of representing information. Instead of representation through words, image provides a mental representation of an experience. These experiences might be developed through a human’s senses such as through our vision, hearing, taste, smell and touch (Kosslyn, 2006). For example, what does a pepperoni pizza taste like? One might be able to form an image of its taste and smell. By forming an image of the experience, human is able to generalize and recall it in a new scenario. Continuing with the previous example, when a person asks what a pizza flavored potato chips will taste like. One might be able to defer their past experience of a pepperoni pizza and link it with the pizza flavored potato chip. In other words, image provides human a different way of capturing knowledge and solving problems, which is very helpful in some circumstances.
The most often usage of images are visual representation. As human, we capture images through our eyes. Visual mental images, as oppose to verbal representation, allow us to represent things on the way it looks and its arrangement. In addition, it allows human to visually compute and model objects in ways that verbal representation cannot. At a very early age, we are trained with our eyes to capture images. Images help us identify objects and its characteristics. We retrieve images from our memory when the information to be...
