BIG IDEAS

Each month, Edutopia publishes an essay focusing on one of ten ideas for improving our schools
(www.edutopia.org/bigideas). The second in the series, this one focuses on an aspect of our
second Big Idea, Connect: Integrated Studies. Email your thoughts to bigideas@edutopia.org.

V
ISU
A L LY
SPEAK
I NG
BY LEONARD SHLAIN
The conventional prejudice is well known: Now that DVDs and movies are ubiquitous, and television and computer
games incessant, generations of students are becoming less literate, with ominous implications for the future.
A fascinating doomsday scenario, no doubt, but one that misses a crucial point.
Educators must acknowledge that there are now two parallel tracks for learning, both equally critical to under-
stand. Running alongside the traditional 3 Rs—readin’, ’ritin’, and ’rithmetic—are the three arts: dance, music,
and the visual arts. To ignore this new language of media and sensory literacy is to shortchange in a crucial way
the education of our children.
I L L U S T R AT I O N B Y D AV I D J U L I A N
2005 OCTOBER EDUTOPIA 45
 F
irst, consider how the human brain works: When a child learns
something new, a set of neurons lights up in his or her brain.
With each repeat of the lesson, the same neurons fire again.
Surrounding neurons, sensitized to the discharges of the first
set, soon become part of an ever-expanding electrochemical
chorus. Thus, learned information becomes burned into an
increasingly complex network of neuronal pathways. This is
how we acquire knowledge that will endure throughout our lives.
Conversely, a child must be exposed to certain kinds of information by a certain
age. Otherwise, we risk letting entire tracts of other specialized neurons wither
through disuse. The recurrent message at neurocognitive conferences these days
is,“Neurons that fire together wire together; neurons that fail to synch fail to link.”
We are born with an excess of neurons, as if nature is telling us to learn as much
as possible as quickly as we can. By the age of eight or nine, a devastating neural prun-
ing occurs, and each of us loses about 40 percent of the neurons with which we were
born. This is why a preschooler can learn a second language with ease, whereas a
college student trying to master the same language often finds it painful and difficult.
Given what we now know about how the brain operates, a larger question
emerges:What are the consequences of the kind of learning we experience on the
larger organization of the human brain?
Two Ways of Thinking
All vertebrates, from fish to fowl, have bilobed brains; humans are not special in this
regard. What separates us from virtually all other species is that each of the brain
hemispheres in Homo sapiens is highly specialized to process two entirely different
types of information. In more than 90 percent of people, the left lobe is the seat of
language, perceived in a linear stream and organized by
grammar and syntax. The majority of other linear,
sequential mental processes—logic, reason, alge-
bra, causality, and so on—also reside principally
in the left hemisphere.
When it comes to temporal processes that
move linearly in time, such as doing taxes or
figuring logic problems, the left hemisphere
trumps the right.When it comes to processes
that are primarily spatial—driving a car, or
playing tennis—right trumps left. Natural selec-
tion has evolved the left hemisphere in humans
into something new under the sun—a sense organ
charged with understanding sequential time.
The right hemisphere,by contrast,is nonverbal and contributes a global (some might
say holistic) awareness to events.This is the side of the brain that can add an emotional
Every infant is born with the aptitude for reading the body language,
gestures, and facial expressions of the cooing mother, the whispering
dad. Visual communication is as natural as opening our eyes.
dimension and larger meaning to the knowledge we acquire. In general, the right lobe
perceives many things simultaneously—whole images at a glance. It lets us respond
to such nonlinear input as body language, voice inflection, and facial expressions.
Simply put, the left side of your brain processes information presented in the
form of numbers or words, while information displayed in images is primarily
processed by the right side.The left hemisphere, for instance, knows you’re five min-
utes late for class; the right one worries about the consequences and imagines what
might be going on in your absence. Of course, the complexity of the brain, and the
broad band of connecting fibers joining the two sides—the corpus callosum—keep
this scenario from being as tidily cleaved as our description makes it sound.
Nevertheless, numerous studies have confirmed this basic dichotomy.
46 EDUTOPIA OCTOBER 2005
The varied functions of the right and left sides of
the brain also can be seen in terms of sexual duality.
(To avoid becoming bogged down in disclaimers
and qualifiers, I’ll concentrate on right-handers, who
make up about 90 percent of the population; no
slight to you lefties is intended.) Every human is a
psychic hermaphrodite, a composite of a feminine
side and a masculine one. In general, the right hemi-
sphere of both men and women is the seat of their
feminine component, while the left hemisphere is
the seat of their masculine side.Many of the modules
in the brain necessary to care for preverbal children,
for instance, are located in the right hemisphere; the
strategy, planning, and cooperative aptitudes neces-
sary to hunt and kill large animals (or make hostile-
takeover bids on Wall Street) reside principally on
the left side.
An Important Balance
All humans have the innate capability to learn the
grammar of the first language they hear. Every infant
is born with the aptitude for reading the body lan-
guage, gestures, and facial expressions of the cooing
mother, the whispering dad, the silly siblings.
Visual communication is as natural and easy as
opening our eyes.
Evolution, however, did not as naturally prepare
humans for the immense innovation we call literacy.
Though the earliest humanoids began wandering
the valleys and wooded highlands of eastern Africa
almost 6 million years ago, the invention of writing
is relatively recent: Inscribing markings on small
bones and cuneiform tablets began only about
5,000 years ago. Early scribes first used pictographs
to convey a series of connected thoughts.
Pictographs, however, are not truly writing, but,
rather, are drawings that represent specific objects.
These communications were streamlined and stan-
dardized by a simple innovation called the alphabet
some 3,500 years ago.The earliest writing seems to
have developed out of economic expediency; some
of the earliest examples were employed to label
farm produce and keep accounts in order. It was an
extraordinary development, on a par with harness-
ing fire and inventing the wheel.
Alphabets, the most abstract, linear, sequential,
and reductionist form of writing, mimic the features
of the left hemisphere. Unlike the spoken word,
which requires the use of both verbal and nonverbal
cues to interpret, literacy depends primarily on the
 use of the left side of the brain.
Western culture, with its monotheistic
religions, dualistic philosophies, perspec-
tivist art, advanced science, and written
legal codes, is the direct result of the
reconfiguration of the brains of those
who learned and relied on alphabets and
its dependence on left-brain thinking. But
there is reason to believe that the imbal-
ance of right-brain and left-brain functions
may actually be in the process of a dramatic and
far-reaching reformation.
A colossal shift I call the Iconic Revolution began in the nineteenth century.
The invention of the camera and film and the discovery of electromagnetism
combined to bring us first photographs and then film, television, computers,
graphic advertising, and the Internet.
We are living in an increasingly post-Gutenberg world where text is rapidly
receding and the image has regained dominance, as it was in prehistory. Daily, we
are bombarded with images from ads, movies, television, and computer graphics,
It has taken thousands of years and
a major technological revolution to begin
the rebalancing of human cognition.
with a concurrent decline in formal literacy—the aforementioned curse of the
modern age.As media theorist Marshall McLuhan presciently stated,“The medium
is the message.”
Our right-brain skills, for centuries playing second fiddle to left-brain domi-
nance, have been awakened and called into service with a start.The result is an
increasing reliance on right-brain pattern recognition instead of left-brain linear
sequencing. And the ramifications are huge. The process by which we take in
information is often more important than the information itself, and our culture
must quickly adjust to a point where there is more of an equilibrium between the
two hemispheres, between masculine and feminine, between word and image.
Increasingly,smart educators are responding to this reestablishment of equi-
librium by approaching visual literacy as no less important than tradi-
tional words-and-numbers literacy. Schools and outside organiza-
tions are responding with programs and other resources aimed
at teaching students to use the skills inherent in this right-
brain, visually electric world.The Educational Video Center, in
New York, for instance, gathers high schoolers from all over
the city to spend four afternoons a week for a semester to
earn academic credit for researching, filming, and editing doc-
umentaries under the tutelage of experienced filmmakers.
dditionally, the American Film Institute’s Screen
A Education Center encourages teachers to use film-
making and media-production techniques as an excit-
ing way to engage students in the study of traditional sub-
ject matter, giving them new tools for expression and understanding.Thousands
of young people in the AFI’s program use digital cameras and computer editing
systems to tell stories and demonstrate mastery of their studies. In the process,
they are preparing for the jobs of the future by becoming literate in the language
of the twenty-first century.
In California, Ronald Chase has created San Francisco Art & Film for
Teenagers, a half-year filmmaking workshop for students. Why? “It stimulates
their minds and imaginations,” Chase says.“They see with new eyes.”
These are important educational programs, but they are only a start. In an
48 EDUTOPIA OCTOBER 2005
online world packed with numerous sources of con-
tinually available information, students must master
a broader set of literacies beyond reading and writ-
ing and mathematics. Digital information comes in
multiple forms, and students must learn to tell sto-
ries not just with words and numbers but also
through images, graphics, color, sound, music, and
dance. There is a grammar and literacy to each of
these forms of communication. Bombarded with a
wide variety of images regularly, students need
sharp visual-interpretation skills to interact with the
media analytically. Each form of communication has
its own rules and grammar and should be taught in
ways that lead students to be more specific and con-
cise in communicating.
In using these new tools, often gathered and dis-
persed on electronic media, students must also
sharpen their interpretive skills to master funda-
mental aspects of information use. These factors
include how to find information, how to assess its
quality, and how to use new forms of visual stimuli
to communicate in creative and persuasive ways.
Development of these competencies must be a
key part of learning. Our visual-literacy skills enable
us to intelligently interpret the visual actions,
objects, and symbols, natural or artificial, that we
encounter.Through the creative and integrated use
of these competencies, we can better communicate
with others as well as more completely compre-
hend the visual information we regularly receive.
It has taken thousands of years and a major tech-
nological revolution to begin the rebalancing of
human cognition. Of course, there’s nothing
to celebrate if reading skills decline. Most
anthropologists agree that to truly
know something, you must have a
word or words to describe it. But
despite dire warnings that we are
headed toward a new Dark Age in
which rappers will replace writers
and grunts will push eloquence
aside, the worst we can expect will
probably be that fewer young people
will read Jane Austen books and more
will rent Austin Powers movies. The good
news, however, is that rather than seeing the
decline and fall of civilization, we will witness a ren-
aissance of visualization and a growing equality
between linear and global thinking. d
Leonard Shlain, chairman of laparoscopic surgery at the
California-Pacific Medical Center, in San Francisco, wrote the
critically acclaimed national best-seller The Alphabet Versus
the Goddess: The Conflict Between Word and Image (Viking
Press). His most recent book, Sex, Time, and Power: How
Women’s Sexuality Shaped Human Evolution (Viking Press),
is also a national best-seller.