Our brains do some pretty amazing gymnastics when we sit down to read
Surprisingly, our brains contain no "hard-wired" circuitry to deal with the written word. Humanity's first attempts at written communication - cave paintings and iconography - made use of our innate ability to recognize "real" objects and exploited these skills to convey a message. These very natural forms of communication spread themselves far and wide throughout civilization.
But then, around 3,000 years ago something strange happened: we began to warp these icons and pictures into ever more abstract symbols to convey information in a more concise way. This was the birth of the alphabet and the written word as we know it.
Some curious things happen when we read. First, we "hack" together those inbuilt circuits which allowed us to "read" cave paintings and iconography, and by bending them to a new purpose, we are able to identify the little squiggles and shapes that we call letters. We then join these letters up into words and begin to read their meaning, and it's at that moment that our brains do something very surprising - they start secretly "visualizing" the individual words to build up a picture without us even knowing.
When you read a sentence, research shows that your brain takes each word in turn and constructs a visual picture of the concept it conveys - and it does so entirely behind your back and without you knowing!
As an experiment, try reading this sentence: The bear ate the honey.
When you read that, your brain identified the key concepts and the relationships between them, and used this information to construct a subconscious image of the scene. Your brain then, still without your knowledge, used this visualization to help you understand the message being conveyed. What is even more remarkable is that this seems to happen even when very abstract concepts are being expressed. Your reading brain is quite simply amazing.
Have you ever watched a film adaptation of a favorite novel and thought "that's not how I imagined it"? And have you ever then thought how strange a statement that is considering there were almost certainly no pictures in the book? Well, now you know - the book may not have had pictures, but your brain just couldn't resist creating them to aid your understanding of the story. Incidentally, this is why children's books use a combination of images and text - the images act as "training wheels" while the child's brain learns to create its own visual representations.
We see the effects of this miraculous process in some unexpected ways. For example, the use of imagery has a profound effect on information retention with studies showing that written copy supported by contextual images is recalled 6.5 times better than words alone.
Visuals also help to persuade. A study by 3M showed that an additional 50% of people will be persuaded by an argument if it is presented in a visually-rich format versus a text-only one. No change to the argument itself, just the use of visuals.
For anyone creating content, this information should stop us dead in our tracks. If visual information has such a profound impact on how we engage with and retain information, shouldn't we be doing all we can to take advantage of this in our work? Clever advertisers figured out the power of images long ago and used it to get us to buy their products instead of their competitors’ offerings. But the use of imagery in content is typically less sophisticated - we might include a single image at the top of a blog post, but that’s it.
Information presented in a visual way is ingested at lightning speed.
That's pretty amazing when you consider all the other important and complex things you do in your day-to-day life.
Scientists believe that our need for visual processing power has caused roughly 60% of our genes related to the sense of smell to be irreparably damaged.
