Pictures
“Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak. But, there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world with words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled.” – John Berger, Ways of Seeing”
Words
“We map words as well as “Pictures” but because these words come to us in bits & pieces, most people assume that the world itself is made of bits & pieces, thereby missing the fundamental unity of nature & human-nature. We dimension these bits & pieces through “Numbers” ( including concepts of Zero & Infinity) , to somehow understand & describe the limitless scale of the world we live in. Languages shape our understanding. The connections we make between different areas of meaning in a language, is the way we mentally structure our world. Metaphorical thinking underlies the way we make sense of the world conceptually & it governs how we think and how we talk about our day to day lives. The ” Map” as such, is just a Metaphor. Just a mix of Words , Pictures & Numbers, that represents our Imagination of a diverse set of information on a specific subject, often a specific geography.
The grammar rules of the language we use has a linear cause & effect & these inadequacies of verbal bias can best be corrected by visual maps where we communicate through not just words but pictures, patterns & schemata. The complete mental picture is a configuration of metaphors ( maps), boundaries (numbers), symbols ( pictures) & stories ( words).Besides these Four basics ( Maps, Numbers, Pictures & Words), the other dimension , is that of ” Intent” .To illuminate the way in which the “mind” can be variously defined by the circumstances, Victor Frankl, author of “Man’s Search for Meaning”, uses the following metaphor: the shadow of a solid object, such as a cylinder, sphere, or cone can appear differently, depending on which direction we illuminate it from.(See Illustration at the bottom of the page) Similarly, the mind/nature duality appears in different ways
The grammar rules of the language we use has a linear cause & effect & these inadequacies of verbal bias can best be corrected by visual maps where we communicate through not just words but pictures, patterns & schemata. The complete mental picture is a configuration of metaphors ( maps), boundaries (numbers), symbols ( pictures) & stories ( words).Besides these Four basics ( Maps, Numbers, Pictures & Words), the other dimension , is that of ” Intent” .To illuminate the way in which the “mind” can be variously defined by the circumstances, Victor Frankl, author of “Man’s Search for Meaning”, uses the following metaphor: the shadow of a solid object, such as a cylinder, sphere, or cone can appear differently, depending on which direction we illuminate it from.(See Illustration at the bottom of the page) Similarly, the mind/nature duality appears in different ways
Numbers
depending on how the observer makes the division, which questions he is asking, and which networks of interaction he focuses on.
Maps