Erica: Welcome to the Executive Function Brain trainer podcast. I'm Dr. Erica Warren.
Darius: And I'm Darius Namdaran and we're your hosts.
Erica: Sponsored by learningspecialistscourses.com courses and resources that support educators and coaches.
Darius: Sponsored by Ivy. Imagine turning your meeting's audio into a live mind map instantly so you remember what matters. Well, try IVVI for free now at Ivy App. That's IVVI app.
Erica: Hey Darius, so great to see you today. It's been a while.
Darius: It has; it has. We're going back onto the sort of monthly rhythm. It's been really busy over here with AI accelerator at Edinburgh University. So that's really intensive.
Erica: I bet. So let's talk about what's been coming up for us this month when it comes to executive functioning.
Darius: Well, something that really hit me quite is this phrase TLDR that you see on the Internet a lot. It's an acronym. Too long, didn't read. You know, so TLDR. And it's got a really fascinating history on the Internet from web forums and so on. And basically it was used originally by administrators. When someone wrote such a huge, long post, they would just put something in the bottom going TLDR, too long, didn't read. And other people would do that as well. TLDR. And it comes back to that kind of. Who was that famous person who said sorry for writing you such a long letter. I didn't have enough time to do a short one.
Erica: I don't know. Yeah, that's funny.
Darius: It's a famous British writer did that. And it's so true, you know, like it takes a lot of effort to write concisely and to communicate in a concise way. And we can be very verbose when we're busy. And also, I've got dyslexia, adhd. I can be very verbose, especially when it comes to writing. I just write in round and round in circles, and it becomes this never-ending kind of block of text sometimes with no paragraphs, et cetera. We all know it so well. And, and again, it's one of those TLDR moments. That's a big deal.
Erica: It's funny because what I keep hearing is TMI. Too much information.
Darius: TMI. Okay.
Erica: So that's the acronym that I keep hearing where from everyone's using it.
Darius: Really?
Erica: Because you were saying the same thing with your acronym. But I hear people just using that constantly and I've started to use it because. Yeah, I mean, and sometimes I see people using it when people are. They're literally giving you too much information. Like hold back a little bit.
Darius: Giving me oversharing.
Erica: You're over sharing. Yeah, yeah, oversharing. And so I, I see them as very similar.
Darius: They are, yes.
Erica: But one is more of my sense, my gut senses is one is more of a too much of a verbal oversharing versus too much of a written over. Sharon.
Darius: Yes. So it's like TMI is the parent concept and then TLDR is one of the component parts of that. Yes.
Erica: Yeah, that's fun.
Darius: And it's very relevant to executive functions because executive function is all about being an executive. An executive needs to make decisions and decisions are based on information. And you need that cognitive flexibility to adapt to new information that's coming through your world, through your working memory, process it and then adapt cognitively, flexibly adapt if needed. And if that information is overloaded and it's too much information, it can actually paralyze you and stop you actually functioning in an executive capacity. Because you're like, I just have got too much information here and I don't know what to do. Because you can't focus on what's important.
Erica: Yeah. You can get lost in the details. You can get lost in the ramble.
Darius: Yeah.
Erica: And sometimes the rambles are very circular. Sometimes it's more like an ADHD type of ramble where it's constantly pulling you away from the main idea. But I really like the, the TLDR because being dyslexic, I don't enjoy the process of reading. I enjoy the knowledge. But it's interesting because sometimes if we get too wrapped up in reading summaries, we do miss a bit of the depth.
Darius: And that's the biggest challenge here. Because what is the solution to TLDR? The solution for many people is, oh well, I'll get AI to summarize it for me.
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Darius: And so you end up having people writing stuff with AI and then other people who are not reading what you've written, they're just reading it through a summary that AI is made. And so you're communicating through multiple AI channels, and you end up having non communication, basically. And that's, I think, one of the biggest challenges we're going to face as human beings. Is this too much information coming at us because of AI and how do we deal with that? I think about this every single day because of Ivy. Like we're building this, a note taking app, which is our mission is to solve note taking for visual thinkers worldwide. And what we're trying to do is if we can solve it note taking for dyslexic students in lectures, then dyslexia can solve note taking for visual thinkers around the world. And so this whole TLDR too long, didn't read is an issue with notes. Because what happens is if you write notes that are too long, you don't read them, you don't review them, you don't remember them, and you don't action them. So TLDR turns into too long, didn't read, turns into too long, didn't review, and then it turns into too long, didn't remember, and then too long, didn't use. And so you're not learning. And this key, it's so important to be able to review. And if we're giving AI that function of reviewing it for us, we're being robbed of that sort of cognitive learning process. So what's the answer? Is a biggie for me. And I think the answer is going to be in our ability to decode visual information faster than words as human beings. They say there's a picture is worth a thousand words. So if it can go into a picture that you can remember and decode the key information, you go, right, I got the big picture. I'm going to go into that section three pages down or three paragraphs down or whatever and go into the depth of that because you can locate where you want to go into more depth. That's going to be the key. This sort of connection between the big picture and the detail is. Is super important. And at the moment in our lives, all of that's disconnected. There's a transcript in Google Docs and then AI summarizes it, or you do a mind map over here, or you do a diagram over there, or a flowchart or a Miro or whatever, and it's all over the shop.
Erica: It is. And the other thing is we're scanning the summary, so we're just, we're lacking depth. And what I feel like is my brain really appreciates the summaries, but my heart doesn't.
Darius: Yes, yes.
Erica: You know what I mean? Because, you know, like poetry, I love. I love reading Mark Nepo and his poetry. And I will hang on a sentence for quite a long time and like, mine it for all of the deliciousness that's in there and really enjoy the metaphors. And when we are skipping over and using those summaries, there is somehow a loss of creativity, which I think also impacts our creativity.
Darius: Absolutely.
Erica: It's almost like it's been bleached.
Darius: Yes, Bleached of Soul. Absolutely. It's been sterilized.
Erica: Yeah, it's been sterilized. And my brain's like, oh, thank you. But my heart is sad.
Darius: But what also is happening with these summaries is that AI is an average machine. It's averaging everything. What is the most predictable next thing a person would expect? If I was an expert doctor, what is the most predictable thing? If I was an expert lawyer or an expert this or whatever, it's predicting what's next. And by the nature of predictions, it's finding the average. It's not trying to find an outlier. Okay. But what tends to happen in meetings between human beings is that when you're having a conversation or a real meeting with someone in business or personally, often you're looking for gold nuggets, outliers, new ideas, things that are on the edge, aren't just details, but are actually jumps of valuable information. And so that is not average. And so when you go through a summary, often it will go through. Yeah, this is what a low-level secretary, assistant would go through as a typical standard operating procedure in a bureaucratic setting. Yes. But actually as an entrepreneur or as an executive or whatever, that point she said about
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Darius: such and such is a nugget of gold that could create a whole new feature, business insight, solve a big problem that the AI isn't aware of, so it doesn't get into the summary. And so we need a way where we can actually filter information, a lot of information rapidly. And I think that's going to be visual.
Erica: I think that makes a lot of sense. And it's interesting because I'm just thinking about the tools within working memory, right, that we have visualization, which is kind of like the visual summary. Then we have the inner voice. I'm really getting into the inner voice right now because I think the inner voice is that inner rehearsal. It's your mind processing verbally. And then it does. It tends to be very repetitive, like, listen to me, listen to me, listen to me, listen to me, I've got this to say. And it just keeps saying it over and over again, particularly if you're not really listening. And so it's interesting. And then there's always the spatialization, which we never really get into enough. But that's why I love mind mapping so much, because it's not just visual, it's also spatial.
Darius: Yes.
Erica: But it also captures the inner voice.
Darius: It does. And often the inner voice is kind of not repeating long strings of word. It's key ideas, key words, key phrases. And the mind Map's got keywords, key images and key connections, which is the branches. And those three things are the building blocks of a schema in your mind, a scaffolding and memory and understanding in your mind basically comes down to those three things are key building blocks of the Lego set of your memory and mind. Obviously, there's tiny other things, but those are the bread and butter.
Erica: Because I think both you and I are very visual and very spatial. It would be fascinating because I often work with students that don't process that way. And it'd be really interesting to hear from somebody that's not visual or. Or spatial, that processes in different ways to see what they think. But it's interesting. They might mine something very different out of a mind map. They might really not see it spatially. They might see it sequentially. Yes, that's. That's what's fun about the mind map. Is it really. It's multi-sensory, Multi. Multi-processing?
Darius: Absolutely. I mean, it can. It's basically a representation of any kind of human emotion are dynamic on a piece of paper, you can draw something, you can do a diagram, you can do a sequence and you. Of being able to externalize on a canvas. Everything to do with humanity has been done. You know, whether it's poetry, whether it's music, whether it's rhythm. Like, even when I see my daughter, who's at Goldsmith's Art School, you know, draw, she would spend hours just drawing these kind of waves and patterns and this abstract kind of art. She can draw literally what she sees in front of her sublimely. But she ended up going into these kind of patterns and rhythms and so on. And you realize that she's dialing into some sort of flow and movement that you could put a sound to or a particular fingerprint of movements that you see a pattern. Yes, an energy. She doesn't feel it. She's not seeing it. She's just experiencing it and she's drawing it out. So there's so many different ways you can kind of express what's going on inside of you. And all of that can be done in a map because it's on a piece of paper. But the fascinating thing, and I hear you talk about this a lot different processing and so on, but isn't it fascinating, Erika, that the two main component parts of our working memory are these two loops or three loops, right. We've got all these different ways of processing, but they come through these three loops of the phonological loop, the visual spatial loop. And it's just through these two Eyes through these two ears and our skin and so on. But the way it gets processed once it comes in is different, but it's coming in in a very similar way. And what's happening is that in the past we've relied very heavily on words to communicate. But we also communicate with pictures. We also communicate with our hands, our faces, our movements, all sorts of different ways of communicating with. Why have we chosen and prioritized words? And the reason we have
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Darius: is because words are very efficient and very. They're low cost. It's easy to decode something into a word and write it down on a small bit of parchment, put a lot, encode a lot of meaning into a bit of a parchment, et cetera, and to decode it out of it. We've got the time to write it, and we've got the time to decode it. But our fastest way, in my opinion as human beings is we are coding and decoding and encoding visually so rapidly compared to text, if you could measure it. That's why we've got this phrase, a picture's worth a thousand words, because we instinctively know how much faster we are at decoding pictures than we are decoding a wall of text.
Erica: It's so interesting because, I mean, this is something that I came up against, oh, many years ago, that we just don't really develop our inner capacity to visualize nearly enough. And I feel like it's a big, big problem in education because we do have this incredible capacity not only to see the outer world, but to have these inner visualizations. And learning how to do that, I think, is incredibly. I think that's. That could be another way of kind of cracking open new capacities. But I have to say that I had this interesting thought because, you know, when we're talking about mind mapping and you think just going back in time when they had to gather and make sense of an enormous amount of information like the world, how can you possibly make sense of the world before we had maps and globes and what it must have been like to map, literally map the world and then moving from the second dimension to the third dimension, moving from a map to a globe. And what I'm really curious about, and I'm very, very interested in what your thoughts are, is when we move from 2D mapping, mind mapping, to 3D mind mapping, when everything becomes more. We have more depth. That's going to be fascinating when we can actually sort things and map things in 3D.
Darius: Oh, it's so coming soon.
Erica: I mean, can you imagine what that's.
Darius: Going to be, because then I'm imagining it already. I've been dreaming about it for years.
Erica: Bringing in that tactile component to touch what you're working with and. And being able to move it across space is just. It's going to be so exciting, going.
Darius: To be so phenomenal. And the interesting thing about visualization, okay, is I'm a very visual person, okay? But I don't visualize way other people think what visualization should be. A lot of people think, oh, so some people would say I'm not a very visual person, okay? For example, if I ask them to imagine a sculpture of horse and rider, okay, I might not personally, I might not see that person, that horse and rider in color. I might not actually see it in my mind's eye, but I see the idea of a horse and rider as if it was kind of like an outline, black and white silhouette. I can see the idea of it. I don't see the words horse and rider. I don't see the picture, but I see the idea of it. And that's visualization as a default for human beings. And some human beings, when they see the horse and rider, they can actually visually see a beautiful brown horse with the white nose and the ears and whatever. I'm not. I'm describing it, and I'm not even seeing it. Do you know?
Erica: But isn't it interesting the more you describe it? As soon as you said the white nose, and I'm like you, Darius, I don't have strong visuals. I just don't. I don't. I see very vividly in my dreams, but I don't get strong visuals. They're very, very hazy. And words help to build the image. So there are ways to build images, But I think we should be training kids how to do this. And I know because I do this with students and I take people that can't visualize and I teach them how to visualize, and some of them learn to visualize better than I do. But I also discovered in my practice, and that part of what blocks your capacity to visualize is trauma. And what it does is it shuts down certain parts of the brain so that
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Erica: you can continue on. Because if you've had trauma, that's what happens when you have trauma, you visualize it. Like my strongest visualizations, my strongest visual memories are usually of trauma. And that's. So we don't repeat them. It's a cognitive strategy. But sometimes, if those images are. Are too disturbing, we shut down that part of the brain.
Darius: Yeah, that's quiet. Yeah, but then I'm. I would go into the middle a bit more. The more normal, where it's like I have in the past said to myself, oh, I should be able to see things better. I should be able to visualize things better. If I'm visual. I should, I should, I should. And it's like, no, I'm quite happy. That is enough for me. I don't see it as a beautiful picture like other people do, but that's okay. And I realized that people visualize differently. And again, that could be. They visualize as images. They could start visualizing, and we would call it visualizing, but they could visualize it as a. As a feeling, as a sense, a kinesthetic sense. They could maybe visualize the fluffiness of the horse and the sharpness of the rider's armor or whatever, you know, but. But they're using some sort of placeholder, put it that way. If you think of it as a. It's a. It's basically a placeholder. One way of thinking about the brain is that it's always vectorizing reality, you know? So if you think about an image, you can have a pixelated image with 1 million pixels in it, or you could have the same image with 100 different lines. And it's the shapes of the lines that create the image. Do I need a perfect image of it with the pixels, or do I need the hundred lines that describe the horse on the rider? And it's kind of like what Picasso does, where he deletes, deletes, deletes, until it's like a symbolic image. And our brain is doing that all the time. And once we realize that we're happy with that and that's the way it's meant to be. We're actually. Our brains are deleting machines, and they're trying to delete as much information as possible whilst retaining that vector, that line of essentially what is really valuable. And we're even doing that with our experiences. We're deleting experiences and pulling out of it those vectors that key moments that become a symbol of that experience.
Erica: I would like to do an experiment with you, if I may. Can I take you back to childhood for a moment?
Darius: All right, go for it.
Erica: Okay. When you were a little boy, did you ever do imaginary play?
Darius: I imagine so. Let me see. Yes, I would play with my cars.
Erica: And did you imagine scenes or even when you had friends over, did you take those cars or some of your toys and imagine these kind of scenarios? I mean, I. I Know that I used to have a lot of tea parties and. But I did. I had a lot of imaginary play with animals behind our garage. Poke their heads out and stuff like that. And I'm just. I'm just trying to reconnect you with that little boy within you and that imagination.
Darius: I'm not sure I did a lot of that, actually. I'm. I was much more like, kick a ball against the wall and figure out how to make it work better sort of guy.
Erica: I used to love rubber balls. I would throw it a table, and have it come back and see all the different ways it could come back to me. Yeah, I had that too. But, you know, it's interesting what I. I really realized, and I've had other people realize, too, that they used. They were able to visualize much better as children. And I think part of it is we're almost told to grow out of it or almost trained to move away from imagination and move into reality.
Darius: Yes.
Erica: And I just know you to be highly creative, and there's a part of me that just knows that you have more capacity to visualize than you're aware of. Just from what I know of you, and I know of your imagination, and I know of your incredible writing. You write your writings about imaginary places. And I mean, you've written some stories that you've told me that are absolutely extraordinary, that have nothing to do with reality. They are. This is stuff that you have conjured up in your imagination. And your imagination is a form of visualization.
Darius: Oh, absolutely.
Erica: So I guess I just wanted to toy with that a little bit with you.
Darius: Could we flip it the other way around and say visualization
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Darius: is a form of imagination? Because in a way, imagination is the bigger entity here.
Erica: I guess it depends on the person.
Darius: Yes.
Erica: I mean, because I've literally worked with people that. Because there's a massive continuum on visualization. And you're right. It's color, shape, number. Everybody's different. Some people can see movement, some people can't. Some have crisp, clean visualizations. I had one student that said the way that she was able to figure out whether something was a visualization or whether it was real was whether it made a sound. She visualize anything in her field as vividly as reality?
Darius: Yeah.
Erica: You know, and then other people that could project images on a piece of paper and trace them. It's been. It's so fascinating to talk to people about how they process reality. We don't do it at all. It's funny that we're all in the same reality. And we trust that we're all processing it in a similar way, but we're really not.
Darius: And I think in essence, our primary way of processing and communicating this information is not word. It's actually some form of imagination. We are converting those words and connecting it to an experience, connecting it to an understanding, connecting it to an item. And these are not necessarily visualizations. They're. They live in this kind of communication.
Erica: Images are for understanding.
Darius: They are, yes, that's it. Exactly. Exactly. And so if we wind this back to ours. Too long didn't read. Okay. What we want is understanding. Okay. And our core method of really understanding is visual. And so, but up until now, our only real method of doing that was to take the time to write it or to draw it. And it's easier to write horse than draw horse. We started off with drawn hieroglyphs and so on, but that takes up a lot of space, it takes up a lot of time. It's just much easier to write horse. And so it's much more efficient. And even if you look at software, you know, it's easier to create a word document than it is to create a mind map or, or a diagram or a flowchart. But now we're moving into this world where we've got this AI agentic world that can start helping us translate it into our way of thinking, because they're kind of translation machines. And my thinking is for executives. If you're going to be the executive of your life, you need to have the big picture. You need to constantly maintain a what's the big picture? How does what I'm doing right now or what we're doing fit into the big picture? And it's so easy to lose sight of the big picture. But that is what an executive does, holds the big picture.
Erica: I have a really interesting thought that I want to bounce off of you. I think mind mapping is so great for you because it helps you to visualize. Yes, it does. I think that once you have mind mapped, you can visualize it, encodes it, imprints an image in your mind that you follow that helps you keep your train of thought. Is that correct?
Darius: Yes, it is, actually. And I think it's kind of like I find that it reorders my mind. So as I reorder a map and move branches around and draw out and structure it, it kind of is rewiring how it's organized inside of my mind. And my. It's called a mind map for a reason, because it's kind of mimicking what's going on in our mind. Our mind is making connections, identifying what are the key priorities, key focuses, highest ideas, concepts, and then making them in the middle of the map and then less important details out towards the edge. Still there, but a few steps away, a few clicks away, as it were. And it reorganizes it in my mind. And I've seen it with students that when we do it and then they sleep and then they wake up the next day and I get them to draw a mind map from memory, they draw the mind map better the next day than the day before because it's kind of like the brain has rewired it and consolidated it. So definitely. And fascinating story that made me realize this the most was my daughter, because when I taught her to mind map eight years ago when she was 14, she was really stressed about biology and she had failed it. And she's a grade A student up until then. And so I said, let's sit down and mind map it. And what we ended up doing was
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Darius: instead of mind mapping on a piece of paper, we took our whole folder out, pulled out the whole messy, dyslexic bundle of disorganized notes, and laid it in a circle on the floor with biology folder in the middle. And we just said, right, where does this go? That goes over there, that goes over there. And it was basically like a clock of notes all the way around in blocks. Lesson one, lesson two, lesson three, and so on. And she said, oh yeah, that's when we learned about cells. Oh, that's when we learned about this. And so on. So she basically had this map on the ground, right? And so we just quickly drew the map on a piece of paper and then bundled it back up, put it in the folder. And the next day she went to school and she came back from school, and she said, dad, I had a biology test today. And I'm like, oh, really? And she said, I did really well. I got an A. And I said, oh, it was on. On what we studied yesterday. And she's like, no, actually it wasn't on what we studied yesterday. It was on the next module. And I'm like, oh, okay. I was a bit deflated because I'd hoped that maybe my mind mapping had helped. And I was like, oh, right, but we didn't study that. And she said, yeah, I know, dad, but it was a bit strange. It was kind of like because we'd organized that, it was like the rest got organized in my mind as well. I don't understand it. It just felt More organized when I got it. So it was funny. It was like. I didn't realize it, but it was kind of like just that process of organizing it visually, one segment of it, like module three. Actually unconsciously, overnight, she was resorting other things to do with biology that we hadn't mapped, but the brain had gone off and said, ah, that's what you want. Okay, I'll do this, I'll do that. And then she had it to her fingertips. When she had the test that she hadn't revised for, she got an A4, which she had failed two weeks before with a C, with no more, no revision. So there's something about externalizing this information and creating this schema that actually rewrites the schema in your brain.
Erica: But you know what's very interesting about this is because I was just talking earlier about moving from 2D to 3D. You went 3D with your daughter. You did a 3D mind map.
Darius: Yeah.
Erica: And that, that's so interesting that you gave that example. I can't, I can't think of doing a 3D. And I can't wait till we have the capacity to do 3D mind maps or even just giving. Well, it's like a puzzle. Right. But It'll be a 3D puzzle. You know, I, I love puzzles. I haven't done one in forever because I, I, I can't stop. I mean, it's literally, it's like almost an addiction. I can't stop until it's done. I won't sleep. I can't.
Darius: That's how I feel about golf.
Erica: Oh, that's interesting.
Darius: I think of it as a 3D puzzle. The golf course. So it's this 3D.
Erica: Totally. Totally.
Darius: Okay. And, and you've got how the grass moves, how the moisture is, how the ball moves, how the club interacts, how the ball. Ball will roll on the green. And all of it's just a puzzle that you're trying to work out.
Erica: You're using visualization and spatialization to be successful at golf. So I'm going to bring you right back, and I'm going to confront you. I'm going to say, Darius, I think you're wrong. I think you do visualize, and I think you visualize through interaction. Maybe you're not able to visualize initially, but when you dive into it and you interact with it and because I know that's what's so great about Golf, is your 3D mapping.
Darius: Yeah, that's so true. And so, yeah. So in the past, I might have said to Myself, I don't visualize now. I'm very visual. I agree I'm very visual. But I have given myself the freedom to say I don't need to picture it to be visual. And that's the key, you know, for me, it's like. So the way I visualize things is not as pictures. I visualize them more like puzzles. No, more like, you know when you get these contour maps with lines on them. Yeah.
Erica: Yes, yes.
Darius: And you get this very stripped back contour map. And it's no colors, nothing, just black and white contour map. It's, in my world, is a bit like that with a label on it. And so. So it's a bit like that. And I see as like a blueprint, like an architectural blueprint. That's the way I view and picture things. And it's like, I think that's great. That's my way of doing it. I don't get distracted by the
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Darius: brick pattern or anything like that as an image. I'm seeing like an X ray of it.
Erica: Alan Baddeley, we've often toyed about why he did not break the visual and spatial loop. And maybe this is a reason, actually, he really speaks to your mind by calling it the visual spatial. Because it's the spatial piece that really. That really triggers the visual piece. Because. I know, I know you see things. You do get a visualization once you have spatially mapped things.
Darius: Yes.
Erica: Am I wrong?
Darius: Yes. I resist it because. Yes, I do. But what. What's the other interesting thing is that. Because I don't see it as a picture in the way I want to see it. Okay. So I would love to see it as a movie, but I don't. I see it as this, like I said, this scaffolding, this X ray scaffolding, as it were.
Erica: Yep.
Darius: So what ends up happening is I then add in a story, okay. And the story is like a light projector that projects the story onto the. The canvas, the shaped canvas. Do you know what I mean? Now, if I switch the story off, the canvas stays, but if I switch the story on, it then becomes colorful. So it's like, oh, there's this story about this knight in armor on top of this brown horse and so on. And what's happening is I am using the phonological loop to tell me a verbal story that is overlaying onto this canvas. Underneath that is the visual spatial. So I'm kind of using both at the same time. And when I switch the phonological off and stop telling myself that Story. I just see the blackout outline of the horse and rider. But then when I think of the story, it animates it and colorizes it. So it's a bit like that.
Erica: You know, as I was listening to you, I'm very similar to you. Very similar. And I'm very and. And really jealous of people that can visualize in color. And I'm like, oh, that must be so amazing. But I also see the story as a chisel.
Darius: Oh, yeah.
Erica: It's. It's not just a paintbrush. It's also a chisel that really carves. So there's something about. I think we like a sculpting. Yes.
Darius: Pressing in on it.
Erica: I think we're both sculptors, right?
Darius: Yes.
Erica: I think that's when we mind map. We're sculpting.
Darius: Okay. So in a way, what you could do is you could say you've got this clay model in front of you that is just brown shapes and so on. And then the story comes on and starts to shape it and colorize it like a projector. And there's this other aspect of it brings color and life and so on. But then when it goes, it leaves this imprint of that final shape, as.
Erica: It were, that I'm amazed how much you are describing how I visualize.
Darius: I think it's very similar to a lot of people's visualizations, and I think that's one of the reasons why this sort of visual spatial and phonological loops are these two core ways of us taking in information and then processing in different ways. So we're describing the phonological loop as this story words, and then this visual spatial as this sort of landscape. And some people are very strong on the visual spatial, and some people are very strong on the phonological. And most people have a kind of balance between the two, of course. But I think these two things now, going back to our focus TLDR is if there's too many words and information coming at you, you're not creating this understanding, and it just becomes nonsense. And no information coming, and your landscape doesn't get painted. Do you know what I mean? Or shaped. And so I think the answer is very much in this visual realm with AI and to sort of tie it all up is AI is going to bring this huge surge of too much information, too much videos, too much documents, too much memos, too much deep research, too much blogs, whatever that are, all really could be really useful. But you're like, this is too much for me to process. We can literally create it faster.
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Darius: Then we can read.
Erica: Absolutely. But. But I also want to encourage you, and I want to encourage everybody out there listening to us to talk to people. Talk to the people you love. Talk to your clients and ask them how they make sense of their world. And the reason why I'm asking you to do that is because I've been giving an assessment for the last 20 years that I created that looks at how people visualize. And I assumed that everybody was pretty similar to me, and they're not.
Darius: Are you talking about your processing assessment or how people visualize?
Erica: No, no, this is just a visualization assessment.
Darius: Oh, right. Okay. I'm not talking too much about.
Erica: I should have you take it sometime because it'd be.
Darius: Yeah, yeah, that's great. Okay.
Erica: But. But having given it so many times to different people, I would say that you and I and our capacity to visualize based on everyone I've given this to are in the. The low 10% of what?
Darius: Of capacity.
Erica: Capacity to visualize an image.
Darius: Okay.
Erica: We're actually not the average. We are way below the average. Most people can actually visualize vividly. Well, not most.
Darius: Oh, really?
Erica: 50%. And we're talking. And most people can. Whether it's. And I. I look at the different classes like history, math, but. But also, can you see color? Can you see image? Can you see movement? I'm. I'm. I'm going to play devil's advocate with you. Based on the research that I've done that you and I actually are really low on that totem pole and most fascinating, can visualize a lot better. And I want to just say to you, reach out to those around you, because it really gives you a much better understanding of them.
Darius: So what kind of questions would you ask them?
Erica: I ask them questions like anything from. Can you visualize color? Do you visualize number? When you are in history class? Can you picture the scenes? Do you visualize math concepts? I'm trying to think.
Darius: I'll.
Erica: I'll. I think there are 20 items on my assessment. And it comes in my book that I wrote years ago on visualization for education. And. Yeah, and it had. The book also has a history of visualization, but it also has a lot of games that you can play that.
Darius: Can you add it to the show notes?
Erica: I will, I will, but.
Darius: And send me a copy of it so I could read it. That'd be great.
Erica: Yeah, yeah. It's. I would like to go through and re. Rewrite it and revamp it, you know, since I've done it. But yeah, it's available, but I want to give you the assessment because I'm really curious.
Darius: Let's do it. That'll be fascinating. Absolutely fascinating. Because in a way I could believe I'm low on the visualization, but because I'm so low with dyslexia on words side of things, the phonological, what I'm doing is I'm compensating with the visual to compensate for that. So I found other ways. It's like, okay, if I've only got clay to visualize something, I will live in a clay world with lots of little clay figures and so on, but there's no colors and textures and so forth. But I used to be a clay modeling teacher, believe it or not, and for children at school, we used to model things with clay at the Rudolf Steiner School, so.
Erica: And I'm a potter too.
Darius: Oh, really?
Erica: Oh, you didn't know that?
Darius: I. No. Yeah, I'm sure you've told me that. It's never registered. What do you make?
Erica: Right. Recently I made. I just finished two blue footed boobies. I just have to. I just have to.
Darius: Are they birds?
Erica: Glaze them. Yes.
Darius: All right, so you model the birds and then you glaze. Do you fire it yourself?
Erica: I've been in a community where I Class where I just enjoy the community. And I do it every day, Wednesday for three hours and. And then some Saturdays. But yeah, I mean, lately I was doing all the bowls and stuff like that, but lately I'm doing more sculptures. I did a family tree and then I've been making small little animals that represent my family members. But the blue footed boobies, I think are going to be quite spectacular. I'll show you them when I'm finished.
Darius: Yeah, fantastic. Well, Erica, it's been a great chat. I better go and I'll see you in a month's time.
Erica: Sounds great. Can't wait. It's always a pleasure to hang with you, Darius.
Darius: It's been good talking. Be good talking. So to you listener out there, I really hope that you max out your visuals as much as you can in this world of too much information. Visualizing information
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Darius: is such a great friend. And if you're feeling stressed, I highly recommend just going, taking a big sheet of paper, drawing it out, drawing a diagram, writing something out and just getting everything onto one page.
Erica: Or organize the stuff around you. Like, listen, be more spatial if you need to be spatial.
Darius: Absolutely. You're so right. Yeah.
Erica: And. Or use Canva, because if you're not very good at drawing, let Canva be your artist and you can pull the images off and organize them on a sheet of paper.
Darius: Absolutely. Yeah. Brilliant. Erica. Till next time.
Erica: Till next time.
Darius: Bye. Sponsored by IVVI. Imagine turning your meeting's audio into a live mind map instantly so you remember what matters. It's ideal for students and managers with dyslexia or adhd. Try IVVI for free now at Ivy App. That's IVVI App.
Erica: Sponsored by the Executive Functioning Coaching Assessment. A quick online assessment that uncovers challenges and develops personalized strategies for success.
Darius: Thank you for joining us at the Executive Function Brain Trainer podcast.
Erica: Check out our show notes for links and resources and follow us on social media.
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