Thinking Like Einstein: Returning to Our Visual Roots with the Emerging Revolution in Computer Information Visualization

With its arguments that visuospatial abilities and difficulties with language often go hand in hand and that the former often outweigh the latter, West's 1991 book, In the Mind's Eye, established him as a hero among dyslexics. In the wake of the book's success, he was asked to write a column on the relationship between what he calls ""visual thinking"" and the exploding world of visual technology for the magazine Computer Graphics. Twenty-three of these slight columns, organized by content but barely updated or expanded, are collected in this book. West repeatedly presents an unsupported dichotomy between visual and verbal intelligence, with visual thinkers being creative, imaginative, big-picture thinkers who are under appreciated by the mainstream verbal culture that relishes specialization of knowledge. Emerging graphics and data manipulation technologies will allow those visual thinkers to claim the new cultural and intellectual high ground, he says. West argues that this revolution is about to occur but, unfortunately, he never thoroughly describes what visual intelligence is, nor does he explain exactly what is so transformative about the visual technologies he reports on. The short length of his columns also doesn't allow for the development of his potentially fascinating arguments, such as the idea that ""the newest computer data visualization technologies draw on some of our oldest neurological resources."" Instead, the columns are often topical reviews of books, news articles or conference presentations related to his overarching and oft-repeated thesis, and philosophically intriguing points are left to the reader as brief musings based on secondary sources. West's original columns were largely preaching to the chorus; this volume will be satisfying to fans of his earlier work, but the lack of description and sustained argument will make this book ultimately frustrating to both casual and skeptical readers.