The Center for Graphic Facilitation

The Game of Memory

Exploring exactly why some individuals' memory skills are better than others has led researchers in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis to study the brain basis of learning strategies that healthy young adults select to help them memorize a series of objects. 

Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the researchers uncovered brain regions specifically correlated with the diverse strategies that subjects adopt.

This study (and the entire topic of imagery + memory) is essential for graphic facilitators. As a practitioner in the visual learning arena, it is important to remember that each individual cobbles together their own strategy for collecting, internalizing and applying new information.

While earlier pilot studies had indicated that individuals use a variety of strategies to help them memorize new information, the following four strategies were the main strategies used by participants in this study, including:

1. A visual inspection strategy in which participants carefully studied the visual appearance of objects.
2. A verbal elaboration — or word-based strategy — in which individuals constructed sentences about the objects to remember them.
3. A mental imagery strategy in which participants formed interactive mental images of the objects — similar to animated cartoons.
4. A memory retrieval strategy in which they thought about the meaning of the objects and/or personal memories associated with the objects.

Read full article: Visual study, word play among most effective memory techniques 
by Brenda Murphy-Niederkorn

Presidential Doodles

From Yahoo News:

Presidential Doodles, just released by Basic Books, a member of the Perseus Books Group, collects the random sketches and drawings of Hoover and most of his fellow commanders in chief, from Hoover's elaborate shapes and swirls to the isolated squiggles of Abraham Lincoln. The book expands upon an issue of Cabinet Magazine, a quarterly of "Arts & Culture" that featured the jottings of eight presidents.

"Just as our dreams and little Freudian slips can mean something about us, doodles can be indicative of the person and issues and things that he is dealing with," says Cabinet editor-in-chief Sina Najafi.

Personalities emerge at a glance: John Adams' hard, straight lines and precise geometrical patterns; Theodore Roosevelt's rugged sketch of two dogs staring across a campfire; Dwight Eisenhower's plain, practical illustrations; Ronald Reagan's childlike portraits, including of himself in a cowboy hat.

President Kennedy, known for separating his life into compartments, would enclose words and numbers inside circles and boxes. Events long after his death give one doodle an unintended chill: A small circle with the numbers "9-11" contained within. Just to the lower left on the page, the word "conspiracy" is underlined.

[thanks to Leah Silverman]

Permanent Innovation by Langdon Morris

New book from Langdon Morris of InnovationLabs LLC.

Innovation is the process of creating new ideas and turning them into new business value.   

Permanent Innovation is the process of doing it continuously, by developing an organizational culture that embraces innovation as a core value, practices innovation as a core methodology, and produces innovation as a consistent output.

The notion of permanent innovation may at first be startling, in that the concept of permanence implies stability and the absence of change, while the concept of innovation implies constancy of change and novelty.

• Overview
• Buy Book
• Download Book

Synesthesia

Do you see music? Can you hear letters? Do numbers or days of the month have personalities? Then you may benefit from the magical powers of Synesthesia, a neurological condition in which two or more bodily senses are coupled. The infamous author of Lolita,  Vladimir Nabokov was a famous synaesthesiest.

Forms include:

• A number form is a mental map of numbers, which automatically and involuntarily appear whenever someone who experiences number-forms thinks of numbers.
• experience colors in response to tones or other aspects of musical stimuli.
• individual letters of the alphabet and numbers (collectively referred to as graphemes), are "shaded" or "tinged" with a color.
• words and phonemes of spoken language evoke the sensations of taste in the mouth.

Visit the Museums of the Mind, a synesthesia portal by Dr. Hugo Heyrman, for more specific infomation on the interaction between art and synesthesia.

(Thanks to jimmyfeet!)

MissingLink debuts at Idea-Round-Up in Pittsburgh

This weekend, MissingLink made its semi-public debut in housing the content produced during a massive civic enegagement forum in Pittsburgh. [see site]

Our team of three was able to photograph and archive ~350 flipcharts from 18 breakout groups and integrate the text documentation and photos using MissingLink. From start to finish, the post-production ran 12 hours. Normally, this would have taken 2-3 days!

At this one-day event, The Sprout Fund engaged creative young thinkers and regional leaders in a conversation that promotes new thinking about the topics that matter most to our community.Participants engaged in panel discussions and worked in small design groups to generate as many brain-busting ideas as possible. All ideas were welcome-the wacky, the way out, the logical, the needed, the necessary, the fun, and the futuristic.

Rather than a typical civic meeting, The Idea Round Up was a highly visual and highly interactive day with 20 local artists on hand to illustrate all the ideas generated.

The Sprout Fund announced plans to release $100,000 in funding to support projects that grow directly out of the ideas developed during this exciting collaborative design event.

• Idea archive on MissingLink
• Event photos on Flickr
• Slideshow

GF Audio Interviews with Christina Merkley

Canadian graphic facilitator, coach and mapmaker Christina Merkley of Make Your Mark, has begun a series of podcast interviews with established graphic facilitators.

In her first 2 podcasts, she explains the basics of the Graphic Recording and Graphic Facilitation genres and shares her own evolutionary story.

Other interviews include: Leslie Salmon-Zhu, Jim Channon, and yours truly.

[click below for more.]