I started to title this post, “We are All Semioticians”. We are visual people. We think visually and interpret visually. We also comprehend visually. Pastors spend too much time putting together logical and reasoned arguments in their sermons when they should be incorporating visually and emotionally stimulating images that move people to action. Below is why that is the case.
Meaning is a function of comprehension and comprehension is a function of the visual. By far, the most dominant learning mode is visual experience. (1) Researcher Stephen Pinker has determined that four different formats are used by the brain in representing thought. These formats are: a) the visual image as a two dimensional picturelike mosaic; b) a phonological [sound] representation; c) grammatical representations of different parts of speech arranged in hierarchal trees; and d) “mentalese, the language of thought to which our conceptual knowledge is couched.” (2) Pinker goes on to state that “[m]ental imagery is the engine that drives our thinking about objects in space…Images drive the emotions as well as the intellect.” (3) Cognitive psychologist Howard Garner suggests that the reason images are primary, especially in the creative mind, is that they allow a person to understand one idea through another idea. (4) It is also the format for all consciousness and all meaning and the basic communication medium for the brain. “When what we read, what we hear, and what we see reach the level of ideas, they all appear in a different format: the format of neural imagery.” (5)
As such, reason is not particularly effective in addressing learning or behavior. “In the process of our becoming, visual communication plays a crucial role, one that is particularly vulnerable to emotional learning and to manipulation by political, economic and other vested interests.” (6) Damasio remarks that “[v]irtually every image, actually perceived or recalled is accompanied by some reaction from the apparatus of emotion” and because “the engines of reason still require emotion…the controlling power of reason is often modest.” (7) The brain forms attitudes and ideas neurologically through pattern formation and repetition. These patterns create the templates used to map and anticipate reality.
The result is that by nature, we are all semioticians, people who read and interpret signs. If we naturally turn everything into a neural image, the easiest way to communicate and most effective way for simple and easy comprehension is to do it through images, including still, and video. If that is not possible, we must learn the art of verbal imagery. Go back and listen to, and at the same time read, Martin Luther King, Jrs’ “I Have a Dream Speech”. Or if you can, pick up Donald David McCullough or better yet pick up the DVD set of the mini-series from the book. Listen to the speeches of the men who helped lead our country through independence. Listen to there verbal imagery. It is spectacular. It actually created images for me; I could “see” what they were describing.
(1) Ken Smith, Handbook of Visual Communication Research: Theory, Methods, and Media, Lea’s Communication Series (Mahwah, N.J.: L. Erlbaum, 2005), 46.
(2) Steven Pinker, How the Mind Works (New York: Norton, 1997), 89-90.
(3) Ibid, 284-285.
(4) Smith, 53.
(5) Ibid.
(6) Ibid, 60-61.
(7) Antonio R. Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness, 1st ed. (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1999), 58.
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