ASSOCIATIVE CONFIDENCE

We typically categorize smart people based on their ability to recall facts. Our entire educational system is based upon this premise. My personal belief is that each of us has a more or less innate capacity for this recall. Nevertheless, much of what is awarded in society is based upon one’s factual recall abilities.

Can the same be applied to the visually oriented? Certainly, we categorize the most artistic as those which can draw the most realistic picture. So we do say that those of us who can do a better job of recording the facts of the visual world are the most creative.

Yet in each of these instances, verbal and visual, what we consider good is based upon accuracy. The ability to draw an apple is analogus to the ability to recall the date of the Boer War. Yet a more important part of what should be criteria for intelligence is the ability to associate.

Where are these facts, be they verbal or visual, held? Many would say that these reside in our long term memory. Yet this term is so fraught with societal baggage that it should be discarded. Would operative memory serve? Or how about cloud memory? Whatever we call it, we do have an innate capacity for storage of elements from which we can retrieve.

I believe that education should emphasize the association of facts. Yet none of us are asked very much of the time to synthesize associations. Knowing the start date of the Boer War gets you a point on the test. Yet we are not asked to make relational associations between that date and other events. Because of this lack of associative conditioning, we lack associative confidence. So there is nothing but an upward potential.

One of the basic facts of any object or building is how it works, not how it looks. A drawing which is merely a pretty picture does not provide much in the way of facts. Rather, a typical opaque linear perspective is nothing more than the start date of the Boer War. It is un-relational and un-associative.

Facts that are relational become useable. Your associative retrieval capacity is strengthened. The increase of useable visual associations will increase the confidence in the user. A Transparent Drawing of an object shows how the parts fit the whole. The drawing gives you facts. This then creates a much deeper dataset from which you can confidently associate, analyze and design.