Biography
Edward de Bono is one of the few people who can claim to have changed the way that the world thinks. Dr. de Bono is a pioneer in the research of creative thoughts and the father of Lateral Thinking; he also provides methods and tools for the new kind of thinking. He is 69 years old and was born in Malta. With his masterpiece The Mechanism of Mind (1969) he was years ahead of his time, and in the meantime he has published more than 30 books.
Dr. De Bono is the initiator and the chairman of the World Centre for New Thinking, in Malta. The functions of the Centre are: to provide a platform to make visible new ideas from any source; to provide an organizing focus for negotiations, task forces, conferences and roundtables to develop ideas on specified issues; to provide creative facilitation for teams as requested and training in formal creativity.
Visual Language.
An essay by E.d.B.
{31st of May 2005}
You can recognise a friend instantly because visual perception allows many things to be assembled at once. Imagine trying to recognise a friend by building up and using a verbal picture on every occasion. The ‘totality’ of a visual impression is one of the key advantages of visual language.
When I lecture, I draw continuously on an overhead projector. As a result, the attention of the listeners is always on the point of development of the image. This is very different from presenting a fixed slide, which shows the same ultimate picture. But one of the limitations of visual language is that, often times, everything must be shown at once – for example, as in a printed advertisement on a page. If it were possible to allow the image to develop step by step, it would be much more powerful because the attention would thereby be controlled instead of choosing its own path.
The brain organises incoming patterns into routines and is a self-organising information system or pattern-making system. Pattern-making systems are always asymmetrical (having a lack of symmetry) and can be explained visually in the following simple diagram.
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© Finn 2011
(The rest of this article appears, in print, in Open Manifesto #2)