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(image visualization) function, and the up-echelon, high-resource characteristic of passing
all outputs through professional exploitation.
Similarly, a lecture on the History of Imagery Intelligence contains dozens of nonverbal
lessons, not all of which the teacher stops to explain. 181 Niepce’s garden is the first
recorded “picture,” but the pewter plate also serves to demonstrate how a blurry scene can
become more meaningful when the teacher takes the class on a visual tour pointing out
trees and buildings. Daguerreotype “cities of the dead” are highly interpretable (to use the
jargon), but the traffic missing from the streets demonstrates that images, not even those
involving visible light, are never real, never “literal.” 182 Neubrauner’s cameras strapped
onto pigeons provide comic relief but also illustrate the aspect of nonverbal intellect that
“whatever works is good.” 183
Only after five weeks of surreptitiously setting the stage does the course openly turn
the mental corner. At the center of the course (figuratively and literally) students comprehend
Imagery Intelligence by experiencing images. The principal textbook for the central
class is Robert L. Solso’s Cognition and the Visual Arts, 184 selected because Solso, like
the present author, is seeking a similar intellectual balance between seeing and science.
The difference is that we are trying to move our respective classes in “opposite” directions.
Solso is teaching fine arts students about the scientific dimension of visual perception;
the author is teaching M.S.S.I. students about the art of seeing.
The first overt class in the art of Imagery Intelligence begins with a demonstration of
the difference between data and an image. This consists of displaying increasing numbers
of pixels sampled from Leon D. Harmon’s famous print: 9 pixels, 50 pixels, 80 pixels...
(See Figure 3.) Removed from context and viewed sequentially the image data mean
nothing. Invariably, some students jump the gun and guess, Western style (hurry, hurry,
rush, rush). This introduces the explanation that image comprehension is intuitive, but
that contrary to Western misinterpretation, intuition is not a guess. 185
181 “Teaching stories purposely contain certain specially chosen patterns of events. The repeated reading of
the story allows these patterns to become strengthened in the mind of the person reading them. The stories take
the mind along unfamiliar and nonlinear paths. Thus it is not necessary to ‘understand’ the stories in the usual
intellectual and rational mode.” Ornstein, 146.
182 Carolyn M. Bloomer, Principles of Visual Perception, 2d ed. (New York: Design Press, 1990), 151.
183 Quote adopted from Philip K. Howard, The Death of Common Sense: How Law is Suffocating America
(New York: Random House, 1994), 185-186.
184 Robert L. Solso, Cognition and the Visual Arts (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1994). The
Artful Eye is excellent, but too long for one class period.
185 For an example, see the misrepresentation of “counterintuitive” as “not what you might guess” in Brooke A.
Masters, “Domestic Violence Programs Save Men’s Lives, Study Says,” The Washington Post, 14 March 1999, C1.
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