Brain Dimensions

I was watching Imagining the Tenth Dimension yesterday with intrigue. The intrigue didn’t so much come from the idea or concept, but rather the method of communication. This site tries to convey a very complex scenario by using diagrams, animations and voice.

Having started to research our leaning styles a little in order to understand a little more about brain polarization I was intrigued by how others would interact with this site. I (as a right-brained person) found myself primarily following the diagrams and animation. Do left-brained people focus more of the voice? Is the concept easier to understand in words than in diagrams?

As an IT Architect I regularly come across issues which have multiple dimensions, because they have multiple variables. I have often tried to portray these problems as diagrams and often struggled, the diagrams becoming too complex for many people to understand Trying to explain the multi-dimensional problem in words is also problematic. This issue is often made worse by different people wanting to understand their dimension, and not being too bothered about the other dimensions. I have often found myself writing documents which repeatedly say and illustrate the same thing, but in different dimensions representing different members of the audience of the document. I’ve also used PowerPoint as a mechanism to constrain myself to a single slide for each dimension and hence each audience. This constraint actually helps to remove the desire to explain every other dimension.

If we want people to engage with something we need to show a dimension that’s relevant to them and not to confuse them with the totality of all of the dimensions. Showing all of the dimensions might not be enough though, we might need to show all of the dimensions in a way that is relevant to people with different learning styles.

tags: Architecture, Thinking