Visual-Spatial Intelligence

Definition: Visual-Spatial intelligence refers to the ancient hunter-gatherer ability to represent the outer world internally in your mind. It's the ability to hold the world visually in your mind "the way a sailor or pilot navigates the large spatial world, or the way a chess player or sculptor represents a more circumscribed spatial world". It gives you the ability to know where you are in space. If you find it easy to visualise things as though you were an observer taking up different positions, like a fly-on-the-wall, then you are strong in this intelligence. Spatial intelligence predominates in the arts and in science.

Usually found in: chess players, painters, architects, sculptors, theoretical physicists, war strategists, navigators, illusionists, graphic artists, designers, cartographers, film makers.

Famous examples: Pablo Picasso, Leonardo da Vinci, Frank Lloyd Wright, Steven Spielberg

Visual Spatial Intelligence traits:

• likes art, drawing, sculpture, painting
• good at directions, reading maps
• can visualise or imagine vividly
• remembers in pictures (photographic memory)
• appreciates colors
• uses metaphor
• often found doodling
• speaks fast
• thinks in pictures (...worth a thousand words)
• tends to look at the "big picture"
• likes to watch the video when listening to songs
• uses language like "it looks good to me" or "I see what you mean!"

Exercises to strengthen visual-spatial intelligence:

• do mind-mapping
• visualize scenarios and goals you want to attain
• create and watch videos!
• take photographs
• practice orienteering with maps
• use visual posters, flash cards and symbols
• highlight info with color
• use computer aided graphics
• merge art with other subjects
• feel free to doodle when studying or thinking
• make diagrams and maps
• estimate distances
• imagine yourself going through different buildings
• imagine looking at yourself from above, below, very close up, far away
• do image streaming
• visualize geometric structures, rotate them in your mind, sit inside them, give them colors

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