Visual Intelligence summary

The psychologist Samuel Renshaw liked to repeat the same little experiment. He would show a blurry, poorly printed black-and-white photograph to visitors to his lab and ask them a simple question: What do you see?

Nearly every adult would get it wrong, yet every child Renshaw showed it to named the image correctly and immediately. The image was a photograph of a cow. Adults were generally only able to see the animal after someone had traced an outline around the animal's face. After that, there was no unseeing it.

For years, the world looked away from Morro da Providência, a hillside slum in Rio de Janeiro. They didn’t even look when three young men were murdered by soldiers and left in a trash dump. Reporters wouldn't even climb the hill to cover the story. 

But then something changed. In the middle of one night, the favela's walls were covered in giant black-and-white photographs of human eyes, staring out at the city below. The images were the work of an artist known only as JR, who’d spent a month living among its residents, photographing them up close. Naturally, the images finally got people looking toward the area; the media finally bothered climbing the hill to interview whoever had painted them. But JR had vanished. With no artist to talk to, the reporters were forced to talk to local people instead. Thanks in part to this dialogue, the story shifted from violence and blame to the humanity of the people living there; within six years, the city had installed a cable car connecting the favela to the world below.

In May 2001, federal intern Chandra Levy vanished in Washington, DC. Investigators traced the last entries in her search history to a large park and ordered a sweep a hundred yards on either side of its trails. But somewhere along the chain of command, the word “trails” was swapped for the word “roads.” The search team scoured along the park’s roads and found nothing. Only ten months later did they find Chandra Levy’s body, seventy-nine yards off a trail. By that point, most of the forensic evidence that could have identified her killer had disappeared.

This example is a brutal reminder that noticing and weighing facts carefully isn't enough if you can't communicate them accurately to someone else. This is our third vital skill: Articulating what you've found so precisely that nobody has to guess what you mean. Here are a few methods that can help you do this.

A New York tabloid once ran the headline “NURSING HOME STRIPPER SCANDAL.” The story painted a lurid picture of elder abuse accompanied by the image of a muscular stripper looming over a confused, vulnerable woman in a wheelchair. People were horrified.

But when investigator Lucy Agate looked into things, she found something else entirely. The nursing home residents had voted for the entertainment themselves and had tipped the performers with their own money. They also had the option to stay out of the action. In fact, their only complaint afterward was that the stripper was terrible. Nevertheless, the story had exploded nationally because it fit a bias nobody wanted to admit: we don't expect elderly people in wheelchairs to have sexual desires of their own.