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The 5,000 Year History of How We Lost Half Our Mind (Or How Blah-Blah-Blah Has Gradually Taken Over Our Lives)

by Dan Roam
"32,000 years ago, our most ancient ancestor drew a beautiful bull on the wall of a cave in a place we now call France. That bull is the oldest known human sketch ever found. In the sweep of recorded human history, it is the beginning of the "whoosh." 27,000 years later, another ancient ancestor created Hieroglyphics by drawing a similar bull on a muddy brick, and written language was born. From that moment on, pictures were doomed. Yes, humanity's five-thousand-year love affair with words has given us so much—but at what hidden cost? Over the millenia, we have gradually purged our visual mind from our understanding of language, communications, and intelligence. Just when we need pictures the most, we no longer have the ability to think visually. It's time to bring our visual mind back."
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Found In Translation: The Case for Pictures in Business

by Dan Roam
"Twenty-five years of helping business leaders around the world develop ideas has taught me three things: 1. There is no more powerful way to come up with a new idea than to draw a simple picture. 2. There is no faster way to develop and test an idea than to draw a simple picture. 3. There is no more effective way to share an idea with other people than to draw a simple picture. While good speaking is engaging and inspiring, we need to recognize the limitations of our words. Let's be clear: there's nothing wrong with words. What's wrong is that they're not enough. This is where pictures come in. Whether drawing them, looking at them, or talking about them, pictures add an extraordinary amount to our ability to think, to remember, and to do."
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