The Functional Art: An introduction to information graphics and visualization

6. Visualizing for the Mind

Perception is a fantasy that coincides with reality.

—Christ Firth, from Making Up the Mind: How the Brain Creates Our Mental World

If you know what tricks and shortcuts the brain uses to make sense of the information gathered from the senses, you can use that knowledge to your advantage. In this chapter, I will focus on the mechanisms of detecting basic features, also called preattentive features. The ability to anticipate what the brain wants to do can greatly improve your information graphics and visualizations.¹

¹ If you want to dig deeper into the contents of this chapter, take a look at the work of Ware (2004), Malamed (2009), Few (2004), and Maceachren (2004), all listed in the bibliography at the end of this ...