Content-type: text/html Downes.ca ~ Stephen's Web ~ The 60,000 Times Question Remains Unanswered

Stephen Downes

Knowledge, Learning, Community

Alan Levine quite rightly takes on this factoid and gnaws at it like a bone: "Research at 3M Corporation concluded that we process visuals 60000 times faster than text." And that's it - no context, no literature, no citation (except for 'research' at 3M corporation. He makes an offer: "I will pay the first person to send me the source of this research $60.00!" Darren Kuropatwa found nothing despite a good look. I scouted a bit myself and found a lot of (name-up) explanations of why this would be the case (like this: This is because we take in all the data from an image simultaneously while we process text in a sequential fashion"). I dipped into Google Scholar and found more references to the same 3M 'research' (which, ironically, has no pictures, so I used a sidebar graphic (above)). So I think Levine has a pretty good point.

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Stephen Downes Stephen Downes, Casselman, Canada
stephen@downes.ca

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Last Updated: Oct 04, 2024 6:01 p.m.

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