The picture superiority effect

- [Instructor] Strategy number four, the picture superiority effect. When you think about New York, what comes to mind? A busy city street filled with taxis, the Statue of Liberty or the Empire State Building, Times Square, or something else entirely. Your answer depends on your past experiences and what you associate with New York. But if you are like those I've posed this question to, what came to your mind was not words, but a picture. Your brain pictured something that represented New York. This provides an insight into the inner workings of our brains, namely that they don't think in words but in pictures. Neuroscientist John Medina explains, "To our cortex, unnervingly, there is no such thing as words." When the human brain encounters a word, it links the word to its corresponding picture. This is so well established that scientists have a name for it, the picture superiority effect. Because the brain thinks in…