Hah! I had forgotten one of my blog obsessions, pursuit started in 2012 to track down and obliterate a never substantiated claim of “research showing people process visual information 60000 times faster than text.”
It’s funny how I just circled back, I spotted in Mastodon a reference to Maginalia Search. An open source search engine that appears to prioritize results from independent web sites. It also seems to match my recent ignored post about web search being both a funnel and a spray.
Not being original, at the Marginalia search I went vanity to see what returned for “cogdog”. It did hit a few obscure blog posts of mine, a different cogdog who sells boats (?), and an post that tickled my memory bone – a November 2024 post at Photuturial “FACT CHECKED: ‘Human brain processes images 60,000 times faster than text’”
The author one (questionable name?) Magic Broz gave my heaps of credit, almost making me blush.
I did get curious how savvy Googles AI search did when I search-prompted “people process visual information 60000 times faster than text.”
It does okay with it’s synthetic reply:
The claim that the human brain processes visual information 60,000 times faster than text is a popular marketing myth rather than a proven scientific fact. [1, 2]
Where the Myth Came From
The statistic originated in a 1982 Business Week advertisement quoting an executive, and it was later popularized by 3M Corporation in marketing materials during the 1990s without any original behavioral research to back it up. [1, 2]
The “sources” are curious as I ended redoing the query, and while I got the same text, the construe it referenced some LinkedIn post (that gives me no credit).
But another post from some outfit called the “Maestro Group” gives me some vanity points in Busting Myths About the Brain: Do You Really Process Images 60,000 Times Faster Than Words?
I can tell they’ve gone down the proper central when they cite the 1982 Business Week ad by Phillip Cooper, the farthest point I traced in my efforts to source the silly claim.
To not hog all the credit, it was a blog commenter named Buster who sent me a clue and then Gardner Campbell’s amazing wife Librarian Alice, found the reference to the source .
I failed to make contact with the mysterious Philip Cooper nor did anyone take up my bribe to knock on his office door at then the MIT Sloan school.
I’m sure that marketing glitz hounds still belt this claim out like it’s gospel, but hey, snake oil still sells.
Kind of fun to look back down the 60000 times hole.
Featured Image: Flickr photo 60000 by Tom Magliery shared CC BY NC SA. The caption is a gem “I started the stopwatch on my iPod Touch at 7:56:03pm on 25 November 2010. It’s still going. This evening I caught a screen shot at a good moment.” The photo date is September 2017, that was a long patient wait Tom to nail the 60000 photo!
Share this barking on social media
Your deep dive on the 60k times faster claim was always at my finger tips. The number of Ed tech pitches and the like where I’d heard that alongside other obnoxious claims Ive long since lost count of.
Im going to have to check out this new search engine.