Often enough, you have heard me say that 50 percent of our brain function is dedicated to finding and then interpreting visual data. This is not whimsy. This is not speculation. This is fact. The eye rules. Though we utilize our other senses quite naturally (sound, taste, smell, touch), visuality rules. We are sight-dominant beings.

Visual information sharing has played a long and dramatic role in the West—but not always in the ways you might expect. Let’s take for an example the superb visual depiction of a disaster that almost no words could describe.

The depiction is a graph made by Charles Joseph Minard, a civil engineer and map maker in 19th century France (below). The disaster was the loss of more than 410,000 soldiers on Napoleon’s catastrophic march on Moscow in his ill-fated Russian Campaign of 1812. Napoleon didn’t just lose that campaign, he decimated his army. But it wasn’t until the publication of M. Minard’s graph in the 1860s—some 50 years later—that the full impact of Napoleon’s defeat was grasped. Our eye understands more than we can explain in a few words. A thousand different comparisons are made—instantly. And we get it.

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