Busting Myths About the Brain: Do You Really Process Images 60,000 Times Faster Than Words?

How many times have you heard that the human brain processes images 60,000 times faster than words? Incredible, right? Maybe ancient civilizations had it right using pictograms. Think how much faster we could communicate if everything were 60,000 times faster! Starting now, it’s images only. ✄📝🥨🐙🚚

I’m having some trouble getting my point across.

While I go install the Emoji Keyboard add-in, you can keep reading about where this oft-mentioned “fact” about the human brain came from.

NICE ONE, PHIL

I’m not the first person to try and track down where this statistic came from. A blogger named Alan Levine actually offered an award to whoever could find the behavioral research that shows that the brain processes images 60,000 times faster than words. Here’s what people did find…

The earliest known occurrence of the claim came from the advertising section of a 1982 issue of Business Week magazine. Philip Cooper, then-president of Computer Pictures Corporation, is quoted as saying, “People assimilate visual information about 60,000 times faster than they assimilate printed copy.” I feel bad that I’m calling him out here. In 1982, he could not possibly have imagined that his comment would go viral, or even that “going viral” would become a thing.

The next time the stat showed up was in the 1990s and early 2000s in several 3M Corporation presentations and documents. These instances claimed that “behavioral research” found that the brain can process images 60,000 times faster than words. Eventually, the internet proclaimed that “research by 3M” shows that the brain processes images 60,000 times faster than text. This was enough for most people to share it in their own articles and presentations as fact.

CRITICAL THINKING SKILLS, PEOPLE

Here’s what bugs me about some of these neurobiological myths that we fall for. If you think about many of them for even a moment, they become instantly suspicious. Our attention span is only eight seconds? How on earth do we get anything done? Communication is 93% non-verbal? If that were anywhere close to true, reading would be meaningless. I’m just saying that sometimes we need to think more critically when presented with some of these oft-cited claims. And the 60,000-times-faster claim definitely falls into that category.

First of all, if you’re measuring how quickly someone processes an image vs. text, you need to compare like items. Is the word “apple” equal to an image of an apple? Is the image an actual picture, or is it more like an icon? If the image is of a red apple with a bite taken out of it, does that mean the corresponding text would be “red apple with bite taken out”? It’s a similar problem to the attention-span myth in that we can’t even define what we’re measuring.

Let’s just say, for the sake of argument, that we could define what we mean and measure and compare how quickly the brain processes an image vs. text. Recent research at MIT found that the human brain is able to identify images seen for as little as 13 milliseconds. That’s actually much faster than scientists previously thought. And we’re saying it takes 60,000 times longer to process the text “cars on street” than the image of cars on a street (which is an actual example of an image used in the study). So, 13 milliseconds equals 0.013 seconds multiplied by 60,000 equals 780 seconds divided by 60 to get an answer of 13 minutes.

If your brain processes images 60,000 times faster, that means reading the words “cars on street” should take you 13 minutes to parse out and understand. If that is true, from the bottom of my heart, thank you so much for reading this blog. It’s taken you two full days to make it this far, and I can’t believe you’re still with me.

A PICTURE IS WORTH A THOUSAND WORDS, BUT THREE WORDS IS WORTH A PICTURE

Why do we have to share the false amazing facts when there are so many true amazing facts about how our brains interpret images and language? As mentioned above, we are able to identify images in as little as 13 milliseconds, which is ridiculous!

Research at 3M, haha, just kidding. Research done by linguistics and psychology researchers at NYU is teaching us more about how the brain processes language. Researchers measured brain activity while participants read word lists that were either grammatical sentences (e.g., Nurses clean wounds.) or just a list of nouns (e.g., hearts, lungs, livers…). They found that the left temporal cortex of the brain, which is used for language comprehension, starts to distinguish a three-word sentence from a list of 3 random words as fast as 130 milliseconds after seeing them. That means that, in the amount of time it would take to hear a single syllable of a word, the brain can detect the structure of a sentence in written form.

According to one of the researchers, Professor of Linguistics Liina Pylkkanen, “Our experiments reveal that the brain’s language comprehension system may be able to perceive language similarly to visual scenes, whose essence can be grasped quickly from a single glance.”

While we’re on the topic of how quickly we can see something with our eyes and have our brain interpret it, did you know that the retina actually develops from brain tissue and is technically part of the central nervous system?! Honestly, my brain is still having trouble processing that fact. Or maybe my eye is having trouble processing it. I just don’t know anymore.

The false claim that our brain can process an image 60,000 times faster than words is often shared in marketing and design media as a way to convince people to use more images in their materials. Even though we’ve busted this myth, we’re in no way saying that images aren’t a useful and critical part of design. Nobody likes slides full of dense text. What’s most important, whether you’re using images or text, is to make them count. Our attention spans are not shrinking, but we are busier and aren’t going to waste time on something that’s difficult to take in, whether it’s words or images. Always be sure to design with the discerning eye-brain in mind.

Are you looking to jump-start your 2026 sales? Reach out to us at mastery@maestrogroup.co.