In preliterate societies, experience is often arranged by a sense life that represses visual values. When visual models are introduced into such societies, they often have great power.

Renaissance pilgrims from rural villages were taken on cathedral tours to view biblical paintings - to see what hitherto they had known only by ear.

"The function of medieval art," writes Marshall McLuhan, "was to involve all of the senses in order to convince." Renaissance science reduced certainty to one sense mode: sight. Newton was first branded a medieval mystic when his theory of gravity presented a nonvisual bond & reversed downward gravity by outward gravity. However, his very visual example of a falling apple made his theory acceptable to the many.

People quickly understood Darwin's theory of human descent when they saw that apes in the zoo did, in fact, resemble relatives.

We converted statistics to charts & heartbeats to graphs. Scientific theories which failed to lend themselves to visual illustration were slow to gain popular acceptance. Mendel was ignored for thirty-five years.

But today, once again, visual models are often irrelevant. "What Sony hears, is," reads a recent ad.