12.2. The Significance of Recording in Images

Although the pictures of the cave artists discovered combine ways of recording by means of symbols, figures and scenes from life, it is obvious that recording in the form of pictures was the initial writing. This is understandable: people lived in groups of relatives, the neighbours were far away, and the members of the group did not need to hide things from each other. These recordings, pictures on the cave walls, were intended to clearly tell the group members how to bring an animal to a trap through different rituals, or how to protect oneself from dangerous animals, or how to pick fruits. To sum up, these instructions had a practical, existential purpose, and only then an artistic one.

The spontaneous way of recording messages and thoughts, the recording in images, is the original form of expression and memorising for our brain. When the brain receives information or text in letters, it transforms the words into images and reacts to images, like it happens when translating from one language into another, when the brain first transforms the words into the mother tongue and then starts the process of translating the contents. It is correct to teach children letters by means of pictures, for instance a house is drawn for the letter H, an apple for A and a boat for B, since the child's brain quickly reacts to the pictures of the house, apple and boat and remembers these symbols easily, because it imagines a house when encountering the letter H etc.