I do believe that there are some universal cognitive tasks that are deep and profound - indeed, so deep and profound that it is worthwhile to understand them in order to design our displays in accord with those tasks.

That is to say, nature's laws are causal; they reveal themselves by comparison and difference, and they operate at every multivariate space/time point.

The speculative part of my work is that these particular cognitive tasks - ways of thinking analytically - are tied to nature's laws.

Edward Tufte Quotes