How do you primarily think and organize information?
I think in text. It's good enough.
I think in text and it's bullshit.
I'm Visual. Makes things a bit difficult, but it'll do.
Visual. Text is pretentious. Abstracts are a meme.
I tend towards pure abstracts, but no one else will know the difference.
Fuckin plebs. Abstract Master Race, bitch.
How do you primarily think and organize information?
Last edited by Cerelict; 03-30-2016 at 02:26 AM.
Is what a symptom of a serious problem?
I think in all three, but mostly in abstracts, or brain feelings, as I like to call them. Sometimes I think in mine and other people's voices too, which I guess is a subset of text.
Thinking in images is often a sign of autism. I pretty much think the opposite way which is 100% stream of consciousness words. And yeah text = voice bc if you're imagining the text spelled out that would be an image and fall into the other category
They are all essential to human thought. Words help form the images, ideas, impressions, and abstractions being generated into something more tangible, which gives a substrate for more intangibles to grow out of, which will require even more words for thought expansion and abstractions. As it is with an infant, the abstract impressions precede the language.
I use all three. Visual thinking is highly symbolic I would think. I am not sure how many pure visual thinkers there would be in the general population but I think it shows on one of the links. I use stream of thought while writing but that stream comes from processing the visual and abstract. That is why I have to sleep on something to fully grasp it sometimes which is common in most introverted intuitive types? Even if they don't remember the dreams. It process the abstract while I sleep then when I wake I have the right words. This is more for things I don't grasp immediately though. I can go a while without a verbal thought in my head but I get visuals and vague feelings. I get those "brain feelings" too but I refer to them as "knowing" without words but feeling could work too, like ouro said. It could be different in a base Ne user since it is extroverted but at the core probably not much difference. I don't think thinking in images is a often a sign of autism since the people I know who do it, are not autistic so if that is your primary don't go diagnosing yourself. I am not autistic and never even considered it I could be.
"The soul never thinks without a mental image" -Aristotle
So whatever you got, work it.
Einstein first described his intuitive thought processes at a physics conference in Kyoto in 1922, when he indicated that he used images to solve his problems and found words later (Pais, 1982). Einstein explicated this bold idea at length to one scholar of creativity in 1959, telling Max Wertheimer that he never thought in logical symbols or mathematical equations, but in images, feelings, and even musical architectures (Wertheimer, 1959, 213-228). Einstein's autobiographical notes reflect the same thought: "I have no doubt that our thinking goes on for the most part without the use of symbols, and, furthermore, largely unconsciously" (Schilpp, pp. 8-9). Elsewhere he wrote even more baldly that "[n]o scientist thinks in equations" (Infeld, 1941, 312).
Anyone in science education reading this?!
Einstein only employed words or other symbols (presumably mathematical) -- in what he explicitly called a secondary translation step -- after he was able to solve his problems through the formal manipulation of internally imagined images, feelings, and architectures. "I very rarely think in words at all. A thought comes, and I may try to express it in wordsafterwards," he wrote (Wertheimer, 1959, 213; Pais, 1982).
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog...ic-imaginationGENIUSES MAKE THEIR THOUGHTS VISIBLE. The explosion of creativity in the Renaissance was intimately tied to the recording and conveying of a vast knowledge in a parallel language; a language of drawings, graphs and diagrams — as, for instance, in the renowned diagrams of daVinci and Galileo. Galileo revolutionized science by making his thought visible with diagrams, maps, and drawings while his contemporaries used conventional mathematical and verbal approaches.
Once geniuses obtain a certain minimal verbal facility, they seem to develop a skill in visual and spatial abilities which give them the flexibility to display information in different ways. When Einstein had thought through a problem, he always found it necessary to formulate his subject in as many different ways as possible, including diagrammatically. He had a very visual mind. He thought in terms of visual and spatial forms, rather than thinking along purely mathematical or verbal lines of reasoning. In fact, he believed that words and numbers, as they are written or spoken, did not play a significant role in his thinking process.
- See more at: http://www.creativitypost.com/create....5pPyBWJN.dpufSpatial-temporal reasoning and spatial visualization ability[edit]
Main articles: Spatial–temporal reasoning and Spatial visualization ability
Spatial-temporal reasoning is the ability to visualize special patterns and mentally manipulate them over a time-ordered sequence of spatial transformations.[1] Spatial visualization ability is the ability to manipulate mentally two- and three-dimensional figures.[1]
Spatial-temporal reasoning is prominent among visual thinkers as well as among kinesthetic learners (those who learn through movement, physical patterning and doing) and logical thinkers (mathematical thinkers who think in patterns and systems) who may not be strong visual thinkers at all.[1]
Photographic memory[edit]
Main article: Eidetic memory
Eidetic memory (photographic memory) may co-occur in visual thinkers as much as in any type of thinking style as it is a memory function associated with having vision rather than a thinking style.[citation needed] Eidetic memory can still occur in those with visual agnosia, who, unlike visual thinkers, may be limited in the use of visualization skills for mental reasoning.[citation needed]
Psychologist E.R Jaensch states that eidetic memory apart of visual thinking has to do with eidetic images fading between the line of the after image and the memory image.[citation needed] A fine relationship may exist between the after image and the memory image, which causes visual thinkers from not seeing the eidetic image but rather drawing upon perception and useful information.[citation needed] Individuals diagnosed with agnosia, may not be able to perform mental reasoning.[citation needed]
Learning styles[edit]
Main article: Learning styles
The acknowledgement and application of different cognitive and learning styles, including visual, kinesthetic, musical, mathematical and verbal thinking styles, are a common part of many current teacher training courses.[citation needed] Those who think in pictures have generally claimed to be best at visual learning.[citation needed]
Empirical research shows that there is no evidence that identifying a student's "learning style" produces better outcomes. There is significant evidence that the widespread "meshing hypothesis", the assumption that a student will learn best if taught in a method deemed appropriate for the student's learning style is invalid.[8][9] Well-designed studies "flatly contradict the popular meshing hypothesis".[8]
Concurrency with Dyslexia and Autism[edit]
Dyslexia[edit]
Main article: Dyslexia
Research suggests that dyslexia is a symptom of a predominant visual/spatial learning.[10] Morgan used the term 'word blindness,' in 1896. Hinselwood expanded on 'word blindness' to describe the reversing of letters and similar phenomenon in the 1900s.[citation needed] Orton suggested that individuals have difficulty associating the visual with the verbal form of words, in 1925.[citation needed] Further studies, using technologies (PET and MRI), and wider and varied user groups in various languages, support the earlier findings.[citation needed] Visual-spatial symptoms (dyslexia,Developmental coordination disorder, Auditory Processing Disorder (APD) and the like) arise in non-visual and non-spatial environments and situations; hence, visual/spatial learning is aggravated by an education system based upon information presented in written text instead of presented via multimedia and hands-on experience.
Autism[edit]
See also: Autism and Nonverbal learning disorder
Visual thinking has been argued by Temple Grandin to be an origin for delayed speech in people with autism.[11] It has been suggested that visual thinking has some necessary connection with autism.[citation needed] Functional imaging studies on people with autism have been given support to the hypothesis that they have a cognitive style that favors the use of visuospatial coding strategies.[12]
The other day, a retired psychology professor told me something startling about himself. He had no mental imagery. Nothing at all. No pictures in the head. No memory for tunes. No ability to imagine bodily actions. Certainly no ability to conjure up a smell or taste.
Once or twice in his life he had experienced the brief flash of a mental image (which is how he came to realise what he was missing). But generally nothing. He couldn't even recall scenes from his childhood or the faces of his family. When I probed him with questions about what he had for breakfast and the colour of his front door, he gave confident answers, but said he still had no pictures in his head. Verbal replies that "seemed right" simply popped into his thoughts.
Of course, he said, no one believes him when he tells them about this lack of imagery. And he was right. I didn't either.
Mental imagery is a tantalising subject; so central to our thought processes and yet so elusive to describe or research. Hundreds of books have been written on the subject. But the explanation that makes the most sense to me was put forward in the 1970s by the Cornell University psychologist, Ulric Neisser. He said imagination was really just sensory anticipation by another name. A mental image is the result of preparing to see or hear or feel something - and then not having the actual thing present to the senses. Memories are used to drive the brain's perceptual apparatus into a state of high expectation, an expectation so vivid that it becomes a surrogate experience.
The brilliance of this explanation is that not only does it tie imagination to something with a clear evolutionary purpose - the general need for brains to predict events in the world - but it also shows why the images themselves might grade from faint inklings and vague premonitions to full-strength, explicit, pictures in the head.
The cortex, with its hierarchical organisation and heavy back-projections between each "rung" of processing, can be driven both ways. The same neural machinery can be driven bottom-up by sensations, or top-down by ideas. As neuroimaging has revealed, picturing a letter or some other target shape can cause a projection of neural activity all the way back down to the primary visual cortex. So the theory goes that the strength of our images depends upon how far back across the sensory hierarchy we manage to push a particular wave of anticipation.
For example, imagine a rhinoceros. That is, ask yourself what it would be like to be just about to see a rhinoceros. You will probably start with a vague feeling of being ready for a rhinoceros type experience - a vigilant, but also oriented, state. Next a concrete image should swim into view. Perhaps a mental snapshot of a dusty-backed rhino standing in the African scrub. You would begin by rousing areas of the temporal lobe with general knowledge about rhinos. Then this would tug on neurons back across the visual pathways until a full-blown image was created.
There is plenty of research to suggest that there is great individual variation in the vividness and stability of such anticipatory images. Some people - like my professor friend - can't seem to get past the initial vague inkling stage. They can't push an expectation to the point where it grows rich in sensory detail. At the other end of the scale, there are those who claim hallucinogenic-strength mental images. These people often have "photographic" memories and are highly hypnotisable. Most of us lie somewhere between these two extremes. Perhaps this natural variation has something to do with the density of a person's cortical back-projections or some other such neurological mechanism.
But regardless, if mental imagery is really anticipation, a basic brain function, then everybody should have imagery of at least the inklings and stirrings kind, even if they might not enjoy full-blown pictures in the head or music in their ears.
My psychology professor admitted this was probably true. When he was answering questions about front doors or breakfasts, he was aware of a background sense of orientation - what he called a state of conceptual-emotive preparation - from out of which the answers sprang. But still, wasn't it surprising that such preparation didn't bear any perceptual fruit at all?
Changing subject, he then told me of a friend who had "kinda fried his brains" on drugs and now claims to see a hundred internal imagery screens at once, all with a different subject and in full colour animation. Well now neither of us knew what to make of the truth of that one.
Reference https://www.physicsforums.com/thread...-works.459910/
I love this subject so I don't feel so bad putting together the links once I realized op is banned.
My posting is based on stream of thought btw.
Last edited by Aylen; 04-06-2016 at 11:35 PM.
“My typology is . . . not in any sense to stick labels on people at first sight. It is not a physiognomy and not an anthropological system, but a critical psychology dealing with the organization and delimitation of psychic processes that can be shown to be typical.” —C.G. Jung
Impressions, abstracts, motion/movement.
Projection is ordinary. Person A projects at person B, hoping tovalidate something about person A by the response of person B. However, person B, not wanting to be an obejct of someone elses ego and guarding against existential terror constructs a personality which protects his ego and maintain a certain sense of a robust and real self that is different and separate from person A. Sadly, this robust and real self, cut off by defenses of character from the rest of the world, is quite vulnerable and fragile given that it is imaginary and propped up through external feed back. Person B is dimly aware of this and defends against it all the more, even desperately projecting his anxieties back onto person A, with the hope of shoring up his ego with salubrious validation. All of this happens without A or B acknowledging it, of course. Because to face up to it consciously is shocking, in that this is all anybody is doing or can do and it seems absurd when you realize how pathetic it is.
I woke up thinking about this and I started quizzing myself about objects around the house, colors of the walls, book covers, flowers in the yard, etc... As soon as I asked myself, what color is... what is the symbol on a certain book cover... what is the pattern on the door... I immediately saw the object, and got the verbal, so I am going to say the visual might have come a split second before the verbal, but there is no measurable time delay evident, so it could be simultaneous. With the book cover of Faust I saw the word "Faust" and saw the pattern but I could not describe it in words. I looked at the cover on the shelf but it was different than what I saw. I searched for different book covers for it online and I saw the one I imaged. It is in the garage in a box. Someone had left it to me so I have both copies but forgot until I did this exercise. The one in the garage is nicer so I am switching them outThe other day, a retired psychology professor told me something startling about himself. He had no mental imagery. Nothing at all. No pictures in the head. No memory for tunes. No ability to imagine bodily actions. Certainly no ability to conjure up a smell or taste.
Once or twice in his life he had experienced the brief flash of a mental image (which is how he came to realise what he was missing). But generally nothing. He couldn't even recall scenes from his childhood or the faces of his family. When I probed him with questions about what he had for breakfast and the colour of his front door, he gave confident answers, but said he still had no pictures in his head. Verbal replies that "seemed right" simply popped into his thoughts.
Of course, he said, no one believes him when he tells them about this lack of imagery. And he was right. I didn't either.
Mental imagery is a tantalising subject; so central to our thought processes and yet so elusive to describe or research. Hundreds of books have been written on the subject. But the explanation that makes the most sense to me was put forward in the 1970s by the Cornell University psychologist, Ulric Neisser. He said imagination was really just sensory anticipation by another name. A mental image is the result of preparing to see or hear or feel something - and then not having the actual thing present to the senses. Memories are used to drive the brain's perceptual apparatus into a state of high expectation, an expectation so vivid that it becomes a surrogate experience.
This is the one on the shelf that didn't come to mind.
I asked myself to describe my yard then I saw the image in mind. I didn't consciously focus on any one detail since I saw the whole yard. Then I asked to see a detail in the yard but I visualized it in relation to nearby objects. I saw my car in the driveway then I filtered the surrounding objects so the car stood out. It was more colorful but as I write this and think of my car I see the whole again. It takes more effort to bring something into complete focus, to the exclusion of everything around it, even though the whole is vivid.
I imaged another book in the last place I remembered seeing it. That one was right. I use it often for reminders. I then told myself move that book mentally and I saw it on the book shelf instead of on the nightstand. I wondered what @Pookie meant by thinking in movement. I am not sure if this is what he meant but I visualized moving a couple objects through the air and tracking their movement until I placed them across the room.
If I am not paying attention I lose small things, like keys, all the time. I can panic if I need it immediately and can't find it in the place I thought I left it. Sometimes someone else moved it and I will tear apart a room to find one tiny flash drive, with important information, only to find it in the first place I looked. This happened the other day. I was thinking of a different flash drive so I was visually blind to the actual one I needed. I just didn't see it at all. I looked three times and I swear it wasn't there. When I remembered which one I actually needed I looked again and I could see it. It was pretty weird. Sometimes I ask my brother if he has something of mine and he says, "no" without thinking but then he comes back in a few minutes and says, "oh yeah I have it". By this time I am surrounded in chaos from looking and thinking I am going crazy. It might look crazy to others but I clean up the mess.
I have to use abstract thinking when conceptualizing something outside my experience. Is there any other way? If I am writing a story from scratch and have to develop character personalities or when I imagine what it is like to no longer be in my physical body. These thoughts are more free flowing images and feelings. There is a time delay but I couldn't say how long since they morph until some type of concrete idea comes out of it that I can write down. Sometimes stream of thought and other times I struggle to put what I am imagining in writing, so it comes in bursts of stream of thought. I need to edit after because it is not always in the right order. To be understood I have to try harder to put things in the right sequence. I know what the right sequence is but the reader will not. It takes a little bit more effort. I do better on tests without short time limits. If I have 4 hours to do a test I will rarely use the whole 4 but if I have 20 minutes I will stress.
I think overall I can see very clear images but they lack detail. Sometimes I can zero in on one small detail but it is hard. It has to be an outstanding feature on it's own. A specific symbol or something. This confirms that I am pretty much "big picture" across the board.
I had assumed everyone did that, to some degree, until I started reading some of these links so one thinking style is sort of foreign to me. I am not as skeptical as the guy in the article but I still wonder what it is like in their heads.
Anyway this was sort of a ramble because too many competing thoughts to write. Pretty much every thought has a visual or feeling tone and don't get me started on random images that don't appear to make any sense. I saw a newborn baby's footprint just now for no reason at all. Maybe it is symbolic of me sorting this out.
Edit: When I say "lack detail" I mean the kind of detail I can describe in detail. I can see fractals with multiple colors. I can't always explain my imagery to another.
Last edited by Aylen; 07-06-2017 at 04:27 PM. Reason: Typo. probably more that I didn't notice.
“My typology is . . . not in any sense to stick labels on people at first sight. It is not a physiognomy and not an anthropological system, but a critical psychology dealing with the organization and delimitation of psychic processes that can be shown to be typical.” —C.G. Jung
Like the idea of Ni being so closely associated with "Time" makes perfect sense to be, even if it confuses or misleads about 95% of people who try to understand it. NiFe thinking and remembering things in terms of a sequence of impressions linking together is 100% dead on to me.
Projection is ordinary. Person A projects at person B, hoping tovalidate something about person A by the response of person B. However, person B, not wanting to be an obejct of someone elses ego and guarding against existential terror constructs a personality which protects his ego and maintain a certain sense of a robust and real self that is different and separate from person A. Sadly, this robust and real self, cut off by defenses of character from the rest of the world, is quite vulnerable and fragile given that it is imaginary and propped up through external feed back. Person B is dimly aware of this and defends against it all the more, even desperately projecting his anxieties back onto person A, with the hope of shoring up his ego with salubrious validation. All of this happens without A or B acknowledging it, of course. Because to face up to it consciously is shocking, in that this is all anybody is doing or can do and it seems absurd when you realize how pathetic it is.
...This just sounds like normal but vague thinking to me. I think everyone just makes huge deals of how they're different and special to the point where it can't possibly be true, then other people feel like they have to follow. Not being able to find the right flash drive because you're thinking of the wrong one is why all that I Spy type stuff tends to be hard for people ("Oh, so it was purple?"). Having random images pop into your mind is normal ("For some reason I just thought of...") but most people don't pay much attention to them. Being able to describe weird fractals and things like that is the kind of thing that generally takes a lot of practice since that's outside of common experience and most language use is centered around common experience.
Post your own thinking process instead of trying to dismiss mine. If that is all you got out of my post then you missed the whole reason I did the exercise.
The guy claimed to only think verbally without imagery. That would make him the "special" one wouldn't it? You just read my post and assumed I thought it was special when I didn't.I had assumed everyone did that, to some degree, until I started reading some of these links so one thinking style is sort of foreign to me. I am not as skeptical as the guy in the article but I still wonder what it is like in their heads.
“My typology is . . . not in any sense to stick labels on people at first sight. It is not a physiognomy and not an anthropological system, but a critical psychology dealing with the organization and delimitation of psychic processes that can be shown to be typical.” —C.G. Jung
That's generally considered a disability.
And yeah, you kind of did since you spent several paragraphs on your thought processes and a couple of sentences on other peoples'. If it was other peoples' that was unusual, that would've clearly been the center of the discussion. There's no need to mention things like "multicolored fractals that I can't describe" unless that's supposed to be unusual somehow. No one says "The sky isn't green again today!" because that's not worth mentioning.
Read the whole thread and perhaps you can see how it all fits together.
The op asked:
What exactly are you having trouble understanding here?How do you primarily think and organize information?
If you saw these multi colored fractals frequently you might find them worth mentioning when asked if you think visually, abstractly or in words. This isn't as big a deal as you are making it by drawing attention to it instead of posting anything related to what the op asked.
“My typology is . . . not in any sense to stick labels on people at first sight. It is not a physiognomy and not an anthropological system, but a critical psychology dealing with the organization and delimitation of psychic processes that can be shown to be typical.” —C.G. Jung
Oh by thinking in movement I meant that if I'm thinking about something it's never in a still. If I remember something via the impression it gave me, I'm remembering (as an example) someone saying it to me and my reaction to it instantly. The whole time period gets condensed into a bite. If I am trying to remember a what or when something happened, I track it by sequence. This led to that, that led to those, those led to it (Oh yeah! It was what I was looking for). Theres always a movement in the thoughts because I'm playing back a passage of time, or projecting a sequence forward that hasn't happened yet.
Projection is ordinary. Person A projects at person B, hoping tovalidate something about person A by the response of person B. However, person B, not wanting to be an obejct of someone elses ego and guarding against existential terror constructs a personality which protects his ego and maintain a certain sense of a robust and real self that is different and separate from person A. Sadly, this robust and real self, cut off by defenses of character from the rest of the world, is quite vulnerable and fragile given that it is imaginary and propped up through external feed back. Person B is dimly aware of this and defends against it all the more, even desperately projecting his anxieties back onto person A, with the hope of shoring up his ego with salubrious validation. All of this happens without A or B acknowledging it, of course. Because to face up to it consciously is shocking, in that this is all anybody is doing or can do and it seems absurd when you realize how pathetic it is.
Yeah, I don't know what I was thinking that day that made me take it more literal but I do something similar. I was in some weird zone. Like @Herzy's did on her walk but in my own way.
I was reminded of this thread while reading the new Multiple Intelligence thread. I was wondering if what I do is visual/spatial or not after reading through it.
“My typology is . . . not in any sense to stick labels on people at first sight. It is not a physiognomy and not an anthropological system, but a critical psychology dealing with the organization and delimitation of psychic processes that can be shown to be typical.” —C.G. Jung
Um... I would use all. There are moments when I can't remember the words for something, but I remember the images. There are moments when I can't remember people's names, but I remember their faces.
I find that interesting... what does it exactly mean when you can't "come up with words" to describe something? What does it mean when you forget a word for something, but you know what it means? You already know what it means, you get the "feel" for it, but you can't describe it.
All of them, combined with music which tends to be the most present. I grew up basically glued to a radio so it's natural why I would often think using random lyrics or melodies.
I don't think I've read this thread before, but the link you quoted on concrete vs abstract thinking was one I was reading yesterday with something else in mind, so it's interesting to see it pop up here.
--
As for thread, I'll have to read it when my brain is working - a little too little sleep, but my memory works spatially. If I want to remember something I think of where it was when I saw/heard it, picture the things around it. I know where on a page in what part of a book I saw some information I want to find, and everything is organized in a spatial way for me based on where it is in relation to other things.
I suck with time however, and often jumble things up in time not knowing which came first. I'll relate things together, but the sequence may be entirely off - so Pookie's description is almost opposite from how my mind works. I tend to see things in stills rather than moving pictures, like freezing it in order to mentally look/walk around the scene, but time is all stacked on top of each other. I might not know whether something happened two weeks ago or three days ago or over a month ago without really thinking about it and relating it to other things, or whether something that happened two days ago happened before or after something that happened four days ago without using other tools to sort it out. Things don't just naturally sequence themselves for me the way he described happening for him.
Edit to add: The spatial vs temporal distinction is the difference between static and dynamic in socionics.
I haven't read everything in thread yet because I'm dog-tired, so maybe verbalizer vs visualizer was brought up as it fits with the thread title. Will probably get back to this later.
Last edited by squark; 07-06-2017 at 04:53 PM.
Static stills when it comes to trying to see timelines?
At other times you then have the video as you described in the other post of yours that you've linked now?
Quoting from it: "I think with "pictures" when I'm remembering something, and so recall the video of it"
"Sometimes I'll look at things and imagine them being made, and that is without words. For instance, I looked away from the computer and noticed the baseboard, and "saw" it being nailed on, the top edge being caulked, etc. or I'll "see" a house being stuccoed, or framed, decorative trim being applied, concrete being smoothed, grass being mowed."
Last edited by Myst; 07-14-2017 at 03:15 PM.
Abstraction.
I tend to rip all information apart into abstract pieces do some lateral thinking and reassemble.
It can even be practical. For example I can solve technical problems really fast. I look at it rip essentials into framework, imagine a bit and BAM. People tend to get amazed how fast I can be. Of course this does not mean that I'm great at let's say meticulous software or something like that on my feet.
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Depends. Sometimes I think with my head, but sometimes I think with "my other" head, if you catch my drift
I was also raised on music. Our family sang together often. Not that we were any good. lol It was a way of passing time on road trips or rainy days. The kids in my family also put on plays and "concerts" for the adults. I remember doing talent shows in grade school with my friends. We even won our school and went to regionals. My friend's mom made us matching costumes. I had terrible stage fright. I almost passed out. I was in school chorus all through grade school (1-6). I tried several musical instruments but had no real talent or interest in them.
Music still plays an important part of my life though. I have a song for just about any situation and I listen for hours every day unless I am in a serious contemplative mode. Then I need silence. My brother and I sing our responses to each other instead of speaking, sometimes. He has such bad taste in music but I know the songs and can respond. hah
“My typology is . . . not in any sense to stick labels on people at first sight. It is not a physiognomy and not an anthropological system, but a critical psychology dealing with the organization and delimitation of psychic processes that can be shown to be typical.” —C.G. Jung
To answer the original question - I think both in words and pictures. Usually simultaneously, as in I see a picture and "talk" about it in my head at the same time. I don't see words as text, unless I'm picturing a word on purpose to remember its spelling or to see a list that was written down somewhere to read off what was on the list in my head. The words instead are normally auditory - I hear them.
According to our little friend wikipedia:
So, those who think purely in words make up the smallest percentage, but 25% isn't uncommon, so that's kind of interesting. I wonder what it'd be like to think purely in words or purely in pictures. . . it'd almost be like being either blind or deaf, but only inside your head.Visual thinking has been described as seeing words as a series of pictures.[citation needed] It is common in approximately 60%–65% of the general population.[1]
"Real picture thinkers", those persons who use visual thinking almost to the exclusion of other kinds of thinking, make up a smaller percentage of the population. Research by child development theorist Linda Kreger Silverman suggests that less than 30% of the population strongly uses visual/spatial thinking, another 45% uses both visual/spatial thinking and thinking in the form of words, and 25% thinks exclusively in words. According to Kreger Silverman, of the 30% of the general population who use visual/spatial thinking, only a small percentage would use this style over and above all other forms of thinking, and can be said to be true "picture thinkers".[2]
By default I do spatial thinking in a quick visual picture that's usually concrete spatial-logical relations of the situation/problem, or for certain things I can think in words in bits here and there - but they are mainly shown as written words, the auditory component is not in "foreground" for me. I don't really use words to think too much though, sometimes it just helps anchor the focus for concentration a little more or something. Often not needed at all. It's enough for me to verbalize things when I write them out in actual text on paper etc. Then in a less visual-spatial way, I have lots of "bits of thinking" putting things together from certain types of new data that can be sequentially processed and put away in their places, half verbal (the silent visual words), half just felt-seen in an organized logical picture. Ah and then I sometimes have some abstract spatials that are just shapes/colours to illustrate more abstract concepts. They are lovely in their abstractness.
Funnily enough, the quick visual picture can be so quick that I don't even notice having actually used it for everyday stuff. So natural to me. It's also because most of my consciousness usually focuses on the sensory traits/details/spatial organization of the surroundings and the thinking bits are just somewhere in the space behind that in my mind. If I do try to strongly focus away from the surroundings then the inner logical picture comes into mind, usually logical-spatial, and even when it's not explicitly/concretely spatial and instead consists of just a logically felt sense of things in the inner picture, it feels like it still utilizes spatial thinking somehow for the organization but somehow it's more than that with logical concepts. Definitely not verbal is what I can say for sure but of course when extracting it, I can continuously verbalize it into writing on paper etc.
As for my memory, first, it's very location based. Then, much of it it's static pictures of situations with spatial organization, often linked to my own conscious moves that I made. I noticed once when testing myself that I actually store many many of these snapshots for the last days before most of them (not important ones) get forgotten. I'm able to flick through them in order of experiencing them if I want tho' I never do this by default, just tested myself on it. Otoh I don't relate to wanting to mentally walk around the scene of one snapshot, that to me is weird somehow, not feeling like moving the viewpoint I originally had of the situation. I'm capable of doing so but I see no point to do so, I already see everything anyway. It's a 3D allocentric scene stored in the snapshot but somehow inside a picture that feels flatter, looking from an inside viewpoint making it more fixed and static.
I also remember in a salient way the core logical concepts/core logical meaning of things and then I can extract the further details from that when recalling, this process is actually helped by verbalizing a bit, helping focus via putting into words what I already thought of, the core and then what follows from that and so on. Ooooh and numbers I remember extremely well.
Sometimes I can recall people stuff in a more dynamic way, their emotionality and related stuff. It's nice. My rarely utilized imagination about stories about people or about internal digging into my own psyche is also movie-like in this way.
My mind is not entirely silent btw, as the above could indicate it. I do like to play music bits in my head pretty frequently. And, it can actually contribute to my memorizing of things via some weird auditory-visual-spatial-etc synesthesia. Numbers and concepts of logical systems get associated with that synesthesia the easiest.
As for remembering time. I do not recall moving stuff/sequences of events like Pookie does but it sounds cool. I have a decently felt sense of how long ago something happened, I can sometimes compare two events in terms of this, as to which one happened earlier, and get it right, even if they happened a while ago. I can of course also deduce the sequence. It also helps that I do try to record dates on a timeline for autobiographical memory, I like to keep my memories decently well in order time-wise. It might relate to how I prefer to have a course forward too. So I'd feel pretty disoriented if I had no idea if something happened a month ago or three days ago. That to me is an almost tangibly felt difference in time anyway.
Last edited by Myst; 07-08-2017 at 05:22 PM.
To find concrete ground on my thinking i found this one good.
http://www.projectlearnet.org/tutori..._thinking.html
I actually tend to make a lot of errors in concrete thinking. Sometimes I have caught myself thinking: next there is going to be XYZ walk... What is that? Then it strikes to me: we are going to move our feet in quite slow pace.
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I think in images and feelings mostly... reading is hard though since it disrupts my ability to think in images and feelings, it forces me to come up with the literal meaning of each word instead of getting an immediate impression.
The images I do get I don't usually focus on though, they're mostly in the background and come with the feelings which I go off of.
First I think in plain text, then I further visualize and create images of the plain text to help me get a better grasp of the information. Then, to organize, I put every piece of information I've processed and analyzed in to an abstract archival system, which connects all the scenarios and information I've thought of. jk hehe
Anyways, where was the original article? I didn't know anyone thought in text as a primary way of thinking. That seems like thinking in touch or smell to me, with the primary ways people think supposedly being either streams of spoken words ("auditory") or pictures ("visual"). I'm not sure I even think much of thinking "in" things so much as "with". By that I mean, it's easy to imagine yourself going outside after the rain, and you walk along and see greyish light reflecting off of things, hear the wind move leaves gently and birds chirp, feel the humidity and temperature, smell and taste the air, and do whatever kinds of things you'd do then, including if you decide to sit down and read something and you imagine the words (maybe this is complicated and not easy for everyone, but my point stands). What are you thinking "in" then? It's just constructing a scene out of memories, which would make your thinking take place somewhere "out" of the scene and put it together from the outside if you want to use a preposition. You can also later still decide to do the same thing you imagined during a time it does rain even if you don't imagine it like that ahead of time.
Why? Text contains a lot of information. Unlike touch or smell, those are a bit more limited in terms of that for most people (e.g. for blind people ofc touch is less limited).
That sounds like visual thinking for the most part. Thinking in pictures with a bit of auditory and other bits of sensory information.with the primary ways people think supposedly being either streams of spoken words ("auditory") or pictures ("visual"). I'm not sure I even think much of thinking "in" things so much as "with". By that I mean, it's easy to imagine yourself going outside after the rain, and you walk along and see greyish light reflecting off of things, hear the wind move leaves gently and birds chirp, feel the humidity and temperature, smell and taste the air, and do whatever kinds of things you'd do then, including if you decide to sit down and read something and you imagine the words (maybe this is complicated and not easy for everyone, but my point stands). What are you thinking "in" then?
There are different formats your memories can be stored in, too. Like I said above, one of the formats for me is visual-spatial and another format is logical meaning. Etc.It's just constructing a scene out of memories, which would make your thinking take place somewhere "out" of the scene and put it together from the outside if you want to use a preposition. You can also later still decide to do the same thing you imagined during a time it does rain even if you don't imagine it like that ahead of time.
Sure, your thinking can take place somewhere "out" of the scene but it can also be a part of it, integrated information.
This thread was interesting to me from the beginning but it didn't really go anywhere at the time. Most likely the op considered himself defective when he posted it. I don't know that for sure but they deleted most of the op.
I think your way of processing, as you wrote it, was a little harder for me to tune into and follow. I am still not completely sure what it means to be a visual/spatial thinker. I guess Wyrd's thinking is pretty normal to me. She describes imagining/visualizing a scene from memory and/or anticipating what it would be like outside of having the actual experience.
When I read a book I get the visual, some sensory, emotions/feelings, along with the words even if I am reading about things outside personal experience. Unlike @Fvaelynn reading doesn't trip me up. I can process it simultaneously. The article @unsuccessfull Alphamale and I both linked was better for me in terms of explaining my abstract thought. That is right up there with my verbal and visual. I don't have problems understanding concrete thinkers but sometimes explaining to them can be more difficult and even draining.
Hmm, when I looked for a test to distinguish abstract thinking I ended up finding one that tested abstract reasoning so I took it. I got 8 out of 10 right. I got a bit bored of it by the end and my mind was wandering so I guessed at the last two to end my torment. I really have to be a frame of mind where I want to take these tests. I score higher when I consistently challenge myself.
Ok, so I did another exercise, this morning, this time I closed my eyes and challenged myself to navigate my home without opening them. I did pretty well since I probably didn't bumped into things any more than I do with my eyes open. lol I was very focused on visualizing each step, estimating the distance from one thing to another. I had to stop a couple times and get my bearings. It was the open spaces that I found harder to judge the distance even though I could visualize the layout just fine. I have never memorized how many steps from one thing to another since I have never had to. I had some eye allergy problem that most likely helped me with this exercise since I had been learning to navigate with eyes swollen closed a few times until I took the meds .
I could not read a map until I was older than most. I covered for that in other ways. It only helped when someone told me to use the sun for a sense of direction and that I could do. I probably just had an overall bad sense of geography and mostly used landmarks to navigate familiar places. I could get turned around in unfamiliar areas and get overwhelmed to the point I would just drive until I found a way out. :/ I don't fear getting lost anymore.
Anyway, I was able to get myself a drink and back to my room without spilling it, all with my eyes closed. It took so much longer. My worst fear has always been to go blind. I think I have been able to face it but it doesn't make the idea any less terrifying on a grand scale. Blind people who can navigate their surroundings and even live on their own amaze me.
As far as what pookie describes about sequence, I take that for granted and it is through reading this thread that I see not everyone does that. There is one particular person, I know, that has a strange time perception in comparison to my own. They think of something that happened in the morning might as well be a long time ago and they often forget the sequence of events or how long ago something actually occurred. It is like, a week ago might as well have been a month ago to them. I would say they are more "in the moment" because of this. I often laugh at their scale of time because it seems so strange to me. I see this might have something to do with how they process and store information.
I have a pretty good idea of when something happened. I am not always 100% on sequence of events but I get close enough that it doesn't really matter. As I get older I might be off by a year (in age, not time) when looking back at my childhood but it is not blocky or anything. It was for awhile there but I had other things going on. I am off sometimes because of a shifting point from one age to another.
I feel like I have had to repair a lot of self inflicted damage to my brain but it is obvious that I have repaired it. I have most of my memories back now and a sense of wholeness that was lacking a few years ago.
Edit: I don't know if this is relevant or not but I did experience a time period where I was obsessively counting things to ease tension. I vaguely remember that I would see the numbers overlaying the image of whatever I was counting. It was a very stressful period in my life. The numbers hung in the air over everything. I don't do that anymore. I think it was a way of grounding myself.
“My typology is . . . not in any sense to stick labels on people at first sight. It is not a physiognomy and not an anthropological system, but a critical psychology dealing with the organization and delimitation of psychic processes that can be shown to be typical.” —C.G. Jung
Just a sidenote, not really related, but some days ago I was walking out to my mailbox and suddenly realized I had been saying "2875" over and over in my head with each step, and stopped and said (in my head), "what the hell? why am I repeating this?" and an image of an app I'd recently installed that counts steps and the number that was on the screen when I looked at it before I left came to mind. I saw the number clearly in my head, and laughed that I had automatically just started repeating it to myself as though I needed to remember it. I sometimes do that with numbers I want to remember and it's become a kind of habit, so now, for no reason whatsoever I still, days later have the image of the number in my head, and can hear myself repeating it.
Ah which part of it was hardest to tune into? I'm really curious about this Btw I could've organized the description in that post better... I rewrote the first version of that post but then didn't have time to fix it all up after the rewrite. Sorry if that made it harder to follow it.
As for the visual-spatial thinking... I noticed in articles several things are often grouped into the idea of visual/spatial thinking. Tbh mine is way more spatial than visual, though ofc it has to have some visual details, those are in some holistic visuals of objects/situations. That quick visual picture of them that I mentioned, I pick up the logical relations from it mostly. It's the same as when I look around in the surroundings, just done mentally. I guess the other thinking process that's not visual at all still works with similar logical information, just more abstractly.
I don't think that distinction about concrete vs abstract thinking works as is. For me it depends on the type of topic whether I do concrete or abstract thinking... for example, for maths related stuff I definitely do abstract thinking easily, and for emotional topics I struggle with abstraction of the feelings and people related stuff. That's where I might have some issue following your explanations.When I read a book I get the visual, some sensory, emotions/feelings, along with the words even if I am reading about things outside personal experience. Unlike @Fvaelynn reading doesn't trip me up. I can process it simultaneously. The article @unsuccessfull Alphamale and I both linked was better for me in terms of explaining my abstract thought. That is right up there with my verbal and visual. I don't have problems understanding concrete thinkers but sometimes explaining to them can be more difficult and even draining.
Hmm, when I looked for a test to distinguish abstract thinking I ended up finding one that tested abstract reasoning so I took it. I got 8 out of 10 right. I got a bit bored of it by the end and my mind was wandering so I guessed at the last two to end my torment. I really have to be a frame of mind where I want to take these tests. I score higher when I consistently challenge myself.
That test you linked I found very easy, so if that's abstract reasoning then I definitely have it.
I guess my nonvisual thinking process I described is also abstract thinking.
Heh I tried this now. Had no problem carrying the drink without spilling it, actually I paid zero extra attention to it and it was still fine. With moving around objects, I did have to reach out with my arms sometimes to be sure I don't take the wrong angle for picking the route in the rooms when going around/amongst many objects. I didn't explicitly visualize anything at all. (Perhaps very quick flashes of the holistic pictures here and there but without me paying attention, more automatic.) I just had spatial "feelings" and "feelings" of distance as normal, but it was not 100% precise/reliable or I wouldn't have felt the need to reach out with arms at times. Still pretty good. I don't see the need to count and memorize steps, I can just "feel" the distance being taken (though not 100% precise as I said).Ok, so I did another exercise, this morning, this time I closed my eyes and challenged myself to navigate my home without opening them. I did pretty well since I probably didn't bumped into things any more than I do with my eyes open. lol I was very focused on visualizing each step, estimating the distance from one thing to another. I had to stop a couple times and get my bearings. It was the open spaces that I found harder to judge the distance even though I could visualize the layout just fine. I have never memorized how many steps from one thing to another since I have never had to. I had some eye allergy problem that most likely helped me with this exercise since I had been learning to navigate with eyes swollen closed a few times until I took the meds .
Anyway, I was able to get myself a drink and back to my room without spilling it, all with my eyes closed. It took so much longer. My worst fear has always been to go blind. I think I have been able to face it but it doesn't make the idea any less terrifying on a grand scale. Blind people who can navigate their surroundings and even live on their own amaze me.
Ah, we are complete opposites here.I could not read a map until I was older than most. I covered for that in other ways. It only helped when someone told me to use the sun for a sense of direction and that I could do. I probably just had an overall bad sense of geography and mostly used landmarks to navigate familiar places. I could get turned around in unfamiliar areas and get overwhelmed to the point I would just drive until I found a way out. :/ I don't fear getting lost anymore.
Yah that's weird to me. I'm pretty in the moment but I do not have a problem with felt sense of time. What's their sociotype btw? Out of curiosity.As far as what pookie describes about sequence, I take that for granted and it is through reading this thread that I see not everyone does that. There is one particular person, I know, that has a strange time perception in comparison to my own. They think of something that happened in the morning might as well be a long time ago and they often forget the sequence of events or how long ago something actually occurred. It is like, a week ago might as well have been a month ago to them. I would say they are more "in the moment" because of this. I often laugh at their scale of time because it seems so strange to me. I see this might have something to do with how they process and store information.
Yep I'm like this too, got a pretty good idea of when something happened and remember my childhood etc well. I didn't get your last sentence though about shifting points and ages. I don't think I have that partI have a pretty good idea of when something happened. I am not always 100% on sequence of events but I get close enough that it doesn't really matter. As I get older I might be off by a year (in age, not time) when looking back at my childhood but it is not blocky or anything. It was for awhile there but I had other things going on. I am off sometimes because of a shifting point from one age to another.
That's cool, mind me asking what helped the most? EDIT: I realize this is off topic, but if you do want to reply, I'd be very glad to hear about it in PM or in another threadI feel like I have had to repair a lot of self inflicted damage to my brain but it is obvious that I have repaired it. I have most of my memories back now and a sense of wholeness that was lacking a few years ago.
I can imagine that helping with grounding from too much emotionality...?Edit: I don't know if this is relevant or not but I did experience a time period where I was obsessively counting things to ease tension. I vaguely remember that I would see the numbers overlaying the image of whatever I was counting. It was a very stressful period in my life. The numbers hung in the air over everything. I don't do that anymore. I think it was a way of grounding myself.
Cool. Pretty foreign to me.
That's interesting too, I'm quite the opposite to the autistic stuff here. I find it easy to extract abstract logic from visual-spatial representations. Foundation of my thinking basically. I tried that approach with taking an abstract concept and try and associate it with concrete details but I find I don't like to do it in that order.Chess is a good representation of visual spatial thinking... there is a logic and maneuvering to it, but the parts are visual and physical things rather than abstract concepts such as words. It is still about logic the logic is just visual and spatial. If you look at a parking spot and you think "I can fit my car in there", you are accessing some visual spatial part of your brain. Now whether you can actually park the car, that's another question and has more to do with your kinesthetic intelligence. Pouring a drink and then holding it and not spilling it has actually probably more to do with kinesthetic intelligence.
The talk about autism is completely backwards: although autistics struggle to pick up language at an early age, they tend to score much higher on Verbal intelligence measures than Performance (i.e. visual spatial) measures. It's actually kind of a strange thing... autistics don't think exclusively in pictures what they do is they take an abstract concept and will obsess over it trying to associate it with a concrete depiction. This is why they always develop obsessions... What they cannot do is take a visual spatial representation and extrapolate the abstract principles from it, and then relate that with other abstract concepts... this is why their visual spatial scores are always lower.
And it was mentioned how some don't think while taking action. Yeah me either much, some of the thinking bits in flashes at best, I don't like to disassociate from the action.
Last edited by Myst; 07-09-2017 at 09:57 PM.
I think the trouble I had following the description of your processes is because it kind of read as a technical manual that I was unfamiliar with. It took me a couple days to assimilate what you were describing, as it didn't evoke any feelings or images in my mind. So yeah, it sounded very "technical" at first. You repeated the words "logical" and "visual/spatial" a few times but I was not quite sure what that looked like from your perspective. I couldn't put myself inside you mind. I didn't have a problem following your response here though.
I could relate to this bit pretty well.
You also mentioned music. I hear music in my head all the time. Music I don't remember hearing before, irl. I see great works of art in my mind too. I often feel like my creativity is trapped inside myself because I was not born with the talent to put this music or art into the real world. I feel I have lifetimes of talents that lay dormant inside me that will never be tapped. I have reluctantly accepted this is my life now. When people tell me I am creative or talented in other areas it kind of makes it a bit better but I can't forget what is trapped inside me. Just not meant to be, I guess. :/Ah and then I sometimes have some abstract spatials that are just shapes/colours to illustrate more abstract concepts. They are lovely in their abstractness.
Cool that you did the exercise. I found it very interesting that I was able to do it but like I said I had some practice because of eye allergies. It is not something I would want to repeat because I had to focus the whole time. I knew I could not allow my mind to wander or I would end up hurt. lol It took a lot of energy.
Re: the self inflicted damage, I would say I used nutrition, meditation, introspection, brain games and sleep to help me form new neural pathways.
And yeah I think the counting helped with emotional grounding. When my emotions were too intense I would turn to counting just about everything. It started in groups of 3s, later in groups of 6s then back to 3s. Eventually I would just count until I was exhausted. The circumstances surrounding that behavior are not something most people will find themselves dealing with so I didn't have anyone to talk to that could understand. It gave me a sense of control but through CBT, and other types of therapy, I learned other ways of coping with that bad situation. I do not have any OCD type behaviors currently. I was pretty young then.
I found another quiz. It is nothing special but I took it anyway.
Types of Thinking Test: Concrete, Analytical, Abstract, Logical, Imaginative, Creative
Here is how much you scored for every type:
Doer: 38%
Analyst: 50%
Orator: 50%
Inventor: 88%
Original Thinker: 50%
For more details see the blue box below.
The Doer: Concrete Thinking
You tend to think in practical, actionable terms. Craftsmen, sportsmen and anyone who produces anything tangible need this type of thinking. Doers contribute to the world by bringing thoughts and ideas together and making them a reality.
The Analyst: Analytical and Abstract Thinking
You tend to think in abstract terms. This type of thinking is important for mathematicians, economists, programmers, scientists and, obviously, analysts. These people are able to process information in the form of codes and complex symbols — something you can’t see or touch. Many scientific discoveries were possible because of this ability.
The Orator: Logical Thinking
You tend to think in terms of words and logic. Good writers, journalists, translators and teachers typically belong to this type. Orators are able to form ideas and then deliver these ideas to others in a clear and logical format. This ability is especially important for leaders, politicians and activists.
The Inventor: Imaginative Thinking
You tend to think in terms of pictures. People who belong to this type have a rich imagination that allows them to imagine things they haven’t seen — either because it’s something from the past or because it’s something that never existed — and express it in their work. Successful architects, designers, artists and screenwriters usually belong to this type.
The Original Thinker: Creative Thinking
You have a rare and valuable ability to think creatively. Creative thinking is an ability to look at problems and situations from an uncommon perspective and find unusual and often surprising solutions. Creative thinking is a rare skill and is needed in all types of work.
“My typology is . . . not in any sense to stick labels on people at first sight. It is not a physiognomy and not an anthropological system, but a critical psychology dealing with the organization and delimitation of psychic processes that can be shown to be typical.” —C.G. Jung
I find the link between being highly/nearly exclusively visual thinking and autism interesting. There's indication that they don't connect visual with verbal:
https://academic.oup.com/brain/artic...sm-thinking-in
Really interesting. It explains some of their context difficulties and they don't "talk" inside their heads but to a very limited degree leaning instead on visual-spatial thinking. Everything is processed visuospatially unlike the non-autistic controls in this study
The whole thing is interesting (at least I think so) but here's another quote summing things up a bitThe participants with autism seemed to process high- and low-imagery sentences similarly (as described below, they were recruiting the visuospatial areas that support visual imagery in both conditions). The control group showed a large difference between the two conditions; in particular, one of the regions in which the control group prominently showed more activation in the high-imagery condition is the IPS area, which has previously been strongly associated with visual imagery in sentence comprehension (Just et al., 2004b). Note that the autism group also had a large amount of activation in this region, but it was approximately equal in magnitude in the two conditions,Thinking in pictures during sentence comprehension may be an adaptation to the underconnectivity in autism, making greater use of parietal and occipital areas and relying less on frontal regions for linguistic processing, possibly because the connections between the frontal and parietal regions are compromised.
Yeah, that article was interesting.
I used a little visual imagery (simplified holistic images of "8" and "eyeglasses") for the processing the example sentence of "The number eight when rotated 90 degrees looks like a pair of eyeglasses", and used zero imagery for the sentence of "Addition, subtraction and multiplication are all math skills", instead I used my processing for logical concepts there, which is a half verbal process, though it would slow me down if I had to articulate each word in my head so I don't do that, and some of it is just me "feeling" the concepts... it's also that process I use for extracting logical details from the core logical concept or inner logical picture, too, as I described in my above post.
That's so completely foreign to me to use mental imagery for reading all kinds of text. My LIE-Ni ex told me he saw a lot of mental imagery when reading stories. I see nearly none. He wasn't autistic though so it's probably not specific to that. Ni egos actually often tell me that they use a lot of mental imagery where I use none. My visuality mentally is primarily spatial, not imagery based beyond that, they seem to be able to use images in a way I don't/can't.Thinking in pictures during sentence comprehension may be an adaptation to the underconnectivity in autism, making greater use of parietal and occipital areas and relying less on frontal regions for linguistic processing, possibly because the connections between the frontal and parietal regions are compromised.
Again that's totally foreign to me, when I'm reading, I don't see a series of pictures at all. I see the words as written, not visualized, they are just in front of me on the paper or the monitor, and the thinking process I described earlier (the non-visual part of the logical process) is running along with it in the background.Visual thinking has been described as seeing words as a series of pictures.[citation needed] It is common in approximately 60%–65% of the general population.
Ah and this, I'm in the 45%."Real picture thinkers", those persons who use visual thinking almost to the exclusion of other kinds of thinking, make up a smaller percentage of the population. Research by child development theorist Linda Kreger Silverman suggests that less than 30% of the population strongly uses visual/spatial thinking, another 45% uses both visual/spatial thinking and thinking in the form of words, and 25% thinks exclusively in words. According to Kreger Silverman, of the 30% of the general population who use visual/spatial thinking, only a small percentage would use this style over and above all other forms of thinking, and can be said to be true "picture thinkers".
This just sounds like some sort of speculative autistic buzzword-using to me. The last thing I read about autism says that they don't engage in any sort of pretending since they have impaired theory of mind and it's difficult to impossible for them to notice their own mental states in order to enjoy simulating a different one, and they can't solve a certain puzzle even if they want to. This is basically the opposite thing, saying they have to simulate mental states due to not having abstract thinking or something. Which is it? Aside from people with really obvious impairments (including milder ones, just clear impairments) all the speculation is useless.
The person talking about being autistic and thinking visually? I don't think it even matters if they're autistic or not (though they speak about their diagnosis and it's not really in doubt) because the point is that they're describing visual thinking. It's one person's account of how they think visually, and you can take it for that.
If you're referring to the study I linked - they were measuring brain activity as both an autistic group and a control group of participants read different kinds of sentences. I only pulled a few short sections out of it to quote here, some of which was speculative, so it's not going to be the whole picture. I gave the link to the study which is obviously going to be a lot more complete than the couple of sentences I quoted if you're interested. You can also do your own article search and find a lot more.
I talk a lot in my head (not with my mouth) without images, then I'm totally invested in what I'm doing and stop thinking with words, just focused in whatever I'm doing. A lot of music plays in my head too. I can imagine/create scenes in my head, like if I were watching a movie(with sound and evn sensatios) more than mere pictures.
Last edited by Hope; 07-09-2017 at 07:19 PM.
Chess is a good representation of visual spatial thinking... there is a logic and maneuvering to it, but the parts are visual and physical things rather than abstract concepts such as words. It is still about logic the logic is just visual and spatial. If you look at a parking spot and you think "I can fit my car in there", you are accessing some visual spatial part of your brain. Now whether you can actually park the car, that's another question and has more to do with your kinesthetic intelligence. Pouring a drink and then holding it and not spilling it has actually probably more to do with kinesthetic intelligence.
The talk about autism is completely backwards: although autistics struggle to pick up language at an early age, they tend to score much higher on Verbal intelligence measures than Performance (i.e. visual spatial) measures. It's actually kind of a strange thing... autistics don't think exclusively in pictures what they do is they take an abstract concept and will obsess over it trying to associate it with a concrete depiction. This is why they always develop obsessions... What they cannot do is take a visual spatial representation and extrapolate the abstract principles from it, and then relate that with other abstract concepts... this is why their visual spatial scores are always lower.
Last edited by rat200Turbo; 07-09-2017 at 04:13 PM.
An interesting first-hand account of someone with autism describing her thinking process and how she accesses visual and verbal information:
http://www.weautistic.com/topics/my-...ism-think.html
(There's a similarity between how she describes her thought process and Aylen's quote on how Einstein described his. That doesn't mean he was autistic as there are also non-autistic visual thinkers and all may describe their thinking processes along the same line. Dyslexics also are more visual, but as I recall with them the hemispheric development of their brain tends to be more even or leans towards greater right-brain development, so there is a different connection there between brain and visual thinking and they don't suffer from difficulty with contextual thinking the way autistic people do.)