Visual vs. Verbal

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I am sort of breaking this off from another thread.
http://www.wrongplanet.net./modules.php ... 61fa92d9a1


In this thread someone mentioned that their psychiatrist said that most people think in words. I, and as it seems a lot of people here anyways, think in pictures. Everything in my mind is associated to some sort of image. Every thought I have is a picture or movie.

Hearing that others can think in any other way just astonished me. How do you think in any other way. I asked a couple people today and they said they also think in pictures and movies.

Feel free to contribute in any way. I have to go do some research on this.

Visual v. verbal?

To me, printed text is a "visual" medium. I think in pictures and words, both of which come in handy. My mind "talks" almost constantly, but I don't always need pictures to go along with my internal monologue. As far as remembering thing go, I either "see" pictures of words, or "see" pictures of other sorts of things. Very rarely do I remember spoken words.

Pictures and spatial impressions, textures, spatial "feel", apart from when I am trying to organise my thoughts or compose a message, then it is words.

From reading the threads on here I am not sure how I think, or even if I do at all!

I do have a constant inner-monologue whenever I am conscious of myself (when nothing else has taken my attention) but these are not my thoughts. Just as I can find myself unable to explain my thoughts I have the same problem in my mind and so my inner monologue gets stuck and sometimes I will keep repeating words until the next one comes to me and others I will not be able to verbalize at all.

So I am not sure in what form my thoughts are taking, they seem to come from nowhere and I just know them. They are not verbal but they do not seem to be visual either.

But if I was to recall a memory it will always be visual, even if it is a taste or a smell or a sound it is accompanied by imagery. Likewise if I was to try and think into the future or elsewhere it will be in the form of a mental movie.

I have been trying to catch myself thinking, such as after reading a post on here or when I do something to see how I learn and that appears to be visual too. It is just times such as when trying to think what to write now in this post that I have the idea I want to express in my head but it is neither visual nor verbal, but I know it is there and I know what it is.

The inner-monologue I think is a rehearsal for being able to say things. A lot of the time these verbal thoughts are conversations with people or emails or web site posts that I want to see, though usually I forget how well I expressed them when I am able to write them down and so I have to start again and do a poorer job.

Well I hope somebody understands that. If you do then you can explain it to me too!

Michael.

My mode of thinking is primarily auditory-verbal. As I'm writing this, I hear the words I am typing, or maybe that's just because I'm thinking about it. I can visualize things when necessary but this skill is weak. I am currently reading an English translation of Les Misérables, and I don't really make the effort to form a visual picture in my head of the characters as the author is describing them; there are simply too many visual details to remember and put together.

Auditory-verbal learners are said to be left brained: sequential thinking, detail before the whole, analytical thinking, rule bound. I'm not so sure about this. I consider myself to be a fairly creative person, and I think I tend to generalize too much. Who knows.

I do know that, when I was younger, I did think more in pictures than I do now. I can't say I know what caused the change (some guesses are atrophy from disuse or brain damage), but the fact is my thinking is more auditory than visual nowadays.

Well I talked to my friend a little while and she is the first to person to answer verbal. She says most of her thoughts are just like talking to herself. Of course she uses visuals for specific things but having to choose one or the other she chose verbal.

I also talk with myself. But even then I imagine myself in an imaginary setting with myself or someone else and talk. The only I can think of when I do not have some sort of image in my head are the times when I "space out" and my mind is completely blank.

When I am reading a story I often get lost in all the pictures formulating. Often After I stop reading I will think I have just watched a movie because I am visualizing every part of the story.

I have been doing some research and have found a couple sites mostly talking about visual, but I havent found much on verbal. I guess I will have o talk with my friend. Any suggestions for questions for her are appreciated. Verbal thinking is is so perplexing to me.

Same here. I've described myself on a number of occasions as a visual-verbal learner; I think in a combination of printed words and pictures, and the pictures are usually a bit vague, almost like Impressionistic paintings or even silhouettes. For simple concepts such as, say, 'cat', I might not have to go through the visualization step and just have an idea of the general being of a cat; for actual scenes involving the interaction of various things, however, I have to visualize it in my mind to really understand what's going on. That goes for directions as well-- if someone's giving me instructions on how to do something, I have to *see* it in order to really be able to understand it.

To interpret spoken language, sometimes I have to translate it first into written words and then, if necessary, into images from there.

Then, of course, there are the thoughts I have which aren't sensory at all; those tend to be more 'intuitive' in nature, generally in the form of concepts or feelings without any associated stimuli. Usually they aren't anything as general as "love", though; they'll be something more like "the sort of comfort I feel from my dog snuggling up to me".

I thought I was the only one who did that! I do that too, the exact same thing, down to the last detail you described. Wow... yeah, so I know just what you mean.

For me, too - it is not just a rehearsal for saying things though, for me it is also a rehearsal for writing things. A lot of things I write on forums are "triggered" by words or ideas that I have "written in my head about" in the past, and then they just pour out onto the keyboard as if "out of nowhere". I guess the reason why this works much better in writing for me, is because when speaking I get too distracted and can't focus, whereas writing is kind of "automatic".

I am beginning to understand this a little bit better now. I still don't know what type of thinker I am, but possibly a mix of something. Uhm I found this site where they listen about 10 different types I think. I started watching this show on BBC called "The Human Mind". Very interessting indeed.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/science/humanbody/mind/

It has got all sorts of tests and stuff, but dunno exactly how reliable...

I'm both verbal and visual. I use my inner verbal dialog to compose thoughts and prepare things I want to type or say. When reading something with important details I tend to verbalize each word as I see it, but if it's unimportant stuff with little detail I can read much MUCH faster by skipping the verbal stage and visually process the words directly. Text that is highly scenic (like a novel) may be read either way, but the end result is that I build a storyboard in my head. If I put down a novel and then pick it up later I may have to re-read several pages to rebuild the last scene before continuing. My sense memory is generally stored the way it was received, so when recalling the memory I can see the scene or smell the odour or feel the touch again just like the first time.

I suspect I'm pretty NT in this regard, particularly with regard to forming expressions for speech or typing. I don't tend to suffer from sensory overload (although it does happen on occasion). Most of my Aspie problems happen in the mechanical phase of getting the idea out of my head. Sometimes my speech and motor centers don't seem to pay attention to what my inner dialog has created and just wander off on their own and end up saying or typing the wrong thing entirely....