Verbal vs. Visual

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Aah now I see, I wasn't sarcastic by the way.

like it seems lots of others .. i don't either have a straight-forward answer to this interesting question ..

tried to yet again think how and what i do ..
as i think now, i notice myself once more go through what i think are my normal stages .. i realise i can't think about it .. i start stimming .. i make a swooshing sound in my ears thru pressing my fingers lightly against them .. bouncing my knees while sitting in this office chair .. also pressing lightly against my eyes and mouth .. also allowing my jaw and teeth to rattle slightly .. bouncing all the time with both feet against the floor .. head rattling slightly and bouncing .. ears swooshing .. mouth and teeth touching my hands .. kind of isolated in a darkish swoshing rattling bouncing bubble entirely my own ..

that's the state i need a lot. i need this "womb state" lots of times every day. (normally lying down) ..
i feel i get overwhelmed really easily .. then to detach myself i need to "return to the womb" .. emotionally .. sensation-wise ..

then i need to stay in this womb sensation for maybe one minute .. maybe an hour .. maybe considerable part of the day ..

only then is my mind once more slo-o-owly starting to move again ..

then i need to try really seriously not to get bogged down and stuck again .. need to NOT be overwhelmed again .. need inner and outer silence to stay unclogged ..

then i try to approach the question at hand .. very carefully .. slowly .. nonverbally .. then i basically have to trust what my mind chooses to come up with .. tho normally it makes a lot of sense to me .. but i really try not to think thru things methodically .. thru a, b and c and so forth .. more like staying unclogged .. free .. open .. and trust what comes to me ..

and, btw, this state was first shown to me in my dreams as a salamander a few months ago .. then lately it's instead been symbolized by a bug of some kind .. beetle .. roach .. etc .. what to me seems to me a very small perspective .. right now i understand that to be telling me to stay small ..

...

generally pictures energize me. and words are costly.

but like now .. i do like to whittle out words too at times ..

when i talk (normally to my GF) i tend to either babble or be silent long stretches .. and be patient when no words appear .. and when i relax ever more the words will come more easily ..


i am still undecided on how to interact with our wonderful WP community .. i feel i need WP a lot .. autism is very important part of my life and learning more is very very helpful to me ..

then again .. i also need to save myself .. not feel like i "need to" .. say this or that .. not "ought to" .. but rather sit back .. enjoy .. coast along .. not try too hard ..

so i still feel i need to explore and experiment to find out if when and how to talk here at WP .. at times it seems saying only very little .. very rarely, is the thing .. then (other times) i realise (i think) .. that i need to be more active here .. need practise and interaction ..

iow: these days it seems the more i can accept myself as pretty non verbal the more energy, function and joy i have

I'm visual to the point where its hard for me to see verbal context. For example, my aunt says to me "im going to the paint shop to get some paint chips (which are little cards with paint colors on them) and instantly, without effort I see a large barrel of old paint chips of all different colors almost like how garden mulch would be at a lawn and garden store. I look at her with a puzzled look and ask "what paint chips?", she, seeing that I missed the context of what she was saying replies "I'm going to get paint colors!", and even though I know what paint chips are in the context of a paint shop, all my brain did was pick out the individual details of what she said and formed visual images out of context. This happens to me constantly.

On the other end, I don't talk much, and when I do, I don't expresses clearly what I'm thinking unless its something I'm extremely familiar with (like a special interest), in which case I usually end up monologuing or talking in a very scripted manner.

I voted visual. Sometimes when I talk to people I would motion with my fingers or hand what I'm talking about. It is not simply gestures. Like i would make the shape of an object or thing I'm talking about. I doubt the other person always know what I am doing when I move my hand and fingers.

Yes, expressing myself is a challenge. Yes, I give short replies. I always think about lots of things but I don't like to talk about them.

If you are primarily visual, is expressing yourself in words a challenge for you? It depends but it's often dificult.
Do you tend to give short replies to everything? Yes.
Do you find it difficult to explain your thoughts, even if you might be thinking a lot of things at the moment? Oh yeah.

(visual thinker here)

yes. (unless typing / writing, with a lot of time on my hands to reread and edit.)



often.



often.



this was a question for verbal people? (why?)
yes.



i have moments of incredible articulacy. mostly written though.

I will just go ahead and co-sign that. Though to answer the question about music, no it is not an essential part of my life, I have actually almost totally removed it from my life, and quite prefer it that way.

Argh I can't answer the poll and it reminds me of a horrible conversation I once had with a bully who called herself a friend but enjoyed, well, conversations like this one so she could laugh:

Her: Do you think in words or pictures?

(I sit there and struggle with the language. I can tell the format is an either/or question and my rule for those is I must give an answer. I finally figure (getting far more authentic communication into the conversation than I usually manage with my stored responses) since words are so alien then it has to be...)

Me: Pictures.

Her: Then you're autistic!

My brother (a truly visual thinker, unlike me, but nonautistic): I think it takes more than that...

(I go into echo mode and ask her...)

Me: Do you think in words or pictures?

Her (with such intense self-satisfied smugness that even I can pick up on it): I think in thoughts!

Me (internally): Nnnnnnnggggggggghhhhhhhh aaaaaaaarrrrrrrrgh!

I can't describe it but she was such a jerk about things like that. Like she thought she was better than me because she didn't get entangled in the kind of knots that my screwy language processing always turned my brain into.

But that conversation, over a decade ago, has prompted a whole lot of trying to figure out how I do think. It seems that I think in patterns of sensory impressions. Not a lot of the abstract stuff most people seem to think in whether they're visual, verbal, both, or neither. I'm somewhere underneath all that just experiencing things in a rather direct fashion. I get little bursts of abstraction almost like little tiny mind-storms in the sky, but mostly I live on the ground underneath all that stuff. I feel things and smell things the clearest of anything -- visual things are there but they are color and shape and texture rather than recognizable objects or symbols unless I work at it. Sound also washes over me in tone and timbre and such rather than words or identifiable sounds, it also takes work to do that. So at the most basic level my thoughts are what I've directly felt and smelled and tasted and seen and heard, but I don't interpret those senses the usual way without great effort. So, sort of a very tactile/kinesthetic way of experiencing things, with colors and patterns of sound and light drifting through.

Also, WRT the actual question, visual and verbal are not mutually exclusive. A friend of mine thinks visual-verbally --written words go through her head instead of spoken ones. Verbal can be visual (written word, sign language as seen from outside), auditory (spoken words), tactile (Braille, sign language as felt on the hands of others by deafblind people), or kinesthetic (sign language as felt by the signer, typing as felt by the typist, writing as felt by the writer). It can also happen without any sense at all attached to it -- someone I know describes it as just the essence of the words going through his head without being in the minds eye or ear or etc. Verbal just means words and words can happen in any sense it's possible to create words in.

Similarly, visual can be a lot of things. I have talked to lots of visual thinkers. Some of them think in words -- written words. Some see pictures or pictures within pictures or other arrangements of pictures. Like photographic type pictures. Others think in something closer to line drawings of images or vague fuzzy images. Some think in three or more dimensions. Others think in movies, with the same variation in image quality that ice described. Others think in flashes of color, various visualized shapes, geometrics, or schematics. All visual means is that it's as if taken in by the eyes, it doesn't mean it's not verbal and doesn't have to mean representational images.

I guess that bully did one thing for me -- she gave me a drive to understand how many ways there are of thinking.

I think I'll vote for visual. Because just like the question she asked me... at least it's not verbal because my thinking is very far beneath language. And there's the odd visual bits in there, they're just not the main focus.

I didn't think you were, but I couldn't tell. I see the figures are more like 2:1 now.

Oh and as to the questions (which my very not verbal brain just saw as squiggles patterns).

I have what to some would seem a paradox. Expressing myself in words is extremely taxing and difficult. Understanding words is even harder. It's like climbing a cliff and hanging on by my fingernails. I spend much of my time unable to even conceive of language.

And yet by putting words together as sensory patterns rather than as meaning for much of my life, I was able to give the impression that I understood far more than I did. By the time I even knew what words were, I had already learned to parrot strings of word sounds in the right situations so it sounded like I understood usually.

And then by working and working at it, by the time it finally completely clicked for me how to consistently connect words to my thoughts, I already had a huge repository of word patterns so that my apparent expressive skills so far outstripped receptive that I often could not read what I had written. I could decode the sound but not the meaning.

Because my way of approaching language involves patterns matched of clumps of words to clumps of sensory and emotional expression, I can be quite long winded and have real trouble writing concisely. And this is BECAUSE of my trouble with language hence the paradox.

What people don't see is that every true thought I write (as opposed to verbal mimicry) has been years or even decades in the making. The stuff I wrote about in my responses today I knew long long before I could write it. It finally comes out but now I know things that may take me another ten or twenty years to learn to write.

Learning to write a thing comes in many stages. At first my brain just shuts down. Then bits more but under pressure and meltdown. Then slowly over years as if a slow growing plant was planted in the ground and it takes forever to flower.

So I appear eloquent in my familiar subjects but unfamiliar-to-writing ones I am utterly incapable of writing. And nobody but me and a few highly perceptive people see the struggle. Also feels strange to be able to write better than many people who have far, far less trouble with language than I do. It is as if they start from higher up but cannot climb, and I start from very very low or even beneath the ground, but can climb quite high, but not for long before I fall in a heap 100 yards below the other person when it comes to words. It's also hard to explain the fact I handle language through a very non-verbal process (sensory patterns). I wonder sometimes if the reason I am better than some others at some times, at a task that seems to be verbal, is that while they have language trouble, they also often think within language-like symbol and category based constructs. When in order to handle language the way I do, it requires a skill entirely outside language and category. And how a language problem makes my posts so long that I often cannot read them (and uses words I have no understanding of even at the best of times) yet have no method to condense them. All of which I think again is to do with language as sensory pattern rather than language as category. If I had to think within categories and symbols and abstractions I would have a hard time expressing anything at all.

Yes, it depends on what I'm replying to, and yes.

I usually plan conversations out in my head, though, so when I have them I know exactly what to say. I hate thinking of a really good response to something or formulating a good way to explain something once I conversation has ended.

I am primarily a verbal thinker.

I'm not totally sure. I think in both ways. On the IQ test i took, i scored quite a bit higher on the verbal part... And i know that i can memorize words easier than images. But i usually have words AND images in my head. In that movie about Temple Grandin, i could identify a lot with thinking of an odd image in my head when someone says something strange. Like on another thread here it asked what other people thought of when they saw the title "missing the lid," and i said that i had a picture in my mind of a tin coffee container missing the plastic lid... pensieve responded to it talking about "literal visual minds." That got me thinking about this... Because i had thought i was primarily a verbal thinker because of my test scores, but i'm not really sure. I do have a lot of images in my mind. I definitely don't have a photographic memory... i have a hard time remember visual details unless it's something i was paying a lot of attention to. A lot of time the images can be vague or fuzzy... Like if you told me to imagine a person in my mind, they would have the general shape of a person but my mind isn't going to bother thinking up facial details or anything. I also think verbally. I have an inner voice in my mind that i think with.. but sometimes i see the words in my mind too(both what the words represent, and the written words sometimes also). I think that when i'm trying to solve a problem, i reason verbally in my head and then at the same time i'm illustrating parts of it to myself in mental pictures. So, uh, i'm just confusing myself here.

mostly visual-I can see the outcome of what I need to do in my head or I need to see what people are seeing so I can direct them how to fix the problem-When I try to explain things-I stammer and can't seem to grasp the proper words sometimes very easily.

I'm mostly verbal.

I don't really enjoy expressing myself through spoken word. I'm good with language but speaking my thoughts is difficult, mostly because of anxiety and social difficulties. I prefer written language. When I hear someone speaking, my brain converts it into a visual format like I'm reading something. Something about speaking feels insubstantial, like the words mean less when they're spoken instead of written. And I remember information I read far better than information I listen to.

So, yes, I do enjoy expressing myself through written word.

Music is a big part of my life.