What is your dominant thinking style?

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What is your dominant thinking style?
Definitely nonverbal (especially visual) 24%  24%  [ 10 ]
Rather nonverbal (especially vsual) 33%  33%  [ 14 ]
Rather verbal (especially not visual) 26%  26%  [ 11 ]
Definitely verbal (especially not visual) 17%  17%  [ 7 ]
Total votes : 42

Sunnyboy2
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03 May 2015, 10:23 am

I never really thought of it, but I sort of have a mixture of verbal (internal) and visual. But I'm mostly visual/non-verbal in thoughts, unless I'm trying to figure out what I should say or type..

It is all mental strength, but visualizing things such as.. distance from an object is easy when I'm in the car. I'm very poor at it [judging the distance of my body to an object] unless I'm 'calculating' the possible point of contact between to objects [that are not me and an object] or how things work (like gears, or even things like circuitry..). I like pick up a lot on patterns, someone's gait being smooth gets me studying. Cars rolling by slowly gets me the same way, but I have an affinity for vehicles. I try to predict what one action will cause another reaction, but it doesn't always go over smoothly as I can't control other people obviously. It's all very visual.

Describing thinking style is difficult when you have no idea what to use as descriptors, but I have an exceedingly hard time with verbal questions. If you ask me something beyond what I'm trained to hear (like things at the job, mostly 'what is the price of this'), you'd be lucky I would understand it without having to pause, process it, and reply about thirty seconds too late (or more). I'm very poor at my verbal calculations.. Word problems (especially in math, I probably failed algebra and geometry due to them) always gave me issues, it was like getting internally confused. You're trying to visualize the objects presented in a word problem, but then they're telling you to attach this explanation or numbers to figure out the cause and affect? It doesn't work that way for me.

I might do math out on paper to calm myself, I write all my finances down and stuff.. but if I can't physically show you by drawing what I mean.. well, I'm certainly not going to be able to verbally explain it.



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04 May 2015, 6:45 pm

Primarily visual, then verbal. If communicating with others, i do much better with written communications than spoken communications. I have trouble figuring out what people are talking about, and tend to stammer or get my spoken word order mixed up.

I realized that I was primarily a visual thinker after one of my verbal shutdowns or meltdowns, I'm not sure what you would call them. If I get extremely emotional, I forget how to speak. This mostly happens if I am very sad or angry, but can even happen if I am very happy or excited. I can picture what I want to say, but can't remember any words to go with them. It's like my mind normally thinks in pictures and then translates it into English. In the verbal shutdown, the English translator has shut down, and all I can do is gesture in a sort of frantic charade.

I am an artist, so I guess the visual thinker thing goes well with that, but can also work with written communication, so I also do programming for a living. Spoken communication is hard though. I usually have to have people repeat things or sum them up in an email if we want to get their instructions right.


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lostonearth35
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04 May 2015, 6:53 pm

I think in words all the time, it's like a voice-over you hear in cartoons and movies when a character is "thinking", but with less echo. They don't seem to use echo in Anime, so maybe it's more like that. :)

When I try to imagine things in pictures it's not as easy or controllable as I'd like it to be. Which can be frustrating since I'm a cartoonist and want to have original mental images of my characters as if they were animated.

It'd also difficult not to talk out loud to myself because I need to get the words out of my head.



nick007
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05 May 2015, 1:17 am

I'm defiantly verbal. but it may be due to being born with a rare low vision disorder & my brain sometimes having problems processing things I do see.


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nca14
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05 May 2015, 4:05 am

My visual thinking appears to be quite significantly blurred. But I can visualise faces quite good and I have not prosopagnosia. I have something which is in some ways opposite to the descriptions of thinking styles of some visual thinkers with ASD about which I read. I suppose that my disorder is not on one spectrum with "classical autism" and I suppose that it would be misnamed as just "nonverbal learning disorder".

Being unable to think in pictures at all also looks not so good for me. It may look even worse that the "lack" of internal voice which may occur when someone has strong preference of visual thinking.



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05 May 2015, 5:11 am

I do not have the insight to conclude either way.


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05 May 2015, 7:03 am

I'm a 99% verbal thinker.

My visual thinking is a lot like trying to watch television on an old, crappy TV with lots of static and a distorted picture.


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RhodyStruggle
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05 May 2015, 8:35 am

I think in terms of relations. It's spatial but not usually visual, unless the relations which I'm thinking of are related in the context of physical space, such as when I'm performing some physical activity that involves direct visual input. So if I'm playing catch I think visually. But if I'm typing I don't, because I don't look at the keyboard - but I still think in terms of each key's spatial relation to my hands.

I guess you could call this thinking proprioceptively, in the context of thinking about myself in relation to other things. This isn't limited to physical-spatial relations though, e.g it also applies to social-spatial relations.

I definitely don't think verbally. There's a separate process that encodes my thought into language, and decodes the language of others into something I can think about.


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nca14
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05 May 2015, 9:02 am

For me it can be "strange" why other people do not think in the same way as I. So well-developed "non-verbal" thinking is something "alien", "unknown" for me.

I think that there may be "harmful myth" that people with AS(D) can't be "simple" verbal thinkers like I. My style of thinking may be viewed as argument against having autism, being an Aspie, it looks more typical to "NTness" or "NVLD", and it does not fit to popular image of autism. I suppose that my thinking style is quite neurotypical.

How people who are not verbal thinkers (have poor or no(?) auditory verbal thinking) formulate their (oral (especially) or written) statements? Is the language of words "not natural" for them? I do not think that the language of words (especially spoken ones) is not natural for me.

It may be hard to imagine for me why someone can have a problem with thinking with "spoken" words (internal voice). Lack of ability of "auditory reflection" in head appear for me as something which is some sort of deficit (I do not want to be offensive). I have significant tendency to "philosophising", which tends to be in auditory, internal words. Relatively simple "philosophising" may be one of my "assets". But I have not a talent in the area of spatial imagination. Despite my good auditory verbal thinking, I do not like writing essays, can have problems with formulating "neat" sentences (especially during speaking orally), I can have problems with finding "adequate" words.

What is more problematic in life? Lack of ability to thinking in auditory words (which may be quite common in individuals with ASD) or relatively poor visualisation ability and visual memory with rather weak spatial imagination?



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05 May 2015, 11:37 am

This is pretty much how i think:
Kiriae typed, "My inner voice usually stays silent except occasional stuffs like: "this" ->"goes"-> "there" (accompanied by image of an item, image of me picking up the item and image of the place where the item should be) or "I still have 15 minutes" (accompanied by the image of me going out of home that is supposed to happen in 15 mins).
They are short comments to the flow of images and videos in my mind and they help me organize thoughts"

Example, if i am thinking about making tea, I will see a video of making tea maybe accompanied with the word "tea"

However, I have a whole lot more inner dialogue if i am thinking about what I am going to say or write. I often rehearse (my part) of a conversation in my mind.



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05 May 2015, 4:34 pm

I have a narrator saying what I am thinking accompanied by pictures that are more like a single picture for each noun and verb. There is also, to a lesser extent, video.

I also, both consciously and unconsciously, spell the words. Like I heard on tv someone say grey wolf. I saw a sign (gray wolf is a company) that spelled gray with an a. I thought, "oh, that is not how I spelled it" but I was unaware I spelled it until there was a conflict between how it was spelled in the world and how I spelled it in my head.

I think my thoughts start out as words and are translated for me into pictures. Example: I need to go to the grocery store. I see a picture of my car and the grocery store.


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nca14
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19 Jun 2015, 2:06 am

I suppose that I do not need so much pictures to think. My verbal thinking appears to be somewhat fluent and visual thinking is often rather "unnecessary" for me, because auditory/verbal/conceptual thinking appears to be strong in my case. I suppose that this thinking style which occurs in my case is popular among NTs, but my thinking style definitely does not look like the style which is often found in individuals with typical ASDs. People with ASDs, in general, appear to think much more visually and "concrete" than me.



Lukecash12
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19 Jun 2015, 2:19 am

Extremely verbal. I have to attach a verbal thought to a visual memory in order to remember or understand it. At this point in my life the overwhelming majority of my memories are of something I've read.


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19 Jun 2015, 3:26 am

Visual, I think.

I always find it hard to express myself in writing. I have an inner narrator that says sentences sometimes, but a lot of my thought is nonverbal.

I often find myself reading through a large chunk of text, and then realize that I have no idea of the meaning of anything I just read.

When I was being assessed by the psychiatrist, they had me do these puzzle things, where you had to put colored blocks into a shape. And apparently I was the only one they had ever seen that was able to do all the parts of that test. I was kind of surprised because it didn't seem that hard to me but apparently it was supposed to be?? I guess that means I'm a visual thinker XD


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kamiyu910
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19 Jun 2015, 10:21 am

The best way to describe how I think is through emotions and sensory feelings. There is verbal and visual parts too, like a movie, but ultimately the feelings are the strongest.
Granted my mind never actually stops "talking" (and I mean never. I've tried to silence it but it refuses.)


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aoeuidhtns
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19 Jun 2015, 11:06 pm

Colors and "videos" to see complex problems.