Are you a visual, pattern, or facts thinker?

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Yeah I guess it is a talent. Some folks can visualize car engines in three D. There is a chemist on WP who can visualize molecules in three D.

I can barely find my way around a car engine when I am looking right at one. I do know that a water molecule looks like the head of mickey mouse. But that's it with chemistry.

But maps were my childhood passion. And when someone showed me a historic atlas I got even more passionate. So I do have an instinct for two D thinking in maps, and combining time and space (history with geography).

Can visualize Africa and not only tick off the names of the countries, I can tell you which European power was their former colonial master because I can see in my mind which ones were always red (British) purple (France), orange (Spain),or other colors (Belgian or Portugese or Italian ruled) in the old maps. Stuff like that.

I think I'm a facts thinker.

I think best with abstractions and figures. My feelings give thinking inspiration and direction.

I think in informational stacks, rather like an office drone in a cubicle going through his inbox one by one.

^^^ This is my emergency back-up setting. When I don't know what to do and am too confused to make sense of anything, and then get depressed because I can't figure anything out, I just make a list and plod through it.

lists with bullet points are our brains on paper kinda friends

^^^ agreed, although I never thought of it that way before. Sort of like tethering the chaos to a physical item. I like that idea. Its a keeper.

^^^^gladja like it I got the idea from watching dr. Daniel Amen on PBS.

I'm almost completely an auditory thinker & I'm a facts thinker & don't do well with patterns

Verbal and facts thinker all the way.

If you can mentally visualize water, you are doing better than some of my general chemistry students. A few of them simply cannot do it at all. They can draw the rough Lewis formula on paper (HOH), but the real shape gets lost in the translation somehow after that. I think it is because they really do not understand VESPR theory (i.e. how electron pairs repel each other) and how that affects molecular geometry overall. This issue becomes an additive problem to them, as chemical structures tend to become more complicated the higher one goes into chemistry. God forbid if they ever make it to biochemistry and want to learn the quaternary structures of proteins.

I also have a connection with history, but not via maps. As strange as it may be, I cannot fully explain it with science: I can sense history in certain items if I pass close by them, leading me to find them in the first place. That is how I ended up with my real Dane axe at an local estate sale. I have been called a "historical junk magnet" by my family due to this trait.

To the OP topic, I am on the extreme end of visual thinking, with hints of pattern thrown in for good measure.

I also blend the visual with facts. I do love patterns and repetition though.

I was terrible at chemistry but I loved those 3D models of molecules and how they fit and twist together with the hydrogen bonds. How the molecular strings twist and glob up into specific shapes. (Of course, by this time, there may be some very different theories than the ones I learned back in the Pleistocene.) I also loved the DNA helix. I had no problems with these. Maybe because they are also patterns of how the atoms and molecules fit together??