What is visual thinking?

Post Reply New Topic

I have heard that most people with autism are visual thinkers. What does this mean and how can it be applied to learning? (For older students).

I was wondering if I was a visual thinker because I have only read a little bit about it and I don't really think so.

From what I understand, and from personal experience visual thinking is basically thinking in pictures or sometimes "videos".

I don't know how the other thinking processes work, but with me images appear when I try to remember thinks, either facts or memories, or when I am trying to remember something. I want to remember to turn off the oven before I leave the house, I have to visually see myself turning off the oven, otherwise I will forget.

As for learning, in somethings it's easy, in other things it's hard. Like in math, sometimes it's easy to visualize the numbers adding and subtracting, dividing and multiplying in different ways to get the answer. Which is troublesome if you have to show your work, how can you show your work if it's done in visual imagery?

Other subjects are a bit easier for me because it mainly involves reading and thinking about what you have read, if you can visualize what you are reading, it's much easier to remember and then describe in a paper.

Visual thinking also helps me with working on technical things. I can easily visualize the device I am working on and see how it works, where the pieces should be and what might not be working, I can visualize how the signal or the power goes through the machine and see where the problem might be. It's rather cool since I can figure out problems just by thinking about it without taking something apart. Save a lot of time and energy if I can just visualize everything in my head.

Now I don't know if this is actually how visual learning works and what not, but this is basically the process that goes on in my head. I should use this visual thinking to write stories, because I can see my stories so clearly, I can describe everything as if it's right in front of me. Which then goes off into the territory of going into the Aspie world. Which is a whole other thing.

I think in pictures. For me it's thinking in 'moving images' like a silent movie. But I can think in both pictures and sound, so yeah, just like a movie.
I've got a vivid visual mind. I can picture things even with my eyes open.

And I agree that visual thinkers learn math better when they use pictures to solve a problem. I even do it to work out what string theory is about. A lot of people get confused and I just tell them to use their imagination.

But there are drawbacks. Visual thinkers can't articulate words very well, in speaking and in creative writing. They can learn to though. I'm not doing any better with speaking but my creative writing style is getting better.

Thinking in pictures.

I really don't understand this all that well, if I'm thinking about a conversation I might have or things I would want to say I think of the words. Everything else is images, are people who say they think in pictures unable to form words in their mind? When I'm thinking of building something I picture the act and all the things I'll have to do, I don't say it to myself in words, that would seem crazy.

Maybe some people talk themselves through the actions in their head, but I don't think that thinking in pictures is only for autistics. I think it might just be the detail and accuracy that makes it unusual, I'm a highly spatial thinker. I think the whole "Thinking in Pictures" thing is just an extreme of the norm.

I'm a spatial Aspie, if that's what you mean; I'm hoping that's the same thing as visual thinking. I can think in pictures, and have used it to great satisfaction in my adult careers. Worked as a Lighting designer, doing visualisation of colour and space, in 3 & 4 dimensions. I used to talk through what the production would look like with the director, and I'd design the lighting rig in my mind to achieve this, and then I'd go and do it. I work as a Landscape designer/architect at the moment, having trained in Irrigation and technical horticulture. Spatial is v good for learning plant id, thousands of leaf types, hundreds of different shades of green Maths I am bad at, so people always question my Aspieness for this reason (and because I'm chatty). I'm currently moving into Architecture, with lots of 3D modelling and Rendering.
I have no issue with articulation, but it can be hard to describe what you are seeing sometimes. That's why I got into AutoCAD I am v extroverted so I'm very social and socialised (at least in the creative world) so maybe that had an influence on my communication.
I am very sensitive tho. Extremely hypersensitive to criticism, but i think that is just an Aspie trait. Also never read fiction or any creative writing. Don't know why.
It's great if you are tech savvy, fabulous for design esp technical and industrial design. I'm a big greenie so I got into sustainability & permaculture & plants so that's the route I took, however I always have worked in a spatial way, I can see things prior to doing them, and yeah I run a video scenario of how something works. I can 'build' in my mind, take it all apart, rotate it etc. Very handy when the client wants to know how everything's going to work. Tend to remember this way too, so I'm lucky in some respects but reading has always been tiring and uncompelling. The internet and visual learning has made it a lot easier to learn stuff for us non-language Aspies...
Hope this helps...

The problem is I don't know what thinking in pictures is either!

I'm an extreme visual thinker. Most of my thoughts are in the form of either static or moving images or flows. I then have to translate those images to words to communicate. Sometimes it isn't possible to express my thoughts at all using words. I see a lot of visual analogies when understanding things.

I had a discussion with a friend about this topic. She is an extreme auditory thinker. When someone says a word to me I see an image, but she sees or hears the word in her mind instead. So if someone says "Elephant" to me I see an elephant in my mind - in this instance it happens to be a pink cartoon-like elephant. She told me she just sees the word.

The most extreme thing I do visually is run sections of program code in my head. I write software for a living and sometimes lay in bed at nights and run particular routines - but in a very different way to the stepwise way in which the computer runs the code. I run all parts of the code simultaneously and see flows and streams and swirls of colours all moving. Sometimes for example there is a leak in the flow and a trickle falls off to one side and I know this is a loop exceeding its numerical bounds. Sometimes I find a number of bugs in the software this way and end up getting out of bed to fix the program code.

I think the principle is similar to the way some aspies can do complex arithmetic in their head where they directly go from problem to result and not in the normal multiple steps taught at school. Visual thinkers tend to take all the input in one go and leap directly to the answer but auditory thinkers have to do this step at a time.

This is funny. I'm reading these descriptions of what it means to be a visual thinker, and I am thinking "Isn't EVERYONE like that?" I just assumed my whole life that everyone was.

Also what is funny about me.. I am a visual thinker, but not a visual person.. because I'm visually impaired. I have face blindness, I recognize people by their voice, and I care more about literature and music than visual art. I prefer books to movies. But when I read books, I absolutely picture everything in my head as if it were a movie. In fact, if I read a book and then watch the movie, I get angry that the movie looks nothing like the visuals in my head did. Whenever I model, I get frustrated because I can so clearly see the picture in my head, and then the picture the photographer takes looks nothing like that. I can't process oral instructions or directions. It has to be written down so I can see it.

I think I actually disregard the visual world around me (I don't even like wearing my glasses) because the visual world inside my head is so very vivid and engaging that I prefer it.

When someone says "elephant" I actually see the details of wrinkled gray skin. And when someone says "apple" I see details of white dots on red-violet apple flesh.

Weird, before reading this topic I never gave much thought to how I think. Now I'm thinking about it & realizing how I visualize intense details for nearly every phrase or word. It just seemed as natural as breathing to me. I didn't realize there were other ways of thinking LOL.