Visual thinkers method of learning

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Anyone else here think mainly in pictures? If so do you find it frustrating when you spend a long time trying to learn a concept which seems to be complicated when its in words but when you see a picture of it you grasp the concept in a matter of milliseconds and your left wondering why they didn't just provide a f****n picture in the first place? University gets on my nerves in this sense cuz all the lecturers do is bombard you with words and if your lucky the lecturer might throw a few pictures and diagrams in with his slides. Its supposed to be a place of learning yet they fail to take into account the fact that not everyone learns well with words. Every single worded concept I learn I have to translate it into imagery in my mind and although I can do this it would be so much quicker if they just threw a picture in with every concept. I study chemistry and luckily organic chemistry they can't avoid it they have to show you the structures and all that but inorganic chemstry I swear to god some lectures its slides and slides of nothing but words.

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read more here:

http://www.euronet.nl/~mjkbeeld/Upside- ... liance.pdf

Please send your feelings on this to an activist group for autism. Perhaps they can get the universities to start a new teaching style. This will open up more jobs for graphic artists and others while helping students learn better. It's the text publishers too who should make course texts more graphic. "A picture speaks a thousand words".

I have often been confused by a written or verbal instruction that I have understood immediately when seeing a visual representation.

Thanks for the PDF aspi-rant. They obviously did their research on this because that characteristic comparison chart is spot on. The visual thinker side at least.

RightGalaxy: Yeah I'll do that actually. Something needs to be done about this, I doubt its just people with mild autism that learn better with images. Its pure truth that saying "a picture speaks a thousand words". Thats what gets me so frustrated I find myself interpreting all these words and when I grasp the concept I end up with a little mental image that wouldn't have taken a fraction of the space on the page and wouldn't have taken a fraction of the time to grasp. If the universities start providing good pictures to represent concepts I speculate it will save all students a lot of time.

When I learn and I read a book, I see pictures in my mind.
But when I'm at school, it's hard to understand only words. I hate verbal instructions and I often ask for repeat. People think I have poor memory, so I tell them I'm visual thinker and I must SEE to understand and remember.

Last edited by Valoyossa on 12 May 2010, 10:51 am, edited 1 time in total.

I'm the same way, I have no trouble understanding complex concepts in many fields but when it's represented only by words (spoken or written), it can take much longer for the concept to sink in.

At first glance the aspects of a visual thinker as described in the PDF apply to me almost 100%.

I want you to know that if you look well, you'll find a lot of books whose authors care about illustrating the concepts they explain with images. It will be hard because they (books and authors) seem to be a minority, but you'll find them in time.

I have been thinking about it lately and sometimes i think the less you understand the professors, the better they feel. Otherwise i don't know why they bombard you with abstract and obscure concepts instead of giving good explanations.

Thanks to Aspi-rant for that link! I work in a school program for autistic students, many of whom are visual-spatial learners. I just printed out the whole thing.

I answered yes to 12 questions on page 2, which would mean that I'm highly VS-oriented. However, I'm fairly sure that I'm primarily auditory/sequential. I guess it's possible to be gifted in both areas. Too bad my social skills aren't on that level.....

I think this depends on the lecturers and how they tend to think.
In my case I am the lecturer and my students are often asking me to give them things in words when what I want to give them is a picture...

Pic-Lit topic

Matrices are a good way to incorporate related words, numbers, and pictures. You can condense a lot of detail inot a small space, get the overall picture and hold it easily in your working and/or longterm memory.

I'm the same way, as well.

I'm a VSL as well, always had trouble learning with "dull" teacher, teachers with humour and lots of visualisation the matter just sticks. Never knowing how I got the answer, but it was always the right answer.

Very very interesting, I'm getting to know myself better and better every day.

yes, and yes.

but yet i am still stuck focusing on details rather than the big picture of things.

i never felt in school like things were taught in a way that made sense to me. i couldn't see the value in memorization. i learn things best when i can visualize and figure them out logically. it seems to me a more permanent way of learning: learning to figure something out rather than just remembering the end result.

I think its inevitable the lecturers lose their jobs as universities eventually adopt a video lecture system where they upload a collection good lectures onto the internet so the students can view them online. The idea of going all the way to college to listen to someone talking about a subject you can find masses of information about on the internet is insane. Anything you can learn in a lecture you can learn online, in my case learn way more rapidly and effectively. Heres a good website demonstrating the principle
http://www.khanacademy.org
then theres the course material from lots of other colleges
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htm
http://webcast.berkeley.edu/courses.php
http://oyc.yale.edu/