What is your dominant thinking style?

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I have rather verbal thinking style (internal voice, thinking in concepts (but not always I can easily put my thoughts into words). I have rather poor visual (especially spatial) imagination. My visual memory is not so strong and precise. I can amass factual information quite easily, I had not to study so much to get good grades in earlier stages of education. Despite quite poor visual thinking, I like vivid colors and maps (earlier I also liked video and computer games) and have a lot of dreams last nights. My auditory attention is rather not excellent and I do not like fiction literature so much.

Do people who are visual thinkers have problems with having "voice" in their heads? Is learning in school harder for visual thinkers?

While my cognitive thoughts are verbal, my memories are definitely visual. My memories are educed like movies. I remember like a video.

I'm definetely thinking majorly in visual structures(as my name indicates), but over time I have learned to almost equally think in words. Since I've been alot on my own and desperetaly needed to make people understand what I thought and felt to not get into unwanted situations in my childhood, I used alot of time to enhance my verbal thinking(writing is especially good for that), and having discussions in my head, I especially liked to discuss thus structurize concepts about time and space! But I understood written language very good and learned myself to read at age 3, since this also could be structured into some kind of visual information, so for me atleast the school subjects wasn't really hard, only when I had to talk as I felt I wasn't understood,which was frustrating. And ofcourse all the sensory inputs, making it soo hard to focus was also frustrating. I wasn't able to do anything but wanting to go out, but that has nothing to do with spatial thinking against thinking in words. But what is relevant is that all the words sprayed around me forced me to visualize pictures I didn't want to see because people talked and I could not control my focus. As it jumped back and forth, I got so frustrated and tired I started to detest school, and felt I was forced to be doing something which I could do much more effective on my own, without all the noise. I always learned concepts almost instant if teachers answered the questions I asked them(which was the right questions for me to understand the topics), but at some point when we got a new teacher he found my questions to not be of relevance to the subject and started to think I asked this to destroy his time with the other students. After that I only did what I had to do to understand the concepts on my own, and once I understood it I was bored and frustrated and intentionally got thrown out as I enjoyed being for myself outside the classroom in silence and my own thoughts alot more than within the warzone of voices, books and pencils that would attack me with pictures I did not want trough the next 45 minutes. So for me it has really been the opposite as what you wondered; I feel my thinking in pictures,movies and structures has gained me faster learning than I atleast percieved others to have, but it is harder to communicate I guess. But no, all the voices in my head is made by myself intentionally, while words on the outside make pictures that pop up unintentionally in my head trough the unconscious associative functions, so I don't have a "problem" having voices in my head.
Interesting topic!

For the most part, I think in pictures. This is very handy in my work. I can see the problem in my minds eye and test possible solutions to see if they work. For a very long time, I thought that everyone was like this. This just another result not being very social.

How people who are visual tinkers express themselves? How they deal with writing?

I am mostly visual thinker.

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. They only pop up when I think of something that is important.

I can translate written words and human speech in my mind quite fluently and they are enough for me to understand the message, especially if it's something abstract which cannot be easily imagined. But I compare it to understanding foreign language - I become fluent in words just the same way as I become fluent in English although it isn't my "native" language.

When I am reading real stories or fiction books that allow me to imagine things I don't rely on words because picture and movie thoughts require much less focus. They just come naturally.

The whole action of the story is happening in front of my eyes like a movie and the inner voice(reading the book), is babbling somewhere in the background, where I can barely hear it. The written text I see with my real eyes disappears completely from my awareness - it's covered by the movie I see with the eyes of my mind. The "inner narrator" reads the words for me. I look at a house in front of my mind eyes and see it has red doors and white windows while my inner narrator reads the book, using a silent voice somewhere in the background: "The house had red doors and white windows...". I look at a smiling girl and clearly hear her saying "Hello. I'm Hanna." while my inner narrator, far in the background whispers: "The girl introduced herself:'Hello, I'm Hanna', with a smile on her face."

Similar but opposite thing happens when I write or speak. I see things I want to write about in my mind in the form of pictures, movies etc. and I let my inner narrator speak about it (in Polish or English, depending what language I want to write or speak about). Then I just write down or repeat using my own voice the words my inner narrator says. Inner narrator turns off as soon as I stop thinking about how I would express my thoughts to someone else.

My biggest trouble at school related to the thinking style are literal interpretations of some sentences - I am fine with most double meanings but I still cannot help seeing their literal meanings in my head because whenever I hear or read something that allows a picture to be imagined I will see the picture.
Some of them are painful to watch. For example when I hear about somebody "losing his head" I see him having his head cut off right in front of my eyes although I know it just means someone was confused.
Sometimes I am also not fast enough on picking up the figurative meaning and I waste too much time wondering how the picture I am seeing in my mind might relate to what teacher is talking about.

I also have trouble with sentences that are too abstract. Such as descriptions of feelings or political relations.

BTW. I agree with what spatialthinker93 said about people talking. They do cause a bunch of random pictures pooping up in my head. For example two conversations: "...then you take an egg..." and "...I went through the door..." mix up and make me imagine myself going through a door with an egg in my hand... And my inner narrator comments: "Wait... What?!".

Last edited by Kiriae on 02 May 2015, 4:50 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I think the options are too limited.

While I am predominantly visual, I suspect the category that I would tick had it been available as an option would simply be 'atypical'.

Yesterday I noticed something novel about my auditory perception. Frequently I listen to orchestral music which may be classical or popular. Suddenly as I was listening yesterday, I realised that I was hearing two different streams concurrently and that they were demarcated somehow by perceptual brain processing - individual instruments and the whole orchestra - without loss of acuity or musical coherence in the sensation and perception of both kinds of input.

I was shocked that I had never noticed this before; and my initial theory about this is that one side of the brain is hearing the "whole" and that the other is performing "auditory focusing", and as the two sides communicate, these are perceived as happening simultaneously. Additionally, as our family has a pronounced tendency to be ambidextrous, I wondered if that potentiated this curious mode of sensation and perception to music.

Despite having a primary mode of visual thinking the auditory is not far behind. I prefer the visual mode for problem solving and am good at pattern perception - whether visual or auditory. So it is much more complex than I used to think. Sometimes the received wisdom on these things is a one size fits all kind and it doesn't fit me, nor others on the spectrum, all that well, perhaps. The received wisdom is based on NT populations, as most of these theories are.

I think I am a verbal thinker for the most part. I mostly think in words, though I do see pictures in my mind as well. I don't have a very good visual memory, and I have trouble rotating things in my mind.

The whole idea of there being verbal versus visual thinking is far too restricted. There was a thread here months and months ago now and some people reported thinking involving, among other things, primarily emotions and primarily tastes.

My thoughts seem more abstract than any of these things. They are loosely tied to emotions and then stronger tied to verbal, but before they turn verbal they are connected not seemingly with any senses. Images are not tied to thoughts, sounds are not tied to thoughts, thoughts are thoughts.

Last edited by cavernio on 02 May 2015, 7:05 pm, edited 2 times in total.

I think if I ever actually pay attention to music I hear it that way. I can easily pick out parts and instruments, if they have different timbres at least. I might hear it that way by default too. Music is one of my favorite things. When in the right mood, it elicits such wonderful emotions in me. I don't like background music much, it's generally either annoying or in the foreground of my mind and removing my focus from the foreground task.

Cavernio, I have just located this and it is fascinating:
http://www.musicandbrain.de/fileadmin/g ... R_2009.pdf

Reading it now. I want to add that I never thought other people perceived music/sounds differently than I do, just that they didn't attach emotions to it as I do, much like some people like genres of music and songs I really don't find enjoyable.

and this surprising find astonished me, discussing gender differences in musical perception in the brain:

Quote from a Wikipedia page on the cognitive neuroprocessing of music

"Minor neurological differences regarding hemispheric processing exist between brains of males and females. Koelsch, Maess, Grossmann and Friederici (2003) investigated music processing through EEG and ERPs and discovered gender differences.[60] Findings showed that females process music information bilaterally and males process music with a right-hemispheric predominance. However, the early negativity of males was also present over the left hemisphere. This indicates that males do not exclusively utilize the right hemisphere for musical information processing. In a follow-up study, Koelsch, Grossman, Gunter, Hahne, Schroger and Friederici (2003) found that boys show lateralization of the early anterior negativity in the left hemisphere but found a bilateral effect in girls.[61] This indicates a developmental effect as early negativity is lateralized in the right hemisphere in men and in the left hemisphere in boys."

...Gosh! Today has been quite an eye-opener, so thank you OP for indirectly leading me to this offshoot of your topic.

It is probably typical to hear music in multiple streams at the same time.
People who play and make music commonly talk about it.

I think in words, daydream in words and images, and my memories are mostly videos and images (and feelings), although speech might be part of the memory too.

I am poor in rotating objects in my imagination. My spatial intelligence may be relatively low. I think that I may have not visual images in my mind for quite long period of time. My cognitive style fits significantly better to "nonverbal learning disability" profile than to HFA profile (which does not fit me). I do not think that all sorts of autism have to be similar to the case of Temple Grandin and for me within "NLD" group there appear to be also some sorts of autism.

Having lack of "internal voice", being unable to think in auditory sentences appears to be somewhat problematic and "unpleasant", "boring" for me. I "like" to have auditory thoughts in my mind, it may be like reflecting, commenting, "philosophising". I do not know how to be a person who has not so much auditory thinking, who do not reflect or subvocalise words which he/she sees. It looks... "boring" or even somewhat "sad" for me.