How Should We Think About Our Different Styles of Thinking?
By Joshua Rothman for The New Yorker
Some people say their thought takes place in images, some in words. But our mental processes are more mysterious than we realize.
“I raised my hand to say something and suddenly realized that I had no idea what I planned to say. For a moment, I panicked. Then the teacher called on me, I opened my mouth, and words emerged. Where had they come from? Evidently, I’d had a thought—that was why I’d raised my hand. But I hadn’t known what the thought would be until I spoke it. How weird was that?
In the recent book “Visual Thinking: The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns, and Abstractions,” Temple Grandin explains that her mind is filled with detailed images, which she can juxtapose, combine, and revise with verve and precision.
In “Thinking in Pictures,” Grandin suggested that the world was divided between visual and verbal thinkers. “Visual Thinking” gently revises the idea, identifying a continuum of thought styles that’s roughly divisible into three sections. On one end are verbal thinkers, who often solve problems by talking about them in their heads or, more generally, by proceeding in the linear, representational fashion typical of language. (Estimating the cost of a building project, a verbal thinker might price out all the components, then sum them using a spreadsheet—an ordered, symbol-based approach.) On the other end of the continuum are “object visualizers”: they come to conclusions through the use of concrete, photograph-like mental images..”
A yes-or-no test designed by the psychologist Linda Silverman to divide verbal people from visual ones:
Do you think mainly in pictures instead of words?
Do you know things without being able to explain how or why?
Do you remember what you see and forget what you hear?
Can you visualize objects from different perspectives?
Would you rather read a map than follow verbal directions?
Visual people tend to answer yes to more of these questions
Read the full article here to learn about our different styles of thinking.