Do you think in pictures?

[Shevek]

my favorite trick is to keep maps in my head keeps me from getting lost.

I do that too, and it works well. However, if I get disoriented, I can't just rotate the mental map. I have to move each street individually, and it's a messy process.

 

[Duna]

I have episodes where I feel like there's an empty space in my mind. Always had them, sometimes every few months, sometimes every day. Those situations used to be confusing, and scary. I (and others who I tried to explain this feeling to) began to think about strokes, dementia, maybe epilepsy that wasn't discovered when tested for it... But then I noticed than other than being unable to find words and form sentences in my one (inner dialogue) everything was working fine, if not even better. My ability to recognize patterns, analyze situations, distinguish sounds and smells or see details improves during those wordless moments.

I usually hated to be in that "phase" but I think that's because of the (wrong) idea that we have to be communicating all the time, and the bad experiences I've had when I actually had to do it while being in such a phase.

This realization will hopefully help me deal better with those situations (like accepting and enjoying them). But it also shows that language isn't necessary to think.

 

[Outdated]

My mind works best when I'm happily daydreaming and I leave it to sort things out by itself.

 

[Duna]

My mind works best when I'm happily daydreaming and I leave it to sort things out by itself.

I seldom daydream. But I can go into trance like phases when I do certain things I enjoy, and besides having a lot of fun, many minor issues I might have resolve during the process.

 

[Outdated]

I seldom daydream. But I can go into trance like phases when I do certain things I enjoy, and besides having a lot of fun, many minor issues I might have resolve during the process.

This was the big issue I had in many workplaces, I work extremely efficiently when I'm in the dream. When people interrupt the dream it shows in my performance and my life becomes more difficult.

 

[Gift2humanity]

While I think in pictures, I would love to create some abstract art to convey my emotions, so that, when people look at my art, they feel the emotion that I feel.
There is a paucity of mental imagery coming to me at the moment, and what there is, right now, is too corny to paint/draw. I hope for sudden inspirational images, I am motivated to produce that affect people profoundly.

 

[Ella Spell]

I think exclusively in words, which is why I tend to use so many. I end up writing in quite vivid detail because it's my only way of identifying or articulating what's going on in my mind. I write until the thought or feeling seems to be conveyed sufficiently for my own understanding. Sometimes I might appear to go on for too long with unnecessary details which others find offensive. That's just me, unable to think or experience emotions in any way but through the rhythm and rhyme of words.

I apologise if I can't think or write like other people. I've never been able to summarise or use inductive thinking (bottom up generalisations). I always take an idea and deconstruct it or break it into lots of parts so I can make sense of it myself using words. I wish I could be more succinct and less vivid, without sounding curt. It's a writers' curse to include descriptive details which others find too much, but I've come a long way already and I'm always striving for change.

 

[Ronald Zeeman]

Interesting perspective, I am so visual it is stunning.

 

[Darkkin]

My linguistic skills are excellent, but I have a strange, tessallative visual matrix that translates amazingly well into written formats. I think it, I see it, I can describe it in exactingly specific detail...my work has been described as vivid, breathtaking and otherworldly. The living world in my head carries over to the one creative medium I can comprehensively command. A visual thinker whose medium is the written word. It doesn't get much more oxymoronic...

 

[Ronald Zeeman]

I like visualizing physics concepts in my head, turning one dimension in to two. three into 4.

 

[Duncan74]

I do a lot of mathematical things with work. Complex modelling stuff. And it's really really hard to describe, but it's like I see machines and mechanisms and patterns that somehow relate to what I'm doing. And I feel as if I'm a conductor of an orchestra and the 'things' kind of float around until they make an ordered/ballance, and then I have the answer.

This makes me sound like I'm delusional, and the words above don't really describe it properly. But I describe it as more art than science (there's no right answer, only some wrong ones I what I do).

It's also hard as I apparently tend to close my eyes, or go into space when thinking and so people feel I'm not listening to them in meetings. Also apparently I can 'lose' people as I've gone a few steps too far forward towards the answer. I've crossed the bridge at the city limits whilst the conversation is still around leaving the carpark in the CBD.....

(Edit - Ronald's post above makes a lot of sense to me).

 

[Polchinski]

I usually do think in pictures. Although the pictures aren't something you can draw, but "mental colors" so to speak. More like abstract art. Perhaps even more abstract than abstract art, because with abstract art you use real colors and real strokes.

But on occasion I notice something bizzare that differs from all that. I might picture a real location I used to frequent at some point (so that won't be abstract art any more). And what is interesting is that said location might have nothing to do with whatever I am thinking about. For example, one of those times I was thinking about racial issues, I pictured a road by a pond in Moscow. What did it have to do with it? I have no idea.

Then there are other times when my picturing various locations can be more logically explained. For example, I was reading a fiction story about Russian prison, and it said that its windows were pointing northwest. My appartment in Russia also had windows pointing northwest. So I just pictured that whole story as occurring in that appartment.

Even if they didn't say northwest, I would still likely fill it with "something" from my memory. It just perhaps won't be that particular appartment. But some other familiar location.

Incidentally, even now, I notice that parts of that story I picture in my current American house, where windows don't point Northwest. So actually it is sort of jaxposition between (mostly) Russian appartment and a little bit of American house and a little bit of some other places.

I don't mean to say that I always envision things that random. When I think about the substance and I need to picture something to help me think, I would. But other times when I need a picture as a filler, that woul dhappen too.

 

[Ronald Zeeman]

You're right this ability is hard to describe Like telling a blind person what you see. I enjoyed fixing processes. before I retired, so easy to see where the bottle necks were. Super man has nothing on us I Think this ability is 1 in 50,000 people.

I usually do think in pictures. Although the pictures aren't something you can draw, but "mental colors" so to speak. More like abstract art. Perhaps even more abstract than abstract art, because with abstract art you use real colors and real strokes.

But on occasion I notice something bizzare that differs from all that. I might picture a real location I used to frequent at some point (so that won't be abstract art any more). And what is interesting is that said location might have nothing to do with whatever I am thinking about. For example, one of those times I was thinking about racial issues, I pictured a road by a pond in Moscow. What did it have to do with it? I have no idea.

Then there are other times when my picturing various locations can be more logically explained. For example, I was reading a fiction story about Russian prison, and it said that its windows were pointing northwest. My appartment in Russia also had windows pointing northwest. So I just pictured that whole story as occurring in that appartment.

Even if they didn't say northwest, I would still likely fill it with "something" from my memory. It just perhaps won't be that particular appartment. But some other familiar location.

Incidentally, even now, I notice that parts of that story I picture in my current American house, where windows don't point Northwest. So actually it is sort of jaxposition between (mostly) Russian appartment and a little bit of American house and a little bit of some other places.

I don't mean to say that I always envision things that random. When I think about the substance and I need to picture something to help me think, I would. But other times when I need a picture as a filler, that woul dhappen too.

Yes it's not really picture s after all how can I see a connection to 4 dimensions. Yet I can see the connection.

 

[Mr. Stevens]

It's a writers' curse to include descriptive details which others find too much, but I've come a long way already and I'm always striving for change.

There is Joyce and there is Beckett. I love both

 

[Princess Viola]

I don't think in pictures and I honestly always thought it was just a visual metaphor that was used to convey the concept of thought, not 'people can actually visualize something in their mind when they're thinking about it', y'know?

Like if you were to ask me to picture an apple in my head, I can't do that. I am literally 100% incapable of doing that, I honestly still have a hard time comprehending that this is a thing others can do at times. I don't even know how it works because I can't do it.

 

[Ronald Zeeman]

I can picture complex ideas in my head but not apples very well.

 

[Aeris]

I do the random word or comment thing as well, usually after a mental roam-around while someone is talking. It makes sense in the context of where my mind went, but that is usually after two or three related subject changes in my mind. I can always piece together the route my mind has taken, though, for my bewildered conversation companion. "Well, you said ___ , which made me think of an article I read last week about ____ , which discussed the same theme as that movie we talked about last night where the main character looked like the neighbor, which reminded me that he came over this morning and borrowed the rake which I really need back because the leaves are a mess and I'd better water the garden." All of this takes a split second.

I do that all the time. I thought it was just me tho. It's just like a question my son asked me awhile back. Do you see just a ball of light or do you see spikes coming off the light as if it was a depiction off of a nativity scene?

 

[The Pandector]

I’m in between. Words are my tool, but I think in paragraphs, which are more like pictures than words. Maybe I’m backwards; I have the thought, then deconstruct it.

 

[mylife2023]

I am trying to learn about all of this and I do not understand what you mean exactly, by thinking in pictures. But, I was curious. Do things like Bitmojis, help you in assessing or understanding certain concepts in a text? emotionally or otherwise?

I hope I conveyed that question properly.

TIA

 

[mylife2023]

I’m in between. Words are my tool, but I think in paragraphs, which are more like pictures than words. Maybe I’m backwards; I have the thought, then deconstruct it.

So you see the paragraph as a whole? You see the culmination of the things in the paragraph, as a picture?