I discovered Dr. Temple Grandin, who is an extremely visual thinker. She brings up some fascinating things in this video:
I still haven't followed up on my earlier post about visual thinking, and I always intended to. This is getting me fired up about it again.
I don't have the powerfully vivid imagery she seems to have, but I do get some visuals, and I can work with them in my mind, change them at will etc. I definitely do some of my thinking this way, probably especially when I'm drawing or painting. But I think I do much of my thinking verbally. Interestingly, I always get told my writing is extremely visual, and also that I include too much visual detail. This totally fits the profile—somewhere in there she said visual thinkers do tend to include a lot of (too much) visual detail. In fact my approach is to go ahead and write it that way, and then edit it down as required later. But when I think about a scene, I see it visually. Some scenes anyway, probably especially on my Beastseekers story when it's set in the woods, because I'm working from memories.
Like her, I also had problems doing math, but I always did quite well in writing and English classes. I seem to move between the two modes.
Another thing I've heard her talk about is that she made things when she was young. My sister and I did a lot of that too. There was a big storage space under the basement stairs where our mom kept craft supplies—paper towel rolls, brown paper bags, egg cartons, popsicle sticks and toothpicks etc. She also had a few books of crafts to do with kids, and each week (I think it was on Wednesdays) we would choose a craft and go to work, cutting and pasting (in the old-school sense), painting, sculpting, and etc. I also had toys like Legos, Tinkertoys, Lincoln Logs, and others that involved spatial reasoning and construction. And I kept doing that kind of stuff when I was doing stopmotion animation. Building sets, making props and puppets, painting everything etc. And then you photograph it all. A lot of visual reasoning going on there! And a big part of what I always loved about stopmotion was how sculptural it was, like toys or statues come to life. And of course I also draw and paint. Yeah, I think it's fair to say I definitely think visually.
I have the video playing now, and she just mentioned being an associative thinker rather than a linear one. I seem to be able to do both.
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