Maciamo
18-03-12, 08:23
Everybody thinks differently. People can't be lumped in just two categories such as 'verbal' or visual'. Like for everything else there is a gradation on a scale and each individual will fit somewhere in between the two extremities.
Verbal thinkers, on one side, think in words. Spatio-visual thinkers think in pictures and animations in their head. Obviously everybody can do both. People in the middle of the scale use both equally. Those lying towards the either extremity of the scale tend to favour one over the other most of the time.
Apparently, from the data I could find, the majority of the population tends towards verbal thinking. I, on the other hand, am much more of a visual thinker. Even writing these few lines I first visualise the statistical graph representing the population on the scale 'from mostly verbal to mostly visual'. Images come first, then I have to think of words to express what I am seeing. The more I visualise an idea the harder it is to put it into words, and the longer I have to reflect about how to express it.
Times and again I am not satisfied with the words available to me in the language, as if some ideas just cannot be expressed clearly with words. That's a feeling I experience on a daily basis, despite my efforts to augment my lexical range to avoid such situations. I found that English is superior to any other language to express my ideas because it possess more words, nuances and grammatical flexibility than any of the several languages I have learnt, including my mother tongue (French). But it is far from being enough, and probably never will be. Pictures and words just don't belong to the same world.
It can be hard to translate some terms from one language to another, especially when they belong to different language families and civilisations (e.g. English, Arabic and Japanese). There are indeed untranslatable cultural expressions. Many words, in particular conceptual ones, never have exactly the same meaning or connotation from one language to another. That is partly why English often kept both the Germanic and Romance words for the same thing (http://www.eupedia.com/europe/missing_words_french.shtml), as the nuance, usage or connotation of the two words varied enough to be used in different situations.
The saying 'a picture is worth a thousand words' applies to everybody, but resonates particularly strongly for visual thinkers. I suppose this is why I like to make maps, as anybody who has been on Eupedia for a while will know.
At university, I didn't write much of what the professors was explaining. Other students were all scribbling furiously every word they heard (often without processing the information first). I, on the other hand, just listenned, visualised in my head everything I heard, then wrote down a few schemes with isolated words or phrases linked by arrows or arranged in a way that would conjure up the images right back in my head when I saw my notes, but that wouldn't mean anything to anybody else. When another student had written 5 full pages, I had barely half a page. Yet I got better results and hardly had to study at home. I just needed to review my schematic representations once before the exam and that was it. When friends asked me for my notes, I had to explain that it wouldn't be of any use to them, and they were aghast when I showed them my notes to prove I wasn't lying.
A drawback of visual thinking is that I was slightly dyslexic as a child. Another is that I am not a spontaneous talker. I always have more difficulties than most people finding my words to express "what I see in my head". I feel like verbal communication is an acquired second language, while my true mother tongue is the mental visualation of ideas. I think it is one of the reasons why I am not much attached to my native (verbal) language and happily traded it for English, a language better suited to visual thinkers.
Those of you who have read me on Eupedia might have noticed that I don't use metaphors. I actually dislike them. It may seem counter-intuitive that a visual thinker do not like using metaphors, but there is a good reason for it. I like to picture my ideas in a clear and realistic way. I don't need images that represent something else. Metaphors are a way for verbal thinkers of using words to help them visualise ideas that they wouldn't normally think of as images. For me not only are they useless (as my thought are already images) but confusing, as they mix new images with the clear ones I already have in mind. I would therefore believe that the more a person uses or likes hearing metaphors the more a verbal thinker he or she is.
Verbal thinkers, on one side, think in words. Spatio-visual thinkers think in pictures and animations in their head. Obviously everybody can do both. People in the middle of the scale use both equally. Those lying towards the either extremity of the scale tend to favour one over the other most of the time.
Apparently, from the data I could find, the majority of the population tends towards verbal thinking. I, on the other hand, am much more of a visual thinker. Even writing these few lines I first visualise the statistical graph representing the population on the scale 'from mostly verbal to mostly visual'. Images come first, then I have to think of words to express what I am seeing. The more I visualise an idea the harder it is to put it into words, and the longer I have to reflect about how to express it.
Times and again I am not satisfied with the words available to me in the language, as if some ideas just cannot be expressed clearly with words. That's a feeling I experience on a daily basis, despite my efforts to augment my lexical range to avoid such situations. I found that English is superior to any other language to express my ideas because it possess more words, nuances and grammatical flexibility than any of the several languages I have learnt, including my mother tongue (French). But it is far from being enough, and probably never will be. Pictures and words just don't belong to the same world.
It can be hard to translate some terms from one language to another, especially when they belong to different language families and civilisations (e.g. English, Arabic and Japanese). There are indeed untranslatable cultural expressions. Many words, in particular conceptual ones, never have exactly the same meaning or connotation from one language to another. That is partly why English often kept both the Germanic and Romance words for the same thing (http://www.eupedia.com/europe/missing_words_french.shtml), as the nuance, usage or connotation of the two words varied enough to be used in different situations.
The saying 'a picture is worth a thousand words' applies to everybody, but resonates particularly strongly for visual thinkers. I suppose this is why I like to make maps, as anybody who has been on Eupedia for a while will know.
At university, I didn't write much of what the professors was explaining. Other students were all scribbling furiously every word they heard (often without processing the information first). I, on the other hand, just listenned, visualised in my head everything I heard, then wrote down a few schemes with isolated words or phrases linked by arrows or arranged in a way that would conjure up the images right back in my head when I saw my notes, but that wouldn't mean anything to anybody else. When another student had written 5 full pages, I had barely half a page. Yet I got better results and hardly had to study at home. I just needed to review my schematic representations once before the exam and that was it. When friends asked me for my notes, I had to explain that it wouldn't be of any use to them, and they were aghast when I showed them my notes to prove I wasn't lying.
A drawback of visual thinking is that I was slightly dyslexic as a child. Another is that I am not a spontaneous talker. I always have more difficulties than most people finding my words to express "what I see in my head". I feel like verbal communication is an acquired second language, while my true mother tongue is the mental visualation of ideas. I think it is one of the reasons why I am not much attached to my native (verbal) language and happily traded it for English, a language better suited to visual thinkers.
Those of you who have read me on Eupedia might have noticed that I don't use metaphors. I actually dislike them. It may seem counter-intuitive that a visual thinker do not like using metaphors, but there is a good reason for it. I like to picture my ideas in a clear and realistic way. I don't need images that represent something else. Metaphors are a way for verbal thinkers of using words to help them visualise ideas that they wouldn't normally think of as images. For me not only are they useless (as my thought are already images) but confusing, as they mix new images with the clear ones I already have in mind. I would therefore believe that the more a person uses or likes hearing metaphors the more a verbal thinker he or she is.