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Ask HN: Do you think in words or pictures?

16 points by wfme ↗ HN
I had a conversation with my GF the other night and she described her thoughts and memories as similar to watching a movie. My thought process is much more abstract or word based, to the point of not truly being able to see anything but instead describing every detail with thought-words. I wondered if either approach was more popular among people that work with software or even across different types of work and whether people had had any success in learning to think the other way.

In short, do you think visually or in words and have you had any experience/success in learning to think another way.

30 comments

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Karawebnetwork
"Aphantasia: Aphantasia is a phenomenon in which people are unable to visualize imagery. While most people are able to conjure an image of a scene or face in their minds, people with aphantasia cannot."
bryanrasmussen
I can visualize things, but I find a running narrative more efficient and natural for me.
EddieDante
I think in plain text. I've got UNIX on the brain, and it didn't come with X Window.
gnulinux
Sometimes I'm exactly likes this too. Even some of my dreams are just purely arrays of words. I just experience it serially throughout the night, almost like reading a book, and then wake up. And when I get into deep thought mode, I'm just like printing analysis.
anon2020dot00
I don't have a running narrative; there is some correlation probably with being left-handed and not having a strong internal narrative.

But I can let my thoughts out when I hand-write on paper but in a crowded room, I usually just stay quiet.

ffhhj
Not trying to impress anyone, but I can see or think of an object, say a headset with cables wrapped around and color changing lights, and rotate it in any direction, even apply transformations. I've been exposed to a lot of 3D design, so I'm not sure if everbody can do the same?
_manifold
I have a similar thing but with music/sounds - I do a lot of work (albeit non-professional) with audio and I when I hear things I tend to visualize a sort of waveform or overall shape/envelope to the sound. There are other visual aspects to certain types sounds that accentuate it. It seems like a very slight, learned synesthesia.
ffhhj
That's interesting, I've never experienced something like that. Thanks for sharing.
marto1
Pictures and it used to be really annoying while taking exams in school. A page with the answer would pop up in my head, but the only clear info on the page would be the page number :-(
knowe
Just with you staying i remeber having this too.
eanc
I don’t see pictures, and I don’t have a monologue running, either.

I don’t know whether it’s the best place to look, but I’ve seen that the people on /r/aphantasia like to talk about these matters.

Claude_Shannon
In words, but I don't have aphantasia. I can imagine anything (but, for some reason, faces. I can't do them)

And I think in both my native language and English, with what language being used determined by what I do. I browse something online? English. Otherwise, Polish. Though for short sentences I default to English for some reason.

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drakonka
I don't really think it's either for me. I don't see a stream of images when I think, but there's no narration going on either. If I really want to visualize an image I can, and if I really want to think something through in a mental sentence I can (I sometimes do this when walking myself through a tough problem). But that results in a much slower, linear, more deliberate thought. It seems very slow and high effort to think in pictures or words full time.
purplepatrick
Same here - no inner voice, no words, no images (unless that’s specifically what I want to do).
sjcoles
Aphantasia[1]

My partner has it to the point where her dreams aren't even visual. I am on the other end of the spectrum. It's hard to describe but concepts are 'seen' and then monologued not the other way around. It's not synesthesia but a kind of mental mapping my brain does.

Interesting side effect is that I have an extremely poor visual memory for places, faces, etc. It all gets jumbled up with the other representations in my brain. At least that's what it feels like.

It seems to be a wiring thing rather than a learned skill. I can't ever think of a time where I didn't have this mode of thought.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia

arduinomancer
I'm curious, if some people just think in words, how do they solve visual problems in their head?

For example, can you solve this problem in your head just closing your eyes and thinking about it? (no using your hands either)

* There is a 2D grid in front of you with coordinate system (x,y)

* X increases to the right, Y increases going up

* Point A is at coordinates (1, 1)

* Point B is at coordinates (2, 0)

Q: If we were to move from point B to A, what direction or combination of directions would you be moving? (possible directions are up, down, left, right)

I can solve this in my head but I clearly visualize a grid and the positions of points while doing so and once I have it visualized I just see the answer.

If someone solves this without visualizing it, what are they thinking or how do they do it?

tsuujin
I talk it out to myself. “Ok, a is right one and up one, b is right two and up none. B to a would be up and left”.

I tried really hard to do this by imagining a grid with points on it and I couldn’t, going back to the reference clears the image and I lose it.

human_person
Same. But in real life I would just draw it out on a piece of paper.
webmaven
> I tried really hard to do this by imagining a grid with points on it and I couldn’t, going back to the reference clears the image and I lose it.

So, you can think visually, you just require an external prop to do it?

Beyond problems of a certain complexity I experience something similar, and for both visual problem solving as well as the linguistic ones (sometimes I just need to talk a procedure through, and sometimes actually explaining it is necessary (eg. Rubber Duck debugging), other times writing it out is what works.

more_corn
I can visualize it too, but ironically I got lost in the words of the setup. I found it easier to just subtract one from x and add one to y. (Move left, move up)
gnulinux
Almost always in terms words. I talk to myself (in the head) all the time. That's my way of thinking. If I don't talk, I don't think. I do however think certain things in terms of images, for example graph theory (in math and CS) I always thought in terms of images, never words. I still hate saying nodes, edges, vertices or whatever. I see the shape, vertex sounds like vortex.
more_corn
I think in a couple ways: Verbally, spatially, non-verbally. The former is who’s talking to you right now. The latter is smarter and wiser. I practice silence and patience to hear what it’s trying to communicate. Difficult strategic and troubleshooting problems get solved this way. I can only really tell it’s working because sore mental capacity is not available while it’s going on. I’m distracted but not by anything I can put my finger on. For this reason I avoid social drama at all costs. Too often I tie up an important mental resource figuring out a lie or minor disagreement. I like to preserve that capacity for important tasks. When it’s working correctly difficult answers simply pop into my head without effort.

My spatial thinking is both pathfinding (which direction is north right now, how can you rotate a shape to fit), but also mechanical aptitude. If you ask a master mechanic how to do something complicated he won’t be able to tell you in a smooth and useful way. He’ll be able to do it without missing a beat though.

In the same way I can spend 6 hours working in the garage without a word passing through my brain. It’s wonderfully refreshing.

mikewarot
I think of things as puzzle pieces that fit together to form all the things I know. In the background, any new thing I learn is checked against all the nearby pieces to see if there are inconsistencies, or something new to try out.

As for recalling events, it's about 70% visual, 30% facts about things.

weare138
I find myself doing both. Overall I'm a visual thinker but if I'm dealing with something new and unfamiliar I go through a process of rubber ducking and talk myself through it until it clicks.
yesenadam
This is an article on aphantasia, written by a guy with it, who (informally) investigated about 70 of his friends to see how their thought/mental pictures etc differed from his. I found it entertaining and really fascinating. It cleared up for me whether I have it or not - a previous HN discussion had left me thinking I probably did; but reading this, obviously not, like the vast majority of the guy's friends. Highly recommended, it's by far the clearest explanation of the subject I've seen.

https://medicine.exeter.ac.uk/media/universityofexeter/medic...

kebsup
I find this one interesting in the context of math. For example with sin/cos, a lot of people think about it as a phrase "sin is the opposite over hypotenuse", whereas I have this image of sine returning the fraction of how many times does hypotenuse fit into the opposite, which is not word based at all.

I can imagine people having vastly different representations of a lot of math concepts.

philomath_mn
My issue with these kinds of questions is how can we be sure how literally each person means "watching a movie"? How can a person possibly describe what is going on in their head? How can we tell if one person's crystal clear image is another person's vague shapes?

I imagine there is a standard procedure in the research literature for telling the difference, but I don't think most lay-person discussions are nuanced enough.