Thionking in Pictures

[Guest guest]

Hi All:

 

I am wondering if anyone out there considers matters of a non-dual

nature in just words and not pictures?

 

Below is an excerpt from a book by a functioning autistic engineer.

At the end is the url for the book and a url for a review of the

book.

 

Another indicator of visual thinking as the primary method of

processing information is the remarkable ability many autistic people

exhibit in solving jigsaw puzzles, finding their way around a city,

or memorizing enormous amounts of information at a glance. My own

thought patterns are similar to those described by A. R. Luria in The

Mind of a Mnemonist. This book describes a man who worked as a

newspaper reporter and could perform amazing feats of memory. Like

me, the mnemonist had a visual image for everything he had heard or

read. Luria writes, "For when he heard or read a word, it was at once

converted into a visual image corresponding with the object the word

signified for him." The great inventor Nikola Tesla was also a visual

thinker. When he designed electric turbines for power generation, he

built each turbine in his head. He operated it in his imagination and

corrected faults. He said it did not matter whether the turbine was

tested in his thoughts or in his shop; the results would be the same.

 

The idea that people have different thinking patterns is not new.

Francis Galton, in Inquiries into Human Faculty and Development,

wrote that while some people see vivid mental pictures, for

others "the idea is not felt to be mental pictures, but rather

symbols of facts. In people with low pictorial imagery, they would

remember their breakfast table but they could not see it.''

 

I also visualize verbs. The word "jumping" triggers a memory of

jumping hurdles at the mock Olympics held at my elementary school.

Adverbs often trigger inappropriate images -- "quickly" reminds me of

Nestle's Quik -- unless they are paired with a verb, which modifies

my visual image. For example, "he ran quickly" triggers an animated

image of Dick from the first-grade reading book running fast, and "he

walked slowly" slows the image down. As a child, I left out words

such as "is,the," and "it," because they had no meaning by

themselves. Similarly, words like "of," and "an" made no sense.

Eventually I learned how to use them properly, because my parents

always spoke correct English and I mimicked their speech patterns. To

this day certain verb conjugations, such as "to be," are absolutely

meaningless to me.

 

http://www.hum.utah.edu/philosophy/faculty/millgram/grandin-

review.html

 

http://www.grandin.com/inc/visual.thinking.html