While studies suggest that we all generate visual images, whether we're envisioning a concept or thinking verbally, it's widely believed that two-thirds of the population predominantly see words and thoughts as a series of pictures.
What he's found suggests that the thoughts running through our heads are a lot more varied than we might suppose. For one, words don't seem to feature as heavily in our day-to-day thoughts as many of us think they do. “Most people think that they think in words, but many people are mistaken about that,” he says.
Pictures are better remembered than words. The finding of better memory for pictures compared to words was reported as early as the 19th century (Kirkpatrick, 1894). Kirkpatrick demonstrated that real objects were better remembered than either written or spoken words both tested immediately, and at a 3-day delay.
Tickertape experience is the subjective phenomenon of routinely visualizing the orthographic appearance of words that one hears, speaks, or thinks, like mental subtitles in the mind's eye.
But Prof Zeman is certain that aphantasia is real. People often report being able to dream in pictures, and there have been reported cases of people losing the ability to think in images after a brain injury. He is adamant that aphantasia is "not a disorder" and says it may affect up to one in 50 people.
People with autism, engineers, and those with ADHD tend to say they think in pictures; teachers, in words, and when a word-thinker hears that there are those who think not in words, but pictures, they often are flabbergasted, taken aback, and have a hard time bending their mind around this alien thought form.
Autism therefore entails behavioral but also cognitive atypicalities. Autistic individuals are often described as “thinking in pictures”. This assumption mainly originates from the eponymous book by Temple Grandin, Thinking In Pictures.
While studies suggest that we all generate visual images, whether we're envisioning a concept or thinking verbally, it's widely believed that two-thirds of the population predominantly see words and thoughts as a series of pictures.
Different brains experience internal speech differently (and some not at all) Most people have some level of internal monologue going through their heads throughout their day, however there is a small group of people who do not experience any self-talk at all.
Visual Reasoning
The speed of picture thinking is nearly incomprehensible. It is multi-dimensional and multi-sensorial, while verbal thought is linear and follows the structure of language. Visual thinkers tend to be very intuitive. They come to brilliant solutions without being able to tell you how they found them.
While new research from the University of California San Diego makes no claims on quantifying just how many words a picture is really worth, it shows that a single picture has the power to sway people – changing how they behave – while a single word does not.
Psychologists confirm that pictures are more immediately recognized, and more quickly recalled, than either the spoken or written word. This is known as the Picture Superiority Effect. When we read a text, or listen to an audio version of it, we are likely to remember only 10 percent of the information 3 days later.
Humans respond to and process visual data better than any other type of data. In fact, the human brain processes visual content 60,000 times faster than text. That means that a picture is actually worth 60,000 words! Even more, 90 percent of information transmitted to the brain is visual.
Everyone can experience word-finding difficulty or that “tip-of-the-tongue” sensation. This is normal and becomes more prominent with age. It can worsen when people feel anxious, excited, depressed or even sleep deprived.
While speaking may seem to happen without a lot of thought because it occurs so quickly, psycholinguistics research has actually shown that we do plan our speech in different ways and we do think in advance to various degrees..
Unsymbolized thinking--the experience of an explicit, differentiated thought that does not include the experience of words, images, or any other symbols--is a frequently occurring yet little known phenomenon.
Their brain structures are different in that they struggle to organize their thoughts, a function that is aided by self-talk. For ADHD patients, they do not process thoughts in the form of an inner conversation, but they process information as they say it and thus it is difficult for them to keep focused on one point.
A person who was born deaf has only ever known communication through the form of signs and images, like British or American Sign Language, so it is very likely that a deaf person will communicate internally the way they do externally. Interestingly, some deaf people have learned to speak through vocal training.
Human thought generally can be divided into two modes, the visual and the verbal.
Our preference indicated a bias in our thinking: left-brain-dominated people tend to think more in words; right-brained people tend to think more in images. This bias indicated to us how to successfully approach an audience, and how to approach communication-skills training.
If you ask most of the world's population to picture a person, place, or thing, they have no problem conjuring a mental image in their mind's eye. But for a small percentage of the population (estimates range anywhere from 1 to 5%), visualizing or imagining images is impossible.
In psychology, visual thinking is that which results from perceiving or processing visual stimuli, forms, or patterns. Or in layman's terms, "a picture is worth a thousand words." Using visuals makes information easier to convey, process, and remember.
Visual learners also include many people who don't have autism.
Interviews with autistic adults who have good speech and are able to articulate their thought processes indicate that most of them also think in visual images. More severely impaired people, who can speak but are unable to explain how they think, have highly associational thought patterns.