Most people don't think in pictures?

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Yup, I do that. I 'hear' what I see while picturing it.

I think it depends what you want to do. Words are summaries. They summarize vast concepts down to tiny grains. And if your audience shares most of the same assumptions and experiences, they are perfect. But I find them incredibly frustrating and impossible to work with. Even writing this feels wrong, because inside I am screaming one thing., and I see the complete opposite come out on the screen.

I just drew a picture of what I am thinking right now - which is the same thing I think all the time. What comes out in words and behavior is just the surface, like the sun flickering as it reflects off the ocean - little spots of light say very little about the miles of dark pressure underneath.
[img][800:800]http://enterthestory.com/other/time_shape.jpg[/img]
The shape of the timeline is not an accident. That is the shape of time to me, right down to the details.

This picture is hopelessly inadequate. Try to image it a thousand times bigger, with every inch crammed with more pictures that you can follow like paths to new worlds. And much better drawn - with perfect lines (the mathematical bit at the top is especially wrong, it looks so messy, and the whole point of math is it is perfect!), and in 4 dimensions -that is, thee dimensional paths, each with a whole range of alternate superimposed paths. Five dimensions really, as the alternates have alternates as well. but really it is all zero dimensional, because it simply describes what is and cannot be any other way. But in order to describe we must take one option and not another and not explain all the overlaid links and alternatives and the reasons. Agh, this is so restrictive! I really feel so trapped.

Words just cannot describe these things. I would need a thousand words for every image, and the human brain is not designed to hold that many words simultaneously. Well mine isn't anyway.

Right now I am a looking out of the window at the rain. Everything connects. The rain means time is passing (time does not really pass, but that is a whole other layer of images and shapes - words are so inadequate). Time passing means reality happens. Reality means bad stuff and good stuff. That means economics and politics and alternate worlds. Reality means it is no good just having these ideas in my head, I have to get them out, I have to simplify, simplify, simplify. That leads to my experience (the time line from the big bang to infinity, and especially my little part of it, from 1968 to 2038). The white curly strip in the middle is how I see time. The planet and the grid are how I see space. The slums in the background, and the people inside, are how I see my relationship to it - I find myself in a broken world so it has to be fixed. The darkness (it is not dark enough - imagine being in outer space, many years from home, in just a space suit - that is the darkness I mean) represents reality again. So does the light. I want to show the layers. So many layers, where everything is a connection to something else. This is so hard to explain in words! To eve explain it in pictures would the years and I doubt I would succeed. But the simple version of the simple version of the simple version is that I am always thinking about how to fix the world, and that is why I am currently making a computer game so I can have time to explain why replacing taxation with land rent will fix everything. Everything is connected. Everything ties to everything else. Everything exists simultaneously. Pictures do not do it justice, and words definitely cannot. But my whole life is spent trying to force that vast universe through a small enough hole that other people get what I am trying to say.

That is what I think about all the time. That is the inside of my head. Everything else - food, shelter, the Internet, having to use words, are just awkward tag-ons, like having to hold up your trousers when you run so they don't fall down.

Sorry that none of this will make sense! It will do one day. In around ten years if all goes well, or twenty years is more realistic. I am on schedule. I have had these thoughts since the age of 12 and have a fifty year plan for getting them out and changing the world. It took 20 years to find the answers I needed, the past 10 years has been spent simplifying them and getting my life in some kind of order so I can get the final stage done: presentation. In 10-20 years I will have a very simple version ready, and finally people will say "oh THAT makes sense, now it all makes sense."

One day.

i think in pictures/videos/sounds/voices

Great post! It makes sense already and is a much better explanation than my feeble attempt.



Well summarised.

It's like having a great voice for opera but only being allowed to communicate using farts. While constipated.

What you are seeing is a scene of incredible beauty, subtlety and complexity but when asked to describe it you get a blank look for a couple of minutes and then force out an unpleasant steaming turd.

Afterwards you stare at it thinking 'that is not quite what I meant', while people stare at you in bewilderment.



When I said this in my post:



It seems to be an inadequate way of trying to explain what you have done in more in detail.

Trappedinhell: ........ Wow........ I look forward to the future just to understand in a more complete way the concepts and thinking that you just explained. That's truly beyond anything I could have imagined. Thank you for that post. Beautifully done.

Can you repost the picture or something? It's not working.

Looks like my web sites are all down

I stuck another copy on Flickr (the original is slightly larger):
http://www.flickr.com/photos/66351465@N00/6143053931/

EDIT: my sites seem to be back up now.

I'm a very visual learner, but I'm also fairly auditory. I have an almost constant inner dialogue (talking or music) in my head, but I also think in pictures too.

I think everything in imagery, still or video, depending on the situation.

I never thought there was any other way.......

If I'm thinking about someone, I'll envision them in a scenario that fits the subject. I'll run them through a visual scene, with animated emotions, all with their dialogue-- I'll replay their voice and other audio back in these scenarios. This is just a playback. Sometimes there is an undertone of a narration by me.

If I'm typing a post, the words are literally seen, with an internal dialogue. I'll see nouns and verbs possibly with a picture or very short animation of it, as one second of time in a video. These pictures need not be the exact thing, as sometimes they are nonsensical abstract scenes, only to be undestood by me.

I'm just wondering, but how do normal people think?

I think through an internal monologue. But I don't see the words and thus read them, rather I can hear them, it's auditory and verbal. I also think in different languages (which I know). But I also think in videos (rarely in pictures), especially when trying to remember things,events, people..etc. And I can also have a combination of both, which I mainly use to remember events with people (and think how they could have different outcomes) or to prepare myself for social situations( or any situation, basically). When I'm listening to music, I can "connect" it to a video of some sorts in my mind, as well.

I've read that depending on whether you're analytically or spacially focused, you are either verbal/auditory or visual in your thinking style. Then again I thought there are more senses you can connect to your thinking process, if you you're brain is wired like that.

I thought NTs can have varied ways to think and may be less focused on one subtype of the thinking process but that's just a guess.

I think about 3/4 in pictures, maybe 1/4 verbally. When I think of a situation, I easily imagine the situation in my head but that situation needs to be accompanied with words, verbally. So in a way I think in motion pictures.

When it comes to learning, visual aids are extremely helpful. I often recreate my learning using mostly images/symbols. But I cant verbally explain it. Its more effective to show then to put verbal interpretation to it. Im horrible at giving verbal directions, yet I can effectively draw an image of the setting and show them how to get somewhere. Whenever I'd do my math/chem HW, I can almost never explain it even if I get it perfectly fine on paper. Whenever you put a a system, picture into words, I read the words and, it takes me a while to understand because I have to translate everything into pictures in my head. But when you put an image in front of me, I understand it automatically.

Me too and my degree is in linguistics I thought they meant that they used words when they're constructing a verbal argument, not that they used them to think with.
We think in very similar ways. My timeline looks different, but the connectiveness sounds the same to me. Just curious, do you have a number line that is not strictly linear as well?