Totally unable to think visually

Post Reply New Topic

Not everyone is a visual thinker - people have different cognitive styles and some are very narrow.

I'm a visual thinker; My other senses get processed via visual symbols. I can't hear sounds without also seeing visual forms in my head. Same with my other senses.

Some people use other senses as their primary 'language'. I don't know what it is like to use hearing, for example, as your main way of conceptualizing the world, but I can kind of abstractly understand that they do it.

That sounds like synesthesia... do you think that's what you're experiencing?

Not to be nosy, but... is it that way for you even with "adult thoughts," where you don't have any visuals?



When I look at things I typically have commentary in my head about what I'm seeing ("leopard blouse, that's nice"), and I remember that commentary; no one has ever guessed that I can't see images in my head because I can describe things better than they can just from my memory of my internal dialogue.

I'm a visual (audio's in there, too) thinker, and it's very detailed. But yet I can't do math problems visually in the same way that many NTs do, and I definitely can't see a map for directional purposes like Newport's character in Mozart & The Whale'. That sucks, cuz I'm bad at directions and this visual sh** doesn't even work when I live in Phoenix, one of the few cities structured in a neat, grid-like pattern.

When I smoke weed I like to meditate to complex/heavily layered music (such at Abbey Road and my friend's techno stuff), lay on the floor with headphones and it creates an image. But whether with shrooms (which I don't do) or weed, I don't advise doing it just for this purpose, it's only temporary. I just happen to decide on doing that activity when I am high, not before.

Haha.
Ok I feel a bit less stupid now because I have done a similar thing. One time when I wanted to work out how many sides a cube has using a dice, I tried to put fingers on sides of a dice and manipulated it around trying to count with eyes and fingers. I gave up on this and simply wrote down each number on the sides of the dice and then manipulated the dice to make sure I had written down every number (which was difficult as I was unsure which sides of the dice I had checked and which I had not yet checked). It took a while and eventually I concluded there were six sides, and thought what a nice coincidence as that is the highest number the dice goes up to.....then I had to slap my head and say "duh".

I am relieved that I am not the only one who ocassionally over-looks the astoundingly mind-numbingly obvious.

Well,
now I'm a minority among minorities...

Because I do have the photographic memory thing, I can purposely recall it and I can see it exactly in color and detail, and movies are like a series of stills they don't really move like a movie unless I kinda flip through the snapshots quickly,
or cut to a scene and it moves like a short clip. with sound in fact that is how I remember verbatum conversations, or events, I play or rewind to that point and play until I get it all recalled, it helps not to be agitated or otherwise peed off, because you can slow down and get more detail.

and then I have random recall, that is the one that kinda sucks, because it is triggered by something external, IE environment, or someone your talking to, and of course seems pertinent to share after all it just came to mind while talking with this person.

But 99.999 percent of the time it is just as random as it came. and has absolutely no connection other than the mental picture was filed under that heading.

So out come seemingly mindless dribble brought on by deliberate and random thought....
That is in technicolor.

Yes. I'll PM you to preserve the sanctity of General.

I can't visualize either. My counselor tries to do mind picture meditation stuff with me and I find it completely impossible!

I had a college boyfriend who tried the same thing with me; he was certain that in order to learn to meditate I HAD to be able to visualize logs floating down a river, and of course I couldn't do it.