Thread: Thought

I don't know of any research about this and it's kind of hard to know what you really mean by "visual thinking".
If it's just visualizations you want, then you can find a ton of meditations/exercises for this.
If you want to graphically represent abstract quantities and their relations in your mind, you could try and study calculus. It's pretty intuitive and provides a good basis for this.

On the side note, while internal dialogue is trash 99% of the time, it can be useful for refining ideas you already have in your mind.

What I mean by visual thinking is simply that. A number of people I've spoken to think using pictures and images a great deal of the time. For instance, if you asked me what I had for breakfast, I'd remember the words. If you asked somebody who thinks visually, he might see his plate.

I know what you are talking about. Most of the time the internal dialog is just used to refine thoughts you haven't put into words yet, as Snake Charmer said. I do this a lot myself, I try to refine my ideas so that I can spit them out, but sometimes it just doesn't come out as good as it seemed to be in your head...

I think most people think with a combination of both visual and dialectic. When I try to remember memories, I'm remembering what other people said, and what the situation was at the time which requires a mental image.

See that's what I'm getting at, I honestly can't remember the last time there was a picture in my head unless I treid really hard to vizualize something. If I was going to remember a situation my mind would conjure feelings, genereal ideas, words, but it certainly wouldn;t paint a picture. What I want to find out is, how normal is this? And is it possible for me to improve my visual/spatial thinking and if so how.

It's probably hard to find info because that gets into a portion of psychology. I'm sure a professor or psych major could find a whole series of books on exactly that.

Originally Posted by imran_p

See that's what I'm getting at, I honestly can't remember the last time there was a picture in my head unless I treid really hard to vizualize something. If I was going to remember a situation my mind would conjure feelings, genereal ideas, words, but it certainly wouldn;t paint a picture. What I want to find out is, how normal is this? And is it possible for me to improve my visual/spatial thinking and if so how.

When you see mental images its not some grand portrait painted in the back of your skull. It's a vague mental reconstruction of a past event. I'm not even sure if the mental image is even "there" so to speak, just in your imagination.

Try to visualize a face of someone you know very well...Parent, brother, sister...It's actually harder than you'd think.

If I'm trying to remember something, I remember it kinesthetically. A word doesn't pop up in my head like "cereal". And I don't necessarily see an image in my head of myself eating cereal. It's more like, I just remember the moment of eating cereal. Remembering usually involves a mental map of where I physically was and how I physically felt

if my thoughts are about the future or present, I have an emotion first followed by dialogue in my head. such as, I will feel a desire to paint and then I tell myself "I want to paint". It's like the two halves of my brain are communicating, and sometimes there's a misfire. Because sometimes I don't always understand the emotional thought. When the emotional thought isn't satisfied with some verbal confirmation, it just becomes stress

I also have verbal thoughts when I'm typing/writing. Like now. When ever I type I hear myself speak in my head.

when something inspires me, or I learn something new, my subconscious comes out to play. and I start to think in pictures and images. sometimes an entire movie/story just explodes in my brain. but the pictures or mini movies are abstract. I have to really examine them to see how they relate to that which inspired it. I will also have a hard time describing what I see in words.

as an artist, I look for those moments. the images can happen so quickly, if im not paying attention it's gone

It's a good question and it's extremely hard to pin down.

I'm doing some maths work at the moment, and it relies on extremely basic intuitive knowledge of logic... it's extremely hard to ever pin down how one is thinking because as soon as you try, you stop your thought process. But I don't do maths with words... I don't always do it visually either. When you're down to such basic levels of logic, I don't know what it is... it's kind of like you're considering the set of all analogies simultaneously.

Interesting contributions. At least it seems like I'm not alone in my lack of decent visiualisation abilities. I've read somewhere that autistic children have incredible visualisation abilities; not sure how true this is? I'm sure that decent visual thinking could be extremely useful in life, not least in lucid dreaming.
Xei, that seems to be the crux of the problem, a lot of the time people aren't thinking visually and yet they aren't using internal dialogue, so how is this thought process occuring without pictures or language? I've always wondered how mammals like dolphins, elephants and apes think because obviously they don't have language so do they think entirely visually?

On a side note, a contribution from O'nus could be quite helpful.

I know Nikola Tesla used "picture thinking"

Tesla engaged in reading many works, memorizing complete books, supposedly having a photographic memory. Tesla related in his autobiography that he experienced detailed moments of inspiration. During his early life, Tesla was stricken with illness time and time again. He suffered a peculiar affliction in which blinding flashes of light would appear before his eyes, often accompanied by hallucinations. Much of the time the visions were linked to a word or idea he might have come across; just by hearing the name of an item, he would involuntarily envision it in realistic detail. Modern-day synesthetes report similar symptoms.

"Tesla would visualise an invention in his brain with extreme precision, including all dimensions, before moving to the construction stage; a technique sometimes known as picture thinking. He typically did not make drawings by hand, instead just conceiving all ideas with his mind. Tesla also often had flashbacks to events that had happened previously in his life; this began to happen during childhood."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikola_Tesla

There is also an article of visual thinking: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picture_thinking

I think there is great potential in thinking like that, many applications.

This is very difficult cognitive psychology you are asking for. That makes me very happy!

I will have to take this lightly and then elaborate as needed.

Premise:
+ All things that we can know are demonstrable through scientific methods
+ We will only apply scientific ideals

Internal Dialog

Your internal dialog is the utilization of the greatest tool invented by man; communication.

In our simple steps of explanation, language has had to evolve for humans to survive as a community. It was necessary for us to be able to recognize our thoughts, express them, and be able to understand others in order to survive as a whole. Without language, humans would likely be extinct, the prey to carnivores and those very animals that we now domesticate.

However, we were able to attach a sound, or other form of representation (eg. ASL, Braille, etc.). This language is able to represent anything we can consciously conceive of. Wittgenstain has postulated some significant works in the philosophy of this representation, but it soluble in utility of language representation. If this step is problematic, just assert so and we can explore that.

Because we found a way to represent any conscious thing with a representation (I will just say language now for brevity), then our internal dialog is nothing more than the streaming lingual representation of our constant environmental stimulus. In other words, we are always sensing things and our understanding of language is identifying with everything.

For example, you are reading this right now and your mind is linguistically representing everything I am saying and those things around you. Your senses see weird pixels on a screen and you are able to discern the language necessary to understand it.

I just realized that is a difficult example. More appropriate, you hear things around you right now and your senses receive that sound. In your internal dialog, you may represent that as a though (ie. "that's a dog barking next door"). I say may because attention is necessary to give linguistic representation.

Cognition

The depths of this question is profound and I want you to grasp that and run! It is very interesting and there is no way I can give a cut-and-dry answer. This is the very simplistic reply I thought I could give and I suggest you look into cognition if you are inclined to ask such things.

Here are some sources:
+ https://www.skeptic.com/Merchant2/me...egory_Code=OTH
- BRAIN, MIND, CONSCIOUSNESS. CONFERENCE 2005 (DVD)
- "A three DVD set of the Skeptic Society’s “Brain, Mind & Consciousness” conference held at Caltech in May 2005. Includes 30–50 minute talks by Michael Shermer, Roger Bingham, Christof Koch, Alison Gopnik, Richard McNally, Terry Sejnowski, Susan Blackmore, John Allman, Paul Zak, Hank Schlinger and Ursula Goodenough."

+ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heuristic
- Heuristics are an interesting starting point and most people are familiar with wikipedia which fairly explains heuristics.

+ http://www.amazon.com/Cognition-Expl...7791748&sr=8-4
- This book was sitting on my lap as I typed this. It was my first year cognition text and I highly recommend it only because I am familiar with it myself.

+ http://www.amazon.com/Sensation-Perc...7791800&sr=1-1
- A little more elaborate

+ http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/
- An easy blog site. Worth a look into every now and then for random tid-bits of information.

There is so much to say but I feel it is best to provide sources accordingly.

What do you think...?

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