Verbal thinking is talking to yourself silently, and visual
thinking is seeing things in your imagination. A verbal
thinker is someone who thinks primarily in the first way and
a visual thinker is someone who thinks primarily in the
second way.
There was a debate, in the late 1800s, about whether
“imagination” was simply a turn of phrase or a real
phenomenon. That is, can people actually create images in
their minds which they see vividly, or do they simply say
“I saw it in my mind” as a metaphor for considering what
it looked like?
[… Francis] Galton gave people some very detailed
surveys, and found that some people did have mental
imagery and others didn’t.
When I was a kid growing up in Far Rockaway, I had a
friend named Bernie Walker. We both had “labs” at home,
and we would do various “experiments.” One time, we were
discussing something—we must have been eleven or twelve
at the time—and I said, “But thinking is nothing but
talking to yourself inside.”
“How yeah?” Bernie said. “Do you know the crazy shape of
the crankshaft in a car?”
“Yeah, what of it?”
“Good. Now, tell me: how did you describe it when you
were talking to yourself?”
Verbal thinking is talking to yourself silently, and visual thinking is seeing things in your imagination. A verbal thinker is someone who thinks primarily in the first way and a visual thinker is someone who thinks primarily in the second way.
-- Yvain, “Generalizing from One Example”
-- Richard Feynman, What Do You Care What Other People Think?