I’m not sure what verbal and visual thinking mean. I hear people talking about it, and I’m actually not sure if they know either. Can anybody explain, or link to a good explanation?
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?”
Once I asked a friend of mine, who’s a Go player like me, what “reading” felt like to him.
For those who don’t know, “reading” is the term in Go for thinking through the consequences of a move before you make the move. There’s a saying, “reading is the muscle of Go”—you can improve your play by having good heuristics and by memorizing some fixed patterns of play, but really good play requires being able to consider the state of play N moves ahead (depth), often for M possible variations (breadth).
My friend, it turns out, is a visual thinker. When he “reads” a Go sequence, he literally hallucinates stones in the appropriate positions; he sees them there. (The difficulty for him is to remember the various pictures.) I’m a “verbal thinker”. (Actually verbal/kinesthetic.) I can stare at the Go board until my eyes bleed and never hallucinate a damn thing.
I have improved a lot at Go by solving small exercises, “tsumego” as they are called. The interesting thing is that I can now look at some non-trivial problems and instantly “spot” the right sequence (sometimes the correct answer plus several alternatives), but I still don’t see a damn thing. The intersections don’t light up with an overlay of imagined stones. It’s more like I feel where the right answer is.
This is a mild disappointment, because one of the reasons I took up Go in the first place was to improve my visual thinking.
Of course your friend hallucinates stones: there’s no other way to read, unless you’re going to recite “black c4, white e3, …”. The intersections don’t light up automatically: they must be “manually” switched on. Even a visual thinker must string words together in order to speak.
With practice you can learn to read. Start with visualizing one move ahead. That’s only one extra stone on the board—anyone can learn to imagine that. Then work on imagining two stones...
“Feeling” the right move without reading is a separate skill. Both skills are fundamental to the game.
You are generalizing from one example. I’m not very good at visual thinking either, and while I haven’t seriously tried to learn go well I can imagine what Morendil describes. Some things that seem like they ought to be expressed in images instead come as some sort of vague feelings that convey the information content the images should, but without any discernible actual image attached. In some cases I manage actual visual thinking, and the images have a similar information content, but because there are actual images the information is much easier to analyse, reference to and reflect on. It’s not much like a string of words, only vaguely comparable to a stream like “move that there and then do that thing” with each reference being clear. Of course I don’t know whether Morendil’s experience is similar.
I suspect that you’re also overgeneralizing. In particular, you probably underestimating what it means to be good at getting information from feelings—they don’t have to be “vague”.
I don’t see how that could possibly be true when all I do is describe my own experience (mostly actual, partly imagined) as one example how things can be different than how Jesse seems to expect them to be in a way that matches the words Morendil uses.
I don’t mean that I “feel the right move without reading”. I mean that reading, for me, has a tactile rather than visual quality. When I imagine an extra stone on the board I don’t see it.
When I imagine an extra stone on the board I don’t see it.
You say you don’t see it, but surely you know the exact board location. Perhaps you don’t (consciously) visualize a stone there but instead look at the spot and get a certain tactile sensation?
I would call that visual+tactile, which are the same two modalities Einstein described thinking in. The parenthetical was to cover the possibility that the visualization happens, but it’s so fast that you don’t notice it (I’m assuming there’s a soft threshold between conscious and unconscious thought, not a sharp dividing line).
When I go to sleep, I am thinking words in my head that eventually become nonsense thoughts that I am not in control of and then I fall asleep. When my girlfriend goes to sleep, she sees a kind of black and white spherical planar blob thing until she falls asleep.
I tried falling asleep to visual imagery a few nights ago and it worked. I saw nothing for almost exactly 15 minutes, but then some natural reaction must have happened as I started seeing a surprisingly vivid black and white spherical image blob thing.
So in training myself to think more visually, that’s about as far as I’ve gotten.
I’m not sure what verbal and visual thinking mean. I hear people talking about it, and I’m actually not sure if they know either. Can anybody explain, or link to a good explanation?
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?
Once I asked a friend of mine, who’s a Go player like me, what “reading” felt like to him.
For those who don’t know, “reading” is the term in Go for thinking through the consequences of a move before you make the move. There’s a saying, “reading is the muscle of Go”—you can improve your play by having good heuristics and by memorizing some fixed patterns of play, but really good play requires being able to consider the state of play N moves ahead (depth), often for M possible variations (breadth).
My friend, it turns out, is a visual thinker. When he “reads” a Go sequence, he literally hallucinates stones in the appropriate positions; he sees them there. (The difficulty for him is to remember the various pictures.) I’m a “verbal thinker”. (Actually verbal/kinesthetic.) I can stare at the Go board until my eyes bleed and never hallucinate a damn thing.
I have improved a lot at Go by solving small exercises, “tsumego” as they are called. The interesting thing is that I can now look at some non-trivial problems and instantly “spot” the right sequence (sometimes the correct answer plus several alternatives), but I still don’t see a damn thing. The intersections don’t light up with an overlay of imagined stones. It’s more like I feel where the right answer is.
This is a mild disappointment, because one of the reasons I took up Go in the first place was to improve my visual thinking.
Of course your friend hallucinates stones: there’s no other way to read, unless you’re going to recite “black c4, white e3, …”. The intersections don’t light up automatically: they must be “manually” switched on. Even a visual thinker must string words together in order to speak.
With practice you can learn to read. Start with visualizing one move ahead. That’s only one extra stone on the board—anyone can learn to imagine that. Then work on imagining two stones...
“Feeling” the right move without reading is a separate skill. Both skills are fundamental to the game.
You are generalizing from one example. I’m not very good at visual thinking either, and while I haven’t seriously tried to learn go well I can imagine what Morendil describes. Some things that seem like they ought to be expressed in images instead come as some sort of vague feelings that convey the information content the images should, but without any discernible actual image attached. In some cases I manage actual visual thinking, and the images have a similar information content, but because there are actual images the information is much easier to analyse, reference to and reflect on. It’s not much like a string of words, only vaguely comparable to a stream like “move that there and then do that thing” with each reference being clear. Of course I don’t know whether Morendil’s experience is similar.
I suspect that you’re also overgeneralizing. In particular, you probably underestimating what it means to be good at getting information from feelings—they don’t have to be “vague”.
I don’t see how that could possibly be true when all I do is describe my own experience (mostly actual, partly imagined) as one example how things can be different than how Jesse seems to expect them to be in a way that matches the words Morendil uses.
I don’t mean that I “feel the right move without reading”. I mean that reading, for me, has a tactile rather than visual quality. When I imagine an extra stone on the board I don’t see it.
Interesting, so there is more than one way to read. Sorry, I had misread your comment.
You say you don’t see it, but surely you know the exact board location. Perhaps you don’t (consciously) visualize a stone there but instead look at the spot and get a certain tactile sensation?
Yep. Not sure where you’re driving at with that parenthetical though...
I would call that visual+tactile, which are the same two modalities Einstein described thinking in. The parenthetical was to cover the possibility that the visualization happens, but it’s so fast that you don’t notice it (I’m assuming there’s a soft threshold between conscious and unconscious thought, not a sharp dividing line).
When I go to sleep, I am thinking words in my head that eventually become nonsense thoughts that I am not in control of and then I fall asleep. When my girlfriend goes to sleep, she sees a kind of black and white spherical planar blob thing until she falls asleep.
I tried falling asleep to visual imagery a few nights ago and it worked. I saw nothing for almost exactly 15 minutes, but then some natural reaction must have happened as I started seeing a surprisingly vivid black and white spherical image blob thing.
So in training myself to think more visually, that’s about as far as I’ve gotten.