Are you (or is your student) claiming to have aphantasia? If so, you’d have to use something external to hold the image.
Visual thinking is like other kinds of thinking, but using the visual sensory channel. It’s a kind of short-term memory with limited capacity.
If you remember the days when we had to look up phone numbers in books, you might have had the experience of loading a seven-digit number into your short-term memory as an auditory loop, speaking it over and over again in your mind’s voice (and hearing it in your mind’s ear), long enough to dial on the phone. You could actually speak the numbers aloud for a similar effect, but most people don’t have to do this to “hear” it. But a moment of distraction, especially an auditory distraction, can cause you to lose that memory.
Visual thinking is the same, but you use your mind’s eye instead of ear. It’s like having an imaginary whiteboard, but it requires concentration to hold an image, and a moment of distraction can erase it. You’re not exactly drawing in lines either (unless you choose to). This whiteboard has limited capacity in the same way your auditory loop has a limited duration. You can choose which parts of the image to focus on, and that can have more detail (just like your real eyes can see things they’re looking at directly better than things in the periphery), but if you stop focusing on an area for too long its detail fades and you lose the memory. If you try to exceed your capacity, then the part of the image you refresh might not quite have what was there before, the same way you can accidentally remember the wrong number if you try to keep too long of a string of digits in your auditory memory.
In the same way you can query your long-term memory for the sound of something, by holding the question in your mind until the sound arises (E.g. What rhymes with “muffin”? Or what does a dolphin sound like?), you can query your long-term memory for an image (E.g. What does a dolphin look like?).
And this can be done without using your mind’s voice. Perhaps you can use your mind’s eye to “read” the text of the question. But you don’t even have to use words. You can use the concepts behind the words more directly. And sometimes these concepts are visual, or can have a visual representation. Even kinesthetic concepts have enough of a spacial component that they can be diagrammed visually in a very natural way. Many nouns correspond to visible things, and verbs correspond to visible actions. Holding such an image in memory along with the intention to query memory can cause an answer to arise to consciousness, the same way a query in words can.
The intention to query for a sound is like stopping for a moment to listen, while the intention to query for an image is like stopping to look. You have to make a space for it in your mind in the appropriate sensory channel.
You can also query your subconscious for things you’ve never seen before. Maybe you don’t know what an ichthyosaur looks like, but someone tells you it looks like a dolphin, but with two pairs of fins instead of one. Running a hypothetical query may be enough to produce the image in your mind’s eye. If that’s not working, you can try to force it by “painting”, which takes more effort: If you had a whiteboard (and artistic skill) you could draw a dolphin, and then draw another pair of fins in the pelvic region. You can do the same thing in the mind’s eye. Start with a dolphin image, and then while concentrating to keep it refreshed in memory, make a change to it: refresh that part differently on purpose.
When I say I can’t stimulate visual thinking, I more mean the problem solving element—I can construct visual thoughts in my mind with some effort, but I couldn’t then work through those visualisations as a primary tool to solve problems. I’m curious as to how that works—do people who do this have a better ability to retain a visualisation in their short term memory, whether innate or practiced? Is there more to it than that?
I’m a visual thinker, and I’d say it’s both a blessing and a curse.
Blessing, because, based on my own personal experience, my brain projects a million images per moment, each with their own story, each colliding into the other to fuel a very abstract form of thinking: In other words: the chaos of criss-crossing communications can be be great for creative problem solving/innovating.
Curse, because, again, you have a million thoughts each moment; but, you’re only human—you can only process so many at a time. This causes you to forget a lot of important stuff; stuff you really wanted to remember, but can’t, as a result of distractions or new thoughts trampling over it.
To be an effective visual thinker, you must always have on hand something to take notes with. Also, you’ve gotta have your ears listening out for your intuition’s voice. I find that when I’m paying close attention to it, it makes sense of what my mind is trying to paint for me. It tells me the words I can use to describe it. Then that notepad, or voice recorder comes out and I make a record of it before I imagine something else that’ll suplex it into the ether.
Oh, and a fun fact: If you wanna know if the person you’re talking to is a visual thinker, see if they’re staring out into the distance or closing their eyes while they’re talking. That’s a sign that they’re trying to communicate something important to them to you, and they don’t want the friendly gesture of looking you in your eyes to distract their train of thought.
We know from IQ tests that working memory abilities vary. Those with aphantasia can’t visualize at all, while others report that not only can they visualize a tiger, they can count its stripes. My visualizations are not that stable. The number of stripes would probably change as I attempt to count them. But visual thinking can be improved with practice, at least in my own experience. Things that took a lot of effort to visualize the first time become simple recall after that. The bigger your bag of tricks, the more likely you can find one that applies to a novel situation.
Visualizations need not be static images. They can have motion as well. I can rotate simple 3-D shapes in my mind, for example. Rotating a cube is pretty easy. I can even do an icosahedron, though that one took some practice. But counting the leaves on a tree would be too difficult, never mind rotating the tree without changing (or glossing over) their number. There are limits to the resolution. You can also do transformations other than rotations, like scales, shears, extrusions, etc. These visualizations are useful in computer graphics and in topology.
In the case of mathematics, I find visualization most useful for generating examples, especially counterexamples. Using the visual query process I described, one can try to query for a shape that meets certain constraints. Sometimes one example (or counterexample) is all it takes to prove a theorem. Sometimes the query produces the example, but sometimes it fails to meet all the constraints and I have to query that part again. Pointing out the part that failed a constraint can bring more examples to mind. You have to give these mathematical objects a visual form to gain the benefits of visual thinking, but there are many morphisms one might try. Besides single examples, you might also be able to enumerate a set of them, or notice a pattern that can be repeated to infinity.
I can generate candidate visualizations much faster in my head than I can draw them on a whiteboard, but then communicating that insight to another person may require a diagram.
A visual thinking riddle: go in one hole and come out three. What am I? I solved this one visually pretty quickly. Try to generate candidate visualizations and see if you recognize the shape.
(Answer: grrfuveg.)
Do you visualize the icosahedron as one object or do you split it up and consider each separately, but reminding oneself that it is actually one object?
My answer to your visual thinking riddle is: breath in through your mouth and breath out through mouth + nostrils. But I can’t decipher your anagram!
Do you visualize the icosahedron as one object or do you split it up and consider each separately, but reminding oneself that it is actually one object?
I have looked at a d20 long enough and from enough angles (it’s very symmetrical) to have memorized the whole icosahedron, and can visualize it that way, at least as an opaque object from the outside.
But the mnemonic technique of chunking is a valid strategy for visualization. Short-term memories must be “refreshed” or they fade away, but if you juggle too many at once, you’ll drop one before you can get back to it. Making each face a chunk would be 20, which is too many. 3-5 chunks is a more reasonable number. My favored decomposition of the icosahedron is into a pentagonal antiprism with pentagonal pyramid caps. That’s 3 chunks, and two of them are the same thing. Other decompositions may be useful depending on what you are trying to do.
More complex objects can be visualized as hierarchical decompositions, though not always in their entirety. Recognition is not the same as recall. The resolution of a weak visual memory may be just enough to recognize a new example (but too low to count the faces, say). A really low resolution image is more of a handle than a structure, but it can point you to the memory of the real thing.
Are you (or is your student) claiming to have aphantasia? If so, you’d have to use something external to hold the image.
Visual thinking is like other kinds of thinking, but using the visual sensory channel. It’s a kind of short-term memory with limited capacity.
If you remember the days when we had to look up phone numbers in books, you might have had the experience of loading a seven-digit number into your short-term memory as an auditory loop, speaking it over and over again in your mind’s voice (and hearing it in your mind’s ear), long enough to dial on the phone. You could actually speak the numbers aloud for a similar effect, but most people don’t have to do this to “hear” it. But a moment of distraction, especially an auditory distraction, can cause you to lose that memory.
Visual thinking is the same, but you use your mind’s eye instead of ear. It’s like having an imaginary whiteboard, but it requires concentration to hold an image, and a moment of distraction can erase it. You’re not exactly drawing in lines either (unless you choose to). This whiteboard has limited capacity in the same way your auditory loop has a limited duration. You can choose which parts of the image to focus on, and that can have more detail (just like your real eyes can see things they’re looking at directly better than things in the periphery), but if you stop focusing on an area for too long its detail fades and you lose the memory. If you try to exceed your capacity, then the part of the image you refresh might not quite have what was there before, the same way you can accidentally remember the wrong number if you try to keep too long of a string of digits in your auditory memory.
In the same way you can query your long-term memory for the sound of something, by holding the question in your mind until the sound arises (E.g. What rhymes with “muffin”? Or what does a dolphin sound like?), you can query your long-term memory for an image (E.g. What does a dolphin look like?).
And this can be done without using your mind’s voice. Perhaps you can use your mind’s eye to “read” the text of the question. But you don’t even have to use words. You can use the concepts behind the words more directly. And sometimes these concepts are visual, or can have a visual representation. Even kinesthetic concepts have enough of a spacial component that they can be diagrammed visually in a very natural way. Many nouns correspond to visible things, and verbs correspond to visible actions. Holding such an image in memory along with the intention to query memory can cause an answer to arise to consciousness, the same way a query in words can.
The intention to query for a sound is like stopping for a moment to listen, while the intention to query for an image is like stopping to look. You have to make a space for it in your mind in the appropriate sensory channel.
You can also query your subconscious for things you’ve never seen before. Maybe you don’t know what an ichthyosaur looks like, but someone tells you it looks like a dolphin, but with two pairs of fins instead of one. Running a hypothetical query may be enough to produce the image in your mind’s eye. If that’s not working, you can try to force it by “painting”, which takes more effort: If you had a whiteboard (and artistic skill) you could draw a dolphin, and then draw another pair of fins in the pelvic region. You can do the same thing in the mind’s eye. Start with a dolphin image, and then while concentrating to keep it refreshed in memory, make a change to it: refresh that part differently on purpose.
When I say I can’t stimulate visual thinking, I more mean the problem solving element—I can construct visual thoughts in my mind with some effort, but I couldn’t then work through those visualisations as a primary tool to solve problems. I’m curious as to how that works—do people who do this have a better ability to retain a visualisation in their short term memory, whether innate or practiced? Is there more to it than that?
I’m a visual thinker, and I’d say it’s both a blessing and a curse.
Blessing, because, based on my own personal experience, my brain projects a million images per moment, each with their own story, each colliding into the other to fuel a very abstract form of thinking: In other words: the chaos of criss-crossing communications can be be great for creative problem solving/innovating.
Curse, because, again, you have a million thoughts each moment; but, you’re only human—you can only process so many at a time. This causes you to forget a lot of important stuff; stuff you really wanted to remember, but can’t, as a result of distractions or new thoughts trampling over it.
To be an effective visual thinker, you must always have on hand something to take notes with. Also, you’ve gotta have your ears listening out for your intuition’s voice. I find that when I’m paying close attention to it, it makes sense of what my mind is trying to paint for me. It tells me the words I can use to describe it. Then that notepad, or voice recorder comes out and I make a record of it before I imagine something else that’ll suplex it into the ether.
Oh, and a fun fact: If you wanna know if the person you’re talking to is a visual thinker, see if they’re staring out into the distance or closing their eyes while they’re talking. That’s a sign that they’re trying to communicate something important to them to you, and they don’t want the friendly gesture of looking you in your eyes to distract their train of thought.
We know from IQ tests that working memory abilities vary. Those with aphantasia can’t visualize at all, while others report that not only can they visualize a tiger, they can count its stripes. My visualizations are not that stable. The number of stripes would probably change as I attempt to count them. But visual thinking can be improved with practice, at least in my own experience. Things that took a lot of effort to visualize the first time become simple recall after that. The bigger your bag of tricks, the more likely you can find one that applies to a novel situation.
Visualizations need not be static images. They can have motion as well. I can rotate simple 3-D shapes in my mind, for example. Rotating a cube is pretty easy. I can even do an icosahedron, though that one took some practice. But counting the leaves on a tree would be too difficult, never mind rotating the tree without changing (or glossing over) their number. There are limits to the resolution. You can also do transformations other than rotations, like scales, shears, extrusions, etc. These visualizations are useful in computer graphics and in topology.
In the case of mathematics, I find visualization most useful for generating examples, especially counterexamples. Using the visual query process I described, one can try to query for a shape that meets certain constraints. Sometimes one example (or counterexample) is all it takes to prove a theorem. Sometimes the query produces the example, but sometimes it fails to meet all the constraints and I have to query that part again. Pointing out the part that failed a constraint can bring more examples to mind. You have to give these mathematical objects a visual form to gain the benefits of visual thinking, but there are many morphisms one might try. Besides single examples, you might also be able to enumerate a set of them, or notice a pattern that can be repeated to infinity.
I can generate candidate visualizations much faster in my head than I can draw them on a whiteboard, but then communicating that insight to another person may require a diagram.
A visual thinking riddle: go in one hole and come out three. What am I? I solved this one visually pretty quickly. Try to generate candidate visualizations and see if you recognize the shape.
(Answer: grrfuveg.)
Do you visualize the icosahedron as one object or do you split it up and consider each separately, but reminding oneself that it is actually one object?
My answer to your visual thinking riddle is: breath in through your mouth and breath out through mouth + nostrils. But I can’t decipher your anagram!
I have looked at a d20 long enough and from enough angles (it’s very symmetrical) to have memorized the whole icosahedron, and can visualize it that way, at least as an opaque object from the outside.
But the mnemonic technique of chunking is a valid strategy for visualization. Short-term memories must be “refreshed” or they fade away, but if you juggle too many at once, you’ll drop one before you can get back to it. Making each face a chunk would be 20, which is too many. 3-5 chunks is a more reasonable number. My favored decomposition of the icosahedron is into a pentagonal antiprism with pentagonal pyramid caps. That’s 3 chunks, and two of them are the same thing. Other decompositions may be useful depending on what you are trying to do.
More complex objects can be visualized as hierarchical decompositions, though not always in their entirety. Recognition is not the same as recall. The resolution of a weak visual memory may be just enough to recognize a new example (but too low to count the faces, say). A really low resolution image is more of a handle than a structure, but it can point you to the memory of the real thing.
That’s because it isn’t an anagram. ROT13 :)