> I don’t buy it. A huge amount of my understanding of technical topics is visual/graphical (but definitely “conscious”!), and takes significant ... You're qui

> I don’t buy it. A huge amount of my understanding of technical topics is visual/graphical (but definitely “conscious”!), and takes significant ... You're quite right and I'm sorry my comment seened much more "everything is text" than I really wanted. To me the central thing is not those verbal reports, it is the recording into symbolic memory. The symbols need not be verbal, they can be records of our internal representations of geometry or whatever. But whatever they are, they are "parsable" -- i.e. it's not just neural wiring that makes you able to do stuff like catching a ball, it's stuff that you could re-interpret (imprefectly) into a verbal report. And you are right, if the thing was a record of geometry, then you are almost always better off drawing a picture than trying to describe it in words.