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I have the opposite issue - much of my cognition is visual in nature. I find it hard to convey what I'm visualising in my mind in words sometimes. It can be har

I have the opposite issue - much of my cognition is visual in nature. I find it hard to convey what I'm visualising in my mind in words sometimes. It can be hard to express abstract thoughts in visual form. My go-to example is always that I can hold a mental image of a V-8 engine in my head and take it apart into an exploded view, see what the pieces are, and then reassemble it again into a complete engine. This is fantastic for being able to plan complex spatial operations but it's really frustrating to people who ask me "how do you know that" when I know where they left their items, or that the couch is too large to fit where they want it to go.

whatshisface 5y ago
Speaking for average people, nobody can explain how they know where they left things, it's just knowledge. It's weird that people ask you to explain how you know where things are.
- caddemon 5y ago
  I mean that's one specific example, but I get what he's saying. I'm super verbal and I used to do problem sets in college with a friend that obviously had much better visuospatial abilities than me. >75% of the time he'd be the one that really figured out the question. But then we'd go home to write up our solutions and I'd get consistently full letter grade higher marks on what was essentially the same work. He was just doing a way worse job of putting his own work into words. Of course it depends on the circumstances how much explaining yourself matters, but in a lot of real life situations it is a good skill to have.
- joombaga 5y ago
  You don't know how you know where you left your own things, but if I do know where a friend left e.g. their wallet or keys, I often do remember why. As if the novelty of the circumstance that allowed me to store the information also caused my brain to store metadata about that memory, e.g. the novelty itself.
mhandley 5y ago
I think of myself as a very visual thinker, but I actually cannot form conscious images in my head. This seems like a contradiction, but it's true anyway. I do have a very good spatial reasoning sense though - like you, I can think of a V8 engine in my head, all the pieces, how they fit together and move, but I'm not really forming a picture in my mind - it's more like I'm thinking about the 3d shapes themselves and how they interact, but if I try to consciously form a picture, it just disappears. If I back off, think about how the mechanisms work without trying to form a conscious picture, then it's all there. But not really as a picture - it's something else - a sense of shape. It's actually hard to talk about because English doesn't include words for what exactly I'm doing when I'm reasoning spatially, and as any images fade when I think about them too consciously, I'm not even quite sure myself. The one exception is when I'm lucid dreaming half-way through waking in the morning - then for a while I can see everything perfectly. As soon as I fully wake, that ability disappears. I love lucid dreaming when I'm working on a difficult 3D CAD problem.
- jaggederest 5y ago
  That's a funny connection, I'm also occasionally a lucid dreamer as well.

whatshisface 5y ago

Speaking for average people, nobody can explain how they know where they left things, it's just knowledge. It's weird that people ask you to explain how you know where things are.

caddemon 5y ago
I mean that's one specific example, but I get what he's saying. I'm super verbal and I used to do problem sets in college with a friend that obviously had much better visuospatial abilities than me. >75% of the time he'd be the one that really figured out the question. But then we'd go home to write up our solutions and I'd get consistently full letter grade higher marks on what was essentially the same work. He was just doing a way worse job of putting his own work into words. Of course it depends on the circumstances how much explaining yourself matters, but in a lot of real life situations it is a good skill to have.
joombaga 5y ago
You don't know how you know where you left your own things, but if I do know where a friend left e.g. their wallet or keys, I often do remember why. As if the novelty of the circumstance that allowed me to store the information also caused my brain to store metadata about that memory, e.g. the novelty itself.

mhandley 5y ago

I think of myself as a very visual thinker, but I actually cannot form conscious images in my head. This seems like a contradiction, but it's true anyway. I do have a very good spatial reasoning sense though - like you, I can think of a V8 engine in my head, all the pieces, how they fit together and move, but I'm not really forming a picture in my mind - it's more like I'm thinking about the 3d shapes themselves and how they interact, but if I try to consciously form a picture, it just disappears. If I back off, think about how the mechanisms work without trying to form a conscious picture, then it's all there. But not really as a picture - it's something else - a sense of shape. It's actually hard to talk about because English doesn't include words for what exactly I'm doing when I'm reasoning spatially, and as any images fade when I think about them too consciously, I'm not even quite sure myself. The one exception is when I'm lucid dreaming half-way through waking in the morning - then for a while I can see everything perfectly. As soon as I fully wake, that ability disappears. I love lucid dreaming when I'm working on a difficult 3D CAD problem.

jaggederest 5y ago
That's a funny connection, I'm also occasionally a lucid dreamer as well.