4 ms·

I think in images and then try to verbalize it when I need to express it.Mostly when I am doing coding or math,the solution most of the time strikes me as an im

• sillysaurus2 13y ago
  I think most of us think more in images than words. I thought so too, but interestingly the imagery is completely different for different people. Einstein often spoke of "thinking with music," and Ramanujan claimed to think of solutions by picturing a goddess delivering them to him as drops of blood. Here's a concrete example of the difference: When I see "13/12", I think of a pie shape with a small sliver filled in, like if you filled in the area between the hands of a clock pointing at 12 and 1. That's the "one-twelfth" part, so the whole thought becomes "one plus [that image]". People seem to think of fractions differently; sometimes purely as an abstraction rather than visualizing what the numbers mean. Someone should write a webapp to poll the community / explore the different ways people think about various tasks. I bet $5 that Bret Victor's mental imagery is more powerful than ours. Naturally, we'd want to change our thinking to match his process, if we had the option to. The only reason we can't is because we don't know what his mind looks like when he's problem solving. Making a webapp that enables us, as a community, to explore these differences is perhaps a step in that direction.
  • dhaneshnm 13y ago
    I doubt most people know they have particular thinking pattern and when they think in images v/s words or in any other form. A web poll would be nice though.