I love this article. It is difficult to convey some of the difficulty of being a non-verbal thinker in a verbal thinkers world. I run into this issue constantly with my partner. I did quite poorly...
I love this article. It is difficult to convey some of the difficulty of being a non-verbal thinker in a verbal thinkers world. I run into this issue constantly with my partner. I did quite poorly in school, while she was near the top of her class. While things kind of leveled out in college and professionally (I entered the geospatial field and found success, surprise surprise) it is still difficult to explain why things were difficult to her. I'm also dyslexic which compounds the difficulty of explaining my already very visual/spatial thoughts. Often she'll comment on the x, y, or z incredibly obvious thing that I could have fixed everything, when in reality those options are obvious and approachable to those who think in a verbal way. In a linear way. Honestly, those discussions took me right back to being in school and I hated it.
However last year, my best friend finally got diagnosis of dyslexia (he grew up without the resources for testing that I had access to when I was young and so went through the testing late in life) and things kind of clicked. I had always been embarrassed about it. Dyslexia is a disability for christ sake! But he would bring it up casually in meetings, tell our friends and folks in his lab. For him it was this validating experience that gave a description and diagnosis for why things had been hard, and he wielded it like a bludgeon. I don't think it should have been as revolutionary as it was for me, but seeing him use it as a positive and couch it as something to be proud of completely changed my opinion of divergent thinking. It's not that I'm stupid and that's why I had such a hard time, it's that we live in a world set to the standards of verbal thinkers, particularly in school. The need to justify more abstract or divergent ideas is one that I had taken as a given, but it doesn't need to be.
Since that revelation I've thought about thinking quite a bit. I started in a small book club where we have intentionally kept membership to those that think and express in neurodivergent ways. Tinkerers is the best way I can describe them. Perhaps we're missing out on perspectives of the type-A, verbal folks, but I think most of us appreciate that we don't need to justify our perspective as no one in the clubs sees theirs as "correct" or "normal". Plus we get that enough in our day to day lives. A comment is rarely followed with a "yes, but...". It makes for incredibly rich and, in many cases, vulnerable conversation. I know the folks I'm chatting with in that little club don't necessarily think the way I do, but I'm given the space to think aloud without the feeling of being boxed in. Unironically, it's a safe space.
I've gotten quite off of the topic, but I just feel... seen. And I hope others do too after reading this article.
“Thinking in Pictures” made the case for the value of neurodiversity: Grandin’s unusual mind succeeded where others couldn’t. In “Visual Thinking,” she sharpens her argument, proposing that word-centric people have sidelined other kinds of thinkers. Verbal minds, she argues, run our boardrooms, newsrooms, legislatures, and schools, which have cut back on shop class and the arts, while subjecting students to a daunting array of written standardized tests. The result is a crisis in American ingenuity. “Imagine a world with no artists, industrial designers, or inventors,” Grandin writes. “No electricians, mechanics, architects, plumbers, or builders. These are our visual thinkers, many hiding in plain sight, and we have failed to understand, encourage, or appreciate their specific contributions.”
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Grandin proposes imagining a church steeple. Verbal people, she finds, often make a hash of this task, conjuring something like “two vague lines in an inverted V,” almost as though they’ve never seen a steeple before. Object visualizers, by contrast, describe specific steeples that they’ve observed on actual churches: they “might as well be staring at a photograph or photorealistic drawing” in their minds. Meanwhile, the spatial visualizers picture a kind of perfect but abstract steeple—“a generic New England-style steeple, an image they piece together from churches they’ve seen.” They have noticed patterns among church steeples, and they imagine the pattern, rather than any particular instance of it.
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Kross’s bottom line is that our inner voices are powerful tools that must be tamed. He ends his book with several dozen techniques for controlling our chatter. He advises trying “distanced self-talk”: by using “your name and the second-person ‘you’ to refer to yourself,” he writes, you can gain more command over your thinking. You might use your inner voice to pretend that you’re advising a friend about his problems; you might redirect your thoughts toward how universal your experiences are (It’s normal to feel this way), or contemplate how every new experience is a challenge you can overcome (I have to learn to trust my partner). The idea is to manage the voice that you use for self-management. Take advantage of the suppleness of dialogue. Don’t just rehearse the same old scripts; send some notes to the writers’ room.
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But Hurlburt’s work suggests that it’s a mistake to ascribe to oneself a definitive cast of thought. Most people, he’s found, don’t actually know how they think; asked to describe their minds pre-beeper, they are often wildly off the mark about what they’ll report post-beeper. They’re prone to make “faux generalizations”—groundless assertions about how they think. It’s easy for me to assume that most of my thinking is unsymbolized. But how closely have I examined it? In truth, the textures of our minds are subtle and variable. There’s a reason James Joyce needed eighteen chapters to describe the mind in “Ulysses.” Even within a single head, thinking takes many forms.
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Hurlburt would say that describing one’s inner life is hard. Schwitzgebel would say that our inner lives are not necessarily describable. On a deep level, he contends, our own thinking is a little like bat sonar. We’ll never know what it’s really like.
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If we can’t say exactly how we think, then how well do we know ourselves? In an essay titled “The Self as a Center of Narrative Gravity,” the philosopher Daniel Dennett argued that a layer of fiction is woven into what it is to be human. In a sense, fiction is flawed: it’s not true. But, when we open a novel, we don’t hurl it to the ground in disgust, declaring that it’s all made-up nonsense; we understand that being made up is actually the point.
I love this article. It is difficult to convey some of the difficulty of being a non-verbal thinker in a verbal thinkers world. I run into this issue constantly with my partner. I did quite poorly in school, while she was near the top of her class. While things kind of leveled out in college and professionally (I entered the geospatial field and found success, surprise surprise) it is still difficult to explain why things were difficult to her. I'm also dyslexic which compounds the difficulty of explaining my already very visual/spatial thoughts. Often she'll comment on the x, y, or z incredibly obvious thing that I could have fixed everything, when in reality those options are obvious and approachable to those who think in a verbal way. In a linear way. Honestly, those discussions took me right back to being in school and I hated it.
However last year, my best friend finally got diagnosis of dyslexia (he grew up without the resources for testing that I had access to when I was young and so went through the testing late in life) and things kind of clicked. I had always been embarrassed about it. Dyslexia is a disability for christ sake! But he would bring it up casually in meetings, tell our friends and folks in his lab. For him it was this validating experience that gave a description and diagnosis for why things had been hard, and he wielded it like a bludgeon. I don't think it should have been as revolutionary as it was for me, but seeing him use it as a positive and couch it as something to be proud of completely changed my opinion of divergent thinking. It's not that I'm stupid and that's why I had such a hard time, it's that we live in a world set to the standards of verbal thinkers, particularly in school. The need to justify more abstract or divergent ideas is one that I had taken as a given, but it doesn't need to be.
Since that revelation I've thought about thinking quite a bit. I started in a small book club where we have intentionally kept membership to those that think and express in neurodivergent ways. Tinkerers is the best way I can describe them. Perhaps we're missing out on perspectives of the type-A, verbal folks, but I think most of us appreciate that we don't need to justify our perspective as no one in the clubs sees theirs as "correct" or "normal". Plus we get that enough in our day to day lives. A comment is rarely followed with a "yes, but...". It makes for incredibly rich and, in many cases, vulnerable conversation. I know the folks I'm chatting with in that little club don't necessarily think the way I do, but I'm given the space to think aloud without the feeling of being boxed in. Unironically, it's a safe space.
I've gotten quite off of the topic, but I just feel... seen. And I hope others do too after reading this article.
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