|
WHAT IS VISUAL THINKING?
Thinking
in language and words is alien to me. I think totally in pictures.
It is like playing different tapes in a video cassette recorder
in my imagination. I used to think that everybody thought
in pictures until I questioned many different people about
their thinking processes.
Thinking in language and words is alien to me. I think
totally in pictures. It is like playing different tapes
in a video cassette recorder in my imagination.
|
I
have conducted an informal little cognitive test on many people.
They are asked to access their memory of church steeples or
cats. An object that is not in the person's immediate surroundings
should be used for this visualization procedure. When I do
this, I see in my imagination a series of "videos" of different
churches or cats I have seen or known. Many "normal" people
will see a visual image of a cat, but it is a sort of generalized
generic cat image. They usually don't see a series of vivid
cat or church "videos" unless they are an artist, parent of
an autistic child, or an engineer. My "cat" concept consists
of a series of "videos" of cats I have known. There is no
generalized cat. If I keep thinking about cats or churches
I can manipulate the "video" images. I can put snow on the
church roof and imagine what the church grounds look like
during the different seasons.
 |
 |
| |
Temple
Grandin's put her visual thinking to work as an engineer
of humane livestock equipment |
Visual
thinking is a great asset in my career as a livestock equipment
designer, and I have become internationally recognized in
this field. Drafting elaborate drawings of steel and concrete
livestock stockyards and equipment is easy. I can visualize
a video of the finished equipment in my imagination. I can
run test simulations in my imagination of how the systems
would work with different size cattle.
Discussions
with other autistic people have revealed visual methods of
thinking on tasks that are often considered sequential and
non-visual. A brilliant autistic computer programmer told
me that he visualized the entire program tree in his mind
and then filled in the program code on each branch. A gifted
autistic composer told me that he made "sound pictures." In
all these cases, a hazy whole or gestalt is visualized, and
the details are added in a non-sequential manner. When I design
equipment, I often have a general outline of the system, and
then each section of it becomes clear as I add details.
-
- - - - - - - - - - -
4
pages: | 1 | 2
| 3 | 4 |
|
