Visual Thinking: The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns, and Abstractions

by Temple Grandin

At one plant I visited, something else entirely caught my eye. Until then, nearly every plant I’d ever worked on or consulted with used equipment made in America. The parts were manufactured here, and there were workers at the ready who could put together new components and repair any malfunction. At this plant, the equipment was brand-new. It was beautiful, meticulously crafted and made of gleaming stainless steel, with many intricate moving parts. Looking at it, I imagined the highly skilled, high-wage workers who had designed and installed the equipment. Then I discovered that it had been transported from the Netherlands on a container ship, in more than one hundred shipping containers. I stood on an overhead catwalk and looked at all the complicated conveyors and exclaimed to no one, “We don’t make it anymore!” This is the price we have paid for removing most hands-on classes from our schools, such as shop, welding, drafting, and auto mechanics. The kids who should have grown up to invent this equipment are often considered poor performers, academically or behaviorally, and are shunted into special education. But many of them are simply visual thinkers who are being screened out because the current curriculum favors verbal, linear thinkers who are good at taking tests. The hands-on classes where some of these “poor students” might have shown great ability are now gone.

When we fail to encourage and develop the talents and skills of people who think in different ways, we fail to integrate ways of learning and thinking that benefit and enrich society. Imagine a world with no artists, industrial designers, or inventors. 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. One reason I was driven to write this book is that the loss of skills in this country terrifies me. And it is entirely preventable, if only we stop screening out the very people who could save us.

How can you tell if you’re a visual thinker? You probably know if you are musical, good at art, or good at putting mechanical things together, or if you’d rather draw than write. These are clues. It’s important to remember that visual thinking, like most traits, exists on a spectrum. Most people use a combination of verbal and visual thinking to navigate their world.

Word-based thinking is sequential and linear. People who are primarily verbal thinkers tend to comprehend things in order, which is why they often do well in school, where learning is mostly structured sequentially. They are good at understanding general concepts and have a good sense of time, though not necessarily a good sense of direction. Verbal thinkers are the kids with perfectly organized binders and the adults whose computer desktops have neat rows of folders for every project. Verbal thinkers are good at explaining the steps they take to arrive at an answer or to make a decision. Verbal thinkers talk to themselves silently, also known as self-talk, to organize their world. Verbal thinkers easily dash off emails, make presentations. They talk early and often. By default, verbal people tend to be the ones who dominate conversations, and are hyper-organized and social. It makes sense that they are drawn to and tend to succeed in the kind of high-visibility careers that depend on facility with language: teachers, lawyers, writers, politicians, administrators.

Visual thinkers, on the other hand, see images in their mind’s eye that allow them to make rapid-fire associations. Generally, visual thinkers like maps, art, and mazes, and often don’t need directions at all. Some visual thinkers can easily locate a place they’ve been to only once, their internal GPS having logged the visual landmarks. Visual thinkers tend to be late talkers who struggle with school and traditional teaching methods. Algebra is often their undoing, because the concepts are too abstract, with little or nothing concrete to visualize. Visual thinkers tend to be good at arithmetic that is directly related to practical tasks, such as building and putting things together. Visual thinkers like me easily grasp how mechanical devices work or enjoy figuring them out. We tend to be problem solvers, and sometimes appear to be socially awkward.

When I wrote about this in Thinking in Pictures, I believed that my connection with animals, especially prey species like cattle, was on account of my autism. I believed we shared a flight response when threatened. I understood their fear. In some ways, I related more to animals than to people. I came to realize that my visual thinking has a component that contributes to my ability to see things that other people miss. I notice details that are amiss or faulty, sometimes dangerously so,

Psychologist Charles Fernyhough is director of the Hearing the Voice project at Durham University. His book The Voices Within describes the pervasive and multiple ways and reasons that people talk to themselves: to motivate, self-focus, regulate mood, direct attention, change behavior. In essence, to become conscious. As we’ll see, even highly verbal thinkers do visualize, but information comes to them mostly in the form of language. Yet Fernyhough, like many, falls prey to a certain bias in reporting on his research. He contends that thinking is primarily linguistic, more closely “tied up with language than it initially appears to be.” He acknowledges that imaging is involved, along with sensory and emotional elements, but “they are only parts of the picture.” While it’s true that I talk to myself, sometimes even out loud when I’m concentrating really hard on a livestock-design project, my mind is not a raft on a sea of words. It’s an ocean of images.

Many visual thinkers on the spectrum, however, must learn to adapt to the dominant culture. They don’t understand that the rest of the world communicates thoughts and feelings through words. Language does not come naturally to us. We struggle to master it, as well as how to modulate our voices with the right intonation, pitch, and tone. I learned to modulate my voice through close observation of the way verbal thinkers speak. It did not come naturally. It is not innate. I still struggle with remembering long sequences of verbal information. Sometimes jokes go over my head, especially if they are delivered rapidly or involve wordplay. To understand the joke, I have to convert the words to images. If the joke includes a verbal leap or strange syntax, I probably won’t get it.

on visual short-term memory (STM).

But the researchers also reported on previous studies of STM in adults and concluded that, contrary to what one might assume, not all adults process information verbally first and foremost.

I am asked all the time how you can determine if a child is a visual thinker. The signs may show up in a child as young as three, but they more often become apparent when the child is six to eight years old. The propensity for visual and spatial thinking will turn up in the activities they gravitate toward. Often, they create beautiful drawings that are highly detailed and realistic. They also like building with toys like blocks, Legos, and Erector sets, or putting things together with materials they find around the house, such as cardboard or wood. They may light up at the sight of a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle or spend hours in the basement or garage tinkering with tools or electronics, taking things apart and putting them back together. Theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking took apart model trains and airplanes before making a simple computer out of recycled clock and telephone parts. Pioneering computer scientist and mathematician Grace Murray Hopper took apart all seven of the clocks in her family home. You probably wouldn’t be happy if your teen took apart your laptop, though you might be happier if he or she turned out to be the next Steve Wozniak.

With adults, I suggest taking what I call the IKEA Test to help identify where you fall on the visual-verbal spectrum. It’s not strictly scientific, but it’s a fairly reliable shortcut to separating the more verbally inclined from the more visually inclined. Here’s the test: You buy a piece of furniture and are ready to put it together: Do you read the instructions or follow the pictures? If I attempt to read verbal instructions, I become totally lost, because I cannot follow the sequential steps. But if I look at the drawings, my mind will start associating all the things I have put together in the past, and I’ll know how this piece of furniture is supposed to look. You may have noticed that IKEA instructions come as a series of illustrations—no written instructions at all. I wasn’t surprised to learn that the man who created the company was dyslexic, privileging pictures over words. I’ve heard of some verbal thinkers who completely fall apart in the face of IKEA furniture instructions, becoming highly frustrated as they try to follow them. What is a perfect road map for me is a confusing mess for them. That must be why IKEA partnered with TaskRabbit, employing visual thinkers to help English majors assemble their bookshelves.

based). If you’re interested in where you fall on the spectrum, take a moment to answer the eighteen questions on the Visual-Spatial Identifier. If you answer yes to ten or more of the questions, you are very likely to be a visual-spatial learner. VISUAL-SPATIAL IDENTIFIER Answer each with YES or NO Do you think mainly in pictures instead of in words? Do you know things without being able to explain how or why? Do you solve problems in unusual ways? Do you have a vivid imagination? Do you remember what you see and forget what you hear? Are you terrible at spelling? Can you visualize objects from different perspectives? Are you organizationally impaired? Do you often lose track of time? Would you rather read a map than follow verbal directions? Do you remember how to get to places you visited only once? Is your handwriting slow and difficult for others to read? Can you feel what others are feeling? Are you musically, artistically, or mechanically inclined? Do you know more than others think you know? Do you hate speaking in front of a group? Did you feel smarter as you got older? Are you addicted to your computer?

Another informal experiment I’ve conducted over the years to screen for visual thinkers involves two disparate groups I regularly give talks to: elementary school kids and school administrators. I show each group a picture of a steer exiting a chute, staring at a bright spot of sunlight on the floor. The caption says: non-slip flooring is essential. I ask for a show of hands: How many see that the animal is looking at the sunbeam? The results remain consistent: With the kids, half the hands go up. When I present the same slide at a conference of school administrators, almost no hands go up. The administrators focus on the caption.

My first brain scan was done on a then-state-of-the-art MRI scanner in 1987 by Eric Courchesne at the University of California San Diego School of Medicine. Cutting-edge at the time, the technology measured brain structure in beautiful, sharp detail. When I saw the images, I exclaimed, “Journey to the center of my brain!” From this scan, I learned why I had balance problems. My cerebellum was 20 percent smaller than in the average brain. Another MRI explained why I had high levels of anxiety before I started taking antidepressants. My amygdala (emotion center) was three times larger than average. The scans that really blew my mind were done at the University of Pittsburgh by Walter Schneider, the inventor of a new technology called Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI). This technology images the nerve fiber bundles that carry information between different parts of the brain. His research was funded by the Defense Department to develop high-definition fiber tracking (HDFT) to diagnose head injuries in soldiers. This technology provided clearer images than other devices at the time and was able to distinguish where nerve fibers connected to each other and where they only crossed each other. My speech circuits were much smaller than those in the control, which may explain why my speech was delayed as a child. But my visual results were off the charts—400 percent larger than those in the controls. It was as if I had a huge internet trunk line from my rear visual cortex to my frontal...

visual thinking is not about seeing, per se. Everyone sees unless they are blind. Visual thinking refers to the way the mind works, to the way we perceive.

Put plainly, we understand how the physiological hardware works, but not the software.

Using the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire (VVIQ) developed by D. F. Marks in 1973 (and updated in 1995), Adam Zeman and his colleagues continued to study aphantasia, administering the test to nearly seven hundred subjects. The VVIQ consists of sixteen questions that examine mental imagery, including memory, spatial reasoning, and the ability to visualize objects not in one’s direct line of vision, and is scored on a five-point scale, from 1 (no image) to 5 (vivid as normal vision). In all, 2 percent of the students qualified as having aphantasia. (If you’re curious about where you fall on the spectrum, you can take the VVIQ online.)

People with hyperphantasia produced excessively detailed memories. Further research with functional MRI brain scanning showed that hyperphantasic visual thinkers had greater brain activity between the prefrontal cortex and the network in the occipital visual cortex. A New York Times article by Carl Zimmer headlined “Many People Have a Vivid ‘Mind’s Eye,’ While Others Have None at All” describes how researchers are looking into the brain circuitry responsible for these two extreme conditions. “So far, that work suggests that mental imagery emerges from a network of brain regions that talk to each other,” he wrote. These brain characteristics may be linked to creativity and novel ways of solving problems. Not surprisingly, people with aphantasia tend to go into science and math fields, while people with hyperphantasia gravitate to more visually creative jobs. Paradoxically, however, according to Zeman, it’s not unusual for people with aphantasia to dream in images. He distinguishes between how the sleeping mind works and how the awake mind works. He explains that dreaming is a “bottom up” process that comes from the brain stem, whereas seeing images when you’re awake is “top down” from the cortex.

Two studies being done on hyperphantasia look at the correlation between hyper-vividness and PTSD. In some cases, people such as soldiers or trauma victims who can’t stop replaying the terrifying images in their mind report images so vivid that they believe their thoughts or flashbacks are real. According to psychologist Chris Brewin, flashbacks are an adaptive mechanism that stores information until it can be processed, after the danger is past. In a study of visual imagery and PTSD, researchers Richard Bryant and Allison Harvey looked at eighty-one motorcycle accident survivors and determined that visual imagery, including flashbacks and nightmares, plays a central role in PTSD. Even something far less traumatic can trigger repetitive visual remembering.

Visual people might say that their office is across the hall from the Matisse poster. People with aphantasia will say it’s three doors down on the right.

Laurent Mottron has found that autistic people rely less on the verbal parts of the brain. His colleague researcher Michelle Dawson is autistic. He describes her as a bottom-up heuristic, meaning she comes up with ideas only from available facts. “As a result, her models never over-reach, and are almost infallibly accurate.” By contrast, he describes his top-down approach: “I grasp and manipulate general ideas from fewer sources, and after expressing them in a model, go back to facts supporting or falsifying this model. Combining the two types of brains in the same research group is amazingly productive.”

Being a bottom-up thinker keeps me grounded in the facts; autism prevents emotions from clouding my judgment.

As I’ve grown older and had more experiences, I can solve problems much more easily, because my memory contains more visual data. My world has gotten bigger and bigger.

Visual thinking is the ability to see associated images from your “visual memory files” and access them in different ways to problem-solve, navigate, and interpret the world. That’s why object thinkers are often designers, builders, architects, mechanics, and artists. And visual-spatial thinkers are often mathematicians, coders, composers, musicians, scientists, and engineers. Many visual thinkers are hiding in plain sight. (We’ll meet many more over the course of the book.) We don’t necessarily attribute their skills to their being visual thinkers. We say they’re good with their hands, they’re great at computers, can do math in their head, and so on. Both kinds of visualizers may have aptitudes for types of problem solving we don’t necessarily associate with visual thinking.

If you went to public school in the 1990s or after, you may not remember such programs. They were largely scrubbed from the public school curricula around that point, along with art, theater, welding, and auto mechanics, with some regional variation. The culmination of these policies arrived in 2001, when the education reform bill known as No Child Left Behind “hit American education like a tsunami,” according to Nikhil Goyal’s critique of the legislation in his book Schools on Trial. Now, not only was the stripping away of hands-on learning a reality, but a new philosophy had supplanted it: teach to the test. The policy, otherwise known as “drill, kill, bubble fill,” became the norm. The legacy of the previous twenty years of federal education policy, from No Child Left Behind to the Every Student Succeeds Act, has created a culture that has simultaneously overemphasized testing and stripped our schools of multifaceted curricula. The goal of raising national academic standards through comprehensive testing decimated the classes that didn’t lend themselves to standardized testing. “Beginning in third grade, the amount of instructional time in the arts, music, science, and history was reduced, because basically what was tested got taught, and these subjects were not equally tested,” writes Goyal. In 2015, the president of the National Education Association, Lily Eskelsen García, and the president of the National Parent Teacher Association, Otha Thornton, wrote in The Washin...

Removing hands-on learning from schools is the worst thing to happen to education in recent memory, in my opinion. Wittingly or unwittingly, its disappearance screened out an entire generation of visual thinkers, whose abilities might have flourished in such so-called extracurriculars. There is no way for kids, especially kids who are object-visual thinkers, to find out what they’re good at by sitting behind a desk all day. Plus, it’s torture for kids like I was, with excess energy that could be better channeled into doing things, making things. These abilities need to be developed starting when kids are young. Without exposure to such classes, we can’t nurture the budding builder, engineer, or chef. We screen out designers, inventors, and artists. We need future generations who can build and repair infrastructure, overhaul energy and agriculture, create tools to combat climate change and pandemics, develop robotics and AI. We need people with the imagination to invent our next-generation solutions.

For any type of learner, a key question is brain development: When are a child’s cognitive skills able to handle abstract reasoning? Piaget believed children become capable of logic by age eleven or twelve. Ana Sušac and her colleagues at the University of Zagreb suggest that the development from concrete to more abstract thinking may occur in late adolescence, when the prefrontal cortex, associated with abstract mathematical reasoning, more fully matures. Their research suggests that, at the very least, we’re teaching algebra too early and too fast, that the road from concrete to abstract reasoning takes more time. It’s not a switch you can turn on in the summer between seventh and eighth grade. A researcher at the University of Kansas raises the possibility that abstract reasoning is developed through experience, which is a good argument for keeping all those extracurriculars.

When I write, the words provide a description of the images I see in my imagination. There were three ways I learned how to write well: Reading my writing out loud to determine if it sounded right. Paying close attention to the way teachers marked up my papers and corrected my grammar. And writing book reports, which taught me how to pick out the main points in the material I read.

many were “difficult children” who exhibited traits that we now associate with Asperger’s and other conditions on the autism spectrum, such as hyperactivity (ADHD), dyslexia, poor performance in school, poor social skills, and an inability to focus on some tasks while demonstrating incredible focus and intensity on others.

me!

Genius is intoxicating. People who change the world are in a category of their own.

Edison was at the bottom of his class and considered difficult, prone to distraction, and “developmentally delayed.” Biographer Edmund Morris quotes him as saying, “I used never to be able to get along at school. I don’t know what it was, but I was always at the foot of the class. . . . My father thought I was stupid, and at last I almost decided I must really be a dunce.” In today’s education system, Edison might have been labeled ADHD, as are nearly one in seven American boys. Mechanical thinkers like Edison often become bored in classroom settings dominated by verbal learning. These are the kids, as we’ve discussed in the chapter on education, who need to be doing things.

Uta Frith helped advance the theory that autism is a genetically based neurobiological disorder. But autism does not follow Mendelian inheritance patterns, meaning that there is no single “autism gene.” Instead, some number of genes influence each other and contribute to the expression of autism. Today researchers believe there are potentially one thousand genes involved in an autism diagnosis.

MRI brain scans showed that musical training increased thickness in both the auditory cortex and areas for motor control of the hands. Increased use of these parts of the brain evidently caused an increase in brain tissue: nurture.

Spielberg had always been a very slow reader in school and struggled with academics, but he had never been labeled. During an interview, he admitted that junior high was the hardest part of his youth. Teachers believed that he was not trying hard enough, and like many people with neurodiverse traits, he was the object of bullying by his peers.

me... in a nutshell!

Dyslexia is associated with greater activity in the right frontal lobe, an area that is also the locus of spatial visualizing.

In 1982, a twenty-one-year-old architecture student at Yale beat out 1,420 other competitors to win a commission to design the Vietnam War memorial in Washington. Maya Lin’s design consisted of two two-hundred-foot-long polished black granite walls that were installed at 10.1 feet below grade and met in an obtuse angle of 125 degrees. It was a completely radical idea, and as with many radical ideas, it met with some intense backlash. Some critics felt that the submerged monument disrespected the very lives it was meant to commemorate. The walls are inscribed with the names of the more than 58,000 killed in combat or missing in action in the Vietnam War. The names appear not alphabetically but chronologically, by the date of each soldier’s death. This was “the genius of Maya’s design,” said Jan Scruggs, the Vietnam veteran whose mission it was to build the memorial. “The chronological order allows veterans who were in battle to see their friends forever united on the Wall.”

But I can also picture how large-scale disasters happen, looming catastrophes other people sometimes fail to see. This chapter is about the need for visual thinkers in all kinds of potentially dangerous situations. Visual thinking does not enable me to predict the future. But it does allow me to home in on design flaws and system failures that, unaddressed, can lead to disaster. Yes, we absolutely need engineers, scientists, and mathematicians to discover and formulate solutions to twenty-first-century problems. But we also need the people on the ground, the builders and installers and maintenance people. Danger is not an abstraction. We need the people who live where I live: in the world of practical things.

In both humans and animals, the PAG (periaqueductal gray) has a network of connections to numerous brain areas in both higher cortical areas and lower brain centers. When the PAG is destroyed, whether in a human or in a cat, they will enter a comatose state, ceasing to react to things around them. Another hub for consciousness is located in the middle lower-brain area. Both areas serve as hubs for processing emotions. The information that is stored in the brain can mingle and associate there, like delegates entering the rotunda of a large convention center. The research points to a consensus that consciousness is a hierarchy. As brain systems become more complex, consciousness becomes more complex, with emotions and sensory information being processed in larger and larger association areas more densely packed with neurons. The lower PAG area acts like the master of a railway switching yard or an air traffic controller. This system enables either an animal or a person to interact both with the environment and with other individuals. For humans and most animals, the PAG is also involved in assessing possible danger. A deer will suddenly raise its head and point both its eyes and ears at a strange noise or sight. This is an innate response to a possible threat. However, the deer still needs to decide how to respond. I have observed this behavior many times. There is a pause while the brain decides whether to flee, keep watching, or continue grazing. This is the beginning of f...

The best horse trainers I have observed could train a wild colt to be ridden within two hours. One of them, Ray Hunt, was hopeless at explaining what he did. The best he could manage was, “Get in tune with the horse.” He simply worked intuitively and empathically. The same is true of many animal handlers. They forge a direct emotional connection between the animal’s body and their own, based on nonverbal communication. They unconsciously draw on sensory recall and visual thinking to observe the horse’s behavior. These skills are very difficult to teach.