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

by Temple Grandin

Think of it this way: the object thinkers build the trains, and the spatial visualizers make them run.

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.

“Spatial visualizers” see the world in patterns and abstractions. They are the music and math minds—the statisticians, scientists, electrical engineers, and physicists. You’ll find a lot of these thinkers excel at computer programming because they can see patterns in the computer code. Here’s a way to think of it: The object thinker builds the computer. The spatial thinker writes the code.