One What Is Visual Thinking? When I was born in 1947, the medical profession had not started applying an autism diagnosis to children like me. I was exhibiting most of the behaviors now fully associated with autism, including lack of eye contact, temper tantrums, lack of social contact, sensitivity to touch, and the appearance of deafness. Chief among my symptoms was late speech, which led the neurologist who examined me when I was two and a half years old to conclude that I was "brain damaged." I''ve since learned that a good deal of my behavior at the time (tantrums, stuttering sounds, screaming, and biting) was connected to the frustration I experienced due to my inability to talk. I was fortunate that a lot of early speech therapy eventually helped me gain speech, but I still had no idea that not everyone thought like me, or that the world could be roughly divided into two kinds of thinkers: people who think in pictures and patterns (more on the difference later), and people who think in words. 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. You probably know some of these people.

The editors I''ve worked with over the years have all been verbal thinkers. I''ve noticed that they strongly prefer to work sequentially, meaning they are linear thinkers and need to connect thoughts in a beginning-middle-end sequence. When I gave my editor a few chapters of this book out of sequence, she had a hard time working with them. They didn''t line up in her mind. Pictures are associational, sentences go in order. Logic for her was lost without verbal order, and she needed me to present my ideas in an unbroken sequence she could follow. 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 began to study cattle behavior, as a graduate student in animal science at Arizona State University, I still did not know that other people did not think in pictures. It was the early 1970s, I was in my twenties, and word-based thinking remained a second language to me.

My first major breakthrough in understanding that people have different ways of thinking came when I was trying to figure out why cattle sometimes balked when they walked through chutes. I''ve written and talked about this experience many times: it was the eureka moment that defined my approach to working with animals and launched my career. The cattle handlers at the time resorted to yelling, hitting, or pushing the animals through with electric prods to keep the line moving. To experience a cow''s-eye view, I jumped down into the chute. Once inside, I saw what kinds of things were halting the cattle in their tracks: shadows, a slant of sunlight, a distracting object such as a dangling chain, or even something as simple as a rope draped over the top of the chute caused them to stop. To me, getting inside the chute was the obvious thing to do, but none of the cattle handlers had thought to do it, and some of them thought I was nuts. Looking at the world from the cattle''s point of view was a radical idea when I first started out in the field, yet it became the hallmark of my approach to working with all animals. I have worked with the cattle industry for many years to improve the way cattle are handled, and I''ve consulted with zoos and other animal-handling facilities to help unlock other questions of animal behavior.

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, an awareness I''ll elaborate on in the chapter on disaster. I didn''t just see that slant of sunlight or chain in the chute; these things jumped out at me. When I walk into a room, I immediately see anything that is off-kilter, the way a verbal thinker will pick out a misplaced comma or a typo in a sentence.

The stuff that shouldn''t be there or is slightly off jumps out. It turns out that this ability has roots in both autism and visual thinking. Laurent Mottron, a psychiatrist and researcher in cognitive neuroscience and autism at the University of MontrZal, and his colleague Sylvie Belleville have worked with many people on the spectrum. Their research encompasses studying perceptual processing abilities. In one study, they administered a series of tests to a patient known as E.C., who was a savant (more on savants in a later chapter). E.

C. could draw from memory in perfect proportion, with great spatial detail. Mottron observed, "Autistic subjects are known to detect minor modifications in their surroundings more rapidly than normal, and to fixate on small morphological details." Mottron later conducted another study looking at visual and verbal thinkers using more complex visual tasks to locate perceptual functioning. Here, too, visual perception played "a superior role in autistic cognition." Uta Frith is the pioneering developmental psychologist who helped pave the way for autism to be viewed as a cognitive condition and not the result of frigid mothers (referred to at the time as "refrigerator mothers"). In an early study, she and Amitta Shah compared how autistic people, "normal" people, and those with intellectual disabilities would complete a task where colored blocks were assembled into different patterns. They found that autistic subjects, "regardless of age and ability, performed better than controls.

" I don''t think it would have occurred to me to jump in that chute if I weren''t a visual thinker. I had to see things from the cows'' point of view. To me, it was the most natural response in the world. Then again, I still believed everybody thought the same way I did, in a series of associated photo-realistic pictures or in short, trailer-like films playing in my mind. Just as verbal thinkers had a hard time understanding visual thinkers like me, I had difficulty understanding that verbal thinkers existed. I didn''t know about the work of researchers like Mottron and Frith back then. It would never have occurred to me that you could study and quantify visual thinking or that there was a name for it. Since then, I''ve given a lot of thought as to why this is the case.

Visual Thinking in a Verbal World The fact is, we live in a talky culture. Verbal thinkers dominate the national conversation in religion, media, publishing, and education. Words fill the airwaves and the internet, with preachers, pundits, and politicians taking up most of the real estate. We even call commentators "talking heads." The dominant culture favors verbal people; theirs is a language-filled world. Psychologist Charles Fernyhough is director of the Hearing the Voice project at the University of Durham. 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 mostly comes to them 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 part 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. Most children connect language to the things in their lives at a remarkable rate. Speech comes naturally t.