Verbal thinking is talking to yourself silently, and visual thinking is seeing things in your imagination. A verbal thinker is someone who thinks primarily in the first way and a visual thinker is someone who thinks primarily in the second way.

There was a debate, in the late 1800s, about whether "imagination" was simply a turn of phrase or a real phenomenon. That is, can people actually create images in their minds which they see vividly, or do they simply say "I saw it in my mind" as a metaphor for considering what it looked like?

[... Francis] Galton gave people some very detailed surveys, and found that some people did have mental imagery and others didn't.

-- Yvain, "Generalizing from One Example"

When I was a kid growing up in Far Rockaway, I had a friend named Bernie Walker. We both had "labs" at home, and we would do various "experiments." One time, we were discussing something -- we must have been eleven or twelve at the time -- and I said, "But thinking is nothing but talking to yourself inside."

"How yeah?" Bernie said. "Do you know the crazy shape of the crankshaft in a car?"

"Yeah, what of it?"

"Good. Now, tell me: how did you describe it when you were talking to yourself?"

-- Richard Feynman, What Do You Care What Other People Think?

Once I asked a friend of mine, who's a Go player like me, what "reading" felt like to him.

For those who don't know, "reading" is the term in Go for thinking through the consequences of a move before you make the move. There's a saying, "reading is the muscle of Go" - you can improve your play by having good heuristics and by memorizing some fixed patterns of play, but really good play requires being able to consider the state of play N moves ahead (depth), often for M possible variations (breadth).

My friend, it turns out, is a visual thinker. When he "reads" a Go sequence, he literally hallucinates stones in the appropriate positions; he sees them there. (The difficulty for him is to remember the various pictures.) I'm a "verbal thinker". (Actually verbal/kinesthetic.) I can stare at the Go board until my eyes bleed and never hallucinate a damn thing.

I have improved a lot at Go by solving small exercises, "tsumego" as they are called. The interesting thing is that I can now look at some non-trivial problems and instantly "spot" the right sequence (sometimes the correct answer plus several alternatives), but I still don't see a damn thing. The intersections don't light up with an overlay of imagined stones. It's more like I feel where the right answer is.

This is a mild disappointment, because one of the reasons I took up Go in the first place was to improve my visual thinking.

When I go to sleep, I am thinking words in my head that eventually become nonsense thoughts that I am not in control of and then I fall asleep. When my girlfriend goes to sleep, she sees a kind of black and white spherical planar blob thing until she falls asleep.

I tried falling asleep to visual imagery a few nights ago and it worked. I saw nothing for almost exactly 15 minutes, but then some natural reaction must have happened as I started seeing a surprisingly vivid black and white spherical image blob thing.

So in training myself to think more visually, that's about as far as I've gotten.

I googled for "visual thinking training" and the first link took me to my favorite internet crackpot, Win Wenger. Dude's awesome. I might actually start trying his suggestion to do underwater held-breath swimming.

http://www.winwenger.com/courses2.htm