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Comment by bgroat | Hacker News Reader

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bgroat·

I'm not deaf, but my primary thinking style is visual.

Sometimes it's exactly what you'd imagine - I visualize a data model, or an algorithm implementation.

Other times it's more abstract, symbolic, or analogy based

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And then there are people like myself who have aphantasia and can't visualize and (as in my case) can't hear an internal monologue. I can still think, obviously, but it's often done "somewhere else" (or at least that's how I think of it). I found it best when learning something, for example, to soak in as much of it as I could, then go do something else. I expect to get insights appearing out of the ether later on as some part of my brain assimilates it.

I don't know if this is because of the bicameral mind, but I expect that most people have cognition happening on different levels or in different channels all the time.

Can you expand on that? How do you make visual analogies, or express abstract ideas visually?

I would argue that you understand the relationship between an alligator and a water buffalo immediately... Now your brain is turning it into language to come up with words like "predator/prey" or "hidden danger" or whatever. But the abstract relationship did not require language before your brain started to reason about it. I think it's the other way around.

Reason, perhaps. Reason via internal monologue... that's the part related to this theory.

Sometimes when architecting something I'll imagine an elderly person with a child and that'll indicate that I'd want to utilize inheritance instead of composition

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