here's a question do you sometimes have
difficulty remembering people's names
but your greater remembering their faces
or maybe you're really good at moving
odd shaped furniture around corners or
packing your carful with so much stuff
everyone told you it was going to be
impossible if so you might just be a
visual thinker how about this
try and remember an event from your past
what happens do you find yourself
remembering something fuzzy like the
significance or emotion or mood around
that event or do you remember specific
scenes and images for some people it
turns out that images and spatial
relationships seem to dominate their
thinking process basically they think in
pictures it's thought that upwards of 60
percent of people are in this category
and it's a continuum not all or none
some people just think this way more
than others for example for some people
and this might be you a messy desk isn't
the problem at all you know where
everything is but you know where it is
in relation to everything else so when
someone comes along and cleans that desk
up supposedly helping you organize you
completely feel lost and you can't find
anything the same sort of spatial
thinking that helps you navigate a messy
desk can be incredibly powerful the
chess grandmaster Bobby Fischer said
that he could see all of the pieces on
the chessboard even when it wasn't in
front of him which allowed him to
practice and play in his head Nikola
Tesla a pretty amazing inventor took
this one step further and said he was
able to build and rebuild complicated
machines in his mind and then run them
to see where the moving parts could
potentially fail when he was only 24
years old the inventor Thomas Edison
described his experience this way I have
innumerable machines in my mind now
which I shall continue to illustrate and
describe day by day when I have the
spare time but this kind of thinking
visual thinking sometimes comes with a
price
namely it can be hard to communicate
what you're thinking to other people
maybe you've had this experience where
you see something pretty clearly in your
head but you wind up needing to draw it
to explain it to someone else Albert
Einstein often said words failed him to
describe the images in his head
but it turned out those images were the
key to unlocking the secrets of the
universe it was after he envisioned a
man riding a wave of light that he was
able to construct his theory of
relativity James Clerk Maxwell the
mathematical physicist had a similar
experience his colleagues urged him to
show the relationship between energy
entropy and volume using equations which
is how they best communicated ideas
instead he used clay and plaster to show
the relationship in the way that he
understood it as a physical and visual
form of thermodynamics and that's the
power of visual metaphors they allow
people to see complex relationships in
new relatively simple ways and the
history of invention and discovery is
filled with those kind of stories for
example August kekulé I unlocked a new
way of thinking about the structure of
molecules when he envisioned a snake
eating its own tail in that moment he
realized that the bonds in the molecule
benzene formed a ring and this led to a
whole new way of understanding how
molecules could be visualized and that's
ultimately the challenge that visual
thinkers face how do you get those
images out of your head and into the
real world as inventions or discoveries
it's also why right now is such an
exciting time for people who think like
this the digital age has brought
technology that allows visual thinkers
to directly experiment with the forms
that they're best at understanding
visual thinkers can now fold complex
proteins on the screen or use 3d
printers to build almost any form they
can imagine and they can invent and play
in virtual reality spaces that just
couldn't exist in the real world it's a
good time to be a visual thinker so next
time you forget the names of streets on
a route that you can navigate with ease
don't beat yourself up you might just be
the next genius inventor of our time
what kind of inventor are you
you