Do you see things in pictures?

And after a nice week with work and the elf fantasy fair. Back to the weird up questions.

The title question was actually something my college supervisor asked me while he was having a meeting with me and my supervisor from work at school. This was connected to the talk about me having some issues with structuring my chapters and what I did with them.

The actual question was “I understand, you are a bit chaotic. Do you have your thoughts in words or in pictures?”

I said at the moment pictures, because the question had never occurred to me before but the only thing I was sure was that my thought most certainly didn’t come in sentences. So pictures was a more accurate thing.

Yet, as almost everything which I absorb which is new, it got me thinking… Or better, analyzing how exactly my thoughts came into place.

And thus, I ended up analyzing my mind processes… obviously way too late to actually mention them to anyone. But ah well, it was somewhat interesting to do. So I decided to just share here as well, mostly because I am also curious about how other people perceive their own minds at work.

So, first of all. Imagine a very very wide white space with lots of boxes. The border of these boxes is however, something a bit mist, you can’t exactly see where the lines of the box end exactly and the box can be either bigger or smaller than what you expect.

This is because I never fully accept any sort of knowledge in my head as granted, but because I need to make assumptions in life, I leave the borderlines of each area a bit foamy and I think of this as an error margin in my knowledge. So with this, if something changes and I need to change the basic way of how I perceive this area, I can do it rather easily and adjust all contents.

This is also why I tend to entitle myself “miss contingency plans” as I tend to pretty much picture all things (within my imagination and attention span limit) which can go off in a set of information I am provided. So the moment something goes off, I do an almost immediate adjustment to all that information.

This is more or less how I make of general areas of information in my head.

Now, picture the boxes filled with thin wool strings, which are all the same color and size. This is the lines of thought which I come up with inside the general areas of information (boxes).

So the thing is, this wool lines of wool have all the information which I associated while doing a line of thought regarding a question.

Once I pick one of these lines, I follow this line of thought in a video like sequence. The more I explore this line of thought, the more it will go on. Sometimes it will be separated in many pathways (usually when I encounter something which I do not have reliable information in and I want to continue thinking, so I start separating in A pathways assuming that a situation happened and B situation assuming the other situation happened). When I encounter this situations, I tend to go through all the other wool lines, trying to identify what is common and what can be used to make accurate forecasting of situations. This is where I start associating things which people wouldn't normally associate to and where my creativity tends to pop.

From these lines, I can also do 2 directions depending on the context that I am working with. I can either become more specific regarding a certain part of the line (what I call an idea that might work), so one can imagine this as certain line parts becoming thicker as I feed information on what might work and may not (again, more lines coming out of this).

This, or I can just make this line go on and on and try to make a prediction of the outcome.

This connects to the reason I dislike to think of the future or make long term plans. Because I, even without intending to, immediately start playing out all the possible scenarios which might come out of doing a choice or another and end up getting bored when I go on the mid 40’s planning. 

With all this, where is my structural problem comes from?

Well, first, my “lines” of thought do not go well with “explain what I am thinking to others” due to the fact that most people won’t form ideas such a wide margin of error just because it is entertaining to think of them.

Second, the moment I pick a line of thought, I can only follow it through and use other lines to help this pathway, so the whole picture becomes a sort of a background thing.

And lastly, third, I think more in quantity of different scenarios than in good quality of the description. So while I’ll have around 4 new ideas on how to work a problem, I won’t immediately think through why this initial idea didn't work.

So, assuming that anyone actually managed to go through all this text. This is how my mind more or less works… on good days.

My methods to improve my structure have been to have post its around me with what I was thinking when I initially went into the box (in order to get me the whole picture) and I tend to write all the lines I didn’t follow the moment I enter one of those problems crossroads. This way I don’t lose the other options and I can pursue the option I was going for at ease. Since in my case, it is very easy to have ideas and even more easy to forget about them.

For writing (in my case, report writing), I make the chapters beforehand with many sub-chapters and place them from general knowledge to specific, I avoid to the maximum explaining how I got the idea and instead try to work on the amount of scientific background on why it will work.