[goto_self]

> Some people claim to be visual thinkers, but there are blind people who are still perfectly able to think. Likewise with deafness. Clearly neither of these can be the only basis for thought.

I don't dispute your conclusions, but I think you might be taking the idea of visual thought too literally. It doesn't necessarily mean a rendered view of a scene, but rather can encompass abstract visual-like spaces such as control flow graphs when thinking through the proof of a program's correctness

[ken]

You may be right. Though, I recently ran across the concept of "aphantasia", e.g., [1]. Apparently not being able to visualize what my friends and family look like is not normal! Or being unable to recall colors.

There's even this [2] "test", which claims that most people when told to imagine a red star will "see" an actual image, which I'm still trying to understand.

I can think about control flow graphs in my head, but it's not exactly visual. (You could also represent any graph as a table, of course, but I don't think of it in tabular form, either.) The visual is more like the means of communication. Similarly, in math, equations and procedures aren't always how I do work, but they are often how I communicate what I've done. I wonder if that could be what other people mean when they speak of visualization. When I'm asked to compute 19*21, I'm not literally expanding (x-1)(x+1), but that's essentially what I'm doing, and if you asked me to explain, that's probably what I'd say. Thoughts are simply a different medium (than words or graphs or equations or music), and every serialization method I've tried so far is extremely lossy.

[1]: https://www.world-of-lucid-dreaming.com/cant-visualize-you-m... [2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/Aphantasia/comments/aioyga/simple_a...