Why Some People Think in Pictures and Others in Words
Close your eyes and think of a horse. What happens?
Some people see one immediately — a specific horse, in a specific field, with light falling across its back. The image is vivid, almost photographic, and it arrived without effort. Others hear the word "horse" echo in their mind, followed by a cascade of facts and associations — four legs, mane, saddle, Kentucky Derby — but no picture at all. And some experience something harder to describe: a direct sense of knowing what a horse is, without either an image or a word carrying that knowledge.
If you have ever discovered that someone else's inner experience is fundamentally different from yours, you know the disorientation that follows. It feels like learning that other people see a different colour sky. The science behind this variation is now extensive, and it reveals something more interesting than a simple binary between "visual" and "verbal" thinkers. The human mind represents information in at least three distinct formats — and where you sit across them shapes how you learn, remember, create, and communicate.
What does it actually mean to think in pictures
When Temple Grandin published Visual Thinking in 2022, she brought decades of neuroscientific observation to a mainstream audience. Grandin, who is autistic and describes her own thinking as playing film clips in her mind, argued that a substantial portion of the population thinks primarily in images — and that modern education and workplace culture systematically sideline them by privileging verbal and written processing.
Grandin distinguished between two types of visual thinkers. Object visualisers see the world in photorealistic, detailed images — the specific grain of a wooden table, the exact shade of a sunset. Spatial visualisers think in patterns, abstractions, and relationships — the geometry of a circuit board, the trajectory of a projectile, the structure of a mathematical proof. Both are visual, but they recruit different neural circuits and lead to different strengths.
This distinction was formalised in research by Maria Kozhevnikov and Olesya Blazhenkova, who developed the Object-Spatial Imagery and Verbal Questionnaire. Their confirmatory factor analysis demonstrated that the three-dimensional model — object imagery, spatial imagery, and verbal processing — fit the data significantly better than any single bipolar visual-verbal scale. People are not simply visual or verbal. They occupy a position across at least three independent dimensions.
How the brain represents words versus images
The neuroscience is unambiguous on one point: verbal and visual processing rely on anatomically distinct neural systems.
Allan Paivio's dual coding theory, proposed in 1971, laid the foundation. Paivio argued that cognition operates through two independent but interconnected systems — a verbal system specialised for language and sequential processing, and an imagery system specialised for concrete, spatial, and perceptual information. The verbal system maps primarily to left-hemisphere language regions, including Broca's area and Wernicke's area. The imagery system maps to right-hemisphere and occipital-parietal networks.
Alan Baddeley's model of working memory added architectural detail. The phonological loop holds and rehearses sound-based information — the words of a sentence, the steps of an instruction, the melody of a phone number. The visuospatial sketchpad handles images and spatial layouts — the mental map you build during a meeting, the furniture arrangement you rotate in your mind before moving anything. These subsystems activate different brain regions, draw on separate resource pools, and can operate simultaneously with little interference.
The critical insight for individual differences: these systems vary in capacity independently of each other. A person can have a spacious phonological loop and a modest visuospatial sketchpad, or the reverse. The balance between them shapes what you naturally encode, what you remember, and what slips away.
Can brain imaging tell whether you are a visual or verbal thinker
Yes — and the differences are measurable, not metaphorical.
A study from the University of Pennsylvania using fMRI found that people who identified as visual thinkers showed greater visual cortex activation even when reading words, as though their brains were automatically translating language into images. Verbal processors showed the opposite pattern: when shown pictures, they activated regions associated with phonological processing, as if converting images into inner speech.
David Marks developed the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire in 1973, and it remains the gold-standard self-report measure for imagery vividness. Research has shown that VVIQ scores correlate with objective neural measurements — people who report more vivid imagery show higher activation in early visual cortex during imagery tasks. The subjective experience maps onto real differences in brain activity.
The variation is not trivial. At the extremes of the spectrum sit two populations that neurologist Adam Zeman at the University of Exeter named and brought to scientific attention. People with aphantasia — an estimated 1 to 4 percent of the population — cannot form voluntary visual images at all. Their mind's eye is blank. People with hyperphantasia — roughly 3 to 6 percent — experience mental images so vivid they approach the intensity of actual perception. Resting-state fMRI reveals that hyperphantasic brains show stronger connectivity between prefrontal cortex and the visual network, while aphantasic brains show weaker connectivity in the same pathways.
Do some people really have no inner voice
The visual imagery spectrum has a parallel in language. Not everyone has an inner voice — and those who do use it far less consistently than they assume.
Russell Hurlburt, a psychologist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, spent decades developing a method called Descriptive Experience Sampling to study what people actually experience moment to moment. Participants wear a beeper that sounds at random intervals throughout their day. At each beep, they record their inner experience in granular detail.
Hurlburt identified five distinct phenomena of inner experience: inner speaking, inner seeing, unsymbolised thinking, feeling, and sensory awareness. The finding that reshaped the field was this: each phenomenon occurred in roughly a quarter of sampled moments, and the variation between individuals was enormous. Some people experienced inner speech in 75 percent of their sampled moments. Others never experienced it at all.
In 2024, Johanne Nedergaard and Gary Lupyan proposed the term anendophasia for this variation — the absence or near-absence of inner speech. Their research found that adults who reported low levels of inner speech performed worse on verbal working memory tasks and responded more slowly during rhyme judgments. The mechanism makes intuitive sense: if your phonological loop is the primary workspace for verbal information, and your brain does not naturally route information through that loop, tasks that depend on inner rehearsal become harder.
The research remains debated — some commentators question whether anendophasia represents a true absence of inner speech or simply a difference in awareness of it. But the broader point is well established: the experience of inner speech is not universal, and it sits on a continuum just as visual imagery does.
The third way of thinking that most people miss
The binary of "pictures versus words" leaves out a phenomenon that Hurlburt's research surfaced repeatedly: unsymbolised thinking. This is the experience of thinking a specific, definite thought without that thought being carried by any word, image, or symbol.
Unsymbolised thinking was reported in 22 percent of all sampled experiences in Hurlburt's data, with individual frequency ranging from zero to 80 percent. A quarter of subjects never reported it. Those who did often found it difficult to describe — not because the experience was vague, but because language assumes that thoughts must be made of something. An unsymbolised thought is not fuzzy or incomplete. It is a clear, fully formed idea that simply is not represented in any sensory format.
This matters because the popular conversation about thinking styles tends to force everyone into one of two boxes — visual or verbal — when a significant minority of people think in neither. Their thoughts arrive as direct apprehensions of meaning, bypassing both imagery and language. Understanding this third mode helps explain why some people feel alienated by both "visual learner" and "verbal learner" frameworks — neither captures their actual experience.
Why this is not the same as learning styles
A necessary clarification: the research on thinking styles is emphatically not the same as the debunked "learning styles" theory.
In 2008, Harold Pashler and colleagues published a comprehensive review commissioned by the Association for Psychological Science. Their conclusion was clear: there is no credible evidence that matching instruction to a student's preferred learning style improves learning outcomes. The meshing hypothesis — the idea that visual learners learn better from visual instruction and verbal learners from verbal instruction — has been tested rigorously and has consistently failed.
What the neuroscience does show is something different. People genuinely differ in the internal format their brains use to represent information. A visual thinker does not necessarily learn better from diagrams. But their brain is doing something measurably different with the same input. The processing difference is real. The pedagogical prescription built on top of it was not.
The distinction matters because dismissing "learning styles" sometimes leads people to dismiss cognitive processing differences altogether. The baby gets thrown out with the bathwater. Your brain's preferred representational format is a real, measurable feature of your neural architecture. It just does not dictate the one correct way to teach you.
What your thinking style means for how you process information
The dimensions of visual processing, phonemic processing, and memory and sequencing interact in ways that shape daily experience far more than most people realise.
A strong visual processor with weak phonemic processing may excel at reading maps, remembering faces, and navigating spatial environments — but struggle with verbal instructions, lose the thread of conversations in noisy rooms, and find spelling unpredictable. This pattern appears frequently in people with dyslexia, where fMRI research has shown that some dyslexic individuals display "expert-like" activation patterns in visuospatial tasks, processing geometric figures faster and with brain activity that resembles trained specialists. The visual-spatial strength is real — but it coexists with a genuine phonological processing challenge, and neither cancels the other out.
A strong verbal processor with weaker visual processing may be the person who remembers every word of a conversation but cannot recall what the speaker was wearing. They think in sentences, reason through internal monologue, and often write with ease — but assembling furniture from a diagram or mentally rotating a three-dimensional shape may feel disproportionately effortful.
People with aphantasia — no voluntary mental imagery — develop compensatory strategies that are genuinely fascinating. Research has documented four major mechanisms: extensive use of lists and external organisation systems, systematic verbal processing strategies, anchoring new information to familiar conceptual frameworks, and multi-modal approaches that bypass imagery entirely. A 2021 study from the University of Exeter found that individuals with aphantasia performed just as well as visual thinkers on memory and learning tasks — they simply used different cognitive routes to get there. Many thrive in fields requiring logic, abstract reasoning, and verbal precision.
How to work with your cognitive architecture
The practical value of understanding your thinking style is not about labelling yourself. It is about recognising which cognitive systems your brain leans on most — and designing your environment to support them rather than fight them.
If you are a strong visual thinker, externalise information visually. Mind maps, diagrams, colour-coded notes, and spatial layouts are not learning-style mythology — they are strategies that leverage the neural architecture you actually have. When you need to process verbal information, convert it into visual form. Sketch the argument. Map the relationships. Give the visuospatial sketchpad something to work with.
If you think primarily in words, use that strength deliberately. Narrate your thinking. Write to understand. Summarise complex material in your own sentences. Your phonological loop is your primary processing workspace — feed it. When visual material is unavoidable, describe it verbally to yourself. Translate diagrams into propositions.
If you recognise the unsymbolised thinking pattern — ideas that arrive fully formed without words or images — trust it. The absence of a sensory vehicle does not make a thought less valid. But externalise those thoughts quickly, because without a verbal or visual anchor, they can be harder to retrieve later.
Understanding where you sit across these dimensions — visual processing, phonemic processing, expression and output — changes the question from "what's wrong with how I think?" to "how does my thinking actually work?" A tool like CognitionType maps your profile across seven cognitive dimensions, giving you a concrete picture of which systems are running strong and which are under strain. That specificity turns a vague sense of being "more visual" or "more verbal" into a profile you can actually use.
The mind you have is not the mind you assumed
The most striking finding from this research is how often people are wrong about their own inner experience. Hurlburt's work repeatedly documented a gap between what people believe about their thinking and what careful sampling reveals. People who assumed they thought in words all the time turned out to do so in only a fraction of their sampled moments. People who had never questioned their vivid imagery discovered, upon comparison, that their images were unusually faint — or unusually intense.
Your thinking style is not a personality trait or a preference. It is a feature of neural architecture — the specific balance of systems your brain uses to represent, manipulate, and communicate information. It shapes what you find easy and what you find hard, what you remember and what you forget, how you solve problems and how you express solutions.
The horse you imagined at the beginning of this article — vivid or absent, detailed or abstract, a word or a picture or a wordless knowing — that was not a right or wrong answer. It was a data point about the mind you are actually working with. The question is whether you know enough about that mind to work with it rather than against it.
CognitionType is an informational cognitive assessment, not a clinical diagnosis. If you suspect a specific learning difference or cognitive condition, we encourage you to seek a formal evaluation from a qualified professional.