Brain teased

I reckon you’ve heard enough about my bladder for the rest of the year, so let’s move onto something more cerebral … brains.

I’ve been fascinated lately by the different ways people think.

I am stealing this question from Forbes: “Have you ever asked yourself what kind of thinker you are? Are you visual, kinesthetic, auditory, or verbal?”

I’ve been doing random surveys recently and discovered there are even people who think in colours. It’s called synesthesia and it’s very rare.

Visual thinkers are more common. They see images in their mind’s eye and include everyone from object visualisers with a knack for design and problem-solving to those who are more mathematically inclined and excel at pattern recognition and systemic thinking.

Temple Grandin, who is on the autism spectrum, has written two books – called Thinking In Pictures and Visual Thinking – as part of her mission to discover how people think and transform our understanding of how our brains are wired.

I never really thought about the way I think until I failed a brain teaser test last year.

I literally could not get my head around answering questions like: “A windowless room has three light bulbs. You are outside the room with three switches, each controlling one of the light bulbs. If you can only enter the room one time, how can you determine which switch controls which light bulb?”

It was made especially hard by the fact I was only given a brief period of time to answer the questions, most of which were curlier than the one above.

I looked at them and totally panicked. I did not know where to even start. By question three I was distressed. The test made me feel really stupid, even though I know I’m not stupid.

The test has haunted me ever since – I’ve always struggled to let moments of shame go.

I keep wondering why I couldn’t answer those questions when I am a relatively intelligent person.

Is it because I’m getting old or because my brain isn’t wired that way or because I have a neural condition or something else or all of the above.

To try and get the anxiety out of my head – where it endlessly swirls – I’ve been examining how I think and looking for answers.

When I think my head fills with pictures. Most come from memories I have filed away. But I can also visual how something new will look, such as window furnishings, without needing to be show an image.

(If I had been a bloke in the 80s, I would not have needed a Playboy subscription …)

I can look at a floor plan and mentally rearrange it so it flows better. I can renovate a bathroom in my head, swivelling fixtures around to different parts of the space.

When I was a weekly magazine editor I loved getting the list of ads for each issue – double, single and half pages, with their placement requests (ie in the food section, in the first half, on the back cover). It delighted me to place them all in a grid alongside the editorial, like some sort of jigsaw puzzle – it was one of my favourite tasks of the week.

I am also a repository for endless facts about movie stars and alcohol brands, but I have trouble remembering people’s names and faces. I often need to search for other clues such as their hairstyle, fashion sense or voice to provide context and deduce who people are.

My brain makes random decisions about information it will retain or delete. You can swear blind you told me or showed me something and I will have absolutely no recollection. But I can tell you what I had for lunch at Bridgewater Mill in the 1990s (and see the dish and restaurant in my mind’s eye).

I can look through the lens on my phone and know how a shot should be framed and whether what I see is nondescript or worth pushing the button to capture the moment.

I can move into a new subject area, put myself into its audience’s head and make a pretty good guess within a few days or weeks about what subject line would attract a higher open rate on an electronic newsletter.

I love discovering details in data that other people might have overlooked. I get oddly excited whenever Australian Bureau of Statistics media releases land in my inbox.

I am incapable of filing and constantly fear I have forgotten something, but struggle with the concept of keeping notes or a diary.

Even when I put things in electronic diaries I can get completely distracted just minutes before and, despite the reminders, completely forget.

When I’m researching something online I can vulture my way around the internet identifying the important snippets of information in long articles and then disseminate them into something more simple and succinct. A bit like what I am doing now, although getting to the bottom of how my brain is wired has proven more difficult.

Maybe all those things are completely unrelated.

I don’t seem to fall directly into any of the categories Temple Grandin explores.

“I didn’t know when I was in my 20s that other people thought in words,” she explains. “I assumed everybody thought in pictures. And when I wrote Thinking in Pictures originally, I thought all people with autism thought in pictures. And then, after reading some reviews of the book, I started thinking about people I’ve met. I figured out that autistic people’s thinking falls into three categories: visual thinker/logic thinker, and musical/mathematical thinker.”

There’s a bit too much detail here so feel free to skim …

• Visual thinkers — Visual thinkers think in pictures and see things, either in their mind or physically, in order to process information.

• Verbal/logic thinkers — Verbal/logic thinkers tend to be good at learning languages, and have an affinity for words, literature, and speech. They love to make lists, and will often memorize (mundane) things such as train timetables & routes, stories in alphabetical order, and software product codes. Verbal/logic thinkers tend to have a huge memory for verbal facts on all kinds of things, such as film stars, sporting events, publications, or historical events.
• Music and math (“pattern”) thinkers — Music/math/pattern thinkers think in patterns. Pattern thinking is a more abstract form of visual thinking; thoughts are in patterns instead of photo-realistic pictures. Pattern thinkers see patterns and relationships between numbers.

I think in pictures mainly, but my mother, for example, does not. Neither does this writer at The New Yorker.

There are also bottom-up, analytical, lateral, and associative thinkers. I am a bit of a bottom-up thinker, but not entirely.

Bottom-up thinking is a process of taking in details and building up from there. The fragmented bits and pieces are structured and categorised, and then an induction is made—a process that brings rise to something—and the bits and pieces are being reassembled into something that is coherent, and leads to a satisfactory conclusion.

Temple Grandin writes: “I’m good at trawling through the Internet through vast amounts of journal articles and then pick out what are the really important things. I then synthesize all of this resource down into one short paragraph… That’s something that I’m good at doing… I’m a bottom-up thinker—I take the details and put them together.”

I would love a simple explanation for why I couldn’t do that brain teaser test – one that says there is nothing wrong with me, that my brain just works differently rather than it indicating a problem.

Doing those brain teasers was also a wake-up call for me about the pitfalls of trying to standardise people with a single test. Assumptions shouldn’t be made about someone based using a one-size-fits-all approach.

Don’t get me started, for example, on how terrible the HSC is …

OK, I can’t help myself. It is very terrible.

Why do we make kids, rote learn quotes and essays. Why don’t we give them the quotes and then ask them to discuss them?

Why is the HSC year all about passing exams rather than learning and preparing for adulthood?

I can’t wait for the youngest’s last year at high school to be over so she can escape the madness. I didn’t even open her most recent report card. I am disappointed by the system and I don’t want to know.

What – and also how – do you think?

Song of the day: London Beat “I’ve been thinking about you”