“Do you also see the world in pictures?” – I asked my best friend Natalia 6 months ago.
She paused for a second and looked at me, almost surprised.
“Absolutely not. I think in text… do you??”
I was floored, because I had spent my entire life assuming that the way I process the world - in images, in actual pictures that I see, move around, and build on - was just how thinking works.
After this conversation, I started to dig deeper and wanted to know how exactly different people think. Being in San Francisco, I went to the MoMA Design Store and was super lucky that day to find a book written by Temple Grandin, a scientist and autism advocate, Visual Thinking - that's the moment where I can say that this book changed my life and the way I perceive the world.
Temple Grandin - scientist, autism advocate, author of Visual Thinking
Grandin breaks thinking styles into three categories, and I want to walk through each one properly, because once you see the differences, you start recognizing them everywhere - in your team, clients, friends, yourself.
1. Object Visualizers
These are people who think in photo-realistic, specific images. Not abstract shapes or rough sketches in their head - actual pictures, almost like a film playing on demand. Grandin describes her own mind as something like a search engine that returns photographs instead of links (so does mine).
When she designs a piece of equipment, she runs it in her imagination like a virtual reality simulation, testing it before it physically exists. She can walk through a building that hasn't been built yet and spot the flaw.
Michelangelo is a classic example. He reportedly said the sculpture already existed inside the marble - he was just removing what didn't belong. Thomas Edison worked the same way, building and rebuilding in his mind before ever touching a prototype. And Grandin herself used this exact ability to revolutionize how livestock facilities are designed, by literally seeing the space from the animal’s point of view before anyone laid a single brick.
If you've ever met someone who says “I need to see it to understand it” and means it completely literally - that's probably them.
2. Visual-Spatial / Pattern Thinkers
This type doesn't think in pictures exactly - they think in patterns, systems, and relationships between things. Less “I see a chair” and more “I see how all the forces acting on the chair relate to each other.” Mathematics, music, code, architecture, chess. Their brain is naturally mapping structure.
Einstein is the most famous example, and the details are worth knowing: he didn't arrive at the theory of special relativity through equations. He got there by imagining what it would physically feel like to ride alongside a beam of light - a spatial, sensory thought experiment, not a verbal one. The math came after.
Same with Mozart, who reportedly heard entire compositions complete in his head before writing a single note. And most great architects and engineers fall here - people who can hold an entire system in their mind, rotate it, stress-test it, and find where it breaks.
3. Verbal Thinkers (my friend Natalia)
These people process the world through language - internal narration, words arriving in sequence, ideas forming as sentences. They're strong at writing, argumentation, teaching, building cases. They're also the people for whom almost every major institution was designed: schools, universities, legal systems, corporate hierarchies.
The essay, the memo, the performance review, the standardized test - all of it was built for this cognitive style.
Think Susan Sontag, Barack Obama, Oprah, most of academia. People who, when they hit a complex problem, literally talk themselves through it, and the thinking sharpens through language.
Here's the thing Grandin keeps returning to: verbal thinkers dominate national conversation in media, publishing, politics, and education - which is part of why this bias is invisible to the people who benefit from it. It's not malicious, it's just that the system was built by verbal thinkers, for verbal thinkers, and everyone else has been quietly filtered out.
So what does this actually change?
I started asking my clients at my brand venture company, Aliiiens, how they actually think (you can always guess, but a well-asked question removes the guesswork completely and gets you straight to the insight you need - the ability to ask the right questions is my favorite skill).
And I realized that a lot of people never ever think about how they think. Of course, they’ve been guessing and feeling what they can do better or how they learn faster - but never doing a deep analysis of their own brain. Which is exactly Grandin's point - we don't question our own operating system until someone shows us there are others running on something different.
Once I started understanding each client's dominant mode, I stopped presenting work the same way to everyone. The work itself didn't change, but the way my team and I packaged and delivered the thinking behind it did - completely.
For object visualizers, I lead with the visual. Mood boards and references come before strategy documents. The brand world gets established through images first, words second. Handing this type of person a 20-page written deck before they've seen a single image is genuinely hard for them to engage with - simply because their brain needs something to see before it can evaluate.
For spatial-pattern thinkers, I show the architecture. How the positioning connects to the messaging, how the messaging feeds the channel strategy, how it all holds together as a system. These clients get frustrated with beautiful presentations that don't show the logic underneath. They want the map, not just the destination.
For verbal thinkers, I write it out. Long-form rationale, detailed creative briefs, positioning statements they can read, sit with, annotate, and respond to in writing. A well-constructed brand narrative gives them something to think with.
Grandin makes the point that the biggest cost of ignoring cognitive diversity isn't philosophical - it's practical. She traces the Fukushima nuclear plant failure and the Boeing 737 MAX crashes back partly to the absence of visual thinkers in the room - people who would have caught the design flaws that verbal and managerial thinkers walked right past.
The stakes at that scale are enormous. But the same principle applies in every meeting, every client relationship, every team.
The person who can't engage with your slide deck might be the most important voice in the room. They just need the information handed to them differently.
Ask people how they think. Explore your own brain and let’s start to connect with people on a much deeper level. I have a feeling it might change the world.