I’m a total picture-thinker, and Betsy lives in a world of words. It was a huge challenge for her to help me arrange my thoughts in a linear fashion. Not only do I think in pictures, but my mind is associative. It creates chunks of visualized information and makes associations. To a verbal thinker, these associations may appear random, but in my mind I’m continuously sorting the images. Betsy, on the other hand, is a strictly linear verbal thinker. She needs a sentence to be grammatically correct before she can understand it and move on to the next. We learned that we think completely differently, but that difference became the cornerstone of our future collaborations. To the uninitiated verbal thinker, my initial draft would have looked like a disjointed series of chunks. Betsy takes my pictures and puts them in order.
Temple Grandin in Visual Thinking