"We" don't all "Think in images". Most do, supposedly. Between
70-85%. The blind from birth do not, nor do I and between 15-30%
of the population. It doesn't seem to slow my thinking: I do
very well on timed tests, thank you. I am and have always been
primarily an auditory/kinesthetic thinker, and I must convert
math problems (which are visual shorthand) into words to solve
them. But I do that very well: word problems are where I shine.
Shakespeare-- the ultimate wordsmith-- has been a passion of
mine since early childhood, and am outraged by productions that
treat his words as so much audio wallpaper and try to substitute
stage pictures so that word-deaf people will "get" it. I am
shocked-- shocked!-- by the statistic someone supplied about
the average auditor only "getting" 20% of the info in a speech
and therefore the necessity of repetition. It's my impression
that the average speechmaker does nothing BUT repeat, and if
I don't extract every scrap of info it's because I've been bored
into a stupor.
I was just in the tail-end of a snit about images substituting
for thought, and the snitty attitude seems to have slopped over
into what I intended as a helpful supplementary post. I certainly
agree with you about the pre-word-pre-image stage where the
mind has "grasped" something but not yet formulated it in a
way that it can be internally manipulated or externally communicated.
(I imagine of that sort of thought-stuff as "vectors".) My image-snit
is part of a larger fear of Virtual Reality. Humans seem to
be so ready to accept one Map as if it were the World Entire--
whether the Map be Scripture or Mortal Kombat. This is handy
when playing a role-- less adequate for dealing with life.
I suspect my character as well as my taste was permanently
warped by reading the huge collection of my Dad's childhood
Boys' Books my Grandma kept in her attic. I began reading at
3, with simple fairy tales and the Sunday comics, and advanced
through the rainbow of fairy tale collections. the Bobbsey Twins,
Hardy Boys, Tom Swift, Verne, Wells; Arthurian Legends, Louis
Carroll, Twain, Stevenson, Kipling, Doyle, Dickens and Scott.
I didn't know there WERE any Girl's Books! I was also devoted
to Shakespeare, and various Victorian poets. When I was in 3rd
or 4th grade, my parents (who were too cheap to waste money
on books for me when Grandma and the library could supply them)
wrote a letter requesting that the library allow me to take
out "real" books from the Adult section, which was granted.
Puffed up with the privilege, I scorned "kids" books, and only
met most of the childrens classics when I read them to my daughter.
by 
