# Deafness and visualization

**URL:** <https://boards.straightdope.com/t/deafness-and-visualization/773671>\
**Category:** Cecil's Columns/Staff Reports\
**Created:** [December 2, 2016, 9:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/deafness-and-visualization/773671 "2016-12-02T21:39:55Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Cartoonacy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/848f3c/32.png) [@Cartoonacy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cartoonacy)\
**Post date:** [December 2, 2016, 9:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/deafness-and-visualization/773671/1 "2016-12-02T21:39:55Z")

</div>

Re: Cecil’s column [“In what language do deaf people think?”](http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2486/in-what-language-do-deaf-people-think)

> [@](#):
>
> The answer to your question is now obvious. In what language do the profoundly deaf think? Why, in Sign (or the local equivalent), assuming they were fortunate enough to have learned it in infancy. The hearing can have only a general idea what this is like — the gulf between spoken and visual language is far greater than that between, say, English and Russian.

It brought to mind [this old thread](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=310467), and it occurs to me that this is the ideal counterargument to those who posted (starting at #10) that they didn’t believe it was possible to literally visualize things mentally.

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Folly](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/folly/32/3219_2.png) [@Folly](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Folly)\
**Post date:** [December 2, 2016, 10:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/deafness-and-visualization/773671/2 "2016-12-02T22:36:11Z")

</div>

That was the thread that got me to start reading the message board regularly. I found it amazing that there was a way to think that didn’t involve visualization, that apparently there are people out there that can’t visualize at all, and that I was 20-something years old and didn’t know either of those things.

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![Melbourne](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/b5e925/32.png) [@Melbourne](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Melbourne)\
**Post date:** [December 5, 2016, 10:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/deafness-and-visualization/773671/3 "2016-12-05T10:17:08Z")

</div>

“New Scientist” recently did a story on visualisation. Some group of researchers reported a study where they were able to measure (??) the ability. I can’t find a direct reference, and I think I’ve given the magazine away.

I hadn’t read that thread, and I realized, to my surprise, that I’m actually not very good at visualisation at all. Like some of the others, I hadn’t realized that when some people “visualise” they actually get “vision”. If I had realized how poor I actually am at visualisation, I probably wouldn’t have put so much effort into trying to visualise semi-conductor physics.