Same here. I usually find myself creating charts and graphs in my mind to try better understand concepts and whatnot.
Writer. I’m the guy in school that frantically wrote everything the instructor said, lest the Charlie Brown’s Teacher factor come into play.
I enjoy reading, but unless I take notes whilst doing so, I’ll forget most of what I read. This saves me a lot of money on books as I can read the same one dozens of times, but it’s a bitch if I’m trying to learn something.
I learned a little bit about Gardner’s theories of multiple intelligences in my education degree in 2002, when it was just starting to be fashionable. (Education trends come in and out of style, just like everything else.) Some schools are even getting their students to classify their learning styles.
And I saw an interesting BBC “reality documentary” last night, Battle of the Brains, which mentioned the same theories and tested them in some quite amusing and interesting ways.
Interesting. I think it’s part of a growing trend towards introspection - lately, everyone I meet has been quoting their Myers Briggs types at me, maybe as some kind of warning.
INTJ. 
I am almost exclusively a reading learner. Auditory - yeah, I get the adults in Charlie Brown effect. I try to pay attention, and I do, but if you want me to grasp something complex, write it down for me. People tell me directions, but I just nod and ignore them - I have a map. When in school, I love classes where all the information comes from handouts or textbooks - I just read and mostly ignore the teacher.
I just came in here to mention that, or as I learned it, the 7 styles of learning (naturalist wasn’t included, when I learned about it). I learn by a combination of two or three styles, but I’m constantly amazed by how differently my small sons learn. One is absolutely a kinesthetic learner, one is mostly spatial and rhythmic, and I don’t know about the other one yet.
None of them listen to me, so I can rule out anything interpersonal or auditory. 
For me, visual is best. And a video is better than seeing something in real time.
If I tape a PBS nature or history show, I will constantly pause and rewind it to pick up the details I would have missed seeing it as aired.
When I was getting my MBA (~1990), lots of the business grad students were working on tests to evaluate personality, learning style, etc., etc. They used the MBA students as their guinea pigs.
And I and the other two engineers in the program were their nemesis. We tested to the extreme on all their tests. I think some of their advisors (who were my professors) took sadistic glee in suggesting “Oh, see how Lightray does on it.”
Back to the drawing board they would go, then, having concluded that I was an emoter with high emotional intelligence (er… no), or borderline developmentally disabled because my “learning styles” were skewed all over (alas, no; I had the highest GPA in the program).
That last one was what this thread made me think of. I can recite conversations back in tedious detail – but I can’t learn stuff from somebody talking through it. I’m a fast reader, with good comprehension, but without pictures or graphs or whatnot I’m lost. This poor grad student’s test came back with me at the max or min possible on all four of his indicators (listening, reading, doing, and something else I’ve forgotten). Which his thesis apparently proposed was an indicator of developmental disability… he was sadly disappointed when I denied every suggestion he came up with.
INTJ, by the way.
I’m a doer, next a viewer, then a reader, last a listener. What works best for me is a bit of theory, followed by an example done by the teacher slowly and with explanations (which combines viewing and listening), but if I don’t get exercises to do on my own or they’re not complex enough to actually have to think about it, the knowledge doesn’t stay.
By “viewer” I mean that I do get more information from a picture or from looking at someone work than from words - in spite of the adagio, this is not always true. Not everybody can read maps, plans and schematics (schemata?); I can read them in any position including upside-down on the mirror.
You’re one of mine, Lightray. Including the funky tests (in my case, I test “undefined” 
), the engineering degree and the being INTJ.
Oooooh, someone else whose brain just shuts down after step two!
What happens to me is: Turn left at the light. Go straight two miles until the farmhouse and turn right. It’s about 18 miles after that,…( I glaze over)
What I hear is: Left at light. Right at Farm House. Wing it from there.
Definitely a reader. I don’t do so well with any medium that doesn’t allow me to go back and re-read stuff (my short-term memory is crap), so lectures or videos don’t work that well for me. I’m always telling people, “Email me about it, or I’ll forget”.
Reader, then doer.
Very strong visual memory, to the point where I effortlessly remember pictures and faces for ridiculously long periods of time from a brief glance.
Better than average auditory memory, which makes me a good mimic and lets me remember songs pretty easily even though I’m almost completely untrained musically. Actually, this one is annoying since there’s muzak everywhere all the time and I can’t shut it the hell out, and a lot of TV programs here will recycle music from everywhere. The Pirates of the Caribbean theme still seems to be a very popular choice, which is not a bad piece, but gets old after a while. The Harry Potter one is so distinctive I wonder why they bother ganking that one.
Oddly enough, I can’t remember names, even though I’ll often remember the personality and circumstances of meeting the person, down to what was worn even years after meeting them. If I need to remember the name, I have to make a visualization that incorporates the name, kind of like the credits for a film.
Kinesthetic memory good enough to pick up the basics of most sports in a few hours of practice. I learned how to ski in a day, well enough to make it down an intermediate slope by that afternoon.
As far as learning by doing, I think that the people who don’t solidify their conceptions that way are extremely rare. Until the advent of widespread literacy (we’re talking only about a century or so) that was the only way to learn things. You’d have to be a darn strange human for that not to work.
Major reader here.
My old American History teacher taught his class this way. The entire session each day was literally him simply covering the blackboard in notes which the students would then copy down. Once everyone was caught up, he’d erase and do it again.
Meanwhile I was off to the side of the class reading and rereading the relevant material in the textbook. Far more interesting and stuck in my head more. Never wrote a single word down. I think the teacher was a little disappointed, but he let me do as I pleased. I still consistently earned the highest grade in the class.