People's belief that thinking is inherently visual seems to stem from our ability to think subjectively through visuals, assuming that we have more visual content in the flows of our minds than auditory or kinesthetic.

Followers of this belief lump everything else into one heap - either as abstractions, mere narratives, or don't consider it thinking at all.

This leads to the desire to communicate through images and better express these images.

Text is something else - first we perceive it visually, then we pronounce it audially in our mind, after which this text can bloom into various synesthetic representations for all senses.

Mind and thinking are inherently synesthetic by nature, and text, not without reason, better allows expressing this synesthesia, extracting formalities from it, and then these texts allow rendering it back into synesthetic representation.

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Picture from dall-e prompt “modern systems thinking practitioner”

Not a hobo!