On (My Own) Visual Memory

There are times when I think my memory is deficient.  There are a lot of things that I don't remember that most everyone else does.  Being how I am, I have to think through it all and wonder if there's some pattern or some category of things that I don't remember or some theory I can create...  One of those theories would be that I didn't care about the same things other people did, and so I didn't remember the same things.  And one of those categories could be visual memory.  Or so I thought.

I supposed that visual memory was storing and recalling images, and I definitely question my ability to remember images.  I mean, if you were to ask me to remember an image, I just don't think I could remember it as an image.  I'd remember it as details.  For example, if I were trying to copy a drawing, I'd focus on the major lines and their relative angles and lengths, rather than by seeing an image of the drawing, or even an image of the lines, I guess you could say.  So it would seem natural to say that my skill was not in visual memory.

Well while searching stuff on visual memory, I found this game.  I was like, "Oh, a visual memory game.  Let's see what it's like," and I tried it.  Yeah you can probably guess how well I did.  One try perfect through all 9 levels.  And I wondered, "Well can I do it again, or did I just get lucky?" and I tried again, and I did it again.  2 runs through and no misses.  But I still wonder, is this really testing my visual memory?  Because you know I'm not doing it "visually".  (With that said, I am curious as to how well other people would do on this, and how they would approach it.)  How I memorize it is first by remembering the locations of the circles along with some order through them (usually top down and left to right, like the order of words in a book, but not always, like if it's a U shape I'd think of the order as going along the U), and then I memorize the corresponding sequence of colors.  So it'd be something like, there's 5 colors in these spots, this is the order I see them in, and the 5 colors for that corresponding order are red orange yellow blue purple, or something like that.  (I had trouble with the one that I guess is maroon; when I saw it the first time I was saying red and the other red-ish color, and I got by with that.)  Then my memory was good enough to keep a sequence of 9 colors memorized long enough to put them back.

I also saw this example from wikipedia's article on visual memory.  All I can say is again that's not something I'd memorize as an image.  It's a Z (a standard Z), a rectangle with three sections (split by horizontal lines, with the size going from small to large), and a circle to the top right.  And it's hard to put into words, but I can remember the relative distances between the objects.  And so I bet, if I were asked to, I could remember this image for a long time, not as an image really, but as the combination of the information I gave here.  A Z, a vertical rectangle with 3 sections and a circle to the top right.  My only question would be: would other people try to remember something like that as an image?  It just seems so unnatural to me.

I'm still not convinced I have a good visual memory.  I think I just have a good memory in general, and can remember the necessary parts of an image through a sort of ordered(?) memory.

One last thing would be that I've heard of people who say that they think (I guess you could say that the contents of their thoughts are) in images.  I guess that doesn't surprise me.  I mean, it sounds very unnatural to me, but I'm sure that's what those people would say about how I think too.  My thoughts were words, a running dialogue, ordered logic...  There were books that I read that were very detailed in their descriptions of places, and those descriptions were always kind of boring to me.  Maybe they talk about a castle, and the great details of all the majestic paintings and statues throughout the castle, and the colors, and all that imagery...  And all I'd really get out of it is that it was a place for someone rich and powerful, or something.  Which is why I know that if I were to write any kind of story, anyone who cared about imagery would find it severely lacking in that department.  I'll say, "They were in this place," and you'll say, "Well what did it look like?" and I'll say, "Well there were these places where one person would have an advantage in a battle, and there were these places where someone could hide," and you'll say, "Well, I mean, what did those places look like?" and I'll say, "Well I dunno, they were just, you know, your average hiding places and stuff like that."  I'd expect that it's like a spectrum,  where you think more in words or more in pictures or somewhere in between.  And I get the feeling that I'm pretty extreme on this spectrum as well.