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A couple of years later I was hanging out in his room laying on his bed reading the latest issue of Scientific American, while he was working on something at his workbench, and I read an article about eidetic (photographic) memories. And I said, "Hey, this is cool! There are people who can take pictures with their minds and hold them and look at them even after the picture is gone!" And he looked at me, astonished, and said, "I thought everyone could do that." I said, "No, it's extremely rare." And it is, but it turns out my brother is one of them. We did an experiment; the article had a picture in it of Alice looking up at the Cheshire cat sitting in a tree, and my brother looked at it for about 20 seconds, and then I took it away and concealed it from him and asked him questions like "How many rings on the cat's tail? How many flowers are there at the base of the tree and how many petals does each have?" And he answered all the questions correctly. Even among people with eidetic memories, my brother is rare. Most of them can do it with photographs, but my brother can also do it with abstract drawings, like schematics. Turns out that when he wanted to wire a circuit, he'd capture the drawing in his head. He could close the magazine because he didn't need it anymore. Whenever he needed to consult the schematic, he'd get kind of a blank look and peer off into space for a moment, and then get back to his wiring. That was what he'd been trying to make me do -- but since I don't have an eidetic memory, I couldn't. The linked article talks about the latest release of Mac OSX. Henry Norr is a Mac fan from way back, but even he mentions that he still finds the dock to be somewhat less useful than it might be because of its exclusive use of graphics icons, as opposed to the mix of icons and text which is used on the Windows taskbar (which Norr says is more useful). And it suddenly occurred to me: Could it be that Jobs, who has always emphasized the graphic over the text, is an "image" thinker instead of a "word" thinker? It's long been known that the subjective experience of thought for most people is of a "voice" inside the head. But for some people, the subjective experience is a series of images. Such people are not necessarily any less intelligent nor are they necessarily less articulate in expressing themselves verbally, but it is a difference nonetheless. It is not actually something you can detect from external behavior; picture thinkers can be great writers and word-thinkers can be great artists -- though I suspect it's more common to be the other way around. Research has shown that "verbal" thought occurs mainly in the left frontal lobe and that "visual" thought mainly in the right lobe, and that for most people the left lobe dominates; picture thinkers make up a few percent of the population. I happen to use both kinds; I switch between them freely and use whichever is appropriate for the kind of problem I'm trying to solve, and sometimes I use them both at once. I find that word-thinking is better for detailed problem solving and for when I'm writing, but that image-thinking is better for things like analyzing entire systems and doing timing analyses, which I can do in my head while other people have to do them on paper. Of course, these things vary quite a lot from person to person, and most word-thinkers use images some of the time and vice versa. But you do get people who go to extremes, and it just occurred to me that Jobs might be exclusively a picture-thinker. Work with me here. If that's true, then for 25 years he's been attempting to design the perfect computer for picture thinkers like him, because he thinks "everyone can do that", the way my brother thought everyone had a photographic memory. So the Mac interface has always tried to use spatial and graphics and icons for things that were often controlled with text on other GUIs. And the Mac has collected a core group of believers while the majority scoff at its GUI concepts. It is perhaps no accident that the greatest stronghold of commercial Mac users is commercial artists, who would be expected to be predominately picture thinkers. The Mac true believers are absolutely convinced that the Mac GUI is well in advance of the alternatives because it matches the way they think more closely, and don't understand why the rest of us are not overwhelmed by its conceptual beauty. To them it seems obvious that this is how it should be done -- which might make sense for picture thinkers who don't understand word thinking. The Windows interface, which is the overwhelming commercial success, is more gen 
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