Yes, actual chess thinking isn't necessarily visual. I think it's been shown (with brain scanning) that the visual cortex is hardly active at all when experienced players are thinking. So not being able to visually imagine doesn't have to be a handicap.
But I wasn't talking about thinking, rather about the
learning/encoding of chess, and there I maintain that seeing a pattern visually is the best known way to encode those patterns and hopefully transform them into some long-term, chess-specific memory. How does that work for you with your Anki cards dfan; is it enough to see positions and the right moves visually, or do you have to also explain/comment verbally to have any learning effect?
P.S. I wonder if any of the blind people who play chess were born blind, and if so how they went about learning the game. I would conjecture that verbally isn't even the
second-best way to present chess patterns for encoding, and instead
tactile should be used as much as possible, as in the special chess sets blind players are allowed to feel during play.
dfan wrote on 11/21/14 at 13:45:26:
I do calculate, I just keep track of the position in a more abstract manner than I understand most people do.
Possibly many, maybe even most players think in roughly the same, more abstract way you do; they just call it "seeing" or "imagining" because that's the closest thing to it and they haven't thought much about the difference.