anyone else think like this? or heard of anyone that does?

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When I think, remember, imagine, dream - there are no 'pictures' or 'video' no visual at all. Only words and emotions... no sound that isn't my own voice. It makes remembering things difficult at times, like faces, memories... the memories I do have are all linked to powerful emotion from that time. I have researched a lot and have gotten very little insight. The only thing close I have found was on a fourm for left handers. Apparently a number of them think in words.

That just means that you're a verbal thinker rather than a visual one.

I mostly think in pictures/videos, but sometimes I think in words when I'm feeling particularly introspective.

i do both, depending on the type of memory/thought and my current level of introversy, but generally, my random thought process ('daydreaming') is in words indeed.

Temple Grandin thinks there might be at least three different ways autistic people think--visual thinking, language thinking, mathematical thinking. Each way can have its own strengths and weaknesses. I'm a very visual thinker (and have a strong autobiographical memory) and can remember even the most minor details of many events in my life as far back as the age of one and can imagine very vivid settings for the stories I read and write (better than the characters, actually). On the other hand, I have problem with abstract thinking, so I suck at math.

I'm a very verbal thinker, though I may be more 'auditory' than anything. I constantly have songs stuck in my head and I'm very sensitive to noise levels and nuance in general. When I try to see pictures in my head, they are usually dull and blurry at best. I can have vivid dreams that have some visual elements, though.

For me, it makes it difficult to shut out auditory information, such as background noise. In order to talk or read, I have to say the words in my head... so if there is competing noise, then I may not be able to "hear" myself. Sounds silly, but I notice this problem a lot.

I do both visual and verbal thinking, depending on what's required. In my job I imagine constructs with shapes to represent logic, like when imagining a packet of data traversing parts of a network I imagine pipes and walls and sorters and vertical heirarchies, or if its really something real I just picture it. But to evaluate something or summarise I use words in my head; actual conversations that I might use with someone else.

If I'm thinking of a scene, its always a picture/video.
If I'm thinking of saying something I will think in a line of words.

Interesting thread topic.

I think in mentalese - no pictures, no words, no mathematics, just thought. I might turn my thoughts into words, pictures or mathematics, but the fact that I sometimes have difficulty doing that seems to me to be pretty good evidence that thinking isn't "in" anything, at least in my case, or in the case of anybody who has ever experienced a delay between having a thought and processing it into one of those forms that so many people believe to be the thought itself. Words, pictures and mathematics are merely communication tools.

I think in imagined scenarios, holograms or little "movies", in which my inner voice, if present, is me talking to someone else. This is the opposite of what a schizophrenic does during a psychotic episode, interpreting his inner voice as one or more other people talking to him. On rare occasion I talk to myself to remind myself of something, and then I need to do so out loud.

It's interesting that so many autistics think visually while it's still not a defining characteristic of autism, e.g. the initiator of this thread thinks exclusively in words. So what is the "common thread" in autistic thinking then, if anything? Being really good at one way of thinking and really bad at any other way?

Not quite - I don't "see" anything much normally - if I concentrate I can get a brief impression of a triangle or a square, say - but I do dream visually and sometimes when I'm nearly asleep I've noticed I can see pictures. Which is kinda odd.

What puzzles me is that I can draw maps with reasonable accuracy, but I can't mentally picture one - I suppose the information is stored in a different way as a set of directions ("north ten miles gets you Sunderland, north ten miles gets you Newcastle, north another thirty or forty and bend round to the left gets you the border..." "...Morocco then Algeria then Tunisia then Libya then Egypt...") rather than an eidetic (is that the word?) memory of "what it looks like." I couldn't draw a picture of anyone from memory... but I do still recognise them (mostly). Whole thing is confusing and it's hard to know what a "normal" capacity to picture things is.

I'm not sure there is a specific style of thinking anymore than is normal..e.g. compare my post (I'm NT) with yours and hale_bopp, its the same style Id say. Maybe a more autistic person would be more divergent?

That's very interesting. It means your outwardly behavior is that of a visual thinker while you do not experience yourself as such. Like me being able to talk without clearly knowing where the words come from. Maybe consciousness is like a light that illuminates some but not all events that go on in a mind at any given moment, i.e. you do visual thinking too and I do verbal thinking too but these activities never make it into our respective consciousnesses?

Maybe relevant to the above is a piece of research done a few years ago suggesting that human brains don't quite think when they think they're thinking, i.e. what we identify as our "thoughts" are actually reflections or echoes of information processing (the actual thoughts) that occurred a fraction of a second earlier.