If you don't think in pictures then...

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I think in conversations. And sometimes in songs. Pictures... not really.

Wow. Reading all the answers is interesting.

I don't think I think in pictures much, which is interesting because I'm a pretty good artist.

I also think in many senses, but a lot of times it's physical sensation. Like anxiety feels like a taught string, or a razor. But not an actual one that I touch with my fingers. Like a physical form that's not really physical. And a little bit of sound mixed in.

But some things yeah--like if I think of the sun I just see a flash image of a painting of the sun setting over the sea, yellow with orange rim. But If I think of something somewhat threatening, like a bug--I see a ladybug against a green background, then I feel a bug flying into my ear and through my neck, which is slightly disturbing. When i think "umbrella" I see a blue umbrella with black spots, but it's opening and hitting me in the face and I can feel it in my eye. The physical sensations come more when I'm anxious and they can be very distracting when I dwell on them--so I'm not sure if it's a good representation of my "normal" thinking.

But I don't see images of lots of different cats like google images.

I think in Manga, Anime, Comic strip, or Storyboards.

That means I think in pictures mostly. But each picture has an internal dialog attached to it witch will lead to another picture and and more internal dialog and another picture and so on.

If you still have trouble understanding how I think read some manga. I recommend Death Note!

I'm wondering, does anyone else get something along the lines of icons?

If I you think about, say, the concept of speed, what comes up? For me it's some sort of animal with its ears back, head forward, wind through the fur and back legs pumping.

I think in both images and words all the time. I "see" and "hear" the words in my mind, but I also see pictures/scenes of whatever I'm reading or thinking or talking about. In answer to edgewater's question above, when I think of abstract concepts/words like "speed," I always think in concrete images. Since there wasn't anything else describing what kind of speed it was, when I read that part of the post, I thought of somebody riding a bicycle really fast. One reason I know that I've always loved complex science theories is because I have the ability to imagine the abstract. I always personalize molecules and atoms and the like. I always imagine them doing the actions I read about and having feelings/personalities. Like the noble gases being really elite and snobbish or something like that. Going along with the other thread about needing to have detail, when I'm learning about something, if I don't have every last detail about a process or an event, I don't fully understand it. I often need more advanced descriptions in order to understand basic processes.

Definitely associative thinking and also visual memory. I defi Italy recall images and video first. I wouldn't say I was a visual thinker though as I tend to think in spoken words atop the visual images.

Jason

I am a picture thinker. Instead of mental grocery list, I have mental grocery map. Instead of written instructions on paper, I have mental instructional videos. For motor activities like lab eggsperiments, I do them many times in my mental videos before I do them for real. I don't worry about getting lost anywhere, because I am obsessed with maps, and I have many maps of many places in my mind, and I find it easy to convert real-life settings into mental maps for real-time navigation. The big problem with thinking in pictures is translating pictures into words, and I only figured out that I could do this about two years ago. Before that, it had eggscaped my attention that such a process could eggsist, and I had no inner speech that I could turn on to go with the pictures and videos that were my thoughts. The translations take a lot of effort, but I like that they are spontaneous communications from my mind instead of what I had previously, which were short scripted statements that made no sense to anyone.

In addition to pictures, I also have a lot of sensory things from sound, touch, smell, taste going on in my mind at the same time that I think visually to figure things out. I would say that I think moar using direct sensory perceptions and less using verbal representations or conceptual abstractions, whatever those are. I am a moar concrete than abstract thinker. Playing with all the details can be overwhelming and take a long time and screw up communications with people who think differently, but I like playing with the moar raw data, because the data can be generalized from the bottom-up in many different and interesting ways.

My abstract thinking tends to be something along the lines of transparent images
laid on top of each other.

With the the main thought on top but others tend to bleed through and blur the process.

Once I've moved onto something in the the background, the original thought is gone.

Memories are not as transparent and have a finite depth.

Abstract thinking tend to move along the "z" axis and memories tend to move along the "x-y" axis.

If someone says cat, I see a generic cat not one from my past.

I explained here
http://www.wrongplanet.net/postxf101833-0-30.html in the thread on High Performance IQ with no visualization ability

I mostly think in images and videos, but there's also a spoken narrative going on in my head alongside them. But if I didn't visualize the pictures and videos, I'd be unable to understand the words. The images and the videos are somewhat in a cartoonish style and they can vary in transparency too.

To me, words and music elicit visual sensations (colors, shapes, patterns of movements), I'm a synesthete. Also, words have physical properties to me, so I always picture them when I hear or utter them. I'm a writer and have a way around words, but I first need to visualize them, in order to be able to use them.

_________________
Probably 75% Aspie, 25% NT... and 100% ADHD

Aspie-quiz results:
Aspie score: 138 of 200 / NT score: 78 of 200 => Very likely an Aspie.

I think almost entirely in words and concepts. I have virtually no visualization ability.

I often feel frustrated with my thinking in pictures, because I feel that I cannot adequately communicate the pictures in words, and I wish that I could just project the pictures out of my eyes for other people to see, but I cannot do that either, unless I draw the pictures in detail, but that would take a really long time.

I think in pictures, video, and apparently looped audio recordings.