Do Your Words Get Stuck?

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Wow Knofskia, I can't imagine what that's like! What is it like when you read? The only way I can comprehend written text is via a sort of "reverse translation" in which I paint pictures in my mind using the sentences. To me, the idea of reading without seeing any corresponding pictures seems like it would be the equivalent of reading gibberish strings of letters that have no meaning; the only thing there is the letters, and they have no context.

FallingDownMan, you could well be right about the stress thing. My stress levels have gone up exponentially since I became an adult. It's made my meltdowns far worse than they ever were when I was a kid as well.

Sometimes I lose the words in my head like AceOfPens, but also often I have a complete phrase in my head as if I'm speaking it but I just can't remember how to move my mouth and breath to make the words come out.

I'm a pattern thinker and I prefer writing over talking because I can edit my words until they match my thougths. But I'm fully verbal otherwise. I just start to stutter, have flat intonation and make long pauses when feeling worse.

My older daughter (7yo) is not diagnosed - she got some attention and services from her preschool psychologist but avoiding labels - but she seems very much like what you describe.
Last time her father told her to get dressed and she started crying, unable to say anything. I know her, I hugged her and asked if she wants a piece of paper and a pencil. She nodded and then she drawed a variety of dresses, skirts, shirts and trousers and herself in the middle of it with a question mark on her head.
So this was easier for her than to say "I don't know what to wear".
She definitely thinks in pictures.

I'm not Knofskia, but I do something that I think may be similar. My memory and imagination mostly don't really work in senses but in spatial abstractions. There's some vague corners of memory that feel sort of like maybe tactile or proprioceptive or maybe even vestibular, but I can't pin them down exactly, and my vestibular sense mostly sucks in the first place, so it's hard to put into words. Regardless, I definitely don't get pictures.

When I read a description of a scene, in my imagination I mostly take the perspective of either the point of view character or stay disembodied in third-person, and I mostly fill in the details as they're given. If the text mentions a door then I understand that there's a door there, and if I have enough information to place it in space then I do that. I usually don't have details of what kind of door it is, unless I have enough context to guess at one. Even in that case, though, I don't so much see it as simply understand that it has the relevant type and all the features associated with it. Big French door? Right, probably has windows in it. Generally no clue what's on the other side of those windows unless I can infer that from context. But I definitely don't imagine them visually: They're just abstractly in the appropriate space.

You might think that makes it hard to remember all the details. You'd be right. My experience and memory of textual and video fiction media is cloudy and--I've come to understand--pretty uncommon.

Wow, I think I'd get overwhelmed trying to hold onto so many details like that! For me, the mental image just slots all the details into place where they belong, and I don't have to be conscious of them, but I imagine your experience feeling rather similar to what I go through when I'm trying to read a description of an object or idea I've never seen or encountered before. I have to manually place all the details in what I imagine to be the correct context, and it makes keeping track of them really hard!

I think if I tried to hold onto all the unrelated details it would be overwhelming. Probably also impossible. Often I can attach them together through spatial relationships, and those are usually pretty coherent and stable for me. Same for if there's some underlying structure that ties the scene together: Then they just connect to that structure, which is pretty easy for me to remember and process. I forget a lot of the details, too. That means that when a work has a lot of scenes or characters with complex descriptions and motivations I'm often pretty lost. Even when I don't remember and connect the details, though, I often respond well to interesting descriptions, and when I'm able to follow the emotional aspects of the story I respond pretty strongly to those, too. I don't read fiction as much as I did when I was a kid, but I definitely still enjoy it!

The only way I can comprehend written text is by translating it into a system of ideas, attributes, and relationships. A is connected to B, B is connected to C, ... , Y is connected to Z. This means that I can remember a lot of information if it is easily connected. But it also means it takes a long time to access some of the information, because I have to start at A to get to B to get to C ... to finally get to Z; there is no "search feature". It also means I tend to skip over or easily forget any information that is not easily connected; my working memory for verbal or visual information is short.