Do you think visually or verbally?

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I do both. It's hard to say, though. I think I switch back and forth. I know that yesterday I was sitting in my rocking chair, relaxing, and I was having pure visual thoughts that were very detailed.

But sometimes the thoughts are words. Sometimes it's as if I'm talking to someone in my head. Other times it's just isolated words.

It's difficult to think about thinking. When someone says, "How do you think?" the first thing I ask myself is "in what context?" There are different thinking scenarios. Sometimes thinking is just random thoughts coming into your mind. Other times the thoughts are a response to something that has just happened. Still other times, the thoughts are of a problem-solving nature.

Okay...I just looked at the clock and had a brief thought that I can't identify as either verbal or visual. It was an instantaneous thought that I'd better start thinking of what I'm going to feed my kids for lunch before they get cranky. Then, I verbally thought, "Oh, man, I've got to make lunch" Then I had a visual image of being in my kitchen and spreading butter on a few slices of bread, and another visual image of the table which is still covered with Legos. If I want to, I can play a detailed visual movie in my head of myself making lunch. Or I can narrate the process in my head. Or I can just go and make lunch without having any thoughts in my head at all. If I don't try to control it, I think it could be any combination of the three.

Sometimes I want to have visual thoughts and find that I cannot. For instance, if I'm looking for a new house to live in, it's really, REALLY hard for me to look around the house and visualize my stuff in it, especially if the house is not empty. Having other people's things in it (or worse, a house that has been "staged") is especially bad because we use our house differently than the typical American family. Picking out clothes is hard, because I have trouble visualizing what I already have, and whether or not the new thing will go with it. But I can play "Snow Cake" in my head from start to finish with in minute detail. I think the issue in those cases is that there are so many distractions.

As far as Temple Grandin is concerned, I think she did think that all autistic people are visual thinkers, but then she learned otherwise. I saw a video of her recently where she said that.

I think in both pictures and words. When someone is talking, I normally visualize what they are saying (without really trying to). Sometimes I see words or numbers in my head but I also have internal dialoge in my head. When I'm trying to complete a task, I normally think in my head like I'm talking to myself like giving myself directions. Sometimes I imagine things happening like watching a movie in my head, I guess this would be called daydreaming. I think I do this because I have ADD symptoms.

I think verbally, although if you were to say "duck" I would picture first a duck, then the word.

Temple Grandin's updated theory is that Autistics think either visually, verbally, or in patterns like math and music. They tend to think very strongly in one way and have difficulty accessing other ways of thinking. This seems pretty accurate to me. One of the things I like about her is that she updates her theories when new information is shared with her.

I generally see things visually -- just not usually in pictures. More in colors and patterns.

I have trouble with the word association game people post on forums. It's also a diagnostic tool used to diagnose thought disorders, although I don't think it's a very good one. My problem is not thinking a random word, mine is not being able to think of a word. When I hear or read the word, the first word that comes to mind is the word I just read.

I think both visually and verbally; It's pretty equal, sometimes I see my thoughts, sometimes I hear them, and sometimes both.

Almost constantly thinking in words... even when I dream sometimes. When I've been living or reading in foriegn languages, I sometimes dream a scene, and have subtitles underneath it (which for some reason I find disturbing). So for example, I have dreamt of people arguing in French, I'm thinking in English, and the subtitles are Russian. The subtitles are almost always wrong though.

I've also dreamt that I'm reading pages and pages of text... and those dreams exhaust me.

However I do remember vividly thinking without words, and feeling very frustrated because I couldn't say what I was thinking. I know now that I was frightened, because I was trying to think about God (or something much much bigger than me) but I couldn't explain why I was scared. My thought picture was me standing in a white field, with a weighty gaze boring down on me, but I couldn't see the gazer. My Mum was trying to calm me down, and I had my hands wrapped over my head, trying to hide, and rocking and humming.

I think I was three or four. It was before I started school, because when I started school I could speak, and was thinking verbally more often.

I can visualise things fairly easily, but words come more naturally to me.

Mostly pictures, in fact, life often just runs by in images in my head but you find eventually that you need language because of other people.

Yes, I find that if I wake up from one of my "reading dreams" I'm usually talking nonsense. For example, "having thus attracted the attention of aged warrior the table scuttled across the ceiling." I hate it when I get something like that stuck in my head first thing in the morning!

Most of the time I have an internal monologue going on inside my head but it certainly doesn't consist purely of spoken words. For instance I'll often not know how to articulate something out loud yet the idea can still exist in it's entirety as an internal thought. Maybe this seems weird but in my head most words have a "feel" or "aura" that remains clear even if I forget the word itself. Some of my thoughts consist entirely of these "feelings" and "auras" and don't contain any actual words. My thoughts can have the form of language without consisting of actual words. It's like language in that it's mostly sequential, yet it clearly consists of neither words nor pictures.

I'm not sure what kind of thinker this makes me exactly. I consider myself a visual/spatial person since I tend to do best in that area on standardized tests. But I wouldn't say I think in pictures. I'm not sure I think in words either.

I think I'm predominantly a visual thinker. Reading and conversations usually generate images in my head depicting what's being said. When I'm remembering some kind of event I recall it as a a vague movie or series of images. Sometimes it's like I have a photographic memory where I can recall an image from my memory exactly as it was, but I can't hold on to it for more than an instant.

I'm also visual when I do math in my head. It's usually in the form of a mental image of working out the problem on a white board. A few times I've even moved my finger in the air like an imaginary marker to "write" the numbers. Does that make sense?

One exception is when I try to recall conversations or something someone said; then I hear it as spoken, but usually with no accompanying imagery. I also think verbally when I'm formulating what I'm about to say. Same for my musical memory. Even descriptive song lyrics usually won't generate any kind of image for me.

This comes up every now and then and I can never understand what it is about.

I have two kinds of thoughts. One refers to the world around me: I observe it, analyze what I see and respond (or, more likely, do nothing). The other refers to the spiritual world, the world inside me, what I heard one profoundly autistic woman refer to as the "real" world as opposed to the "regular" world most people inhabit. Those thoughts can lay dormant for years, or they can pop around like popcorn for no obvious reason. Because the spiritual world is not physically limited (the reason, I believe, I've always had a strong sense of collective self but a weak sense of individual self) those thoughts also appear from elsewhere, which is very helpful (probably the reason I'm still around). Call it intuition or guardian angels or whatever but it's very useful.

Personally I don't think very highly of words, I think people take them much too seriously. I think they are helpful when they are accurate but most people these days don't have or take the time to think things through so they throw words around like they don't matter. So they don't, much.

I think thoughts for me are more the way some people say they see numbers as having smells and colours - they have personalities. Those thoughts that are accurate and helpful, whether they are mine or someone else's, I feed. Those that are not accurate or helpful I try to limit to the best of my ability. But it is very hard work to verbalize thoughts so I can't do it as often as I'd like. I want to reply to things on WP sometimes, I log in and sit there...nothing. My future husband (whom I mentioned a year and a half ago) wants to hear from me sometimes, I can feel him tugging at me...but I can't come up with anything to say. (But with him, he's at least as hard work as I am so it doesn't matter.) (And I think my thoughts and feelings feed him too, even when I don't have words for him.)

But recently I've been trying to practice bringing the two kinds of thoughts closer together, briding the worlds so to speak. I'll say to myself "That's not her" when I see somebody else who's not me - I know it's not, but it brings me closer. Or I'll say "She's thinking about her father RIP" if I am, so I know it's happening in this world too.

That's all a bit complicated and much thrown together. I just don't have anything to say about verbal or visual so I wanted to say what I do have something to say about.