Thinking in Pictures as Opposed to God Knows What Other Way

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Phonic: do you hear them in your own voice?

One thing that always confused me was why so many people around me constantly talked things out to themselves and each other. Like if you are looking at a map deciding what route to take, and you talk about turn left take this road turn right with someone, or if you are at the computer store looking at specs of different computers, and you talk about the specs to compare them, or if you are assembling furniture, and you talk about fit this part into that part then screw it in, or if you are doing something on the computer, and you talk about open this window and click this, etc etc etc. I couldn't understand wtf was going on with almost eberryone around me, and I thought that these people were addicted to talking. Now, my new perspective is that people are using talking to think verbally and work things out a different way from the way that I use, which is all visual in all these cases. With the computer specs, I see the words as pictures, and it is very fast for me to compare specs, because one picture of one card of specs is obviously different from another picture of another card of specs, and it is obvious what the differences are in the pictures, the two pictures being as noticeably different as an apple and a pear, which you don't need to talk about to break down into constituent different details and compare.

Amongst the people who are always talking about eberrything, I have noticed that some are good at certain activities, like drawing and map-reading, and others are not and seem to be almost incapable of these functions, and my guess is that some of the talkers also think visually a lot, as a mix of visual and verbal, while others have difficulty with thinking visually or seeing details many at the same time or some other visual function. I have difficulty with thinking verbally quickly enough to keep up with many conversations, as the visuals need to be translated into words and ordered in some linear way, which they are not to begin with, since they are visuals.

I've a new theory on this since the last threads on this subject.

Almost everyone can think in pictures. Everyone did think in pictures when they were young and before spoken or written language developed.

As you mature and master spoken language, you replace these pictures with words. As you master written language you may recall and store the written word. You no longer need to recall the picture or say the word. This is good, it is efficient. You can of course recall what your living room or what the Mona Lisa looks like, but when you are writing a paper or talking to someone your mind is mostly in tune with your output.

The autistic difference for some is that this progression doesn't happen, the pictures remain, alongside or instead of the words. The problem (and benefit) is that these pictures are slower to work with than words and are very distracting. You'll make all sorts of associations from the picture you recall, rather than moving on linearly to the next thought or idea.

Eg. Asked the question do I like dogs? I might my stock images of my memorable dogs, where I lived in my snapshot, where I walked them, leading to more images and potentially more distractions. Lots of recall, but all irrelevant to a straightforward question. If I'm lucky I might get back to the question and respond. In the real world two minutes may have passed.

Jason

For me, thinking in pictures is just holding lots of visual details in your head at the same time, like on the "visual-spatial sketchpad", and I think that some people do this more easily than others, possibly because this is the way they perceive the external world eggswell, like photographs with lots of details all seen at the same time. Instead of ordering and making sense in words, it is easier to flip through lots of these pictures or play videos for me.

I'm not good at vague verbal labels to things in these pictures. It is much easier to describe the individual details of the pictures instead of generalize into something something that fits with a one-word label.