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

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I think in words and feelings

I see ALL my mental imagery "behind my eyes" or "in my mind's eye." I never see them projected in front. Like you, I couldn't concentrate in the real world if that were the case.

FMX, I never was in a spelling bee per se, but I probably wouldn't have won. I'm an excellent speller, but I am horrible at tasks where I have to say things out loud and not write them down. I have a poor working memory. I am very, very visual. So, despite being a good speller and having a great memory, I do badly at things like digit span and spelling out words verbally.

Visual, and associative with some tactile memories thrown in for good measure. I feel like my mind is playing leap frog all the time, and I have a hard time sticking to a conversation. Most of the time I have a song running in my head as a background to stay focused on the here and now.

I'm great at writing things down. I was always years ahead of the norm as a kid in spelling.

Saying things out loud - another matter.
I don't have time to concentrate on my words, so I don't say things right.
Never went to a spelling bee. Really wanted to, though.

I think where it helps is with foreign languages. I don't have to connect my vocal words to a picture to learn them. I can't. The word means what it means, I just learn what it "looks" like. It saves time.

OddDuckNash - I'm glad I found another person out there who thinks like me! This made my day.

What does it mean to "think in pictures" anyway? What are the different ways of thinking?

Also, to those that are talking about "thinking in words", aren't words really just a special form of picture.
Seeing a picture of a cup and seeing the word "cup" written seem equivalent to me.

Anyway what does it mean to not think in pictures?

I think Neurotypicals likely think in a mixture of things, they could have vague images when they daydream, which could include sound. They could also think in a verbal way (not talking aloud, just thinking of words). They may or may not think in full sentences (this is all a random guess)

Definiely pictures here, but with a sound track, if people are involved. You say "cat" I picture a feline, domestic or maybe a Leopard.
If I am recalling something from my past, I sometimes start talking for the people in the picture(s) my mind conjures up.

Sincerely,
Matthew

I can not spell very well unless I write the word down or type it. I have to go through the motions with my hand/s. When I'm doing math in my head like a simple arithmetic problem i usually have to "write" the numbers and signs out with my finger and then I "see" the numbers on whatever surface I wrote them on.

I mainly think in pictures and sometimes think in words or text as well. For example, when listening to classical music I may think of people dancing in medieval times or a scene from a movie, etc.

Most of my thinking is done with my "internal narrator."

However, I can also see still pictures and moving video.

I highly doubt I have a "special" way of thinking.

Some NTs told me that when they thought in pictures, they thought in vague general impressions that are pictures, not in clearstalcrys detailed pictures like photographs. Maybe the amount of detail is the difference between NT picture-thinking and autistic picture-thinking.

They also told me when they look at the world, they see the general features, but not the details until they look to see the details, and I said that I see the small details at the same time that I see the big picture or that I see the small details before I see the big picture. We guessed that what I see when I look at the world may be similar to what we all see when we look at photographs of the world, the difference being the amount of detail that is seen at any given moment.

There was a study about visual perceptual load that showed the autistic people see a greater number of things at the same time.

They also told me that when they are driving, they filter out eberrything that is not relevant to driving. I guess that it is the same for doing other things. I don't filter as much, so I see lots of things all at once. But even if we are all focused on looking at things with no filtering, I just see moar things at the same time. I think that this is why it is fast for me to find a street name on a detailed city map, but I get overloaded driving down the city street.

I usually see different details but not one overall photo

When you say cat I don't see pictures of lots of cats, I just see a random race of cat or generic one.
I do think verbally too, I have conversations with myself in my mind, I also listen what I'm writing or reading like in movies when someone reads a letter and the voice of the writter starts playing.
I daydream a lot, its like watching videos but I also can recreate feelings like taste, touch or pain. Same when reading a book, at first I only see the words in the book and I listen my mental voice reading, but then I forget I'm reading and it's like watching movie or being there.
But unlike the visual thinkers I've read about I have problems with details, I notice it when I want to draw what I imagine, I can't focus the picture, it's like if it were just an sketch or like it hasn't loaded yet, for example, if I read "man", I see one in my mind, he is standing up and has two legs and two arms, he is not nude, but there are not specific clothes at the picture, he is not bald, he has short dark hair but I haven't imagined the haircut, I haven't imagined the face either.

While I was reading I could hear the words in my mind, when I read this "If I you think about, say, the concept of speed, what comes up?" I saw a yellow, red and orange background with motion blur, then when I read this " For me it's some sort of animal with its ears back" I saw the head of a brown wolf moving his ears back, but I couldn't see the rest because I don't know the meaning of "pumping", I'm going to look it up later.



They are talking about audio, not subtitles.

This reminds me of how my drawings from my childhood were always incredibly detailed. If I drew a traffic signal, for instance, I'd include various brackets for street signs, bolts, and all sorts of other bits of minutiae that your typical six-year-old would not have noticed.

My thinking is both visual and auditory, like most people here seem to have. It used to be a lot more visual than it is today (not sure why it's changed.)

This! Except I do remember what I did before I could read. I used to have an entire vocabulary made up of pictures. Abstract concepts were usually made up of something that sounded similar to the word I heard, but every word that had an obvious representation (like say, pillow,) had an image of that whenever someone said it. If somebody spoke a sentence, I saw it in my head as a string of images. Like if my mom said, "I have to run to the store for some lettuce," I imagined a generic person running, then an image of a generic store, then a head of lettuce. I didn't have pictures for words like "I" or "to" or "and", etc. Such concrete thinking also helps explain why I would then get confused when I saw my mom get in the car. "I thought you were running to the store?" Lol!

I don't see the words as much as I used to, though. Somewhere around my teen years I guess some other part of my brain developed more and slowly the text showed up less and less. Maybe I needed it before to help make sense of the word-sounds, like training wheels on a bike, but now I can understand without them?



That's one of my (not-always-successful) tricks for when I have insomnia. The usual reason I can't sleep is because I keep thinking of things in my head, with sound. I will be kind of "speaking" in my head, even when I don't want to. Sometimes I'm going over issues that need to be resolved. Other times, I might just be repeating a word or a sentence without context. And yet other times, I have a song stuck in my head. I can't just turn it off, but sometimes I can wean that constant thought into a visual flow instead of an audio flow. So I start trying to imagine, say, the street outside. Then I pretend I'm walking down it, crossing the bridge, looking at the river, etc. I try to make up some story for it so it's easier to keep the "video" going until I slip into a dream/sleep.