How do you think?

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I don't really know how I think. I used to believe that I didn't think in words because it would always take me some effort to explain in words something that I intuitively understood, and I would often do a poor job of it. But at the same time, what is in my head is mostly words. Maybe it's more like a shorthand, where I can explain something to myself in a succinct way that would not adequately explain it to someone else. But using too many words gets in the way of the concept or the intuition. (And I consider intuition to be the sum of one's understanding and knowledge of a subject or concept, not something that arises from nothing.)

I spell everything but also have video and see pictures.

Lists of things always have a visual look in my head. Numbers turn in a different direction with multiples of 10. When I think of the years, they change direction at the end of each decade. The first decade of the 21st century goes upward, the second decade downward (the current decade's direction is still unclear in my mind). The 1990s are flat.

When I think of the days of the week, they ascend until they reach Saturday, where they taper around. When I think of the hours in the day, they're somewhat diagonal from midnight until 6AM, then they travel upward until they reach noon, then they start ascending from there.

Music is often represented in my head by specific colors. Guitar music is green, flutes or whistling is dark red, organs are white. Electric guitars are variously orange, yellow, brown, or gray, depending on how they're played. Pianos are...yellow, I think? Certain sounds are represented in my head as pink. It's interesting to me that I rarely visualize music as blue, despite the traditional musical uses of the word (which I suspect have a synesthetic origin).

I also occasionally think of music as well as other concepts in terms of taste--certain songs and certain concepts are "salty" or "sweet."

Time eludes me ....idk why ,it just seems too.....things come in order...i cannot explain it much better than that....

My brain is weird. I have trouble remembering names, dates, exact numbers, spelling. I remember vast numbers of other things. In history/social studies in grade school and high school (age about 10 to 16). I could recount whole stories and event and get all the names and dates wrong. Or just fuzzy grey spots in my memory. Or only remember some of the letters in a name. Needless to say this was not great on tests.

I tend to think in words and pictures. But not always both. Lots of visual thinking.

“Associative Memory” might be like the “hyperlinks” you mentioned.

Here is the URL with the parentheses replaced with percent-encoding:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Associa ... chology%29

I write much better on a Wiki than on an Essay. Wiki and hypertext is more like the way I think.

Sometimes I wonder if this above extra wiring can create indecision problems at time .? But it does seem to offer more options on the table for handling issues and understandings ..

I learned Geometry before I learned Algebra. We did it the old fashioned way with a straight edge and a compass. When I did algebra I always had to picture the curves. I turned every problem into geometry. I learned to program in Basic at the same time. So I had this basic idea about x and y and where they went on my computer screen. I also knew that things like y = x squared meant all values of x, but in reality you could only use some of them: x is 0 through 10, adding 1 each time through the loop. Or adding 0.5. (Etc) but never really “all”. When I took physics I did the same thing, I had an idea of geometry. And wood or Lego or something. The equation related to the graph, and they both related to the experiment. When my kids do algebra or physics (chemistry, etc) they don’t seem to get this back and forth between the three things. It is funny, because I can’t do it any other way. I also have to be able to read equations out loud. If I don’t know the name for the symbols I have to make them up. In boolean logic there are symbols that look like arrows but you read them as “indicates”. It makes sense to me. I cannot always explain it to other people.

Slowly, but constantly.

My conscious mind is generally one-threaded. Mostly, I use constant verbal monologue, in which I'm arguing with myself and with myself and with myself... I don't like to agree with myself - it's boring. New associations come pretty quickly, so I move between subjects, and none of them seems well thought through. But then I come back to old topics. And then again, and again... Often I make shortcuts using some "pure ideas" and relations between them. Then, I think I understand something, but cannot put it in words, and begin to think if there are any ideas in my mind, or it's just a false feeling of understanding.

When it comes to more demanding tasks, like turn-based games, I'm trying make decision trees using the monologue, but my working memory doesn't have enough RAM and previous elements in a tree are removed very quickly. That's why I hate chess and people tell me to click enter already when we play civilization.

I think my visual imagery is quite vivid, but I don't use it in reasoning. It accompanies reading books and trying to understand mechanisms, e.g. in physics. I can also imagine taste of food quite precisely. For other senses it's much weaker.

This is a very interesting question! I am an industrial engineering and I remember very clearly the day when we learned about time studies and task prioritization at NC State University. From that moment on, my mind uses the Critical Path Method and think of tasks as written on a spreadsheet and start calculating times and priorities.