# Do you think in words?



## FearAndTrembling (Jun 5, 2013)

Somewhat. I see words as bubbles that rise out of the water. The water is the real thought. Sometimes just bubbles come up. We mostly think in words, when trying to communicate with others. When typing a post or having a conversation for example, one is more likely to think with his inner voice. Words are a communicative tool first and foremost. They come from speech. Thought predates them. But it has become so entangled in thought. It's weird..


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## Lil Ugly Mane (Jul 30, 2014)

I think in words in the sense that I hear my voice in my head articulating what it is that I'm thinking about. When I'm preforming a task that I can do on auto-pilot I'll just have an inner monologue about something else that is on my mind.


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## Axe (Aug 1, 2014)

I don't even see how it's possible to think in words. You can think before you can speak. So you're not exactly going to have words


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## Harizu (Apr 27, 2014)

I never think in words. I think in pictures and sounds.


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## ScarlettHayden (Jun 8, 2012)

I rarely think in words. It's usually just abstract visualizations or uniquely flavoured spaces passing me by..

INTJ.


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## raveninwhite (Jul 3, 2014)

This makes me wonder what makes us think in the way we do - images, words, a combination of the two, etc.

I mostly think in words. The only exception I can think of is when someone says "What's the first thing that pops into your head when I say ___". In that case, I usually see an image.


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## yippy (May 21, 2014)

Thinking in pictures comes naturally to me. Even when I am writing a story, a post, or poetry my thoughts are dominated by images. However in school (and by writing in leisure time) I have developed word thinking more and can now combine the two. I see an image in my head and can pretty quickly translate that image into words. It also works the other way around. When someone talks to me, I can imagine what they are talking about without breaking too much of a sweat.

Also: when listening to music I tend to think in images and emotions. No words there. Think that is the reason why I am not so great with lyrics

*INFP here btw*


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## ai.tran.75 (Feb 26, 2014)

When thinking - I think in words- I have conversation with myself in my head and thoughts - when daydreaming or spacing out it's a combination of words, thoughts and emotions 


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk


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## L'Enfant Terrible (Jun 8, 2014)

spylass said:


> I don't know if this question has been brought up before. I find that I almost never think in words or sentences, unless I'm thinking about writing something.
> 
> When I'm just thinking I tend to think conceptually or visually. Words might float up, but never in a sentence structure.
> I'm an INTP. My sister who is an ISFJ says she also doesn't think in words very much.
> ...


I think both in words and in motion pictures. I don't really think in images - more like movies.


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## intjonn (Apr 20, 2013)

emberfly said:


> Sometimes I make connections and "put two and two together" without words, but for most everything else, I think in words.



But do you come up with 'four'? :laughing::tongue:

*<<<<=============take it frum a koon!*


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## Entropic (Jun 15, 2012)

I think almost explicitly in words and sounds as in, I hear the words being spoken. They aren't silent or visual or the like. I rarely if ever think in terms of visuals.


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## HellCat (Jan 17, 2013)

I think in colors, sensations, I mix them sometimes. Words only I see the words too, carved out in space, random images and most of all film, which is like blueray in its intensity and enhanced imagery.


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## PaladinX (Feb 20, 2013)

I think in words, space, logic, and sometimes music, video, and feeling.

My girlfriend is Dyslexic and thinks in 3d images. She can manipulate all of reality in her mind's eye. For example when she is mad at me, she will rip my head off (in vivid detail) and beat me with it or drop houses on me.

A business professor I know usually thinks in words, but when in work mode he thinks in math. This is not just equations he is working on, but even when people talk to him it translates into equations in his mind.


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## sink (May 21, 2014)

Not at all.
Unless I feel like talking to my inner twin out loud rather than in my head.


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## ladypancake (Apr 20, 2014)

I tend to think about words and images together. Sometimes the words create the images, and vice versa. I create narrated "scenes" based on imagination or memory. This likely comes from being an avid reader/ tv watcher/ bored and lonely child.


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## silver skies (Aug 6, 2014)

For me it's really a mixture of everything. Sometimes words, sometimes visuals or sounds or something else. I can't really describe it and I usually don't pay too much attention to it.


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## Brother (Sep 21, 2013)

If tl;dr, skip to the last paragraph.

What we do is think in structured concepts. Each of these concepts happen to have one or more utterances, words, inflections, phrases, even whole quotes or people's names intricately connected with them - for bilingual or trilingual people, it gets even more messed up. But at the same time, automatic, unconscious thinking also allows for processing concepts and schemas that don't actually have words for them. A word connotes very specific things, and is a concept in and of itself. However, the concept it is meant to symbolise, may have connections and meanings, memories, feelings, far beyond what we would mean by using the _'appropriate'_ word for it.

That's what happens when something sounded better as you thought it, than it does when you speak it out loud. Any concept expressed in language has a measure of ambiguity, and what meaning it takes on is contingent on the context, circumstance and linguistic environment. So the stupid thing you say is the attempt at communicating the entire content of your _thought_ including its disambiguating, schematic context; that is, you're thinking of a lot of stuff that altogether facilitates _one_ meaning of the exact physical communication.

As it happens, in the informational space of your stream-of-thought differs from the shared, common space between individuals. Your utterance, with its element of ambiguity, takes on another meaning as it's placed in that common space. To take the metaphor to a whole new level, imagine if the inside of your head was a stand-up comedy club, and the current conversation a morose, bleak funeral. The exact same utterance would be disambiguated in entirely different ways.

So, uh, that is to say, _noone_ really thinks in language. But language is the easiest way to make conscious sense of the concepts we're processing at the time. People who grow up without language process in almost exactly the same way we do, except they don't affix verbal language to thoughts, but instead perhaps episodic memories and experiences. Hard to say.


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## ThatOneWeirdGuy (Nov 22, 2012)

I'm a verbal thinker. I've always been better at languages and writing than math and science, even though I'm more interested the latter. You can tell mathematicians are visual thinkers. Just look at all the notation that makes it a little more difficult for people like me haha.


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## aef8234 (Feb 18, 2012)

Maybe?

The only time I notice when I think, words are involved, but that's few and far between, meaning I either don't think a lot or I don't notice when I think most of the time.


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## MightyLizardKing (Jun 7, 2014)

I think in pictures and words and it all gets muddled. If I need to think clearly I talk aloud to myself.


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## Kingpin (Aug 14, 2013)

I think it depends on the visual, kinesthetic or auditory learner thing


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## spylass (Jan 25, 2014)

Brother said:


> If tl;dr, skip to the last paragraph.
> 
> What we do is think in structured concepts. Each of these concepts happen to have one or more utterances, words, inflections, phrases, even whole quotes or people's names intricately connected with them - for bilingual or trilingual people, it gets even more messed up. But at the same time, automatic, unconscious thinking also allows for processing concepts and schemas that don't actually have words for them. A word connotes very specific things, and is a concept in and of itself. However, the concept it is
> meant to symbolise, may have connections and meanings, memories, feelings, far beyond what we would mean by using the _'appropriate'_ word for it.
> ...



Wow that's fascinating! Do you have sources for the last part "People who grow up without language process in almost exactly the same way we do, except they don't affix verbal language to thoughts, but instead perhaps episodic memories and experiences." ?


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## Brother (Sep 21, 2013)

spylass said:


> Wow that's fascinating! Do you have sources for the last part "People who grow up without language process in almost exactly the same way we do, except they don't affix verbal language to thoughts, but instead perhaps episodic memories and experiences." ?


This is the best article on language-less thought and language-less people that I know of. I've been meaning to pick up the case literature by Schaller that he writes so much about, but I know I don't have the time. The gist of it, after reading it through to the end, is that _symbolism_ facilitates complicated cognition. Language contains a vast array of these symbols, and arranged with grammar they allow ideas to be communicated to others. But thought itself, internally, personally, is subject to a matrix of symbols, and even though many, probably most, of the symbols we use in thought are words from language, there are many concepts that have more complicated symbols, such as metaphors, that are too complicated for words.

I want you to imagine an African hunter-gatherer society, and how much of their lives revolve around the practises of other animals, and both hunting and understanding animals in order to survive. The crocodile hides in fresh water, that everyone approaches for sustenance sooner or later, and explosively assault their prey - jackals are matriarchal pack animals, opportunists, who also feed on carrion - which is also the 'prey' of a wide variety of buzzards and vultures, each with minutely differing techniques. To someone intimately familiar with the technique, mechanism and motivation of each of these predators, the underlying _intuitive_ schemas would be readily recognisable. Furthermore, interpersonal conflict, competition, trade, communication, can show similarity to these varying hunting techniques.

I can tell you "He came upon his cousin like a crocodile does a gazelle," if we have common culturally cued knowledge, but you and I don't have single, symbolic _words_ for it. But imagine the metaphor of the crocodile, hiding in the drinking water, indistinguishable from the water itself. In a socially supportive tribal society, your kin and family's support are paramount. They are something that everyone needs, and everyone depends on - it is to people what fresh water is to all living creatures. What if a family member took advantage of this? Appears to be part of this support until you come close, because you need it, and quickly takes advantage of your need to further his own goals? The way the crocodile hunts now becomes an available metaphor, it's a symbol for a very complicated social exchange. Of course, living in a hunter-gatherer society must mean language, but I think you get my point: The symbolism we just imagined wasn't linguistic at all, only my communicating it was linguistic.

Extrapolating from that, from the idea of wordless symbolism, we can understand - even if we can't imagine - the wealth of imagery, metaphors, symbols, connections, correlations, signs and portents that a language-less person would have. They would probably, like Ildefonso in the article, have great difficulty understanding the concept of borders, jurisdiction and law. But so do many people out there who _do_ have language. To the Tuaregs of the northern Sahara, insisting that there is an invisible line separating Mali and Algeria somewhere in the middle of the desert, would probably generate some head-shaking and chuckles. They have a well-developed and ancient language, but that doesn't make all arbitrary concepts available through symbolism.

So when you're immersed in what Greg Downey, author of the article, identifies as a similar un-narrated stream-of-thought, you're thinking in symbols, metaphors, imagery, memory, abstraction, feelings, that are complex, intricate, and interconnected, without consciously attuning to the linguistic content of the concept, at the very least without adhering to the limitations of the _grammar_ you'd use to elaborate any of the ideas you're contemplating, in communication with others.



> Even when I find that I have not been engaged in an inner dialogue, it is like waking from a sleep, unable to recall a dream that fast slips away. Perhaps like Ildefonso, I cannot talk about a languageless 'dark' once in the linguistic 'light,' even though tehre is a rich potential for action and perception in the dark.


Ah. This was nice, after a lazy summer, to dig into some proper tough matter again.


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## alfred.greene (Jul 30, 2014)

I remember thinking before I had words to think in....then I got an upgrade in word thinking, that was fun. I think in words now.

I wonder in all the ways one could think.....


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## Spades (Aug 31, 2011)

Definitely primarily non-verbal for me. Actually, I didn't start to consciously recognize sentences in my thoughts until I was about 22ish? I think social media and posting my thoughts online is what led me to formulate them verbally in my mind, as if finding the phrasing before writing it out. Normally though, I have done so *as* I'm writing! My thoughts are "conceptual" mostly; kind of like "a general feel of things", and often visuals and words come out to refine and sharpen those concepts. Also, when I mediate, and the words become even more sparse, the visuals and concepts become more prominent.

Great topic!


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## Awkwardacious (Aug 11, 2014)

I think with pictures and also words in my head. The pictures I form in my head are pretty clear. Like movie clear. But thinking about the same things too much would make the images fade away. So I have to constantly think about different things to keep the 'movie' in my head going. Pretty confusing and annoying, but that's how it is.


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## Maximus Deus (Jun 8, 2013)

I'm having an inner monologue practically all the time.


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## Glassland (Apr 19, 2014)

Words, pictures and abstract thoughts that do not fit into any kind of form.


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## The Pistachio (Aug 13, 2014)

I'm always thinking with words, even when imagining images, sounds. I so think with words, that sometimes I even end up moving my hands around in the air when imagining how a conversation will go with someone/what to say. I usually don't even notice when this is happening because I'm so deep in thought.


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## Brother (Sep 21, 2013)

Spades said:


> Definitely primarily non-verbal for me. Actually, I didn't start to consciously recognize sentences in my thoughts until I was about 22ish? I think social media and posting my thoughts online is what led me to formulate them verbally in my mind, as if finding the phrasing before writing it out. Normally though, I have done so *as* I'm writing! My thoughts are "conceptual" mostly; kind of like "a general feel of things", and often visuals and words come out to refine and sharpen those concepts. Also, when I mediate, and the words become even more sparse, the visuals and concepts become more prominent.
> 
> Great topic!


Now this is actually really curious to me.

So as a rule, until fairly recently, you didn't conceptualise verbally in words or phrases?


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## Spades (Aug 31, 2011)

Brother said:


> Now this is actually really curious to me.
> 
> So as a rule, until fairly recently, you didn't conceptualise verbally in words or phrases?


That's not quite right. It was probably there in the background, I just didn't pay much attention to it/use it to refine my thoughts. Or if I did, it was not a conscious process.


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## Aqualung (Nov 21, 2009)

Sort of like an ongoing movie playing in my head, as someone mentioned before me. Once in awhile a feeling comes from the movie which gets my attention & is given time to dissolve or stand on its own. If it's still there it starts becoming an idea that might make the leap to words. It never begins with words. On the other hand, if someone speaks their opinion or idea to me I'm all rational & objective & it starts & ends with words.


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## Valtire (Jan 1, 2014)

My thoughts always seem to be in words, but then when I try to communicate I can't always verbalise my thoughts. So apparently I don't think in words.


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## pygmylion (Aug 23, 2014)

Aelthwyn said:


> Both. I get pictures, feelings, and sort of like....huge clouds of concepts or meanings that are sometimes difficult to articulate. But I also find myself composing sentences in my head. Most of the time I feel like I think best when I can be typing at the same time





A Clockwork Alice said:


> But when I'm by myself I think only visually, in concepts. This has become one of my problems in communicating with people, because I need time to transfer ''the picture'' in my head to ''the words'' I'll say out loud.





Aqualung said:


> It never begins with words. On the other hand, if someone speaks their opinion or idea to me I'm all rational & objective & it starts & ends with words.


Same same same. It is especially frustrating while reading poetry and trying to explain what you understood while not being able to put it into words. I often look at poems as if they were one big concept rather than a bunch of lines and stanzas that talk about different things each.
If I have anything to add, it's that images in my head are not very clear, not like a movie, but more like visualised concept, very vague. It's hard for me to imagine a detailed picture.
One more thing: when I'm frustrated or ashamed I tend to hear words or sentences (very negative usually), which are being "replayed" in my head over and over.


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## bubblePOP (Aug 8, 2014)

I generally think in words, mostly remembering conversations I've had without thinking about the imagery around it, although specific visualizations pop up if I'm trying to connect something to something else.


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## aendern (Dec 28, 2013)

I read recently that thinking in words is neurotypical and those with Autism tend to think in pictures/ideas.

If you're more curious than I you could check out Temple Grandin's book -> _Thinking in Pictures_


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## Brother (Sep 21, 2013)

Spades said:


> That's not quite right. It was probably there in the background, I just didn't pay much attention to it/use it to refine my thoughts. Or if I did, it was not a conscious process.


Ah, of course, didn't mean to imply you _never_ verbalised, but that it was a less prominently conscious modus.

I have to say, this thread is just the biggest guilty pleasure. The textbooks give a very good idea of what we absolutely do know about cognition. The lecturers, conventional theory and even opposite/outlying theories do a good job of sketching just what the nature of thought is. But how we conceptualise, and how we attempt to communicate to others an _accurate perception_ of the concept we are ideating, is a magnificently difficult concept to grasp. Not even a pun.

People here are truthfully describing their introspective process, and how they _think_ that they think. I have to disambiguate that, and transcribe it into my own framework of understanding. It's like working at an information stand and learning "Excuse me, sir, would you happen to know where I can find the men's room?" in perfect Queen's English, and then a drunk 90 year-old Welshman tells you "I've got to sprinkle the flower bed, son." You know there's some barely disambiguatable metaphors in there, if only you could be sure of which words he actually used.

So here, I've got this picture perfect theory, if vague and incomplete, about how the human mind processes a concept, with some form of spreading activation of patterns, connecting to various networks invoking various particular experiences, feelings, memories and conclusions. But the nature of metacognition and introspection, is that any thought is a flash of activity, the overwhelming majority of which is lost in hundredths of a second, a suddenly unconscious lingering echo, and anything memorable that stood out, consciously memorable, is now in hindsight warped by the new, current thought you're having. What is consciously memorable? Maybe something peculiar about the nature of your thought, or how you think, that you notice as a trend over time.

That is the thought, as-is. _Then_ people try to explain their experience of thought, and of feeling. Their experience being the trend they noticed about their thinking - the perceived commonalities of a lifetime of evanescent flashes. This, though unreliable enough already, is distorted through more lenses, more ungainly moulds, into a form capable of verbal communication. This impossibly, achingly abstrac idea must now be forced to make sense within the simplistic utterances of the English language, in the hopes that most of the meaning will survive for me to perceive and disambiguate, with my own filters of expectations and preconceptions.

Imagine _that_ fucking flowchart. From a neurochemical burst of activity imperceptible to science, the nature of your idea suffers through that process before I'm capable of considering it with my own conscious attention - the higher-order processes of a single other human mind, each more powerful than all the electronic devices from calculators to supercomputers in existence in 2008. Express your metacognition on this forum, to be read by dozens of others... is _not_ a trifle. Cognition is remarkable.

I'm sorry, where was I? What are we doing?

Haha... uh... Yeah. Shit. Sometimes, I momentarily realise the colossality of the smallest transactions of human thought, and I get overawed.


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## Du Toit (Mar 2, 2014)

Am I the only one who actually got a slight headache thinking about coming up with an answer ?
I think that I think with words, images, and bunch of other quick and indiscernible processes.


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## Reluctanine (May 11, 2014)

Do I think in words? Yes, I think in words. Do I ONLY think in words? No, I do not only think in words. Do I primarily think in words? That one I’m really not sure of, and I’m kind of curious to find out. From what I can gather at the moment, I can think in words, images/video, emotions, taste, body sensation, sound, and smell. It depends on what I’m doing or what I want to write at the time. So, before I continue, I have to make this distinction clear for myself. “Thinking in” is like the medium, the pathway connecting me to memories of the same experience, links to an alchemy of something new from imagination, but it can also be the end point and it’s not just the destination. “Memories” are things I’m pulling from the past. “Creations” are things I formulate together from different memories of different “thinking in” mediums. 

Are my memories of words, images/video, emotions, taste, body sensation, sound, and smell? Yes. Can I freeform associate with different memories of the same medium? Yes. Can I create new impressions in my mind using the same medium? Yes. Do these new creations/impressions usually exist as one medium? No, which is the reaaaaallllyyy confusing part for me.

And now I have to try and explain everything in words. AHHHhhhhh, my head!!!!!!!! PAIN! OKAY LET’S GO WITH THAT FIRST since it’s at the forefront of my mind.

Thinking in Body Sensation

* *




Instantly, I flop my head down on the table and rest for a few seconds. Did any words pop into my mind? Nope. Sound? Nope. Smell? Nope. Taste? Nope. Emotions? Yes, I greatly dislike having a headache. The thing that I pulled from my memory is that when I had headaches in the past and rested my forehead on the table, it felt good, so my body just reacts to that and rests. But it isn’t a conscious pulling of memory, it was unconsciously done with emotions as an accompaniment to my body wanting to get rid of the pain.

Thinking in the medium of the body is very closely linked to the emotions of desire and protectiveness for me. It manifests the most in team sports. I see the image of a group of people forming a pattern that is closing in closer to the net. My body moves into position to intercept, with the feeling of desire to protect my team increasing. The ball is coming just out of reach. My body jumps and catches it. There’s no words, images, taste, sound or smell in my head then, just the urge to get my hand to the ball as the main focus. Other people barely exist in my world then. Am I seeing the ball? Maybe. Sometimes the ball is going too fast to see properly. Do I have the image of the ball and my hand closing in on the ball in my head? Not really. I can’t anticipate how my hand will grab the ball and how it’ll look then, so my mind is usually blank and I’m just bodily reacting to the ball’s speed and trajectory. Probably why the ball is such a bright colour. And when I get the ball, I instantly throw it back out to a familiar face. Do I think in images then? Yes, to recall and pull back up the familiar face of my teammate. Familiar face, ball go! There’s no time to think of anything else, even their name, because I NEED to abruptly change the flow of the game. If you hesitate too long, people get into position to guard instead of attack. Oh wow, this is something I realise only now as I write it out, lol. It’s always been instinct for me to throw it out quickly, because then the people move away quicker and I don’t have to be on high alert and I can relax and just chill in my corner again, lol. 

So, when I was writing all that about body sensation above, how was I thinking? How do I write about body sensation? I place myself back in that situation, surrounding myself in the image and video of my team and the surroundings and I relive the way my body felt as it tensed up before the jump, and the SMACK of my hand on the ball, and I can feel the pain of it when the ball is going too fast. If I want to think in the medium of the body, I can focus on the pain my hand felt then, and link it to other times when my hand was in pain, like accidentally touching a hot pot, getting stitches, even massaging my hand. I can literally feel and link the different sensations and differentiate them and just think in them without words. BUT there will be accompanying images of what is around me at the time, though the main focus is on body sensation.

So, what makes body sensation so different from taste? Thinking in the medium of the body seems to be led by my gut with regards to decisions. And it usually pulls from memory, much more than trying to create something new. Though it is possible for me to feel, for example, the imprint of a triangle shape on my arm in different sizes, and think of different contraptions that could cause it, and maybe create them, but it’s not something I’m that interested in, you know? So, that part of thinking in body sensation isn’t so developed.




Thinking in Taste

* *




Taste is different, because I’m VERY interested in foooood! So, I think that part is more developed. When I think in taste, not only can I “know” instantly what is missing from a pot of soup, and the image or the word of the ingredient THEN pops into my head, but if you give me a word list of ingredients, I can imagine the flavour they will produce when combined. I can also taste out in my head what to add to get a certain combination of flavour that I want. And if, for example, you say “sour”, I can taste out a sour taste on my tongue and the different fruits associated with that. Lemon, orange, lime, kiwi, sour plum. HMMMM Kinda weird, but I think for taste, when I think in taste, the ingredients that I associate with the taste in my mind are images with text underneath. Like the fruit and vegetables chart you have as a kid.

The most clear way I think in taste is when I’m adjusting a pot of sauce. I know it tastes different from how I want it to be, but I sometimes have to try it out two to three times to figure out what is wrong with it. There’s no words or images or anything else in that moment, just tasting away and rifling through my memory to try and pull other tastes out and connect them to try and figure out what in a hippo’s foot I added to the thing to make it come out so wrong and what to add to correct it. So, I’m like a modern day potion master mixing and matching as I taste and add, taste and add.

So, do I go about life tasting the air or something? No, thinking in taste only activates when I’m eating, or when the air tastes funny. Like before it rains, which is… related to smell.




Thinking in Smell

* *




Most clear example of this was when I opened the fridge one day and something hit my nose. “What’s that smell?” I said out loud to my mother and started rifling through my memories and pulled out the smell of rotten food. But I’m not sure. Because when my mum smelled, it was so faint, she didn’t detect it. So, now there are the words “rotten food” in my head as a tentative label to this smell as well, because I don’t know what food is rotting and I’m still not sure if I’m actually going crazy. I use my nose and start tracking down the offensive thing in the fridge. Because I can’t even describe with words what I was smelling or what the thing looks like, so it’s a very clear example to me of thinking in smell.

Yeah, turns out there’s a fermenting broccoli in a plastic bag in the fridge.

Smell… I can’t synthesize new smells like I can with taste. I can sort of combine them together, but I find it hard to imagine a new fragrance. Because it’s not my area of interest. I can easily recall and link up smells. Rose smell, flower smells, smell of fresh water, smell of my bathroom, smell of towels, smell of our detergent, etc. There are images, and sometimes words attached to the smells.

And it seems like the thinking in smell is more location based, huh? Come to think of it, if I closely analyse it, it might even be a running video accompanying it…




Thinking in Images/Video

* *




Ahahaah, this is something I’m super familiar with. I’ve been doing it from a young age to entertain myself before bed each night, because I usually had difficulty sleeping from worrying a lot, so this was a way to distract myself. I just choose a scene in my head, a few people, and away we go!!! Story time! Sometimes when nap times are boring, I’ll just lie there and play out the movie in my head. Thinking in video also allows me to see what bad things might happen before they do, like my grandpa tripping over a sudden raised step that isn’t painted a bright yellow, for example.

Images seem to be more reserved for things and labeling them. Like to categorise things properly in my head, like with food ingredients, or people and their face, with names floating below them or a line linking to them from the side in web-like manner, depending on how I met them. If I met a group of people in school, there’s almost a palpable line from their face to the image of the school.

AND WE GET ON TO ARCHITECTURE OH MY GOD OKAY the great thing about thinking in video is that you can create this fantastic castle and rooms and building and stuff in your mind that can’t be realised realistically in real life. Did you watch Inception? Yup!!!! 3D models of fantastic buildings and you can go 360degrees on them, or zoom in on a gargoyle or like… WOOOOSH THROUGH THE ROOMS! Of course, the building has characteristics pulled from memory of buildings I see in real life and online, but it’s so fun to imagine!!!!!! Even better than the sims, which has like… limits in terms of computing power and designs, but ANYWAY.

Hm… I find it harder to do this for human faces though. Like, I’m trying to imagine a totally original human face, but it is quite hard. It’s doable, but a bit harder. Okay, physique I can seem to morph their body in my mind, height and width wise and muscle-fat tone quite easily. 360 degrees as well. Face I can only seem to pull up faces that I know and make a mish-mash there. Not sure why?

But like… I can make a GIANT APPLE as big as the world, and a tiny one balancing on a worm’s head, no problem. I might need to practice my human face imagery… I think because I just move the people in my head around like dolls, and faces take a lot of effort to process? Maybe because I’m an introvert? Dunno. I just get the “feeling” of their personality and play the story out from there.

OH OH DRESS DESIGNS!! Like, imagine this lady on this tall pedestal and there’s this dress that is going around her almost like an apple skin spiral when you cut it out from the apple from earlier, except it’s like purple because apple as big as the world, so universe is full of sparkling stars, so the dress is shimmering, not glittering. 

But yeah, you can see I get really excited, which leads me to…..




Thinking in Emotions

* *




Ahhhhh, this is hard. Okay, the strongest emotion that overrides all others for me is sadness and grief. I can’t seem to put it down without doing something else if it hits me. Thinking emotionally is just… immmersing in the feeling and being flooded with it. So, you got to either cry it out, sleep it away or go do occupy your mind to chase it away. When you think in emotions, the sadness you feel just starts pulling up memories linked to sadness and it can spiral very quickly.

CONVERSELY, thinking in happiness is AWESOMEEEEE!!!! Oh gosh. Sometimes thinking in happiness is so awesome because I start linking all these different mediums I mentioned above. Happy memory…

Walking to the swimming pool!!!! So, there’s grasss which smells great, freshly cut grass smell, if I follow along that path, it brings me back to my grand mother’s house where they cut the grass and it smells great, rain after cut grass in school, cut grass as I walk home with my mother, maybe eating a bread cheestick thing, which links to my grandfather bringing me home, and maybe we stop for ice-cream (image linking here), ice-cream taste links to ice-cream birthday cake I had once, which links to the plastic fork in my mouth we used to eat it, which links to all the BBQs we had using plastic forks, which links to the smell of charcoal, which links to the my friends at the beach with me, and also this pool party I went to for a friend’s birthday, on and on and on.

All very happy memories for me. Or I can just wallow in my happiness and think of the feeling I'm having, ahhhh! And if I want, I can use the emotion to create happy worlds. Or to write out how a character feels in exquisite detail, which leads to…




Thinking in Words

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This is a little tricky for me. Because there are two ways. One way is to have the word flash in front of my mind, like when I’m labelling the food ingredients earlier. The other way is when I’m typing this out now, see I’m typing this like I’m talking to you and there’s no pause in what comes to my mind and flows to my hand. Almost like I’m talking to a friend, which is my natural typing state usually.

BUT when I’m writing out a story, I use all the different mediums above to create a scene. There are no words floating in my movie. Maybe smells of the wood and the mist on your face as you stand at the precipice of a tall and twisting tower, with the sound of a robotic tortoise with wings suddenly jetting past your head.

I think I’m able to dissociate words from ideas and concepts and smells and thoughts and imagery and sounds and everything else so easily, because I learnt a lot of languages from a young age. English is the one I’m most comfortable with.

But I also have my mother tongue, and because of my grandparents, I also can listen to two dialects. And because of the culture I’m in, some words have a few names in my head. And because I love learning about cultures and languages, a feeling, emotion, concept, idea, object can have many names associated with it.

For example, bread = mian bao, lo ti, mi pau, pan, roti, naan, pain, khanom pang

Erhm, I hope I got the spelling correct? Cos I mainly remember foreign languages in sounds, which brings me toooooo…..




Thinking in Sounds

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Wheeeee! Most obvious way of thinking in sounds is when I’m swimming underwater and I got a song going in my head and it’s just music and I swim according to the beat and then I link the sound to another song that is close to it. It can be guided by emotions at the time.

AND another way to think in sound is when I hear a word that sounds similar and I play with it in my head. Like jerk, twerk, sperk, werk, irk, merk, berk, lurk, oooo-erkkk. The words don’t always make sense, but that’s okay, because language is supposed to be fun! So yeah, it’s easy for me to synthesize new words because of the funny sounds they make and I just try to spell it out, and it’s from a combination of old words and the different words I pick up here and there from the different languages I come across.

I don’t really feel the need to know the correct spelling of the different languages, because I’m more likely to say it out? So I usually give the sounds my own spelling so that I can remember how to say it easier? But yeah, at the stage before I link letters to words, the only thing linking the objects to a name is the sound of the word. Sometimes I learn from youtube videos and sometimes online, so the actual word given to the object is not stable yet. I don’t know… I find that I learn easier when I give the object my own spelling because the way I pronounce a vowel is actually quite different from how some of them spell it out due to my background. So, I prefer adapting. Is that okay? I mean, I usually have a vague impression of the actual spelling in mind such that I can recognise it when I read it on a menu, but I prefer to keep my own spelling locked in mind and on my notebook.




So yeah, here’s how I think, and my body thinks it’s time for a nap because my eyes are sleepy. Not too sure which one I think in most of all though.


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## Coburn (Sep 3, 2010)

I sometimes write my thoughts out visually in my mind.


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## 66393 (Oct 17, 2013)

I project pictures and short clips. If I want to project words I have to focus energy onto that -- it doesn't come natural to me


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## Eska (Aug 18, 2014)

I never knew you could think in words.

You mean literally imagine the words?

I associate images, I've never thought about "words" themselves.

The images give me the basic ideas and key words, then I simply add verbs/determinants,etc. to structure a sentence with it.


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## SpinniBell (Aug 9, 2014)

I very rarely ever think in words. I always think in emotions (if that makes sense ) Or sensations, I guess, would be a more accurate term. I like to think in visuals, too. When I'm letting my mind wander about whatever, that's when I think in sensations. If I'm doing work, or some type of writing, I think in words.


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## mikan (May 25, 2014)

%90 of my thought are in words.


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## Reluctanine (May 11, 2014)

Some thing really odd happened today. My grandmother called me up to ask for my mum’s office number.

So, what happened was, I pulled the numbers from my memory. They were stored as sound though. In English, since that’s what I’m most comfortable with. I realised I store numbers in this rhythm.

XX XX XX XX

So, I had to translate the numbers to her language. I was having a very difficult time though, because there were so many numbers, so I slowly started to translate them 2 by 2. She read back the numbers I gave her but something seemed off.

So, I held out my hands and repeated out the numbers in English in my head, each digit moving as each number was read out. Then, I realised I had given her one digit short.

So, I started saying out the numbers in English over the phone, with my hands moving, and holding the image of numbers in my head. My grandmother complained and told me to not say it in English. I told her to hold on. Each time I repeated the numbers out, the image in my head became clearer and clearer, until finally I could read off the numbers in her language back to her.

Stressful, man. D: But yeah, example of thinking in sound, then image/words.


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## spylass (Jan 25, 2014)

emberfly said:


> I read recently that thinking in words is neurotypical and those with Autism tend to think in pictures/ideas.
> 
> If you're more curious than I you could check out Temple Grandin's book -> _Thinking in Pictures_


Interesting. I'm neuroatypical but not in the Austic sense. I have comorbid mental illnesses. Around the time they started manifesting in adolescence, I became much more creative, and thinking in a far less structured way. My thinking became much more visual and conceptual (less and less with words) and much more like a web of associations instead of a chain of thoughts that follow one after the other. I think I started to think faster too.


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## action9000 (Jun 15, 2013)

Words, definitely!

My thoughts are made up of conversations with myself, intermixed with some imagery to help with the abstract ideas. The conversations can often involve other personas to help expand the viewpoints of the thoughts.


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## saturnne (Sep 8, 2009)

Unspoken assumptions, as Eckhart Tolle calls them - not in words; arise before you know it
And then there's the inner voice, the unending stream of words...


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