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How Do You Think?

A

are

Active Member
V.I.P Member
I 99.99% think in one of two ways:

Primary: Unsymbolized. I think thoughts without words. They're like "semantic units". Where they mean something to me but if i listen there's no voice. And they have connections attached to them and metadata -- like how certain I am.

Secondary: Dialogic. If i have someone listening. Like now. Or just imagining someone else. Then I collapse my thinking into words. But I have to know who i'm talking to or words don't form.

How do you think?
Do you have a story in your head? Is it in words?
 
are said:
I 99.99% think in one of two ways:

Primary: Unsymbolized. I think thoughts without words. They're like "semantic units". Where they mean something to me but if i listen there's no voice. And they have connections attached to them and metadata -- like how certain I am.

Secondary: Dialogic. If i have someone listening. Like now. Or just imagining someone else. Then I collapse my thinking into words. But I have to know who i'm talking to or words don't form.

How do you think?
Do you have a story in your head? Is it in words?
Click to expand...
Initially i had the secondary (in bold) mode 100% of the time. Otherwise I was fool-proof ASD 1 or should I say Royal Guard.

I was 100% freeze until i got Defenestrated. After I DDW i won.

Edit: "they" don't recognize my Victory. Have i won then?
 
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Always with words. The internal monologue is always on... even while dreaming... sometimes with more than one conversation at a time.

I do tend to be a visual thinker... pattern recognition, imagining things, etc... but also with the narrative.
 
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Spock: "Captain, how do I think?"
Kirk: "Don't ask."
Spock: "But sir, that's not logical given that I already posed the question."
Kirk: "Never mind Spock. Scotty, two to beam up....and hurry!"
 
My memory for everyday things is entirely based on images, always. Where are the car keys? I have to recall the picture in my head of where they are.

I never have internal dialogue in words or verbal thoughts.

Otherwise, I think either in logical sequence/steps, or by creating a mental model of something. If I have to remember facts for a test or whatever reason, I imagine a related model already in my head, and "attach" it to the model. I don't think of it as a visual process, but that's the only way I know to describe it.
 
I believe my thinking is also more of unsymbolized thinking, by concepts or feel of the subject. I often just form a formless idea, or do things "intuitively". Kind of having an understanding rather than "a clear picture". "Fuzzy logic" could be a describing word. If I have to explain the logic to someone else, then I need to convert / translate concepts to mental images or words (it feels like translating to a different language - and rethinking everything in more language friendly way). Sometimes I need to do that even to explain things to myself, as I do find accurate handling of complex structures hard without visualizing them in graphs or words.

I also have an internal dialogue, but that is more of fantasizing conversational situations than a way of thinking.

Sometimes I visualize situations in the vein of "I can see in my mind's eye someone's face when he hears about X". But logical thinking, planning, problem solving etc. is usually without words and mental images.

I reserve a possibility that my "conceptual thinking" is actually a form of visualization even thought I don't admit seeing my thoughts as pictures. Only thing I am sure of is that it is not verbal thinking.

Is there any tests to solve what is really my way of thinking? I mean, answering to this is distorted both by my self-image and the fact that I have to now think in words as I am writing this.

Hmm, all answers from officially diagnosed people go with words or visuals, while me and OP go with concept thinking (so far). Could it be a telling signal about something? Severity, or a stereotypical limitations in abstract thinking, or something?
 
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I become very zeroed in on what I am thinking about, and talk to myself about it. Also have always noticed patterns: I love to count tiles.
 
I think in mostly sensory...like the world as I experience it through my senses recreated in my mind (memory of emotions and many physical sensations is actually sort of ghostly-re-creation of the emotion/other type of feeling in my body though...that is a bad description but best I can do). Mostly visual spatial -- and almost entirely visual spatial for the limited symbolic abstraction I can do.

And some part of my mind does patterns but that is a background thing...doesnt really have conscious manifestation.

Words are not thoughts for me, I never think in words..I think of words to translate thoughts, but they are not actual things and have no place in my actual thoughts...hopefully that makes sense?
 
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UFO said:
I believe my thinking is also more of unsymbolized thinking, by concepts or feel of the subject. I often just form a formless idea, or do things "intuitively". Kind of having an understanding rather than "a clear picture". "Fuzzy logic" could be a describing word. If I have to explain the logic to someone else, then I need to convert / translate concepts to mental images or words (it feels like translating to a different language - and rethinking everything in more language friendly way). Sometimes I need to do that even to explain things to myself, as I do find accurate handling of complex structures hard without visualizing them in graphs or words.

I also have an internal dialogue, but that is more of fantasizing conversational situations than a way of thinking.

Sometimes I visualize situations in the vein of "I can see in my mind's eye someone's face when he hears about X". But logical thinking, planning, problem solving etc. is usually without words and mental images.

I reserve a possibility that my "conceptual thinking" is actually a form of visualization even thought I don't admit seeing my thoughts as pictures. Only thing I am sure of is that it is not verbal thinking.

Is there any tests to solve what is really my way of thinking? I mean, answering to this is distorted both by my self-image and the fact that I have to now think in words as I am writing this.

Hmm, all answers from officially diagnosed people go with words or visuals, while me and OP go with concept thinking (so far). Could it be a telling signal about something? Severity, or a stereotypical limitations in abstract thinking, or something?
Click to expand...
No there is no way to resolve that problem that i found. It just is. But i understand exactly what you're pattern matching to. I found it was subjectively true like a coherent way to think about my unsymbolized cognition. but it's not objectively true. There's no way to know from first-person experience alone.
 
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Constant internal dialogue. When thinking, reading, dreaming, always there. Even if it's just a song in my head.
Images when remembering a place. Or when reading fantasy stories, I like to create how the characters and places would look with my imagination along with the words.
 
SusanLR said:
Images when remembering a place. Or when reading fantasy stories, I like to create how the characters and places would look with my imagination along with the words.
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For a long time I couldn’t understand how people could do anything other than this. I resisted going to see the movies of Lord of the Rings for a long time because I knew that when I did my Gandalf (and all the other characters and places) would be irrevocably overwritten.
 
AuAL said:
For a long time I couldn’t understand how people could do anything other than this. I resisted going to see the movies of Lord of the Rings for a long time because I knew that when I did my Gandalf (and all the other characters and places) would be irrevocably overwritten.
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I watched about half of the first movie and was so sad about how frantic the Shire -> Rivendell sequence was that I got up and left the theatre. I've never walked out of a movie before or since. The dissonance between Peter Jackson's idea of what Middle Earth feels like, and the feel of the very high detail internal world I used as a refuge as a pre-teen/teenager, was just too much to bear.

I still haven't seen the rest of the first, or any of the others. It was a memorably unpleasant experience.
 
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AuAL said:
For a long time I couldn’t understand how people could do anything other than this. I resisted going to see the movies of Lord of the Rings for a long time because I knew that when I did my Gandalf (and all the other characters and places) would be irrevocably overwritten.
Click to expand...
I resist going to movies of any of my favorite books, not because of characters being overwritten (I rarely have an internal image of a character), but because the story itself ALWAYS gets rewritten in unnecessary ways. I can somewhat excuse changes where accurate depictions of the story would be difficult, but with CGI and other new cinematic techniques, even that excuse isn't valid anymore.
 
With mostly random images or words. I’ve come up with some interesting things with my thinking process and it sort of lets me see things from a completely different yet valid angle.
 
I realized that therefore I am...and it just started happening.

Just kidding.

I have the internal monologue at all times. It's probably why I always liked film noir movies with the narration stuff going on.
 
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