Do all aspies think in pictures?

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I thought everyone thought in pictures until I read about Temple Grandin and I didn't know what she was talking about with her thing in pictures because why was it a big deal? Everyone thought in them, I thought.

I have always been a visual thinker and I admit I can see words now but I can't stop seeing pictures. But my thinking doesn't work like Temple's. I believe she has the wrong conception about autistics thinking in pictures, she says lot of them are but I find that to be untrue. She really needs to come to these forums and educate herself on individuals.

Well, I definitely do. I always think of images and I can visualize a lot of things. I'm also a very visual learner, which makes me bad at things like English and History where you can't really see what is going on, unlike Math and Physics where there's always graphs and diagrams.

My thoughts almost have it's own five senses. So yes, I see in pictures but not only that, but also in moving pictures, and I can see words as well as hear them, which sometimes causes me to talk to myself or stare blankly at nothing in particular. And if I think about a certain taste or smell then I can actually almost taste or smell that taste or smell.
And while I do think in "moving pictures" they aren't always very vivid, like I can easily picture a face I've already seen, but I have trouble picturing a face without ever having seen it. so in my moving pictures thought with people I've never seen but only imagined, i can't easily visualize what their face looks like or what their voice sounds like.
some of my friends also think in pictures, but most think in regular thoughts, which I don't know it consists of cuz that's all they said. but my aspie friend thinks in moving pictures and in words

My normal thought is mixed verbal/visual, but I can switch to a much more one-sided thought mode when lying in bed after waking up. It does not work always; I think it happens when I wake up from a dream. I must have been lying on the right side for hours and keep that position after waking up to stay in the alternate thought mode. In this mode it is much easier to keep a visual picture in mind. The mental image disappears and the mode wanes if I open my eyes. Whenever I find myself in the visual mode after waking up, I try to stay in it for as long as possible by not moving and keeping the eyes closed.

The visual mode helps me think much more clearly about problems that have bothered me the day before. The problems must be visual in nature, however. They have to be representable by a concrete mental image. For example, a good problem to think about in this mode is how to rearrange the furniture in my room. The room and everything that is inside just stays effortlessly before my mental eye and allows me to zoom in, out, rotate the view, and move stuff around.

That ease of mental imagery comes at a cost, however. While creating, keeping and manipulating concrete images is much easier, it is harder to think about abstract things. I tried to think about insurances, free will, or consciousness. It was almost impossible to have a single coherent, useful thought about any of those concepts. This reminded me of Temple Grandin, an extremely visual thinker who writes she cannot think about abstract concepts without imagining a concrete picture. When she thinks of dogs, she always sees a concrete dog. I tried this by thinking about "Dogs hunt cats". I immediately saw a concrete dog of a specific race, with a specific size and color, hunting an equally concrete cat. In normal thought mode the dog and cat are much blurrier and not real visual pictures. I use this test to find out whether I am in visual or normal thought mode when I wake up.

I believe there are two things causing the visual thought mode. The first is probably the brain still having its attention switched to the inner mental eye, because I find myself in this mode most often when waking up from a dream. The second cause I believe is that lying on one side for hours has flooded one side of the brain much more strongly than the other. When I change my position after waking up by turning on the other side, I fall out of the mode. Lying on the right side fills my right hemisphere with more blood. This hemisphere seems to be responsible for concrete visual thinking.

This might sound ridiculous, but the reason I believe this is that I sometimes am in a different alternate thought mode when waking up lying on the left side. Mental imagery is much harder then, but something else is easier: mathematics. After finding I was in a strange thought mode that was not visual mode, I experimented with different things and found that the way I do calculations like 19 times 23 is much different in this mode. Normally I just try to do the multiplication procedure I was taught in school: 10 times 23 plus 9 times 23. But in left side thinking mode, the numbers got a life of their own. 19 was not just a random number but presented itself as 20-1. I computed 19 times 23 by computing 20 times 23 and then subtracting 23 from the result, which is easier. This trick might be an old hat for many, but I normally do not compute this way. And lying there in bed this way of computing just came natural to me. I tried another computation: 25 times 17. 25 pulsed in front of my eyes, activating all kinds of relationships to other numbers. 25 is 100 divided by 4, which is 2 times 2. So I computed the result as 100 times 17 and divided the result by 2, and then by 2 again. Again much easier than the school procedure.

This reminded me of Daniel Tammet, an autistic who has savant skills in the realms of numbers and languages. Lying on the left side must have flooded my left hemisphere, responsible for mathematical thinking. I call this thinking mode Daniel Tammet thinking mode. Thoughts are much less associative in this mode than in Temple Grandin mode. In the latter I have problems switching to a completely new thought that is not visually related to the current one. Daniel Tammet mode is also better for abstract reasoning. I thought about the abstract concept of marriage. I found it pretty easy, coming up with different metaphors. A couple marrying is a bit like cells forming a multi-cellular organism; they use synergy to attain common goals. Marriage is also a bit like getting publically shackled to each other: by limiting your own future possibilities, you become more reliable and predictable to your partner. Now these metaphors are not really brilliant insights, but they showed me that thinking about abstract concepts is much easier in this mode.

Each mode has its advantages and disadvantages when compared to the other and to the normal mode. I alternate sleeping on the left side on one night and on the right side on another, so on some days I wake up in Temple Grandin thinking mode, on others in Daniel Tammet mode. I also try to keep a repertoire of visual and analytical problems to think about when managing to wake up in one of those modes.

All of my thoughts are usually location / geographically based and almost always involve images. Sometimes I will be thinking about something I was doing in my kitchen a few days ago and then suddenly remember to myself, "hey, yeah, that's right! I AM in my kitchen" **However, abstract thought is an exception - In my head that's all just sets of numbers and letters and symbols and stuff.

I always think in pictures. Since I was younger my mom associated words I had to learn with pictures. Than after that reading a book saw it in pictures, some conversations I see in pictures. I memorize everything in my high school I see the whole thing. Say I go to my Uncle's house or Aunt's after 2 times, I know the whole house. Like in August this year I went to my Uncle Bob's house first time in 11 years, I knew where everything was kitchen, bathroom and the bed room I was going to sleep in. After not being in high school in 3 years I believe I was able to draw a whole picture out of the high school where everything is.

When I give directions, I see everything the trees, houses turns and such. Than I give directions by that, like go down the road when you see a open space of land with 10 huge rocks on your left hand side turn down that road. People told me that it's much more helpful than the directions my mom gives them.

I think in pictures, a lot.