Visual representation of thoughts

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i have a constant movie screen in my brain. i t never stops and varies in intensity but it is always there just blitzing me with pictures. I stop a lot mid sentence when i am talking at home, because i cannot keep up with verbalising the pics or because i simply get lost in the pictures and images. Until finding out about AS, i actually though everyone thought like this.

Sometimes it is like internal hallucination it is so vivid and intense. LIke right now, when i thought of vividness, i was engulfed in a field of lavender - thousands and thousads of flowers and i can just about smell it too. (oh no - the smell has just gone now.) just simply beautiful.

Of course, it can get very scary too.

I have sensory integration issues and words have shapes to them. I also nearly vomit sometimes when i go to the local shopping centre (you guys in the U.S call it the mall.) I see all the faces so vividly on a bad sensory day, and then off goes a whole chain of riotous and replusive imagery> if someone has a wound or a sore...goodness....not nice...the chain of internal mental imagery can take over and swamp me in such a yucky place. I can literally feel like a fly in the wound. BUt it is not classic hallucination, because i am aware that it is a sensory synaestheasia issue.. THere seems to be a very very thin metaphorical membrane (if any) between my five senses. THey seem to blur a lot.

I can small things i see in my brain (eg, like th lavender, or like something yucky.)

Wouldn't change it for the world, even though on a hard day it means i don't stray too far from home.

great thread and great topic by the way

For me it's a physical sensation in my head. It feels as though all the neurons are firing in some perfect sequence that makes my brain go all warm and fuzzy, but perfectly clear at the same time. And I visualise myself going around corners, looking under small things, just generally bending and twisting in little details. For some reason my head likes these things.

I get that problem with wounds and similar things, too. Also with asymmetrical holes, cracks, that sort of thing. It makes my brain vibrate and feel wierd again, but in a bad way. In this instance, the neurons are firing in the least perfect sequence possible. It makes me want to hit myself on the back of the head to try and bash my mind back into place.

Likewise. If I really concentrate I can get a very vague shape, a square or a circle maybe, to hold steady for a few seconds. Otherwise I've just formless thoughts being (poorly) turned into words. It's not that I don't know shapes, I can draw a reasonable map of the world or places I've been, but I can't ever see them. I had thought it was linked to poor facial recognition, but that wouldn't seem to be the case.

I'm reading a book at the moment about how we see things, it's absolutely fascinating stuff. It's not simple at all, not like a TV camera; everything goes through a whole set of filters and pre-processing. The "spotlight" of our visual field is tiny, and the rest is built on approximation and guesswork; the brain fills in all the blank spots. Really interesting and it seems noone really knows how any of it works in detail.

Any other fascinating examples of how you perceive this?

Not really related to special interest, but I have pretty much photographic memory. I can read a page in a book I saw if I concentrate really hard. I can look at a chemistry code and immediately have a three dimensional molecule spinning around in my thoughts. I used to draw all the time, and I have come up with some wickedly unusual art that is simply the exact replica of what I see in my mind when I think of different emotions and ideas.

Growing older I've lost some part of my visual thinking to word thinking (baddly, but it's hard to translate otherwise). I think that I think (sorry for ripetition) intuitivly. I usually simply "know the answer" then I try to remake the steps with graphs and finally words. Sometimes there are though I can't simply make an image of or say in words, the most appropriate things is saying that is like an org... but with my mind. But usually I think with graphs.

I imagine a spherical room with varying-sized blocks of infinite length in the direction facing away from me jutting out from all directions with me at the center, the blocks being my thoughts. I originally came up with the idea as a meditation technique where I'd flatten all of the blocks to the same level and get to an 'empty' state of mind, but it eventually stuck in me as a constant image of my mind when it came to thought.

I always imagine the blocks getting abnormally close to me and closing in on me when I start to get worried about something, so I try to push them away to keep myself from lashing out or breaking down.

My "field of ideas" is kind of a spherical projection screen. I see different ideas in different locations on this screen. When evaluating a specific idea, it takes up a large amount of area on the screen. If it needs to be discarded, it kind of recesses until it's a very small image. Then, I enlarge a different idea from another location. It's kind of like the "memory interface" in Minority Report, if you've seen it. I'm a programmer, so I have to evaluate and discard a large number of ideas before settling upon a single "best" solution.

In the event that I'm looking for a solution to a problem, I then construct a mental model of my best idea, kind of like a machine with gears and conveyor belts, though having none of that imagery, through which I send different variations of the main problem. If nothing "breaks down", I conclude that the idea was a good one and take whatever steps are necessary to bring it to fruition.

That is how I envision, design, troubleshoot and eventually fabricate industrial items in a manufacturing plant. And having just recently discovered I am an Aspie, I can now sit and "stare at stuff in my mind" without being critical of myself for "just sitting there" and seemingly doing nothing.