Question for NTs about how you think

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But it is impossible to just make myself stop thinking as that requires me to think! My monologue might stop, but it's impossible for me to notice that it stops, as that would require thinking about my thoughts, which would make me think.

I'm so damn confused, thinking about my thinking confuses me so much, and I'm afraid I spend far too much time doing that.

One time I ate a hash brownie and my consciousness dropped about ten seconds behind the action. I was walking around, crossing roads and stuff, and there was clearly someone in control who wasn't my voice/picture/thinky system.

I can only use my "inner voice" with a "catalysator", which means a medium, where I can direct it to so that I can have an "inner voice". It is like I can only think in words when for example I think I am writing on a forum or talking to a tree or something. But it is very chaotic, except when I am in an SI and a 100% focused, but then I have no "inner voice" anymore, then I think in pictures.
If I think in words without a "catalysator", I directly fall into echolalia very strongly.
I cannot use this "inner voice" for direction, it is too blurry.
I am very picture-thinking, which means I see for example an idiom and then I "translate" it. This is often funny, but it also happend, that people insulted me with an expression, which I first see and it looks funny, so that I was laughing when people insulted me.
When somebody asks me a question ("how is your sibling doing?"), I will see many pictures of him from all different stages of age and have to try to find an answer from that, but I never know then how to answer, because it is difficult to analyse all this pictures and give a clear answer.

btbnnyr's descriptions are the closest to my thinking style that I've seen here.

I thought the posts about reading a lot to get an inner narration were interesting, as I read voraciously. If there's nothing else going on, I read as much as I can (I came very close to reading a book a day while the power was out - I was slowed down by the relative lack of light and distractions from other people) and taught myself to read. But when I read, I produce and fill in pictures and movies based on what I'm reading and end up visualizing what I'm reading.

This is similar to what I do. I mentioned in another thread, and fraac said my thinking was like Temple Grandin's - but I think my thinking and memory are "fuzzier" than hers, and not nearly as perfect in terms of visualization and definitely not recall. Plus I think there are other differences that I can't really articulate right now, but when I read her writing, there's a definite difference.

Please for more neurotypische to reply, danke.

When I read novels I first only listen to my inner voice repeating what is written, but then the narration goes to the background(or disappears, I'm not sure) and I begin readding faster and see it as it were a movie(I can't imaging enjoing a novel without "seeing" it, I suppose all the people who likes reading see it as a movie). But when I'm studying a text there is only verbal thinking maybe that's why I read so slowly and I don't remember it as clearly as a novel, sometimes I just repeat in my mind what is written but I don't pay attention, I daydream and suddenly I notice I have been reading the same page over and over.

I can't do that at all. I've always been confounded, when a novel is made into a movie and people say the actors don't look like what they imagined the characters to be. I used to think, who in the world imagines what the characters in a book look like?! I am completely incapable of doing that.

Yeah, reading is not the way to get an internal narration for me. Instead, I get transported into the world described by the words, so the words are sort of de-emphasized. This happens for both novels and technical readings. I was reading a Jane Austen novel last night, "Northanger Abbey", and there was a part about the characters visiting some social setting in Bath, and I felt like I was there and everything described, especially the muslin fabric of the dresses, I felt in my hands. And all the background noises I heard - the clinking of knives and forks while people were eating and all that. Earlier, I was reading a neuroscience textbook, and I ended up in a "Fantastic Voyage" world traveling up a nerve into the brain while watching the flickers of light of the action potential traveling up the nerve at the same time. I like to view the third person and first person perspectives at the same time. I view and experience the first person perspective with the right side of my body, and the third person with the left, especially my left eye.

I have found that writing was my way of finding an internal narration, not a nearly automatic, nearly constant, nearly effortless one like the verbal stream of consciousness, but more the purposeful one that I mentioned earlier, the blood pressure cuff one.

It was only within the past year and a half that I have been able to have any purposeful thinking in words, like I acquired the little squeezable round thing to pump the blood pressure cuff. Before that, I did not have this kind of thinking to any useful extent, as I sucked at forming grammatical meaningful sentences in my mind to talk to myself or communicate my thoughts to others. I did not know how to translate my non-word thoughts into words. It was extremely hard work, and the results sucked. Then, somehow but I have no idea how, I learned to write by magic suddenly one day, and this ability to have purposeful thinking in words magically appeared. Before that, I wrote by rote, like combinations of phrases that I had read in books and other sources, and I sounded quite idiotic in writing and no way could I have posted on Internetz forums to communicate anything meaningful. Even my emails sounded bad bad bad. It would have been exhaustingly difficult to write a paragraph like I am writing now, rather easily. I thank the Sky People Up On High that I have been blessed with this magical ability relatively late in life (30).

Ok, it looks like there is four types of thinkers here: Completely Nonverbal, Semi-Nonverbal (lacks an active internal monologe, but it sill apears at times), Mixed (has an active internal monolouge, but also thinks in pictures at the same time), and hyperverbal. And then there is whatever Tuttle is, as she claims to be nonverbal, but non-pictorial either. I say I'm mixed.

This is similar to me as well - I started doing it a long time ago. I've mentioned on the forum before that the way I can get something like an internal narration is to write or speak out loud. Otherwise, thinking in words doesn't really happen, not more than a few at a time, which turns into mental echolalia.



I used to rely on a "phrase bank" a lot more than I do now, although there are times I get stuck using it, when the alternative seems to be not talking at all. I know as a child talking like this got me into trouble a few times. Did you ever match phrases that sounded appropriate to what other people wrote/said? That is, knowing certain phrases were used in response to other kinds of phrases? Am I making sense?

I think it seriously started for me when I found BBSes in 1989 or so. Writing fluidly, that is. I didn't have regular access to means of writing before then, and I think I developed fairly rapidly as it became so much easier for me to put my thoughts into words than I could with speech (and this is still the case). I effectively downloaded a lot of language into my brain before I was 7 or 8 or so (hyperlexia), and I think it took until my early 30s to process it well enough to use it with full awareness of what I was saying, though.

What about a mix of three? Verbal, visual and concepts. The concepts are generally expressed more or less akwardly in verbal right after though.


It confirm what I see so far from NTs, they're boring. I mean, they can make they mind work on anything they want, like figuring out how things work, video games or imagining a man fighting a big rockets launching robot with his lightsabers, and they focus it on everyday tasks!! !! No wonder they better that me for those everyday tasks!
No wonder I'm so alone either. How am I supposed to have fun with peoples like that?

I've known many NTs who are far from boring and often quite interesting. Often, NTs find me boring.

I wonder if "concepts" is what I called "something" or is something else.

I find this interesting, because I've been a voracious reader since before I can remember, and I don't have an inner narrative.
I don't "hear" written words as spoken words in my head, either.

I am NT, and yes I think in this internal conversation, this is how I work things out, refine them, plan, but its not exactly verbal, but I guess close to it.
Sometimes I imagine an actual conversation using words with someone else to explain something, and then my thoughts are at their most clear and powerful.

But I pull up images still and moving where I need to, I am an engineer, I can't imagine how you could be an engineer or understand science without being able to think visually. I'm one of those people that can't remember a name but always remember faces.