Internal Representations: Do you think in words, pictures, smells, something else?

When I was 17 I had a conversation with my friends Dave S. and Kirky that blew my mind. It was in that conversation that I discovered some people have a continuous internal monologue.

Prior to that conversation, I was aware of internal monologues from movies and novels, (I was reading a lot of Stephen King and he uses them liberally).

I'd always assumed this was just a kind of narrative convention. Of course people don't actually think in words. You just have to write it like that to make it work in a movie or a novel.

But then I had that convo with Dave and Kirky and they both insisted that they literally had a voice talking to them in their head pretty much all day.

I don't think in words. I also don't think in images, at least not very clearly. I'm somewhere around the middle of this scale



But "the middle" here still feels pretty impoverished, and I certainly don't do most of my thinking in a primarily visual way.

I'm also certainly not enlightened. I'm thinking much of the day, just like almost everyone else.

The most natural way to describe my experience of thinking is "I think in thoughts," but that's a bit circular. My thoughts are something like shapes in some abstract space, something like feelings, sometimes with a bit of fuzzy visual information, sometimes with a bit of language. There's a thing in NLP call Visual-Kinetic Synesthesia which is probably closish to the mark.

So, it's always gratifying when I hear someone else describe something similar, like in this passage from a recent substack article

In the 1940s, when the French mathematician Jacques Hadamard asked good mathematicians how they came up with solutions to hard problems, they nearly universally answered that they didn’t think in words; neither did they think in images or equations. Rather, what passed through the mathematicians as they struggled with problems were such things as vibrations in their hands, nonsense words in their ears, or blurry shapes in their heads. - Henrik Karlsson

This passage, and the article, sort of implies that this mode of thinking is especially smart. For the record, my guess is that's not true. Perhaps different modes are better suited for certain kinds of tasks. I'm not even convinced of that. I'm a little above average at math, but my strongest talents are linguistic, which would naively make you guess that I thought primarily in words. And there are brilliant visual artists who are fully aphantasic.

I'd love to hear from you about your experience of thinking, especially the internal sensory experience.