I think in words.
That has upsides and downsides.
The biggest upside is that I can use my words to solve (or at least ameliorate) issues. I often forget that this is a skill that many humans lack. I'll hear about people having relationship problems, say, and I'll ask, well, when you talked to him about this, what did he say?
"Oh, I haven't talked to him. He's oblivious."
He's oblivious because you haven't talked to him!
At that point I have to assume that whatever the problem is, it's accepted within the relationship, and back away slowly, wondering to myself why it is that communication seems to be so difficult for so many people. Open your mouth, words spill out. Doesn't matter if they're the wrong words--at least you have something to edit. The alternative is to accept things as they are. That works, sometimes..but it shouldn't have to work all of the time.
Because we communicate with words, my facility with words makes me look intelligent. I don't consider myself particularly smart, but I'm not above making myself look smarter than I am, often by playing with words.
The downside os that without words to guide and shape my perception, I'm often at a complete loss. Give me a schematic and I'll look at it for hours without grasping its relation to the physical world around me. Give me a problem to solve that involves moving things in physical space, and I'm apt to display the intelligence of a dumb three-year-old.
I'll give you an example.
The placement of our clothes washer has bothered me since we moved in here ten years ago. It bothered me even more now that we have a new, larger washer. The laundry area is pretty narrow, and there's barely enough room to open the door of the washer and get clothes into it. You're hemmed in on the right by the laundry sink, from behind by a toilet, and on the left by the open door of the washer, not to mention the door to the laundry room itself. It's a tight, awkward fit--again, especially with this new deeper washer. It calls for flexibility I do not have.
I'm responsible for the laundry in this house. Eva has never actually seen me struggling to get the laundry into or out of the washer...until the other night when a best-not-discussed emergency necessitated the use of the toilet (much closer to the side door of the house, and as I'm sure you know, descending stairs is easier than climbing them under certain conditions, and here I am discussing the emergency anyway...sorry.)
"Why don't you just rotate the washer 90 degrees?" she asked.
"I can do that?"
"Yeah, just back the back of it up against the laundry sink."
That had honestly never occurred to me.Not once in ten years. The washer faced the toilet when we moved here; without even putting any thought into it, I just assumed it had to be that way. Now I'm smacking myself. I've been low-grade pissed about that washer every single time I've run a load of laundry through it for the last decade--and never once did I think I could just move it. Took twenty seconds.
I had asked if the door latch could be detached and mounted on the left instead of the right, such that the door would swing open the other way. This, too, is vintage Ken. I can and do come up with the most convoluted "solutions" to any spatial problem while steadfastly ignoring the dead-simple solution staring me in the face.
The news aggregator site Reddit.com, "the front page of the Internet", awards link and comment 'karma' points based on the popularity of your submission or comment. I don't care overmuch for Reddit karma, but I do care that it's called karma. To my mind, they missed an obvious opportunity to call it cReddit. This isn't something I thought up after asking myself "gee, what would I call points that accrue to people on the site Reddit.com"--this was an instant thing. "It's called karma." "What? Why wouldn't they call it cReddit?"
"I don't know, why wouldn't you think of shifting the washer ninety degrees?"
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