I tend to agree with Albert Einstein below; there's a very physical/spatial aspect to my problem solving before it can be translated to words. I work in software so there's nothing innately physical about it. Never put much thought to it until LLMs brought it up for debate.

"The words of the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The psychical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be "voluntarily" reproduced and combined....From a psychological viewpoint this combinatory play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought....The...elements are, in my case, of visual and some of muscular type. Conventional words or other signs have to be sought for laboriously only in a secondary stage, when the mentioned associative play is sufficiently established and can be reproduced at will."

Do you have an internal monologue?

I don't. I seem to think at a more abstract, pre-verbal level rather than through an internal voice.

Some studies suggest that frequent internal monologue may occur in roughly 30–50% of people [1], but the research is based on relatively small samples.

[1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/intersections/202304...

These days, words. When I was in an environment where language swapping between 4 to 5 languages was common, I thought in pictures and described it in the correct language for the audience. It was a plasticity mind trip.

Also saved pesos on the charge-per-text SMS schemes the local phone companies used because we could embed information across so many options.

How do you know that it's the words driving the thinking, rather than the stream of words just being an observable trace tacked onto the actual thinking?

My friend has aphantasia and cannot think with words, sounds, or pictures.