When is it better to think without words?

Been thinking a lot recently about what my thoughts look like. They definitely aren't words (though as I type this, I can imagine hearing myself think ahead to the end of the sentence). The best I can describe it is visualisations - whether that's images of maths notation, 3D rotating models, or a flow/map/block diagram.

One pattern is that I'm a very prolific connection-forming machine.

Exhibit A: The first thing that enters my mind for each word. (OnePlus One) (android pattern unlock) (Islamic State) (unit vector named t) (ich bin) (emoji-blood-type-A) (Latin etymology word root with verily) (https://prolificusa.com/) (New York Times Connections) (roll-forming, blow moulding, sheet metal stamping...) ("my body is a machine" meme)

My wife was confounded when I told her I don't think in words. For her, it's a one to one correlation.

She had assumed that all people think in this mode. I had assumed that all people think in "thoughts" and went through a separate step to articulate them.

Made both of us aware of a difference in people.

I don't feel vibrations or sensations though, and I definitely don't think in images. I only have a thought level, and it's very independent of any external presentation.

> (ich bin)

Are you a native German speaker? or additional language? (it's an interesting/seemingly-random association)

The rest is similar to my (dyslexic) reading process. From what I can tell, I coped by memorizing the "shape" or image of words and associated them other things/images/sounds/dictionary-definition/feeling/emotions/experiences or some other abstract things I don't know how to describe -- attached metadata, if you will. The biggest issue is words like (is, that, a, etc) since the associations are weak at best, leading to them being disappeared/changed/hallucinated/moved or replaced by others in the same sentence/paragraph. Sometime when it's really messed up, leads to rereading a sentence or paragraph multiple times until the sequence of all of that makes sense.

But sounding out words is an absolute disaster no matter how much I try and fell behind in early grade school until my overwhelming need to not disappoint family, who were getting frustrated with me, kicked in and I developed my coping methods. It takes longer to read and learn new words but the associating and pattern matching resulted in my comprehension and language scores in school being so high no one picked up on how slow I read (or the disaster that reading aloud is) and how poorly I spell as being something off.

I knew a really great programmer. He was also a classical pianist (and unrelatedly an astronomer). Well anyway he wrote large entire programs with mostly two character variable names. He usually conceives entire programs in his head and would write them out using whatever symbols were still available. Most of the time, I would see him sitting and swaying in his office chair and maybe touching fingertips while looking around at the ceiling or walls. His title back in the 80s before such things became memes was Chief Scientist. He also couldn't care less that another person at the company would write books and take credit for his creations. (Maybe he saw the marketing value in something he had no interest in doing.) Oh and the programming language used didn't have variable scoping--all global. It's kind of like Tesla designing an A/C motor in his minds eye and drawing it out only for purpose of communication.

Do you have the opposite of aphantasia? How do you generate words ultimately?