I’ve come to believe everyone thinks in pictures, even if they don’t know it. By adulthood some of us go on autopilot, our connection to the pictures, images, emotion-movies cemented so far in the foundation-concrete of our makeup that we know only words anymore.
Creativity demands turning away from the words and toward the pictures. Visual creatives, you live here. Connect your hands to your pictures. We wordsmiths, though, must act as our own interpreters, must turn our backs on the pictures while remembering them, must translate the pictures into words.
At least, that’s how it works for me. When it works for me. (The rest of the time I just wander among the pictures and say to myself, “sure, I’ll remember this for later.”)
all the voices in my head 
For some of us, the pictures never faded into the background, but still remain active today. For me, I can say it has been a blessing, and a curse.
I do not claim to have a “photographic” memory in the classic sense, but I am on the spectrum, if you will allow. It has been a blessing to me all my life, being able to recall where I last saw and object, a tool, a work document, a mathematical formula, a bit of music on a score, a hidden turn onto a road that appears on no generally published map.
But it has also been a curse. Teachers would fail my work because I would give the correct answer but not show my work on how I got to the answer. I did not then know that I thought in a different manner from what was expected of me in a classroom environment.
How could I show my work when I had no words to describe the way the answers assembled in my mind – or convey the beauty of the process as it happened?
I get lost when someone with good intentions takes a look at my messy desk or workshop and decides to clean it up and organize it for me while I am on vacation (this happened to me more than one time at work.) How can I function when someone has cut off my right arm?
In my latter 20’s I finally began to recognize what was going on and I began working to corral the wild processes, to bring a hint of organization to the ‘madness’ so I could manage to function within the parameters of a business world that demands the counting and reporting of beans to show profit and loss to the shareholder.
My ‘gift’ also applies to the subjects of photography, music, writing, and spirituality, although I feel no inclination to apply rigid rules of formality to those subjects because the existing rules are more in tune with the gift itself.
I am glad that I’ve reached a point in life (survived!) where I no longer need to “show” my work, or explain my thought process to anyone who is not of a like mind in their thinking, but It has felt good to take a moment to chat about these thoughts with you in response to the prompting I felt from reading your beautiful post. Thanks for the exercise.
I will attest to my longtime friend’s memory. However, my idea of pictures that need to be brought out as a metaphor for the creative process has to do with thinking in pictures and bringing out something new–not a memory photograph. I’m talking about unformed ideas, and I’m saying these ideas dance across our brains first as pictures, only later to be translated into words or clay or oils or whatever. Thus I can’t really comment to a lot of the above.
I can say that I never stated we all lose the ability to see think in pictures. In fact, I believe I said the opposite right up front.