The two sibling comments have great answers. For me, it feels like a very intuitive process. I've described it to others in the past as feeling like I'm constructing a sort of cognitive atom graph, where memories, emotions, facts, and concepts are the nodes, and the strengths of connection between these are the edges.

To be clear, I'm not actually picturing a graph in my head; it's more that it feels similar in a lot of ways.

This probably sounds incredibly complicated, byzantine, and wasteful to word thinkers, but for me, constructing these "graphs" is so natural and rapid, that I can easily outthink my ability to convert my thoughts to words. It's intuition driven, and operates very quickly, in a sort of semi-conscious scatter/gather way.

I'm guessing other people may also do this subconsciously before they turn what they've gathered into words (maybe?), but for me, retrieving all this is often a more conscious activity.

All of this is as natural to me as breathing. I’m not planning out which things I’m going to scatter-gather, it just sort of happens, just like breathing or beating my heart just sort of happens, and just like those two things I can either be aware of it and control it, or unaware of it and just let it flow.

As an example, where someone else might literally think the words “my favorite flowers are roses”, I would grab concepts of flora, flower, plant reproduction, bees, nectar, pollen, etc. and facts like climbs trellises, susceptible to fungal infections, has thorns, and memories of many of the times I’ve seen roses or listened to someone talk about roses, and finally my emotions like happiness, fear (from the thorns), peacefulness, contentment, enjoyment, personal-ness, etc. Then link all of these together to give a graph that carries a lot of meaning that is extremely specific to me.

All this happens in a tiny fraction of a second. I'm aware of all the parts that go into this thought, even as I understand what the sum of those parts adds up to. There's a great deal of nuance in my new way of thinking that's hard to convert into words in a concise way. "My favorite flowers are roses" is a highly pruned version of what I was actually thinking. It's not a better way or a worse way of thinking. It's just different. Like everything, it has its strengths, and it has its weaknesses.

> "My favorite flowers are roses" is a highly pruned version of what I was actually thinking.

In this scenario, would the phrase "My favorite flowers are roses" have materialized in your mind?

Or if this scenario would be: you have been asked "What are your favorite flowers?", and you would just speak out those words to the other person without rehearsing in your head, would you be capable of recreating that scenario at another time, including the person asking you and you answering, in your head?