One of my friends says she can remember things from school by seeing the textbook exactly in her mind, I can't do that but I'm good at memorising things word for word.
Yes, that's how I think. I take "snapshots" or brief moving segments like film reels and store the information that way. Words, I remember as images or patterns on a page - it's why I'm great at proof-reading: wrong words make the wrong shape.
I do take in words and sounds too - of course - but it's a lot more limited and inefficient in my mind than the visual information. It's why, though I read, I much prefer films and television. When I read I first have to "translate" the words into imagined images in order to process the information. When I read text on a forum, I "hear" it before I can think it, like reading aloud to myself in my head. Of course this is all split-second stuff, but those translation processes have to occur.
I would have thought that this was strange, considering how much writing I do as a hobby - but then I realised that
because I do all this translating, it makes me better at it because I can describe things more easily than most people.