Question for NTs about how you think

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No you are not. You just think you are. I can tell. I'm clever like that.

This is such a steaming mound of slippy cow poo. You don't know anything about cows.

pasta: your account sounds a lot like me, except for this one bit: "My internal voice never shuts up unless I'm talking (even then my body voice keeps talking). It is there when others are talking, even if I am giving them my full attention."

Mine is on or off as I choose.

I'm amused by the idea that they want to teach the opposite of meditation to autistics.

This is similar to my voice. Mine is off unless I consciously turn it on, like pressing a button and holding it, not like pressing a button and letting go. If I let go, the voice is gone.

Please to be thinking of more experiments - like but unlike the gorilla - for testing this: "it was impossible to think of a concept without having language to describe it." Tests that any of us could try.

I haven't thought about it greatly in depth before, but the more I think about it, for me its mostly to do with planning actions. I can do things by rote without verbalising, but with complex things, the more I verbalise the better I can achieve those things.
And I find this interesting because I have seen numbers of threads on here discussing problems with 'executive function', and often it will be along the lines that the person has a high IQ but cannot get organised or achieve things, and is frustrated with themselves.

If I couldn't verbalise thoughts in my head I feel I would be somewhat adrift and live a chaotic life too. I would find it hard to write too.

But then I use imagery as well in the planning so its a mix.

This is something I read that Isaac Asimov (or was it Arthur C Clarke) wrote years ago, and I really wondered if it was true.

Verbalising my thoughts still doesn't stop me having issues with my executive function. I still have trouble with maintaining attention, thoughts can go off at tangents and working memory is impaired.

I just arrived from several two way and three way conservations. And in the course of these, I forgot to self monitor my self to parse it out what happens , but shooting from the hip: I was actively watching when someone spoke and felt the presence of them by imagination. I listened and felt the 'non-verbal' as what it was to experience their experience. There was not one thought of consciously watching my performance as some sort of feedback. There wasn't one iota of an internal voice by my part during this listening phase.

The speak phase: I'm talking while drawing off of images or literal pictures that flash up. No emotion is drawn up on my end, it is a matter of fact, but I sense the other mind as what I'm transferring in there, via emotion. I can feel the boredom, or excitement via intuition.

That's the nuts and bolts of a conversation.

A lot of my internal dialogue is just ranting and raving about things that are going on. Things like:
I wish they would hurry up
OMG I hope that guy is not going to try to talk to me
These cars need to go faster or get in the other damn lane
OMG another idiot left their damn shopping cart in the middle of the aisle
This sucks so bad, I want to leave.
I have no idea what this person is talking about
When will this meeting be over?
OMG they are talking again, shut up, please, shut up.
Why do they always play this damn music in here?
I am so tired, my head hurts, I'm hungry, waaaaah

Often the ranting is just a litany of swearing and cursing.

And there is the constant thought "I want to go home." I think that even when I'm actually at home.

Then there is the "remembering to do stuff" type of instructions. This can be making mental notes about things I have to do later, or it can be talking myself through what I'm doing now.

Then there are the "practice conversations" where if I practice what I'm actually going to say to people the next time I talk to them, or I work out what I'm going to say when I post again on a forum.

Then there are the "expositional conversations" where I pretend I'm talking to someone, and I'm explaining something I'm interested in, or something I've been thinking about, but it's probably not anything I would actually say to them.

Then there is the "narrative" which sounds like a book narrator telling what happened. But here's the weird thing, I narrate past tense for what is happening in the present. I also narrate past tense for what I plan or hope to do in the future.

I think largely with an internal monologue. However, back in my teens I became convinced that it makes no sense to say that thinking has to depend on language, or that thinking is just speaking in your mind, because in order to make a sentence, you have to have some idea of where the sentence is going. If you didn't have a pre-language idea of what you were going to say, you wouldn't be able to build the sentence on top of the idea. My perspective on it is that (for people who think using language), language can help clarify and refine thoughts, but there is thought before it gets put into language, even if for someone like me it is almost impossible to identify a thought before it gets language-ified.

Also, even for someone whose thoughts are full of language, like mine are, sometimes it's hard to find the right words for an idea. That indicates that the thought is separate from the language, because the language needs to fit the thought.

(I do occasionally have thoughts that get halted before they get put into words, usually when they're thoughts I don't want to think, and my mind manages to catch them and stop them before they get worded.)

I have seen verbalizing and planning linked in the scientific literature, and people have told me that they use verbalizing for planning purposes.

For me, visualizing and sensorizing seems to be the equivalent of verbalizing. I use these instead of words for planning, as I described in an earlier post. I don't have the executive function problems of not being able to plan out lots of steps or execute the steps in order. My executive function problems all have to do with hyperfocus and the runaway train Autistic Inertia Unlimited. All of my planning takes place in mental videos and sensory experiences, and I never use words, because verbalizing actually interferes in my planning, like the most difficult part of the planning would be the verbalizing part if I were to verbalize while planning. In the somewhat flawed study thread, the idea of researchers having autistic people switch from visual or sensory to verbal in order to help them do tasks seems ridiculous to me. Instead, develop the thinking that they already have and that comes naturally and adjust the instructions to fit the thinking. This is probably why sqool sucks for autistic children being forced to do things in ways that are totally alien to them. The development of their natural cognitive talents is probably stunted as well, since there is no one to help them develop those, and the teaching materials are very very very verbal all-around.

Are people who consider themselves to be very verbal in their thinking also good at planning and organizing? I guess that just because a person is a verbal thinker does not mean that the verbalizing will be applied to the planning, although people have told me that they do apply one to the other often.

I have virtually no internal narrative, and do not think in words. This is an interesting topic. So, NTs experience something like what is represented in the tv programme Peep Show?

Ha! Yeah. I thought that was just a comedy device.

I'm good at planning and organizing, but I don't believe verbal thinking has anything to do with it. I use more of a spatial type of thinking for that. I'm very good with maps and routing.

For me the main point of verbal thinking, is just to make sounds in my head. The phrasing and tone and melody of the words is musical. It seems to help my emotional processing to "hear" what I'm thinking, because I understand emotions through music.

The rest of my dialogue, aside from reminding myself to do things, is mostly just practicing how I will talk or write to other people and figuring out how I can explain things. In a real conversation I'm very slow to put things into words, so I have to figure out ahead of time how the words go.

I find the idea of an 'inner voice' to be highly derivative, if not demeaning, in the context that is being used. Of course I have an inner voice! It just comes out different, I suppose. For me, an actual inner voice or even a general sense of intuition is just too abstract. Rather, it just comes out as the thoughts I have. Many aspergians are visual thinkers, myself included. I'm just not as extreme as Temple Grandin. I feel like in my head, there is no steady narration, just random bursts of thoughts I can't control, although this is probably due to my bipolar as well. Also I have steady underlying thoughts that guide my life. Otherwise I see the world in an associative manner, one that goes from one association to the next., conjuring up ALL the flurries of emotion and thought associated with those associations.

I feel like there needs to be some clarification about this whole 'inner voice' thing, because it's too abstract. Once I understand more, I will be able to give more than a provisional understanding of this concept.