Somewhat Flawed Autism Study

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With me too, I have constant pictures and video and thoughts in my head that's why I sometimes am on autopilot and do tasks then realise I've done something and was completely unaware because I was playing inside my own head. That's also why I miss sentances and don't listen very well.

Also thinking in pictures and movies is actually quicker and easier and it's easier to relate the world visually than with words. We don't view a room and just see the words 'table,sofa,television etc so why would we just experience it with words. A ridiculous study.

I don't know what 'thinking in pictures' means either though. I can visualise stuff when I want to but I don't think anything unusual is going on there for me.

I'm going to get to the bottom of this.

That's not the way the monologue works, it really is just a simpler narrative of everything I do, and sometimes I talk with it. It like summarizes my nonverbal thoughts and actions.

Can you describe this in more detail, like with an example?

I used to have an internal monologue but at a certain point it went away. If I try to force it, now, it feels exhausting and clumsy. So, maybe my brain dropped it because it functions more efficiently without it. If such a thing were taught to me as a kid I would hope it would be with the understanding that my own ways, while possibly odd, might work better for me. I'm also reminded of how I had to learn to 'translate' standard math teaching & texts into a form that I could understand.

Sometimes, I wish my internal monologue would shut the heck up for 5 minutes.......

Damn, this is hard to describe. I might be describing it completely wrong, metacognetion is confusing.

Ok, I a think up an image, such as a scene in the MLP episode "Luna Eclipsed" showing Twilight Sparkle as Star Swirl the Bearded. A verbal thought immediateness pops up like "Twilight Sparkle" "Purple Unicorn" or "Its Twilight Sparkle dressed as a wizard.", but it is by no means a complete description. The thoughts are sometimes proper sentences, some times just jumbled ideas. Or I think of an identity, for example a( b + c) = ab + ac, and an image of the the identity comes up in my end. My monologue says some like "a times b plus c equals ab plus ac", which of is somewhat nonsense verbally, and often the verbal description is just mathematical nonsense that has nothing to do with the actual identity. This little monologue never stops. If I focus more on these thoughts they tend to turn more verbal and grammatical and becomes more like a conversation with myself, and if I focus on the images they get clearer. Sometimes the verbal thoughts degrade to the point where they are just a random song, but as far as I can tell it doesn't go away completely unless I'm in deep sleep.

my internal voice acts like a kind voice-over to all the pictures, movies, blueprints, diagrams, landscapes, thoughtscapes, memories and whatever visual thought process is going on… commenting and discussing options, solutions, scenarios, relational links and so on…

it even switches between three main languages; danish, english and dutch… e.g. i usual count in dutch...

it is never silence or dark inside my head, behind and in front of my eyes… never. ever. not even when i sleep.

sometimes - rather often - this voiceover comes out loud… and i speak with myself… asking me questions and telling what to do. step by step.

Its like this.

Wow. I know that thinking changes a lot with age, and I can't even remember if I used to be like that. Possibly. Nowadays I'm like a still pond, I've gone very abstract and almost nothing can cause a ripple.

I only think in words if I try to think in words on purpose. By default, there are no accompanying words popping up in my mind, and I seem to lack the internal monologue that people are describing in this thread.

Well it hard to describe how I think because when I think about how I think my thoughts change.

It's like narration, essentially. I'm doing it now as I read people's posts.

What this boils down to is these people are saying 'verbal stimuli didn't HURT the autistic adults performance therefore it must be useful'. I didn't see anything about it HELPING their performance. Basically what happened is the adults successfully tuned out the noise they were making and performed the task in a non verbal way internally. Meanwhile the NT group's score drops in the presence of verbal stimuli because they are trying to complete the task using a verbal methods internally and it conflicts with the the word they are saying aloud. What they are suggesting is that if we force kids to think in an NT way at an early age it will help them conform to the NT education system which is verbal based and to communicate better with others. Heeeellllooooo! There's a reason they don't think verbally, their brains are wired differently. This is exactly what the schools here in the US did prior to the 70s to left handed kids when they forced them to write right handed. It didn't benefit the left handed kids in any way, and that's one of the reasons it isn't done any more (other than that it's just a f'ed up thing to do to somebody). All this study is suggesting is 'make the left handed kids (autistic) do it like the right handed kids (NT)'; let's rewire their brains at around age 6 or 7. I'm no rocket scientist but forcing someone to think in a way that isn't natural to them seems counter intuitive (and just plain f'ed up). I wonder what would have happened if Einstein had been forced to think verbally instead of 'seeing himself riding a beam of light', hmmmm....

Exactly. On another note touching on the subject, I watched a documentary a while back on a man with total color blindness. Because his eyes had no cones, which detect color, he had more rods, which detect light, than most people. This condition left him not literally, but legally blind because day light and even indoor lighting was too bright for him, and the glare and lack of cones caused poor detail resolution, meaning he couldn't make out printed words without the help of magnification. Because of this, he was sent to a school for the blind as a boy, where they attempted to treat him as if he were completely blind like the other students. They attempted to make him learn how to read braille with his fingers and when they saw he was using his eyes to read it they blind folded him to try to force him to learn to read it with his fingers. He eventually had enough and ran away.