Somewhat Flawed Autism Study

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Don't you?

Not in the sense of an auditory hallucination, but yes. It's usually playing some annoying song that has been stuck in my head all day, or repeating irrelevant yet phonetically fascinating sound bits from movies, commercials, and TV shows. Despite this it doesn't seem to impede on my actual daily thought process.

That's not to say I never utilize it for practical purposes but in most instances I could easily complete a task while repeating a day of the week. The downside of this is I can very well read something and not pay attention to what I'm reading. My brain simply processes the words into their respective sounds while I dwell on entirely different things.

It's not really an auditory hallucination. Can't you form sentences in your head, or basically talk to yourself? Such as maybe tripping over and then thinking the words "f**k that hurt you're such a stupid a**hole chronos?"

What is your actual thought process then?

I tried to think "f**k, that hurt. You're a stupid a**hole, Verdandi." and what my brain did was "f**k, that hurrrr.........[garbled mess]."

I find myself using the inner voice when confronted by unexpected scenarios, solving problems, running over a past conversation or rehearsing a conversation. All those things that don't rely on learned, unconscious behaviour or instinctive reactions.

So, I'd be using the inner voice a lot when trying to solve a problem with a piece of software on my computer. But when I need to get dressed, or eat, or visit the toilet then there won't be any inner voice.

Outside of all that I have the inner voice pop up at seemingly random times, which is part of the internal babble of sights, sounds and thoughts which occur continually in my brain and can never be switch off.

I don't think this is as black and white an issue as people are making it here. There have been larger studies done on this and the results were that the majority of HFA/AS people employ both verbal and visual processing. The fact that you can think verbally does not mean that you will use it to complete tasks.

On the inner voice thing- When you are reading this do you hear the words in your head as you read? Yes YOU.

When I'm reading I sometimes hear the words and sometimes not. I know that reading is faster without, by taking in whole sentences visually. I often like to linger though, to take in more of the tone.

Yes, we do process language as speech and hearing, or writing and reading. When I read, I don't "hear" the words. I process them into imagery. If I read a book, you can ask me what the words were and I cannot tell you. But if you ask me what I saw, I can certainly describe that.

I'd like to understand how this works: What image does the word "process" have? I could understand imagery for cats, bicycles, clouds, balloons, but a word such as "process" has no particular image attached.

A process is a machine doing something to change it into something else...to process it.

It has a sound too, like a clothes dryer or photocopy machine.

But haven't you then imaged a machine and not "process"? When you read the word "machine" do you get confused with "process"? Sorry for so many questions, but does "process" as in "process your application" conjure up the same image as "process waste products"?

Wow. So you think like Temple Grandin? I wouldn't have guessed you couldn't internal monologue from your writing.

I am confused about what the inner voice is - on the one hand, I feel that I have an inner voice (I consciously think these words as I type them, or when reading), I think that repeating a distraction word (to interfere with the inner voice, as in the study) would not have any effect on my problem solving:

So, if I have the same thing as they mean by 'inner voice', I am (like their autistic subjects) not using it for problem-solving.

Bizarre, isn't it? Makes you want to strap an NT to a chair and ask them questions until you can make sense of it all.

Verbal thinking is one-at-a-time, while visual thinking is all-at-once, so for a visual thinker, it is hard to sequence the all-at-once bits and pieces into the one-at-a-time bits and pieces, so for a visual thinker, it is hardest of all to speak one's thoughts and participate in back and forth and give and take at a fast pace in real-time. Everytime someone says something, I convert the sequence of words into an image, and everytime I am expected to respond, I have to convert the image that I am thinking of into words through sequencing. Often, it is difficult to know where to start, and the more detail that there is in the image, the harder it is to know where to start and stop and the harder it is to generalize, because there is just so much to generalize. Add a few other senses occurring at the same time as envisioning the image, and you get a full sensory experience, more like being inside a movie than watching a movie, and the difficulty of sequencing your thoughts into language gets even more difficult than if the words only brought up a still image. It is very hard for me to communicate even the smallest bit of my sensory thoughts in language, so I am extremely slow at speaking and speak incoherently and the whole thing is unfun for all involved. I do better in writing, because I have more time for sequencing. I often freeze when someone asks me a question, because it is so hard to sequence my thoughts to generate a quick response like the person is expecting.

That's interesting because I'm a verbal thinker but I find it hard to sequence words. When listening to others it starts out ok then starts to become a meaningless stream of izzle-fizzle-woozzit-wibbly-wobbly-ZZZZZzzzzzzzz.