Question for NTs about how you think

Post Reply New Topic

Hello! How have you been? Good, good. You're looking well. Is your mother feeling better? Excellent.

Regarding http://news.yahoo.com/talking-things-he ... 47542.html and http://www.wrongplanet.net/postt187897.html - we autistic types can find no clear pattern among ourselves over who uses an 'inner voice' and it's difficult to know if we're even talking about the same thing. Please, I would appreciate a moment of your time, if you could reflect upon your own modes of thought and experience with an 'inner voice'. I'd really like to learn what's going on here.

Thank you.

Isn't inner voice a thing all humans have? Or was I just clueless all along?

Most (or many) autistics are unusual in that they lack a verbal stream of thought.

I think using a constant verbal stream and it tends to be a never ending chatterbox of whatever I'm seeing at the time, it never shuts up, even when I'm concentrating.

I think in images, words, music, numbers etc depending on what is most useful to me.

I do have an inner voice that rarely shuts up. It really just sounds a lot like my own voice nattering away in my own head as I think. So I can hear my inner voice (in my head, not out side of it) nattering away outlining my thoughts to me about what I want to say as I type this post...

If I need to think in images then my thoughts are image based instead and so on and so forth.

Depends what mode of thinking I need at the time.

So like narration for the blind?

Does this mean that NTs can't see anything they haven't narrated?

Oh, well, I just had a shot at doing some work while saying "Thursday" over and over out loud. Only effect it seemed to have was that now I've got a sore tongue.

if I don't narrate it, I probably haven't processed it.

It is extremely rare that I am looking at something I haven't narrated. The only ocassional times I can think of are rare ocassions when I was woken from a very deep sleep quite suddenly. There would be seconds of disorientation before the internal narration started up again, usually with the word "what?". In those seconds of disorientation, I can see but not understand. It passes too quickly to be an ongoing mode of thought.

This narration can be quite an annoyance and at times I think it gets in the way of full sensory experience. It puts up a wall of words between my conscious mind and what my senses are taking in. This may be why I am such a consistent NT poster on WP. I am absolutely fascinated by the idea of sensory experience unmediated by internal narration. Lots of posters are similar to me with the constant inner monologue. But some aren't. In particular there is anbuend. (Or there was, she hasn't posted in a while.) She comprehensively explained a mode of thought she called "beneath words" to explain this experience of senses unmediated by internal narration. She also posted a series of oil paintings that conveyed the idea quite well. I can comprehend it but I can't experience it. At least not anymore. Obviously I experienced it before I learned to talk. But those memories are locked away (or dissolved) in inaccesable because unlabled files. That's probably why I have no baby memories although several other people have described their own baby memories.

I have done a lot of meditation trying to quiet this narration. A major goal of meditation, at least as it is taught to Westerners, is to shut up that talking voice. I have had partial results. I've managed to reduce it temporarily to a mumble.

The idea of having a constant inner narration strikes me as incredibly distracting. Obviously this must not really be the case for many people, since they have it and are often much less distractible than I am. Still, interesting.

I don't usually think/function "beneath language" like Anbuend does, but I think I occasionally end up there when overloaded or shut down. Or sometimes it just happens just because.

It gives substance to fleeting and nebulous thoughts, but it isn't running (at least for me) when I'm listening or watching something. It doesn't feel distracting in the least.

The inner narration/dialogue is what I think of as me. I cannot image an identity or a concept of the self without it, which is not to say it can't happen but that I'm so bound up with it and it is so integral that that is my perception of conciousness.

This is annoying because when I was 18 I wondered about this very question, and then I completely failed to investigate, and now it turns out to be important.

I'm dumbstruck. Constant narration. Remarkable.

This discussion is saying, enties don't have non-talking thoughts? I did not read the links yet.

^^^ This, exactly.

That is also the most likely reason why pre- language memories are extremely difficult to access.

I understand hypnosis is one way but even that does not work for everyone.

It isn't saying that. That would be the next question.

You don't have memories in pictures instead of words?

Many of my memories are in pictures or video tape format (play like live movies in my head), so not all of them need language in order to recall them. As far as I know I am neurotypical.

Yes good question. Memories are replays of events, no? Is there narration during the memory? If the memory has dialogue does the narration quote the dialogue or is it about the dialogue?