Having to listen to or watch your thoughts...

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...in order to know what you're thinking:

My thoughts and actions regularly have to go to an external "observer" for approval.

As such - i'm usually out of synch with my environment.

Ja. I think I have that, too. Schizophrenia researchers, I believe, call that "simultaneous introspection":

http://books.google.com/books?id=Olm10G ... ia&f=false

You just get the sense, though, that some of this same stuff also happens in autism, the main difference being age of onset.

I used to have to visualize or hear my thoughts in my head to know that I was thinking. Nowadays I don't have to.

You mean this isn't how everyone does it? I'm always rehearing myself thinking, didn't think there was anything wrong with it. Interesting find.

I almost always rehearse anything I'm going to say over in my head, before i say it, if i have the time to do so.

But I think this has more to do with the fact that translating my thoughts into words that others will understand isn't as easy as just splurting out a bunch of words that would make sense to me. Most people don't get what I'm saying in the way I'd vocalize it naturally (well.. naturally isn't maybe the best word because any vocalization is not completely natural to me).

When i "think", I use no words, i simply observe my brain going over various thoughts that I throw at it.
Once i've thought it out, i will think in words but that is simply to create an outlet to express that thought in the event that i decide to share it. I think too, that it increases my ability to hold onto that thought... Remembering the abstract is definitely more difficult that remembering the concrete.

The real problem is... that once vocalized, the precision and conciseness of the thought has been degraded due to the restrictions of language.

I think NTs that mentally vocalize their thoughts do it for different reasons.

The OP talked about "audible thoughts" As in thoughts that you HEAR, i assume.
I know my brain processes my thought words so close to the same as if i had been actually speaking aloud, that really there is no difference between the two. Yet I know the difference, despite my being "an observer of my body" instead of "my body" Maybe that separation of "observer" and "Participant" in others makes it harder to distinguish between audible and mental stimuli... and that people who "hear voices" are simply just those that are unable (at least at times) to make that distinction. And with some thoughts that are unbidden, maybe it's an unwillingness to distinguish.

Exclavius,

Indeed, the phenomena they refer to do include auditory hallucinations (and I think they believe that these phenomena are one source of auditory hallucinations in schizophrenia), but are not limited to it, I think. As I understand, even though Sass, et al., are discussing thoughts that are audible, if you do read the paragraph in question, they are not focused on the auditory qualities so much as a qualitative shift in the way the person thinks, such that the person no longer automatically unifies meaning and expression. If you look at the context of these authors' work, you will see that they are mainly focused on sub-psychotic phenomena in schizophrenia, positing that schizophreniform psychosis and other characteristic symptoms are generally the end result of these processes--other forms of psychosis have different pathways, they generally argue. (However, I see that a lot of these issues, like fragmentation of perception, exist in the autism spectrum as well.)

In another article, this one by Louis Sass (one of the authors of the study quoted in the OP), he mentions that French playwright and poet Antonin Artaud (who Sass says likely developed schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder) seemed to be referring to a phenomenon similar to that of many patients with schizophrenia, and Sass says comes from "[f]ocusing explicit attention on the signifier-signified relationship...," which is the connection between the content of the thought and its expression and is pretty similar to what I discussed in the OP:

I have too many thoughts in my head to not say them out loud. It usually happens when I'm hypomanic. People make jokes about it when they hear me do it or start doing it themselves. I tell them speaking your thoughts out loud is what geniuses do because that's what they call me.

I sometimes think I hear the voice of the devil in my head, but I'm a Christian and think it's just my anxiety. I have a fear of becoming schizophrenic because I'm bipolar with psychotic features. Even before that I thought it was possible. I used to hear voices but again I think it was just my anxiety.

In my opinion I think it's more the direction of the Signfier-Signified relationship that is the issue.

I need to make the translation between the thought to the expression, where I think you'd find that the schizophrenic would have to make the translation from the expression to the thought... Or something other than translation altogether.

However... I know that many Aspies tend to repeat things that have been said to them, either aloud or quietly, and that might well be a need to translate in the opposite direction. Myself that translation is just done with a moment of concentration.

The OP quote I believe talks about the different brain functions that occur during the processing of pure thought and the processing of words, audible or thought/sub-vocalized. I know my mind processes thought words like spoken/heard words so i think the brain would act similar under both. But in pure thought I know it acts differently. It's all in the "when" (and perhaps the purpose/reason) that one changes from one process to the other. And that I believe is what would differ from an Aspie and a Schizophrenic.

Does this sound like disturbance of the signifier-signified relationship?

Sometimes I think about a word, and I overanalyze it so much that it seems meaningless. I think about how it is just a label that doesn't truly describe what things actually are.

Sorry for the delay in reply, i'm not online every day.

I guess what i'm saying is that the mind goes through the different processes for different reasons.
I think an Aspie brain goes back and forth between the "thinking" and the "symbol processing" because symbolism isn't as inate in us as it is in an NT. That is why we often repeat words or sounds over and over. Perhaps it's associating the word with the concept, or expanding the concept that we have already associated with a given symbol (keep in mind that words are symbols that represent concepts) Or else it's just that hearing it a few times (more specifically having our brain translate it several times to ensure we get the same translation each time... and/or check for variant translations) helps us get a clearer idea of what has been said, and reduce the chance of misinterpretations.

Now i'll admit my knowledge on Schizophrenia is minimal, but i think the symbolism issue is the reverse, they are more in-tune with symbolism in general, symbolism can have great effect on schizophrenics, and believe that it is used in treatments. Some symbols can set off a schizophrenic episode too.

There are many analogies where when you go too far in one direction from "normal" you get very similar looking results to what you get when you go too far in the opposite direction (a political analogy would be fascism and communism's similarities)

Yet despite the similarities in the symptoms, the root causes are very much different.

Aspies use the brain process involved in hearing and/or sub-vocalizations as an interpretive process.
Schizophrenics I believe use that same process for their version of abstract thinking, I think they are actually thinking symbolically. Efficient symbols can be processed this way, but inefficient symbols would mess up such a mind. (Efficiency of symbols must be viewed relatively, and from the perspective of the individual using them to think)

Exclavius,

I think to resolve this discussion, we would need to get phenomenologists on autistic people, pronto. Also, they would be needed to assess direction as well.

In addition, if you look at Artaud's writing, it seems he was saying he had difficulty converting his thoughts into words.