indirect gedankenlautwerden

   The term indirect Gedankenlautwerden is indebted to the German term " Gedankenlautwerden,which translates as thought-echo, thought echoing, thoughts-out-loud, or audible thinking. The term Gedankenlautwerden refers to a " verbal auditory hallucination (VAH) echoing the contents of the hallucinator's conscious thoughts. The German term indirecten Gedankenlautwerden,how-ever, which was introduced in or shortly before 1908 by the German neurologist and psychiatrist Kurt Goldstein (1878-1965), refers to a vari-antofordinaryGedankenlautwerden in which the affected individual discerns his or her own thoughts in the words spoken by another person. As Goldstein explains, one may speak of indirect Gedankenlautwerden "when the patient perceives an external auditory percept, and hears his own thoughts in it. Here ... it is uncertain how much of this is mere false interpretation, and how much actual hearing of one's thoughts." Indirect Gedankenlautwerden can perhaps best be classified as a variant of "auditory pareidolia or as a "cognitive illusion. The underlying cognitive mechanism is sometimes referred to as " apophenia (i.e. an excess of perceptual or heuristic sensitivity leading to the discernment of patterns or connections in random or otherwise meaningless data).

   References

   Goldstein, K. (1908). Zur Theorie der Hallucina-tionen. Studien über normale und pathologische Wahrnehmung. Archiv für Psychiatrie und Nervenkrankheiten, 44, 1036-1106.