I've noticed that I can do both the monologue thing and also the nonverbal thinking, and I suspect that most people can do both also.
I do verbal thinking when I'm by myself and thinking through options. What should I have for dinner? What gift should I buy? That kind of thing.
Non-verbal thought is when I'm totally focused on something like a competitive game. When I'm 100% in the zen-like focus of moment to moment instinctive action, there's "no time" for monologuing.
Unfathomable to me. My mind is constantly racing, playing out different conversations, interviewing myself in a variety of roles to navigate my thoughts on things (one day I'm the president of the US talking about foreign policy, another day I'm a big tech CEO navigating the diversity questions). I constantly have something in my ears to tune myself out, podcasts or music. After being diagnosed w/ ADHD I realize I'm probably on the extreme end of those with internal dialogue but to see a complete lack of it in others is very surprising.
I used to be like that, and it was helpful in many ways as I seemed to always be ready for wherever a conversation might go. But I wasn't living in the moment. Now I actively stop myself from simulating the various branches of potential conversations. It feels good to live in the moment (shaking my head a little when I feel it starting helps). The downside is that I don't have as many prepared responses and am more easily caught unaware, so now I rely more on sentences or behaviors that are broadly applicable to buy me time to think about my actual response.
Why is it a bad thing for your brain to be running DFS all the time? Is it a wasteful use of time? Does it cause behavioral issues? Is it a personal choice? Or...?
I think it's a question of balance. I was too far on the side of not living in the moment, and spending lots of time on what-if scenarios. I think that I might have veered too far to the other extreme now, and my capacity for empathy is suffering a little.
This "Living in the moment" stuff has depth such that many books have been written on it. It is one of the premises of mindfulness meditation, and Buddhism thoroughly explores this.
The summary is that you will be more satisfied if you are not continuously ruminating on the past, or anxiously anticipating future problems, but instead focus on your immediate happiness. e.g. Right now you are comfortable, not in any pain and surrounded by interesting things. Enjoy this, and don't worry about some conversation you might be having later.
For me personally it seems to make it impossible to get to sleep. Which makes me tired, and less resistant to rambling trains of thought. Repeat ad infinitum.
When you think less you may be open to more possibilities, be more spontaneous and even have some childlike fun. However, others can be taken aback and even suspect ulterior motives, until you harmonize better with others.
I am surprised that you said others can suspect ulterior motives, because that started happening to me but I can't figure out what the connection is. Can you expand on that?
I have learned to be cautious with two very different types of people (this is not a scientific exercise, take with a grain of salt):
- One is people who are constantly negative and cast stones everywhere, but offset that negativity with charm. They can accrue a network of Stockholm-esque followers that would say "he's not an asshole, he's actually a really sweet person." When they perceive a threat from you, or they find that you are indifferent to their charm-aura, you can get on their s*list pretty quickly. They can subtly isolate you from their followers, and be as useless as possible if you have to depend on them for anything. If they lash out at you, it's actually not out of character because they lash out at everything. They're just being themselves, right? Much of their venom is hidden behind sardonic humor, which gives them plausible deniability. They are not beholden to social norms, and everyone around you has accepted that. In lieu of social norms, they create impenetrable, arbitrary standards that only they and their followers can meet.
- Another type of person I'm initially careful of is someone who doesn't give any "tells." They always go with the flow, and laugh at everyone's jokes. The only overtly interesting thing about them is how social they are (they only open up in trivial ways). They listen very deeply, asking follow-up question after follow-up question, but they're likely to go and spill your secrets over drinks "I heard X said Y....ya I know, interesting." They don't waste an opportunity to gain social currency, spanning all social groups in order to trade between them. They rarely challenge people, and seem above the fray, but they're as political as anyone.
People mostly prefer "their own kind", at least until they truly get to know you. Solving fatigue by being recluse starves crucial human contact. For many reasons there can remain barriers before getting meaningful contact. Your question itself points to this preference and yearning, and not indifference.
A different mode of mind will be received by others differently, as an experience. To get anywhere we must move, but to others this might be deemed too uncomfortable or even mistaken as implicit criticism.
As social creatures we must have/find support around us. This works as platform and mandate, so helps true leaders lead.
"interviewing myself in a variety of roles to navigate my thoughts on things"
I used to from time to time imagine my half of a conversation in which I was showing around someone notable who had traveled through time to get to the present day. Maybe someone from 1,000 years ago or maybe from 50. That is, for entertainment, not to cope with anything. I never felt like my imagination was quite good enough to turn it into fiction.
In general though, I don't have a monologue in a continuous sense. I frequently imagine saying things, imagine other people saying things, occasionally imagine saying something to myself, but I would never say that's how I think exclusively. When I am having trouble with a concept or problem though, I tend to return to verbal analysis - a narrative or verbal description helps me figure out things that I otherwise struggle with.
If I am writing, I might be hearing the words in my mind, or I might not. If not, I might reread what I wrote and then feel like editing it, probably because I wasn't conscious enough of how it sounded. So, really, I don't exactly relate to having or not having an "internal monologue". Thinking one type of thought all the time seems weird to me.
As far as this post goes, I didn't know what it would look like until I was done, so I'm not necessarily conscious of how I organize things at all.
> I used to from time to time imagine my half of a conversation in which I was showing around someone notable who had traveled through time to get to the present day. Maybe someone from 1,000 years ago or maybe from 50. That is, for entertainment, not to cope with anything. I never felt like my imagination was quite good enough to turn it into fiction.
I do this exact same thing.
I also have conversations with random people in my life, explaining what I’m doing and what I’m thinking to them. When I have an inner monologue, I don’t think of it as talking to “myself”, but rather the imagined presence of some friend or family member. I have no idea how normal this is.
This is interesting, I've done this a bunch of times too (the time traveler conversation thing). It's just a fun thing to imagine how someone from the past would see things from the present day I think. It's fun when films do it, like Frequency or Kate & Leopold.
I also do the conversation thing, it's a good way to sort of internally rubber-duck your thoughts, or just for working out what you might say in some real conversation. I wonder how many people's "internal monologue" is really more of an "internal conversation practice."
And, as far as visual thoughts go, I don't think I'm a visual person, but I wouldn't say I don't think visually. Once in a while, I do. Waking from dreams, I often feel like they were very visual. I guess maybe my sense is that my visual imagination is latent or stunted. Usually it's difficult for me to picture anything, but I feel I know what it's like, that I can imagine waking up and being able to see the tiniest detail of something I'm thinking about.
Ketamine infusions can completely, instantly and seemingly permanently remove these racing thoughts, allowing you to only have them when you want them. Doesn't impact creativity either. Feels like the part of the brain responsible for running worrying scenarios quiets down and only brings them up to consciousness when necessary. There are several studies showing anxiolytic in addition to anti-depreesive effects. Doesn't work for everyone, though.
I have a serious question to people here describing themselves (as I understand it) as thinking in words and whole sentences:
How can you think about concepts which cannot be put into words or for which no words exist?
Do you have to come up with elaborate verbal descriptions of abstract concepts in your head before you can think about them? If so, don't you think that any verbal description is essentially incomplete? Are you afraid that thinking in language categories prevents you from accessing deeper truths?
1) By thinking about them in other modes. I have an internal monologue, but it's not so much "the only way I can think" as "a thing that happens that comments as I think, and can be used to talk through things in my head". Eg: I'm also a pretty strong visual/spatial thinker, I can recall scents OK, and I'm reasonably facile with numbers; all of these sorts of thinking / recollection feel different as I do them.
Some may involve the inner monologue in an assistive role - eg, for math, my mental voice will often either narrate or speak key numbers as I complete steps, which allows me to use audio-memory as well as visual-memory to keep track of all the things I'm operating on.
2) Dynamically created neologisms that refer to particular not-easily-describable thoughts. Though in many cases, my brain may not create an actual word but just think "THAT thing" where "THAT" is accompanied by the concept in question, or some association/shorthand of it.
I think with words, in multiple languages, but they're silent. I can't actually hear anything. Importantly though, the verbalizing is a later stage of thinking. First there is the thought, seemingly instant, non-verbalized, and fuzzy. If needed, I can already act based on that thought without verbalizing. However if I verbalize it in my head, then that allows for further analysis that may lead me to override the initial guessed value of the thought. Not everything can be verbalized easily though. I also heavily think in pictures. Pretty much exclusively scenes/objects from my memories. Sometimes remixed a bit, but nothing completely novel.
I think the way that this actually works is that we don't actually think in words and whole sentences, but that words and whole sentences flow from most of our thoughts. We've just become so used to this whole process that it feels like the words and sentences are driving the thoughts.
I'm certainly a "think in whole words and sentences" person, but if I think of it, I also have had moments realization/emotion that I certainly couldn't put into words.
I think this is true, and was reaching for ways to express the same thought. Which just goes to show that although I internally verbalise a lot, the verbalisation itself is not the thinking. It just seems that way.
I think this can become a problem. Verbalising takes time, it acts as a brake on thought. I’m compensation I think it helps clarify and crystallise ideas and builds skills in expressing them into communicable form. There are definitely pros and cons.
A great many abstract concepts can be put into words (which are, to generalize, abstract symbols) - that is one of the great powers of human language. I wanted to ask what ideas cannot be so expressed, but of course there is a problem...
There may be candidates in qualia, the subjective experiences that tend to tie the philosophy of mind in knots, and which, being subjective, cannot be communicated precisely in language (can you tell a blind person what it is like to see red, such that they can learn it from your words?) In these cases, however, our internal monologue could refer to them indexically ("seeing red is like that", where that picks out an aggregation of memories.)
Bizzarre as this may seem to you, I can assure you that it feels very natural, easy and straightforward, though it might be something of an illusion, merely the way we explain thinking to ourselves when we pay attention to doing it (see my other post.)
I am similar. After some musing I found that I usually have a faint internal monologue when considering simple things such as, "what should I write in this reply". Mostly in situations where you might be caught saying something aloud on accident. When starting a book, the first page or so usually has strong monologue, but it disappears almost completely after that. Frequently I spend hours in a row random thought. During these periods I cannot remember hearing an internal monologue. There are very likely other times that I am not conscious of the monologue. At the moment, trying to think I am floating in and out of monologue. I suppose this may be because I am somewhat focused on whether I do or not.
Finally, I've found somebody like me. I was starting afraid about how my brain works. Can I hear the sounds? is that the sound? where are the words? Oh, here I can see now. Hmm, let me try thinking about a class and methods of a module in my codebase... no voice, no words. no images. what the fuck? how I can know that.. yes it's like feeling. Fuck now I'm starting to hear the voice of somebody else. Which was the my voice?
So how do you think about something that you can't describe to someone else? There are many things I can deeply understand, but turning that understanding into natural language takes considerable effort.
Are people with internal monologues incapable of understanding things they can't verbalize? Or is it that their brain just instantly verbalizes thoughts after the thoughts have already been formed? The latter seems a bit more likely to me, but I imagine it must be very lossy at times. (That is, the verbal monologue is merely a summary of the thought.) I often have thoughts that take only an instant, but would take many sentences to verbalize.
> the same way you would talk about the concepts out loud to someone else.
But isn't this extremely exhausting and time-consuming? And if it indeed works this way, then where do you think the idea you are trying to formulate in your inner monologue comes from?
I suspect the author is exaggerating a bit when he says it's the only way he thinks. I also have the "narrative voice" but I absolutely can think about things without the voice, it just doesn't feel as much like "thinking", if that makes sense.
There are some things that are explicitly visualized, like an object I'm thinking about, where I wouldn't say in my head "I am imagining the sun. It is bright. Etc. etc.". I'd just picture the sun, and my "narrative" would probably be about why I was thinking about the sun, not describing it.
Same applies for more abstract concepts, just without the visualization.
This is how it seems for me, too. When I pay attention to what I am doing, it seems as if I am thinking in complete sentences, but if I then try to write down the idea that I have just been thinking about, I find that it takes a lot of editing to turn it into coherent language. Furthermore, I cannot really say anything about what it is like to think when I am not paying attention to doing so, so maybe it is just how I explain my experience of thinking to myself.
Perhaps experiments using techniques such as PET scans might reveal if there is something more characteristically linguistic going on in those of us who feel we have an internal monologue.
Concisely describe the space battle you see in your mind's eye in less than 0.5 seconds. It's not that it can't be described. It's that I'm looking at / living a shot from a movie in realtime or faster than realtime. If I tried to write that out ... it would be too slow and actually over-specified.
For me, scents are rich sensory experiences. Yet I can’t describe cinnamon to you, other than that it smells like cinnamon. It’s like an opaque pointer, I can compare equality but not inspect it beyond that.
That reminds me of the password used to enter the TARDIS control room in Doctor Who: "Crimson Eleven Delight Petrichor". But you could not say the password verbally, the words are irrelevant. You need to visualize the color, and the recall the petrichor smell in your mind, ...
How do you know when to refactor code out into a new class? It starts with a hunch. You might notice that some logic had acquired a distinct shape relative to the code around it. You get this thought before the new code has a name or even a description, and now you can start to play it. It's like this in the general idea-space too.
I took mushrooms once and only about a month after the trip did I realize I hadn’t been using an internal dialogue since the trip. It started up again and hasn’t really stopped since.
Yeah mushrooms will do this. It's not a bad thing to be able to quiet your mind. It's nice to have an internal monologue but once you've had that silence it's good to learn how to bring it back when you need it. Mushrooms helped show me what it was like quiet so I could do it myself without them.
There was a blog linked here some time ago where the author turned off his internal dialog and was able to observe his more automatic behavior. I recall trying it on my way to work and was fascinated. It was not like meditation, but I was still suspicious of the safety. This piece just reminds me that I need to try it again, but I dont recall how.
Me too. My mind is always going off on different tangents playing out various scenarios, even ones that almost certainly won’t happen. I haven’t been formally diagnosed but I suspect I have some level of ADHD as well.
On the other hand the random thoughts if I can stick with them long enough do help me form a coherent train of thought. It’s a bit hard to explain, but sometimes my mind is not “clear”. I’d be noodling on a problem (typically not a technical one, more like social or life problems) and feel like there should be a solution but it’s just out of my reach. If I keep focusing on that one issue it have a hard time coming to a conclusion. If however I follow the random tangents a bit then some how the various tangents converge on something useful.
Same, ADHD and everything, but overtime I've learned to control it. Now I typically use my internal monologue to work something out. Sometimes it still gets away from me though and I have to purposefully refocus my thoughts onto work or something constructive.
Honestly, I no longer view ADHD/ADD as a disorder, but different brain functionality. It doesn't typically fit in with our modern schooling systems so it's treated like a disorder. It certainly has some handicaps to be sure, but it's benefits, hyper-focus (when you get it working) and creativity are very helpful sometimes.
Yeah, this is crazy to me. (I'm hearing these words in my head as I'm typing them.) Like, what form do your shower thoughts take if you don't have an internal monologue?
Visual / tactile. Put head under shower, open eyes, facing down. Notice how streams of water look like the capital ships from Robotech firing full frontal barrage. Relieve some Robotech nostalgia. See patterns in the shower tiles. Words are too slow for thinking. But, words give solidity and can help develop a train of thought.
When I have verbal shower thoughts, they come out verbally and I sing or monologue.
I wish I knew how to switch on this power. As it stands, I seem to be pretty good at grasping the abstract “shape” of problems, in a way that short-circuits words, but I can’t flow forth with conversation or write believable dialogue to save my life. My thoughts are entirely fuzzy.
Sometimes when I’m very sleepy, I can simulate friends and relatives talking to an uncanny degree, but not at any other time.
Also ADHD and experience the world in a similar but slightly different way. All my narratives are about potential immediate futures and how they might tweak the longer term outcomes. It's interesting but insanely draining and often depressing. Since I've noticed this about my self I've been intentionally trying to take steps to slow my thoughts and be in the moment, but when I do I'm constituently thinking about how doing that will effect my future self, lol. Still, I think I've found that intentionally trying to take moments has been helpful and beneficial
Another thing that happens is that when someone else is talking a lot of the time I've already thought through what they are saying to the point that they don't even need to say it for our conversation to continue and keep track. This makes me extremely annoyed by people I deem long winded. I used to try and hurry the conversation along, but it turns out people don't like that and it definitely makes me look like an ass hole. Also, sometimes I'm wrong and I not only look like an ass hole I definitely feel like an ass hole. As I've matured I've gotten better at listening and not looking annoyed, but my mind wonders as soon as I know where the convo is going. Haven't quite figured that one out yet
Vice versa, for the past couple of years I've started practicing verbally walking people through my entire thought process from beginning to end. I found that this has been useful in eliminating misunderstandings. It's tiring though, I'll give you that, so I only do it when I believe that it will have long-term positive impact.
It's helpful for simulating different thoughts and feelings from different viewpoints in real or imagined scenarios. It doesn't grant super-empathic powers of comforting, or mirroring feelings in the moment. Moreso it hinders my ability to mirror emotions because I'm dont live "in the moment" as much.
It also leads to overthinking. You could simulate several long conversations based on wrong assumptions, resulting in wrong conclusions and probably some anxiety.
It also makes it harder to deal with you because only you can react based on those long analyses, everybody else has to react based on your actions.
fwiw I also have ADHD, and certainly daydream a lot, and often imagine myself in situations or doing interesting things, but I would say that I don't have much of an 'internal monologue'. I imagine being in situations, but very rarely speaking is conciously involved. For example, I also sometimes imagine being the leader of my country, but I'm more thinking about issues that might arise and how I might decide to act to respond to them, and how people might react, what obstacles might be encountered etc, but in a more abstract way? Like on an emotional level rather than a linguistic level.
On a tangential note, I was amazed to find that there exist people who struggle to keep geometry in their head, in a sense have no visual "minds eye" at all. I was playing a game with somebody where you have to build a very simple tower while blindfolded, as somebody else reads the instructions, and they had a great amount of trouble imagining that a specific tetris-like shape might look like the letter 'T' even though they held it in their hands, until they removed the blindfold. They were still able to understand the shape of the object in some sense, but not 'see' it in some other sense until they removed their blindfold.
I wonder how well these kinds of simple differences in internal concious organisation map to personalities, or competency in certain areas.
With me it is often less words and more action movies: getting innocent people out of harms way, looking for cover, looking for anyone like minded who might be able to help block the doors and try to ambush an attacker together with me. Calling the police, whispering the address etc etc.
Not sure if it would work if anything happens, but this is one of the thing my mind keeps itself busy with as I walk through the city. And no, I'm formally a trained soldier, but I don't have much training in this so it is just my bored mind going crazy with ideas.
Pretty much describes The Last Psychiatrist's writings about Narcissism and The Matrix generation. "When the time comes the Universe will make it so I save everyone and know Kung-Fu, because I'm innately a hero so of course it will".
A tangent on this: superheroes are creatures/concepts as old as stories though, from the oldest myths of Ulysse and Atlantis to Superman and the Force and indeed Neo. It's a whole category, perhaps the all-time biggest (think who fits the profile of "historic superhero", you'll be surprised who goes in that basket, even if we believe their life/deeds were real and not 'super').
I mean, stories, right.
I personally risk the assumption that the outer manifestation of these shared inner delusions of grandeur is called "civilization". I would actually call it "aspiring" to greatness, and if it's a disease, then it's the best we ever got.
I have this "condition". I didn't know it was unusual. I was on propecia (hairloss) medication for awhile, and it took the internal monologue away. I'm now off of it because life was dull and lonely without an active imagination. How curious that testosterone derivative hormones could alter brain activity.
I don't talk to myself in my head, except rarely (usually if I'm scolding myself, or trying to do an accent), but I think you'd be entirely wrong to describe me as not having an active imagination.
This is among the many reasons why I almost never drink alcohol any more - easier to learn to manage the problem than to wake up hungover every morning.
Having conversations with yourself and re-playing conversations is different from narrating things like a voice over though. I do the former, and I believe that's quite normal, but not the later.
I have internal monologues, talking to myself as I write this, and when I was younger I'd play out stories in my head. Still do it sometimes when I'm bored or stressed, or particularly upset about something.
Example of a story: something very much like The Watchmen graphic novel, before I had read it (movie and show didn't exist, or were even talked about.
I also have ADHD, but my thoughts (multiple and distracted they are) are “flashes”, not a fully dubbed voiceovers. They would be much slower if they would need to be “pronounced” mentally.
He discovers that he can read while counting in his head at a steady rate, but he cannot talk while counting. When he tells his friends, one of them claims to be the opposite, and indeed proves that he can count while talking but not while reading. It turns out “he was visualizing a tape with numbers on it going by.”
That friend was John Tukey. You may have heard of him. He invented the Fast Fourier Transform.
This has gotten me into a lot of trouble in my life. I don't use internal monologue to read - that means that I can be reading and listening to someone at the same time, and comprehend both. But, even if I can prove I heard and understood everything someone said, they inevitably view it as rude if I am reading something while listening to them.
Is this a left/right brain split specific thing or is there another thing going on? ever explore it?
I can do neither of these things. One voice dominates, self speaking, reading, listening to another person talk to me - the rest of them get 'left behind'.
I used to get in so much trouble for this in primary/secondary school. Listening to someone talk was boring beyond belief. So I read sci-fi in class.
I could always respond correctly when called upon, and could recite virtually word-for-word the entire class lecture if need be, so I eventually got a pass to just do my thing.
At this great distance in time I can see how this was impolite to say the least. But, really, it was bordering on abuse to make me sit there and listen with nothing else to keep my mind occupied.
This topic (comments here, the OP, and comments in threads elsewhere) exposes some conflicting definitions of what an "internal monologue" is or means.
- Some people describe hearing their internal monologue, which I take to mean something like: they have an internal monologue, and it manifests as a voice that only they hear. These people are analogous to those who see things they picture in their mind's eye.
- Some people describe not hearing their internal monologue, which I take to mean something like: they interpret "internal monologue" as a metaphor for their train of thought or stream of consciousness; they think of themselves as having an internal monologue (i.e., they are thinking in language), but don't experience it as a voice. These people are analogous to all of the aphantasics surprised that the mind's eye isn't just a metaphor.
- Some people describe not having an internal monologue. I suspect these people are a mix of those who think in language but interpret the term "internal monologue" as requiring hearing a voice, and people who'd describe their thought process as nonlingual in some way (visual, abstract, etc.)
Across these characterizations, different people describe their thought process(es) all over the place WRT to how compulsory/voluntary/consistent they are. Some of the people who "see" things do this consciously; others can't help but picture things they read or think or hear. Some people describe a conscious/conditional train of thought, while others describe one that is racing/intrusive/incessant.
For myself personally, it depends on what I'm thinking about. Thinking about writing this sentence, I hear each of the words I'm going to type in my head before I type them.
However, if I'm working out how to assemble a table, I'm not hearing "And now I screw the leg on" I just abstractly know that's what I'm going to do.
I have to imagine that's the case for at least most people. Thinking out complicated abstract concepts in internally verbalized words just seems like it would take forever.
Came to make the same comment. Normally, I avoid giving the "Me Too!" comments, but I think in this context it's appropriate. If I'm casually thinking about life, the universe, and everything then I typically have a monologue. I don't "hear" it, per say, but I am thinking in sentence structure. If I'm analyzing a problem, working on a project, or trying to digest a situation, then I do not think in such sentence like ways. If I'm performing a low-cognitive-load activity (like a long road-trip), then I've got an inner-monologue going on with words & sentences. If I'm really in need of my focus (driving in Manhattan), there's zero inner-monologue.
I think Ihave control over how I think. An internal monologue is great for remembering in order. But I rebuild as an image of keywords which is great for connecting but the words blur. I rebuild as a map to navigate with a mental car. I rebuild as a shape to trigger my eyes, a sound for my ears...
However the last week I've been stuck on naming "a complete thought", not just a vision which is just an image. But one that breaks through unconnected to any sense. A thought so full that it first needs to be unpacked in language, image, shapes and steps before it can be expressed. Thus like the article: does anyone else have this? Does anyone have a name for it?
I think almost entirely in images, usually moving and relating to each other in 3D space.
There are words mixed in, but when they come up they are usually just single words or a phrases which are attributes of something I'm thinking of, or an action I should take.
Sometimes I think more in words, but that's usually when something is really unclear to me or if I am obsessing over something.
I think that years of training myself not to obsess over things probably reduced my internal monologue almost to the point that it would be good to have a bit more of it sometimes.
I'm pretty much the same, but my internal monologue sometimes manifests itself as, I don't know how to describe it, but, as "feelings". This is somewhat usefull, but I need a more formal method sometimes to explain me to myself.
> However, if I'm working out how to assemble a table, I'm not hearing "And now I screw the leg on" I just abstractly know that's what I'm going to do.
This is funny. I can't imagine anyone doing that. There is no end to that. Like imagine someone thinking while walking down a lane "I am walking down the lane, and now I am going to turn left ... " this is endless ...
This reminds me of an electrician I know. He spends a long time working by himself. Sometimes he explains to his tools what he is doing. "okay mr drill. Now we are going to make a whole here to get the cable through. Ready?". Occasionally his customers hear him.
This is what I don't understand when people claim things like "language is required for higher thought" or whatever (no link but I'm sure I've seen that claim numerous times across various articles). We necessarily do plenty of thinking without words. Certainly you can be someone who focuses more on the words or less on the words, and maybe word-based people are naturally better at talking because their thoughts are mostly in word-form to begin with, but you can't put all the thoughts in words.
A google came up with this long article from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on the language of thought hypothesis, which seems fascinating. Mentions Turing, NNs etc..
"The language of thought hypothesis (LOTH) proposes that thinking occurs in a mental language. Often called Mentalese, the mental language resembles spoken language in several key respects: it contains words that can combine into sentences; the words and sentences are meaningful; and each sentence’s meaning depends in a systematic way upon the meanings of its component words and the way those words are combined. ..
LOTH emerged gradually through the writings of Augustine, Boethius, Thomas Aquinas, John Duns Scotus, and many others. William of Ockham offered the first systematic treatment in his Summa Logicae (c. 1323), which meticulously analyzed the meaning and structure of Mentalese expressions. LOTH was quite popular during the late medieval era, but it slipped from view in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. From that point through the mid-twentieth century, it played little serious role within theorizing about the mind.
In the 1970s, LOTH underwent a dramatic revival. The watershed was publication of Jerry Fodor’s The Language of Thought (1975)."
> LOTH emerged gradually through the writings of Augustine, Boethius, Thomas Aquinas, John Duns Scotus, and many others. William of Ockham
Based on the people mentioned, this theory sounds hugely and heavily influenced by western-christian theology, philosophy, and anthropology, which, since we don't 'know' scientifically, is neither good nor bad, but simply one strain of hypothesis. Other religions have other concepts - eastern christianity followed different lines (cf. 'logismoi', palamas, etc), and of course other religions have differing concepts e.g. chakras, etc.
without being an expert at all, it seems to me that at least on a higher than biological level (e.g. 'proto concious'), internal representation is to some extent malleable and based on ones own philosophy and conceptualization, something which some more esoteric or 'symbolic'/'structural' religious groups focus on - and perhaps (or perhaps not) - one representation may or may not be adaptive or maladaptive to our biology or not..
I am also somewhere in between these two extremes, and I actually find that the process of taking an abstract thought and forcing myself to form it into words is a great way to find out how well-conceived the thought is.
In other words, I may find that I can't easily put it into words and that will indicate to me that I need to put more time into thinking about it and deciding what I really think.
I don't necessarily think about all the words, they just appear at the keyboard (I touch type). A bit like if you're speed reading and skip the internal vocalisation, the word is before my mind, but not in a vocal sense. Like when you imagine a square, but don't imagine a picture of one -- or perhaps when you imagine a 5 dimensional hypercube and don't imagine a picture of one (much easier!).
There are some theories that the brain may effectively contain more than one "proto-consciousness" (or perhaps some of them are actually "fully conscious"). Maybe 2 or 3, maybe a whole lot of them.
If this is true, then when you have an internal "dialogue", you may be literally conversing with different sapient "beings". If so, who's actually the "you" there? Are you one of them, or all of them, or just kind of observing them all from above? Are you able to switch between those modes, intentionally or otherwise? Are "you" a microservice architecture, a monolith, a monolith orchestrating microservices, or all, or none?
We intuitively feel like we're a single voice and "manager" of everything that's going on. That could still be true even if there are other consciousnesses at work in there. Or it could be an illusion, or sometimes you are and sometimes you aren't, or maybe consciousnesses can somehow merge into a true single whole.
Or maybe it's closer to what we think, perhaps with multiple "intelligent" subsystems exchanging information, but only one actually conscious, sentient system.
There are a myriad of puzzling possibilities. We still know very little about how the brain and mind truly work, so this is all blind speculation. But it's interesting to ponder.
I actually suspect we will someday have pretty definitive answers to questions like these, or at least answers which apply to 90%+ of humans. But those answers may not come in any of our lifetimes.
Wow, as I'm aware of the idea, that our brains may indeed host several consciousnesses, I did not expect to be freaked out by any of this. But if my inner narrator is another consciousness, holy.
Just at the realization struck me, my inner voice said knowingly "Heeeellloo there". Ahaha, I'm going to bed now.
You should read up on tulpamancy. There is a subset of people who would argue that the consciousnesses in your brain are just as much deserving of a life as you are.
There is a subreddit (r/tulpa) that deals with questions about tulpamancy. They are very very insistent there there is a difference between mental illness and tulpamancy, primarily because tulpas are not supposed to bring you any harm.
I don't practice tulpamancy, but my mind was just so blown by this other perspective that I've been passively observing them for the past few months.
Or maybe it's like a first-person novel (for example, ASOIAF), where the narrator is a different person at different times. Not to freak you out more...
If I were to purely guess, my gut feeling - which of course means little with complex, unintuitive things like this - is that your inner narrator / monologue-giver really is just one single consciousness the vast majority of the time.
That is, I think there's a pretty good chance it is just "you". Phew. But I think there's also some chance it communicates in some way with other conscious entities, and it can be influenced by them as well. Different states of mind (for all meanings of the word "state") may cause those systems to temporarily "corrupt", or perhaps even substitute for, your inner narrator. For example, these could be systems that evolved well before primates, like things involved with fear, anger, sex, etc., that can partly or fully hijack the narrator, but only for limited periods of time, and usually infrequently. Maybe some guys really do, literally, occasionally think with their dick. Maybe some people guilty of "crimes of passion" really were different people during those moments. Maybe certain psychoactive drugs can put the narrator in the shotgun seat while some other stuff takes the wheel. Maybe psychotic disorders mess up the communication channels, so people start hearing those other consciousnesses "talking" when normally the neocortex would suppress or ignore most or all of that chatter.
But I think most of the time, it's just the single inner narrator. This may be the highest layer of the neocortex, which is the most recently involved system. Maybe it can tell the other consciousnesses to shut up, or speak up, or ask them to compute something in parallel, and at other times maybe it's just completely overwhelmed by them (which may lead to anxiety, delusions, and other issues).
I suspect something sort of like this is likely true, even if those other systems aren't actually conscious in any way, but are more just like cold information processing systems.
Or if not that, the next thing I'd lean towards is that there are two full consciousnesses: one in each hemisphere of the brain, with similar but not exactly the same behavior, thoughts, decisions, etc. Some philosophers have concluded this after performing studies of split-brain patients (people with their hemispheres surgically disconnected to treat epilepsy). Redundancy can be beneficial.
If true, maybe these are the two full ones, and the others are only "kinda conscious", sort of like having a few different ant brains inside your own brain. Ants are conscious, but not in a very deep way. I believe they are likely aware and sentient, but they only have a limited understanding of what's going on, why they do what they do, etc. They have their own thoughts, but they are very simple, dumb thoughts. Maybe each hemisphere controls its own respective set of one or more ant- or squirrel-like brains/consciousnesses.
Going by evolution, it wouldn't be that shocking to have one or more lower-level, cruder consciousnesses inside our brain, which the neocortex builds on top of. Maybe those are like deep learning models, and the highest executive in the neocortex is like the data scientist feeding data, tuning hyperparameters, and interpreting the output. This could maybe (partly) explain why some people with brain trauma and genetic conditions turn out to be savants - the neocortex is disrupted or routed around, and some of the raw models become more exposed and closer to the highest layer of awareness and consciousness, and they can use their billions of years of evolutionary advancement to compute and memorize things when large datasets are inputted.
Octopus intelligence is an interesting case study. It evolved totally separately, so it doesn't necessarily create a path we can follow to our own intelligence, but it does suggest possible options. And given the commonality of convergent evolution, maybe it could be giving us some applicable options.
Octopi seem to have one central consciousness, and one crude consciousness in each arm. So, 9 total. The octopus can choose to intentionally move all of its arms in synchrony, but each arm can also think and act autonomously. The arms can act autonomously even for a period of time after the octopus has died, and even if the arms are totally removed (or both). If their arms can do that, it's certainly not impossible that lobes or regions of our brain do something similar. If there were some way to safely take some regions out of a person's brain and see how those parts behave on their own (and how the person behaves without them), maybe they'd be a little like the detached octopus arms - autonomous consciousnesses, but able to be directed and controlled by a central consciousness when they're connected to one.
I think that the bicameral mind hypothesis makes sense.
Oh, and the phenomena wherein the disconnection of the hemispheres of the brain results in strange cognitive artifacts such as being able to give two different answers to one question, even questions like "what is your favorite color," points to at the very least some kind of parallel consciousness. Another hypothesis is that one hemisphere is the "speaking" brain and the other is the "listening" hemisphere. That is, only one of the consciousnesses can talk -- and that's the one we call "me"; maybe it should be "us."
Seriously, it never occurred to me that you could choose an appealing voice for your inner monologue, mine has always been a neutral version of my real voice. Stranger since I subvocalize while reading, and as a kid, the voice would actually act and change for each character.
I'm the spell it out type and I don't think it takes for ever. I more or less talk my self though abstractions and visualize the steps in my head. Usually in chunks if it's a complicated thing, but often as a whole. I think a cad model would be the closest parallel I can think of. My inner monologue is talking me through it as I visualize whatever I'm working on. So, it's not saying and.. now.. I.. put.. the.. next.. leg.. and so forth, it's this is how these 4 legs are going to fit
As with the ostensible Aphantasia I believe that this is a problem with people being able to describe their inner experiences accurately. It makes way more sense to me that >99% of people fall into the behavior category that you described, rather than that 10% of people don't have an internal monologue.
FWIW, my experience lines up very closely to yours.
1. I do inner monologue. And I have to say, sometimes I get scared from what I "hear". I don't mean sometjing like "I hear voices telling me to kill everyone", but nasty, brutally cynical, sometimes outright violent thoughts. They feel alien to me, because on general level I consider myself "the good guy", but one the other hand they don't feel like someone else whispering me evil things.
2. Sometimes I feel like my mind has layers, where this monologue is the the most upper one with some lower, less verbalized layer which is only later formed into words. Doesn't happen often, but it feels like the lower layer is actually more capable because it's not constrained by language/words.
In re: #1 The world is hell. Look at history: everything has been a psychotic nightmare for most people most of the time, except for a handful of people in the last few minutes. That's gonna leave a mark.
> Under the present brutal and primitive conditions on this planet, every person you meet should be regarded as one of the walking wounded. We have never seen a man or woman not slightly deranged by either anxiety or grief. We have never seen a totally sane human being.
~Robert Anton Wilson
So, yeah, don't pop off on the bus or anything and you're doing alright.
> "Oh, yeah, if I didn't have inner peace, I'd completely go psycho on all you guys all the time." ~Lenny, from "The Simpsons"
In re: #2 Of course your mind has layers. Who does your breathing when you're not watching it? Also, the nervous system in your gut is as large as your brain (just distributed, spread around, yeah?)
One of my favourite series, Bojack Horseman, had an episode where you hear his internal monologue. It was scarily eye opening, because I've often found my inner monologue saying the exact same things, and I can't even remember how long this has been going on for.
Sometimes I have a "how awful would it be to do XY" moments. Usually something brutal. But it always makes me pay even more attention to not doing that very thing even accidentally because I definitely do not want to break stuff or hurt someone. Yet it makes me a bit nervous. What if I actually decided to do that? Fortunately it never happens when I'm under influence. Do I need help?
As others have said, these sound like typical intrusive thoughts.
The most common intrusive thoughts are, I believe, the "call of the void" ones (also known as "high place phenomenon"). You might be driving down the freeway and think "What if I drove into oncoming traffic?" or standing on a cliff at the end of a hike and think "What if I just walked off the ledge?" There's also some common less-morbid ones, like "What if I kissed my boss right now?" or "I just want to scream in the middle of this board meeting for no reason." Your immediate reaction should usually be to dismiss the thought as disturbing and move on with your life. If you find this dismissal to be difficult... that's when it can be worth checking out with a psychologist.
One hypothesis [0] for this phenomenon is that it is actually a post-fact reconstruction your brain is doing. Really, it's that your subconscious was uncomfortable with some imminent danger and forced you to compensate without thinking, and then you start thinking about what just happened. "Why did I suddenly step back from the ledge? Huh, must've been thinking about jumping off."
Another hypothesis I've read (which I can't find a good link to at the moment) is that it's some self-test mechanism. Your brain kind of sends a false "What if?" signal, and you should dismiss it because of the discomfort. This dismissal causes heightened awareness of the danger imminent and causes you to be more alert and thus be safer.
Again, though, these are pretty normal. That link I shared estimates that 50% of people have experienced the "call of the void". It's really only an issue if they're extraordinarily frequent (like... all the time), or if you genuinely feel tempted to act on them. Intrusive thoughts are not always indicative of suicidal ideation, but have also been linked to OCD and similar anxiety disorders (because they're a weird coping mechanism, when you think about it).
I think I remember reading somewhere that thinking about jumping when you are near a staircase, balcony, cliff, or something like that is pretty common, even if you don't have the least desire to commit suicide otherwise.
I remember reading these are called parasitic(?) thoughts, uncontrollable and random thoughts, sometimes leading to more complex reasoning but ultimately almost on autopilot ; like the mind is just suggesting many different things at once and you just happen to notice one of those random thinking when it reaches the surface of your consciousness. I belive it also has to do with an anxious mind but I have nothing to back that up.
I feel the same way on the 2nd layer you're talking about. I feel like I can plan out a big project in my head, and see it, and understand it. But when I try to verbalize it, I get really flustered. I just want to zap the idea into someone else's head so that I don't have to explain how it works, because I'll inevitably do a poor job until I start working on said project.
Trying to explain it is part of understanding it. Our brains do a really good job of lying to us. They tell us they understand the topic, while ignoring what we don't know because it's harder to conceptualize.
I think it was Feynman who said you don't understand something unless you can teach it.
As I understand it, this is correct. One's mind is made up of different, sometimes 'competing' parts, most of which we are not consciously aware of (most of the time).
It's widely believed that the 'thinking' part of our brain, the neo-cortex, is far less in control than the deeper, emotional parts, such as the limbic system.
> 2. Sometimes I feel like my mind has layers, where this monologue is the the most upper one with some lower, less verbalized layer which is only later formed into words. Doesn't happen often, but it feels like the lower layer is actually more capable because it's not constrained by language/words.
I have something like that which is more akin to wandering formless thoughts to me. I don't think they are more capable though, I think it's an illusion given off by the deeper or soother sensation it instills into the mind.
I get really annoyed with people who twitter about crap old people say (example old Clint Eastwood). Have always believed they’re just losing control over their internal monologues, because you just -know- a lot of people think that way sometimes but aren’t bad people.
On layers, it’s like there is a second contrarian thread that pops up during controversial topics. Like some safety or auditing function.
Intrusive thoughts are normal. I get that too, stuff I'd never say out loud (and that I'd not agree with). I think it's just a natural way for our brain to bring up alternatives and test our assumptions.
On your second point I think that thinking in words actually slows down my thoughts too. I've read about it and try not to, but sometimes it doesn't feel right until I spell it out to myself like I'm explaining to a child.
This isn't so hard to understand if you've ever meditated. It becomes clearer that the internal monologue is a process that just runs on its own almost endlessly, and the feeling that we control it is mostly just an illusion. You can test this for yourself by trying to find out what your next thought is going to be. You never know until you have it, which indicates that the process is spontaneous and involuntary. I have ADHD and possibly some mild form of OCD so for me a big portion of the mind chatter is just counterproductive noise, and the only (healthy) freedom is meditation. I envy people who have no internal monologue, although they probably get the same noise just in a more abstract way.
There must be a language/hearing center in the brain that's being activated for some people and not activated for others. When I'm consciously having an internal dialogue, sometimes my tongue is lightly flickering around in my mouth as if I'm actually talking!
I never knew that people actually thought verbally! I always thought it was a figure of speech.
I mean, I can "think verbally" if I try really hard... even then, it's more like me imagining myself saying something rather than actually thinking verbally.
Similarly until last year I never knew that people actually could visualize things when they closed their eyes. I thought it was more of a metaphor. But alas when I close my eyes it's darkness. Thankfully I have my internal monologue to describe things to me in that darkness.
When I close my eyes the images I can produce are no more vivid than the images I can produce with my eyes open. E.g., I can picture the car driving down the street behind me, or I can imagine a sphere in front of me. But in either can it's semi-transparent. It's like a hologram places in 3d-space relative to my-self, and it doesn't matter if my eyes are open or not. This is what I consider imagination. I thought this is how it worked for everyone.
How does this relate to what you're saying? Are you considering this visualizing things or not?
I can't visualize every kind of object. The easiest things to visualize are simple geometric shapes with a strong color. By default, if I try to "visualize something" it will be a red triangle.
I cannot visualize faces whatsoever, even if the person is right in front of me and I close my eyes suddenly.
Glad it's not just me that cannot visualize faces whatsoever! But with the exception of faces, I can visualize complex 3d shapes if I'm lucid dreaming. When I'm fully awake, my visualization abilities decrease quite a bit, so when I get a chance (which isn't so often with kids) I'll often lie in bed for an hour or so just thinking visually. My wife thinks I'm being lazy, but it's often the most productive part of my day.
For me, thinking verbally means either monologue by someone else than me, or dialogue with not-me. Rarely dialogue where neither party is me. You've never argued with ancient Greeks? I find the act of dialogue with my idea-form of Plato hilarious.
I am literally speechless, thinking that it wasn't an idiom; and that the monologue as recorded in e.g. modern literature, was likely meant to be read and as is read as a transcription...
I have always at a deeply unexamined level assumed that that was just a convention of how literature functions through its medium, language; that the recording of thought through its semantic content was a (to me "obvious") necessary translation-layer thing.
I don't have a headache, but I might have to go sit somewhere and stare with my eyes unfocused for a while, to come to terms with this. I've been cross examining my coworker (who does "hear the voice") about what that even means.
The aphantasia thing was curious. This is somehow much more of a shock.
Yes, I always thought that when a novelist describes the “voice in the head” of a character, or when a coworker does the same, they are trying to convey thought over a medium incapable of conveying true thought.
I never imagined that that was the actual thought!
Do you not hear music in your head? Like I have a song running through my mind right now, lyrics and all. No visuals just the music. If you don’t hear a voice in your head wouldn’t that mean you can’t ever hear music in your head either?
6 years ago I tried relaxing and listen to smooth jazz or something. Being in the moment and just observing my surrounding with hyperfocus was very pleasant. Time felt infinite. Time was now. I have these lapses every now and then, but I wouldn't have it as my new normal.
Without your thoughts you only your body, an animal. Language is what expands human sphere of influence beyond what we see, taste and feel. The "Noosphere", if you will [1]. I don't find internal monologue counterproductive, it's how I explore the possible and impossible without moving.
P.S An honest thanks, I wouldn't have discovered my own thoughts on this subject without an invitation to dialogue in the form of your comment. Language takes two :)
> Without your thoughts you only your body, an animal. Language is what expands human sphere of influence beyond what we see, taste and feel.
This is nonsense. Geoffrey Hinton pretty much demolished this. Language goes in, and language comes out, but your thoughts aren't little word-symbols in your head. They're patterns of activation. Language is a by-product, not the essential thing. As I pause while writing this, I'm visualizing a machine part, rotating it in my head, animating screws going into it and out of it, and oh, it just turned into a banana and walked away.
It's extremely likely that many non-human animals have similar thoughts. Put another way, it's extremely unlikely that humans have adopted almost all our traits from other animals, except for the inner monologue.
I guess the idea is that the part that makes decisions is not under your control and you are just an "observer" who justifies what this "person" is doing. It is a scary thing if true, but can help in understanding why things are the way they are.
I'm not sure what point you're making, but it sounds like this is less about how you define the self and more about how you define involuntary. The heartbeat is an involuntary action and is simultaneously part of yourself. That's all I mean.
I agree that a heartbeat is an involuntary reflex but I don't see how you can compare that to the mind chatter which is AFAIK related to cognition much like the rest of your thoughts and mental processes.
Not only that, your inner monologue is completely unique to you. Probably from a part that you do not identify with which is why I was asking.
I dream up movies and songs and all sorts of rich fantasies in my head, and I do this constantly. As a consequence of this, I never get bored as I've got an incredible imagination to lean on.
I think about movies I want to make, startups I want to create, the change I want to put into the world. New songs on my commute, goals I want to accomplish, what I could do with time travel. I'm always working on the structures of my different dream worlds, modifying the rules and the characters, exploring how they interact. The languages they speak, and the rules of the magic and science systems that form the bounds of their existence.
I have never once in my life been bored. Not once. I can sit in an empty room and just daydream.
If I play music or walk or run, this imaginative power is supercharged and becomes a transcendent experience. It's why I love running and headphones. I haven't taken drugs, but I imagine it's something like that. It's a pure, unfettered deluge of dopamine. I can also walk in circuits and circles around my house doing this and can waste hours in fantasy. Entire weekends can be "wasted" this way.
I think this is a source of my ADHD. I've got instant dopamine fixes from my raw imagination and it's incredibly hard to do anything else as I can always give myself something better to do by just daydreaming.
As an aside, the dreams that I have when I sleep are almost like movies. They have intricate (but often nonsensical) plots, and I'm seldom even involved.
The main thing I want to do with my life is to create tools so I can get this out of my head and out into the world.
I wonder how many other people daydream like this and have a vibrant inner creativity?
I used to have such an imagination when I was young: before going to sleep, I would always reimagine the movies I just watched or the books I just read, factoring myself into the story (often as a coprotagonist, not particularly OP but helpful in many ways), sometimes going a bit meta trying to explain my presence to the characters, tweaking their response, trying not to trigger the obvious self-doubting panic that would ensue if someone told you your reality isn't actually "real".
I even had a cross-universe canon for my character: I often had wings (watching Winx club as a kid helped), and sometimes took characters on a multi-dimensional ride in my magic hyper-technological flying car, big as a house on the inside, capable of traversing space and time.
I absolutely feel the same way about music, it manages to turn any world, even a simple concept into a fantastical and magical music video of sorts.
As I went on with my life I somewhat lost this ability, possibly due to the highly technical nature of my job and hobbies, however I still love reading and watching good fantasy stories, and sometimes, when I feel like it, I still fantasize by joining the story and aiding the main characters in saving the world (and music still can transport me away to another world, like before).
I have often considered the enormous power, and just as enormous limtations of modern creativity tools.
I honestly can't wait for neural interfaces: when everyone will be able to extract images and audio directly from their brains.
It will truly be a revolution for the media industry, a change as big as the introduction of computers.
It will also give way to haunting new aspects of copyright law: what happens if someone publishes a YouTube neural video that uses copyrighted characters, do we prohibit people from even thinking about copyrighted IP?
Do we beam films using widevine L0 DRM directly to people's brains, immediately removing all memories of them after they were seen to avoid copyright infringement?
Those will truly be interesting times, and I would really love to live to see them.
Have you read "The Continent of Lies" by James Morrow? I can't remember how I came across it, not quite my normal reading fare, but it delves into some of what you are talking about.
I can relate, as I do this all the time, being inside my head, a mashup of multi-verses, projecting myself in alternate realities, being able to time-travel in to the future and opening a conversational 1-on-1 portal to my present self, to answer the question like Dr. Banks from the movie Arrival or when Brand reaches out to her past self in Interstellar, all while taking bus home, or while taking a long shower.
I can watch an entire movie inside my head from another character's point of view or vantage point.
I'm also able to on the spot improv storytelling, something that I was able to do easily as a teen during summer camps and recently I got introduced to the world of DnD which got my mind racing and volunteered to become a DM.
Loneliness is a rarity for me as I feel content wandering off, writing and art is my way of projecting to this world, which I have plucked out from the sea of infinite realities through dreams and daydreaming.
When someone talks to me, asks me a question/opinion or solution, a whole mindmap/flowchart,timeline appears before me which I can navigate spatially in 3d.
When someone asks for direction or trying to find out where I am, I literally see a 3d flyover or bird's eyeview from where I'm standing.
When I dream, not only that I dream in colors but they have a feel to it like watching something nostalgic or when I travel. Sometimes dreams has visual filters as a part of it. Have you dreamed being inside a cartoon/comicbook, painting or noir movie?
I do have a hard time turning my brain off which sucks when trying to go to sleep.
I believe I am similar. I have often thought that I would not consider locked-in-syndrome to be as bad as others express as a worse-than-death fate. I think I would just happily continue wandering within my meandering mind.
I think it is detrimental to achieving things though. Actually doing things takes far more discipline and that's time that could be used for coming up with more internal ideas.
As a side note to this, I also have aphantasia. So I don't get any images. Just concepts,dialog, connections etc.
While discussing lucid dreaming with my partner, we both learned that she has aphantasia. I think it blew my mind more than it did hers. Things like, "I pictured that character so much different when I read the book" after watching a movie-- she always thought people were just saying that because they had different ideas of the characters mannerisms, or the text conveyed something different to them... Not that they could actually play out a scene in their head.
It got me thinking about a lot of ways we go about teaching. Math for example - my partner struggled with calculus in uni when presented an equation she hadn't seen something similar to before. It never occurred to me that people couldn't attempt to "graph" something in their head.
I had the same thing. The more anchored it became to reality through supportive others and responsibility and commitment the quieter it became. Writing out my ideas and then really thoroughly and deeply exploring one that means something to gave a weight to bear on my psyche that quietened the others.
Ze Frank has a good video on this where he quotes Jung's work. https://youtu.be/u2cMjeSvZSs?t=184
Artists say life begins when you leave your comfort zone, in regards to making good art.
I find it still an important driver in life to follow that burst of ideas. The only way for me to raise up an idea structure or skill is to follow that buzz upwards. My capacity to imagine is jammed packed with meaningful content now and it grows a weight of it's own.
I have the same thing going on in my head. Sometimes I think that this has a negative effect on me, because it's very easy for me to procrastinate, because all I need for that is to daydream.
It helped me through school though. I cannot imagine going through classes without daydreaming. It sounds like torture.
It is not only healthy, but a great ability to be respected and cultivated. It is also good to learn to not do this. Saying it's unhealthy is like saying /dev/random is unhealty, but /dev/null is, or stars are bad but empty space is good. Both are quite useful. (let's please not have that talk about cryptographic qualities of /dev/random). My experience is that if you can easily tap into endless creativity and also experience the calmness of no-thought at will, you will have greater abilities than average in most situations. Meditation, among other things, can help you be more adept at either.
Luckily legal prodrugs of LSD exist, compounds which metabolize into LSD before reaching the brain like 1P-LSD and ALD-52. In the United States, you can order these off the clearnet without fear of legal repercussions, unlike shrooms. (although psilocin has its own collection of legal prodrugs available including, for example, 5-MeO-DMT and 4-HO-MET).
I do exactly the same. Started when I was 6, walking around in circles, just imagining things. Music makes it even easier. It also helps deal with frustrations and anxiety by imagining catarthic scenes.
I still spend an hour each day doing that during my commute.
I've found that improv theatre and writing books really helps with the "getting it out of my head" part.
For those who do inner monologue - I worry about telling you about this. It might make you wish you didn't ever realize it. So.. spoiler in the next sentence. When you start talking in your head, pay attention to your vocal cords and the area around them... Notice anything? They're probably moving like they would if you were actually talking out loud. Have you ever noticed how you tried to talk really fast in your head but seem to always get limited and it feels weirdly physical that you can't talk even faster? It's because you can't actually speak that fast in real life - thus you're limited because your mechanisms for talking are actually moving at the rate you're speaking - but if you can't speak fast then you can't think fast either really. It's usually something you'll casually notice but ignore... and then later you'll really notice it every time you think. Similar to floaters - always there but only when you're tired or looking at a blue sky do you really notice and get upset over it.
Sometimes I find myself speaking at an unreal speed in my head (but everything is clear and distinct - something that doesn't happen when people talk fast, things get slurred) but it's because I suppressed the vocal portion of my physical movements for just a moment. It's weirdly surreal. I think, "Is this how fast I would talk if I wasn't physically limited?" To think faster, I usually skip words in my inner monologue because the physical part always gets in the way. To someone listening in, it'd sound weird. And I always worry that people can tell what I'm thinking because I know my body is actually moving when I speak - it's sometimes like people pick up on it. I think I pick up on it too here and there... hard to say.
I definitely have an inner monologue but my vocal cords don't move when I'm thinking or reading (this is called subvocalization [0]). There is a significant population of people that don't do it much/at all and you can be taught to suppress it.
My internal monologue doesn't seem to be constrained by my speaking speed, which aligns with your experience of being able to think very quickly when suppressing subvocalization.
Regarding your worries about people being able to tell: most of the time, the muscle movements involved in subvocalization are so small that they're not possible to see without the aid of machines [1] (though the speaker can often feel them, as you report).
Interesting - while I can make myself do the ‘silent talking’ thing, my normal internal monologue is usually disconnected from my movements basically completely.
It’s pretty normal for me to be thinking ahead or of other things to say while speaking at the same time. I do some music gigs here and there, and if I know a song well enough, I find my mind drifting and monologuing on random observations about the venue, or people around me, or even something completely random, while also singing the normal words to the song and playing guitar!
I’m not sure who is more “normal”, or if there even is a “normal” here!
I would have just considered that habit. If you are familiar enough with something you don't need to consciously think while you do it, whether it's singing or just going about your day.
I think your thoughts are right. I think once we have good neural interfaces, interpersonal communication will become much, much faster for some people. Both linguistic and non-linguistic (symbolic, abstract, etc.).
I think there will be certain superusers who start using them from a very young age and will be able to communicate and transform information with incredible density and clarity. I'm not totally sure how useful that'd actually be for conversing or teaching, but for writing, programming, and creating art, I bet it'll be very significant.
Chiming in as someone who experiences an inner monologue, but does not subvocalize while either thinking or reading. I don't think one implies the other.
I was taught to read without subvocalizing and I think I am a faster reader for it. I visually process "chunks" of text and hop from chunk to chunk. My SO subvocalizes and is a noticeably slower reader.
If someone who doesn't experience inner monologues is willing to answer, I would really like to know how does it feel for them when reading? Do you vocalize in your head the text that you read, or it's also just abstract non-verbal stream of words for you?
It might be a bit far fetched, but from observing & talking to my kid when he was learning to read, I strongly suspect that there's a connection, that it has something to do with the skill of reading without saying the words aloud. Kids can't do it at first, they have to say every word aloud in order to understand the text, and then with time they train themselves to read in silence. For me, I still say the text as I read it, but I just say it in my mind, not aloud - And it feels exactly the same as when I verbalize my thoughts. AFAIK a lot of people reads like this (all my friends at least). This seems like some sort of "hack" to help us understand the meaning easier, we run it through the same processing as a spoken language. Some of us obviously can learn to avoid this intermediary step of verbalization, and can focus the consciousness directly on their thoughts.
Something I discovered within the past year is that if I know a song fairly well, I can "play it" silently in my head, and be entertained. The experience isn't quite as emotionally resonate as listening with headphones, but it's not so far off either. It's useful when I'm bored.
...can anyone else do this? I actually find it supremely weird.
No, I think that's pretty normal. I do it all the time.
I can even "compose" my own music (it can be any genre, with any type of instruments, and even include voices), but I have no ability to play instruments myself. I'd love to get into music, but just don't have the time.
My literature professor back in college said he "listened to" classical music in his head during his morning runs. I just assumed everyone did it based on sample size 2.
Man I can't even imagine. I realize a while back that I don't actually hear music in my head when I have an earworm, instead I hear a representation of it made entirely of what would be vocalized sounds. So if I'm hearing the guitar solo from November Rain, its kind of like someone (me, really) going 'bowwwww owww nah nahhhh nah nahahhhhhhh wan nah nah nah nah wah wah' rather than actual guitar noises, but then it's followed up by the singers legitimate voice.
My wife found this pretty weird. I suspect it's related to my also experiencing aphantasia. It could be some form of mental lossy compression, where the brain knows it can roughly replicate what it heard using the limited set of vocalizations it already knows instead of actual note/instrument combinations.
I'd like to explore this aphantasia idea a bit more. I would classify myself as very visual, but on thinking about this more ... it's not like I have a high-fidelity visual impression of the imagined object in my mind's eye. It's more like a physical / tactile impression of presence. Is that what it's like for you?
As I'm sitting here, I'm thinking of describing it as ...
If I shut my eyes I still know roughly where the monitor corners, the keyboard, the table corners, the wine-bottle, the apple, etc. are. It's not like I'm seeing them, but I can spatially query them and perform operations on them. So is this a difference in internal perception, or is it a difference in how we describe those internal states?
I think in a very spatial way. I can roughly imagine objects or scenes as something like a 3d graph of connected points. I can imagine the facade of my house if I close my eyes only by sort of tracing its shape, in which case I can feel my eyes moving along that dimension as I do it. I cannot imagine a person's actual face, which I'm told is really weird, although I'm very good with recognizing them when I'm shown them. I can generally map out a location as if I was overhead once i've walked through it, but only really as a spatial scene. Closing my eyes is kind of what I imagine its like to be blind.
For very simple objects, I can vaguely visualize them like a drawing from an early 80's graphics demo, but that's about as good as it gets.
See, what intrigues me about this is I wonder if you're just more nuanced and precise in your description. I always thought of myself as being very visual, and I'm like ninety-nine point something percent of spatial ability, and yet your description seems like a fairly accurate description of what I experience.
The problem is that the descriptions depend on so many subjective things. For instance what does it mean to be able to see someone's face in one's mind? At what resolution question mark at what level of detail? I mean it seems like a lot of people with uncorrected vision can't even see faces to any standards I would consider seeing. So could it be that you're holding your mental visualizations too too high a bar and comparing them with people you have a low bar for mental visualizations?
Edit .. your description of having to trace out the facade is particularly apt to me. It's almost like some kind of DRAM thing where I have to refresh my mental image by touching / scanning parts of it or it goes away.
Maybe it's a combination of both, and you're just more attuned to the nuance? It's funny, when you mentioned November Rain I did the guitar noises, in my voice, in my head. Great, now that's stuck in there. Thanks. But something like the Star Wars sound-track. I do hear a more instrumental version, although for parts that I can sing I also get some ghostly sensations in my tongue and throat.
>No, I think that's pretty normal. I do it all the time.
[Edit: Currently I "listen" to a lot of Georgios Papadopoulos, heh!]
>I can even "compose" my own music
I can relate! Unfortunately, I'm totally untrained regarding music. I once tried to enter one of the melodies in my head (simplified) into a music program, and it took forever, because I had to find the correct notes by trial and error: "Not that one. Neither that one. Still wrong. Not quite. This one is it! Next note..."
I think this kind of trial and error is actually the best way of learning an instrument. My guitar teacher did exactly what you did (but on a keyboard) when he was a kid, and even got feedback from his parents on whether he hit the right keys. He's a hell of a guitar player now, surely among the (subjectively) very best in my country.
> it's so slow and frustrating that the melody in my head just disappears.
Use a microphone to record yourself humming the melody first, so you can get the original back if you forget it.
Separately, I'll mention that imitone (https://imitone.com) works surprisingly well. The transcriptions don't come out perfectly by any means, but they provide a base that you can then clean up.
I cannot 'play music in my head'. I can recall vaguely what it felt like to have been listening to a specific piece of music, but not much further than that.
Possibly related, I have a very poor ability to visualise anything internally. (I cannot, for example, "picture a beach in my head")
In fact, most things I try to hold in my head evince nothing more than a foggy recollection.
It has been this way for as long as I can remember.
I'm a drummer and my wife always gets mad at me for drumming on things. I have a song in my head and can hear all the parts really well even over whatever sounds my taps are making. So in my head I'm drumming along and it sounds super good, but to the rest of the world it's just monotone taps on a table or whatever.
I do the same, but unintentionally and the songs that seem to pop into my head are all songs I hate. It's incredibly rare that my favorites end up playing, but rather repetitive Pop crap. This isn't even a comment about Pop Music, as even though I don't really listen to Pop, I've heard plenty that I like. But not the songs that fly around in my head all day; Pure garbage.
Edit: As I was typing this, "La Macarena" popped into my head.
I specifically avoid viral earworm songs because I am very prone to getting them stuck in my head. I can have the same song playing "in the background" non-stop in my mind for days. I have songs in my dreams and I'll wake up with them still playing in my head. Sometimes it will just be a single bar of a song, or just a piece of it looping.
To this day, I have never once listened to "Chocolate Rain" or Rebecca Black's "Friday" because I fear never being able to turn them off. (I avoided Taylor Swift for, like a decade, but now just thinking about means I've got "Shake it Off" playing.)
Writing this out now makes me realize how weird this all sounds...
I have the exact same experience. It may even, unintentionally, be the _reason_ I don't listen to Pop music. It's generally not even a whole song - usually not even the chorus. I'll get a 2-4 second loop in my head of some insignificant section of a crappy song for 2 or 3 whole days.
Like you, it will sometimes start when I'm sleeping. I won't remember much of the dream, but the song is still there, echoing as it was in whatever setting my dream took place.
The way I solved this is by stopping completely to listen to pop songs. I will actively avoid the radio or web stations so I won't be "contaminated" by these cheap songs. I actively look for more complex music: jazz/classical style and similar.
I've also had songs get stuck in my head for as long as I can remember. What surprised me was the realization that I could (A) consciously initiate and turn off a mind-song, and (B) actually be entertained by the mind-song.
My "mind's eye" is pretty strong as well, but I would never mentally look at a painting or watch a movie to pass the time. Yet it seems to work for music.
I once read that to get the loop out of your head, you have to "finish" the song, i.e. play it to the end, either in your head, sing it or play it on the stereo.
I haven't done it for many years but you've reminded me that I could sometimes play songs in my head and actually hear it. Only very softly though, like old-fashioned headphones on a very low volume.
I still have music in my head very often - I play piano and I'm always getting ear worms, but it must be at least 20 years since I last physically heard my mental music playing. I wonder if I can get it back?
I have experienced something similar, namely hypnagogic hallucinations, usually when waking up, that sound exactly note for note the same as the recordings. Strawberry Fields Forever was the most memorable. To my mind experiences like this and particularly vivid dreams show that our mental capacity for self-stimulating is profoundly more extensive than most people believe. I can't think of any reason why you couldn't have a kind of state of lucid wakefulness effectively functioning as an overlay of what your sense organs are telling you. Imagine for example a race car driver who sees the line as clearly as in one of the simulation games that enables it.
Edit: I've also had vivid hypnagogic visual hallucinations intentionally. It's a kind of fun game to play, seeing my bedroom clearly with my eyes closed, or checking the time on my watch while same. Obviously I'm conscious and aware that I'm not really checking the actual time, but not particularly surprisingly I'm pretty close since I tend to wake about the same time every day.
In case you're interested: "hypnogogic" refers to experiences you have while falling asleep. The word for experiences you have while waking up is "hypnopompic".
Yup, have been able to do that as long as I remember. It's great for pub quizzes where they play the start of a song, I listen to the rest in my head until I've worked out the song's name.
Isn't this the experience of getting a song "stuck in your head?"
Yeah I can also do this (sometimes), the experience is the same as yours: I can't quite emotionally resonate with the song as I would if I were hearing it IRL, but if I know the song quite well I can get all the details right.
It is particularly intriguing to be able to "sing" using other people's voices, since the lyrics of the song "feel" the same way as my inner voice, passing through (I assume) the brain's phonological loop.
Once I had this really weird experience, where in certain conditions, certain muscles would resonate exactly with the song playing in my brain (and not just the rythm, even minor details were somewhat transferred, as if my brain was redirecting raw PCM audio from my brain directly to the nerves); I was really excited about this, as there was potential for a direct non-invasive neural interface to my brain, capable of extracting original songs directly from my brain without any instruments; unfortunately I could not replicate this weird behaviour reliably, and I also felt a bit weird in my brain when trying to do so, so I just dropped the matter.
Yep, I can totally do this. It's normally not the whole song, just a section of it (but that doesn't bother me). It's a particularly common thing for me to do in bed, using the last song I heard that day.
Absolutely. I work extremely long hours, so I've noticed that when I'm particularly tired, my "mental iPod shuffle", as I call it, will go into extreme mode. Sometimes reading a single word or sentence is enough to remind me of a song, and BOOM it's immediately playing in my head.
I now basically have actual music on nearly 24/7 to drown that out otherwise it can get pretty annoying – especially if the song that's stuck in my head isn't one I actually enjoy.
Yes, I think the inability to do this seems to be associated with aphantasia. Most people do not have aphantasia, therefore I'd expect most people are able to do this.
I think similarly that most people who do not have an internal dialogue experience aphantasia - the ability to replay or simulate sensory experiences mentally. Personally I do not often have thoughts "racing" through my head - maybe one main one, maybe zero - and I think this related to my aphantasia.
My wife doesn't like listening to music in the car, but one of the local radio stations will show the title/artist on the center console. So I put the radio on with the volume at 0, I hear the song in my head, and she has silence :)
When you say play do you mean like a musician or do you mean like hitting play on a music player, if the latter I can do that, I suppose what would stop people is not a good memory for music.
Most well-trained musicians can read a score and construct the sounds mentally. It's an essential skill for composers and conductors, and useful for others.
I can do this too. I also will sometimes unconsciously bop along to the music.
One time, a friend's Dad asked me why I was rocking back and forth. I think he thought I had a nervous tick. In reality, I was "listening to a song" and didn't even realize I was moving along to it. Seems to happen most often when I'm bored.
I found that when some particular song is getting too much of my internal "air time", the best way to get rid of it is actually to find it (personal collection, youtube, google music, spotify - whatever you are using) and just to listen to it from beginning to the end. HTH.
I can play a whole song in my head, and then realize that I don't know the words, and when I try to get the words out of the song in my head, I can't understand them, because my brain only committed the musical parts, not the lyrical parts.
I can even hear the vocals, they're just gibberish until I make a conscious effort to memorize them.
I saw this viral tweet and I hoped that was more scientific information to read, because I'm a little confused. I don't see enough information here to even determine which type of person I am. Of course I've always heard of "internal monologue" and of course I think about things using language. But I also don't "hear" anything, and definitely not something that literally sounds like my voice speaking. But if I were to try to explain my thought process, I likely would describe it as myself expressing thoughts using language as if I were speaking.
Obviously this gets deep into the philosophy of qualia, but do we have evidence that there are two very different modes of thinking? Could this not just be different analogies people have adopted to describe their thinking?
An Instagram poll isn't a great tool to study this. I would like to see a psychological or neurological study about this idea. As of now, I'm pretty skeptical that the dichotomy exists. It sounds like the claim that "some people describe their brains like a computer, while some people describe their brains like a library." Computers and libraries are very different physical objects, yes, but the choice of analogy doesn't really tell me much about how people are experiencing their own thought processes.
Of course, if it's true that the majority of people do actually experience auditory hallucinations of their own voice speaking all of their thoughts, then my criticisms here are invalid, and I'm definitely in the other group of people.
"of course", no most of my thoughts are not expressible in any language. Why would they? Thoughts are so much richer than any language can possibly express. How to solve this physics problem? If I had to do it via a monologue it would take forever. Same with programming. Instead I just think the thoughts directly and just solve the problem without verbalizing anything.
Of course this makes it harder to tell others what you are doing, but I don't see how you could possibly solve any problems at all while being limited to thoughts you can verbalize.
> Thoughts are so much richer than any language can possibly express.
I'm not sure about that. Couldn't it just be that we sometimes don't understand our own thoughts? If you can't describe one of your thoughts with language, I would say that you must not understand that thought. And of course we sometimes have thoughts which we don't understand.
I think that understanding our own thoughts is something that needs to be worked on, both individually (we certainly should be better at is as adults than as children) and collectively (science and philosophy should allow us to keep improving our understanding of our own thoughts).
For me it can be "auditory" in the same way that I can "see" pictures of things I'm thinking of inside my head. My understanding is when you're visualizing something in your head -- say, your partner's face -- the visual cortex is activated as if you are actually seeing it. The same goes for my thoughts.
Not every thought is actually.... auralized? auditorialized? ...though. There's some sort of default mode that I operate in most of the day. I don't have to "hear" every single thought I have, I'm able to take in information and perform common actions without hearing thoughts. But, as soon as I go into "conscious" mode, nearly everything becomes sounded out internally. For instance, when programming, I'm constantly having a real internal conversation along the lines of, "Okay, so if this value is Y here, but then this transformation happens, then..." And yes, this occurs in my voice, or at least how my voice sounds to me when I speak. (Sometimes, when I'm really in the flow of it, I'll even start unintentionally voicing it out loud.) I actually like this, because it forces my thoughts to slow down -- when I'm really thinking through a hard problem, I have no choice but to think at the speed of my monologue. It's like built-in rubber-duck debugging.
Having said all of this, we know that thoughts can be expressed differently in different people because deaf individuals (who were born deaf) certainly do not have an ongoing auditory inner monologue.
I mean, at the end of the day, a thought is just a pattern of firing neurons, so what precise neurons are involved is going to impact how you experience that thought.
It is indeed an intriguing topic to consider. I hear something like my own voice both when I am thinking throughout the day and when I am writing, such as right now I hear my “imaginary voice” speaking what I’m typing out.
The idea of ones own voice is hard to describe. I perceive it as similar to what my voice sounds like, but from heard from within, almost like you’ve rolled off a bunch of the high-end. Imaginary voice is much more consistent in volume and tone for me too than speaking, much less emotional, almost no variety in pitch.
I wouldn’t say I think in full-sentence monologues all day, but I guess I think in fragments of sentences? It’s one of those things that is hard to look back and remember doing and explain how you did it, kind of like breathing. It’s just automatic.
I wonder if some of the “no monologue” people aren’t much different from the rest of us, but they just didn’t articulate their process the same way. I can kind of identify with the concept map thing, so I could probably answer differently depending on mood or how I felt when I read the survey.
I would not say that it is auditory hallucinations as in you don't actually hear the voice in your ears. But you thoughts are in a voice in your head that is distinctly your voice or your identity. At least that is my experience and it sounds like what the author is describing to me.
I'm working on a PhD in cognitive science. Something that I think relates to this is the idea of Emboddied Cognition [0], and in particular off-line emboddied cognition, where you use sensorimotor mechanisms in your body while thinking, even if you're not actually interacting with the environment. In this case it would be your brain activating the same audio processing areas you use when sound enters your ear, even though you're generating the sounds inside your head while thinking.
I used to, but I intentionally stopped and cleared my mind every time I did it for half a year, and now I only think in language when I'm trying to compose a speech or write.
So that's a thing you could try if you want to see for yourself, in case I'm a P-zombie.
I would not say that my internal monologue is entirely auditory, but there's an auditory element to it. I sometimes sort of 'see' the words or concept I'm thinking about, and if i focus on it, I think I can switch from one to the other.
A similar subjective experience just came up recently[1] on HN as an aside in an article posted about Derek Parfitt:
> He attributes [his severely deficient autobiographical memory] to his inability to form mental images. Although he recognizes familiar things when he sees them, he cannot call up images of them afterward in his head: he cannot visualize even so simple an image as a flag; he cannot, when he is away, recall his wife’s face. (This condition is rare but not unheard of; it has been proposed that it is more common in people who think in abstractions.)
That article was from 2011, before the term aphantasia was coined in 2015[2] and (arguably) popularized in 2016[3]. Most folks also assume that everyone uses their visual cortex to process memories while that idea sounds absolutely implausible to some relatively small percentage of the population.
I think it's more common for people with this to cope by thinking in terms of abstractions, rather than the other way around.
The flag's a great example. Can't call up an image of a flag, but I can hold a kind of inferred 'essense' of a flag based on the abstract idea. Rectangle, some dividing lines depending on the country, kinda a wavy shader effect on the edges, probably a pole off to one side holding it up. But that's as rich as the image gets.
If internal monologue is supposed to be an actual voice that you perceive vividly then yeah, that's not present either.
I had a surprising conversation with a talented artist a while back and while we were discussing methods it came up that they always had to work from a model or photograph because they could not recall images, at all, from memory.
I don't know enough about SDAM to know if it's the same thing as visual aphantasia, but they are presumably related. I am unable to visualize anyone's face (or, really, anything at all that isn't a black void), yet I can easily recognize the person (especially if I know them well) and I can describe them. What I can describe about them are whatever notes I've made about them to myself along the way (round face, black hair, mustache, broad chin, etc).
Reminds me of a book I read to my children about the woman Temple Grandin (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temple_Grandin) the book described her ability to think in pictures, and how it differed from the minds of others.
I have the inner dialog myself. I've talked with my sister about it, and she says she is able to have multiple threads going at once. Like she can do mental math and have a conversation with herself at the same time. I can only do one at a time. I've tried by counting and saying the alphabet in my head simultaneously, I can't do it.
I become aware of this after reading Temple Grandin's book Thinking in Pictures (1995):
> When I was a child and a teenager, I thought everybody thought in pictures. I had no idea that my thought processes were different. In fact, I did not realize the full extent of the differences until very recently.
> At meetings and at work I started asking other people detailed questions about how they accessed information from their memories. From their answers I learned that my visualization skills far exceeded those of most other people.
People differ drastically in many fundamental ways. This should be taught at school among other facts of utmost importance. Can you even imagine the inner experience of a dolphin or a bear, let alone be sure it's the same like that of yours? The degree of difference between you and another person you meet can be equally substantial. Many believe a diference is just a matter of personality - another person may be more or less lazy, more or less smart, more or less sociable than you etc but this way of thinking is absurdly primitive, like saying a laptop is no different from a coffee machine, just more lazy because it won't make you a cup of coffee.
This doesn't make any sense to me, even his example:
'One person even mentioned that when they do voice overs in movies of people’s thoughts, they “wished that it was real.”'
How can they form the thought 'I wish that was real' if they have no monologue? And to convey that thought they just open their mouth and spew forth a sentence with no knowledge of its
shape?
I've not figured out if I have the internal monologue after all or not, or both, but I often find myself composing something I'm going to say or write and feeling that the final sounding out is redundant. I already know what that sentence is going to be, no reason to actually put it in words.
Why would they need to be able to put it into words in an inner monologue in order to form the thought?
The fact that it is possible to translate sentences into different languages should make it clear that the information content is not the same as the manner in which it is linguistically encoded. One simply... forms the thought. And then encodes it into speech for the purposes of telling other people about it later, and separately.
> How can they form the thought 'I wish that was real' if they have no monologue?
Guessing -- a feeling of wistfulness and desire related to the sentence they just read?
> And to convey that thought they just open their mouth and spew forth a sentence with no knowledge of its shape?
I don't understand what this means. Do you know what you're going to say, before you say it? I mean the actual words? I have the intent to convey some information or meaning, but I don't know the exact words I'll say until I'm saying them. I've queued up intent or agreement or objections but in a normal conversation I don't hear the words until they come out of my mouth.
This was disturbing to me as well, but one way to think about it is how babies end up learning to talk: they don't speak any language initially, but they are still capable of thinking, since you need that in order to learn to talk, so they must be using something else other than language to "think", and since monologue is mostly language, this "something else" is unlikely to be a monologue.
> How can they form the thought 'I wish that was real' if they have no monologue? And to convey that thought they just open their mouth and spew forth a sentence with no knowledge of its shape?
For me, the thought exists in concepts/feelings/imagery until I perform a "reduction in dimensionality" by bringing it down to actual verbal speech.
A while back I discovered that I have aphantasia. I can construct elaborate ideas that are wholly visual in my head and describe them to other people in great detail but I cannot visualize an ounce of it in my own head. I've since read accounts of illustrators and graphic artists who are successful in their fields and who draw for a living and yet they also have aphantasia. I think this internal monologue thing probably isn't terribly different. FWIW, I _do_ have a _very strong_ internal monologue.
You’re taking it a step too far. People with no inner monologue are not incapable of thinking and feeling. What they expressed to the author just wasn’t expressed internally the way you and I would (by thinking and talking about in our heads).
I think one can convey the feeling of "wishing something were real" into spoken words without actually thinking those exact words to themselves.
It's like when you are hungry, and decide to eat. You didn't have to tell yourself to do it to know that you should.
Speech is largely subconscious. Even people with a strong inner dialog are capable of expressing themselves in words without explicitly thinking out every word they say prior to open their mouths.
I do verbal thinking when I'm by myself and thinking through options. What should I have for dinner? What gift should I buy? That kind of thing.
Non-verbal thought is when I'm totally focused on something like a competitive game. When I'm 100% in the zen-like focus of moment to moment instinctive action, there's "no time" for monologuing.
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