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.
On the other hand, it is so satisfying when a conversation hits a branch you worked on for hours on end! Very useful for dating and job interviews. Especially for people with foot-in-mouth disease[1]
While I do play out a lot of conversations and branches in my head, my imagined lines of conversation never really play out in reality. I find for example that my imagined conversations are a lot more hostile, I'm always imagining having to battle and batter my coworkers and managers to explain why things are the way they are - but in person I find that not only are others nicer than I imagined they would be, but I am too. I'll plot the cutting things to say, but in reality I realize that such things would be wholly inappropriate and undeserved and I don't really want to be mean anyway.
For me, this tendency is more of a problem online. This is because I can simply plot out a conversation and then write it the way I planned. It's something I need to be mindful of, to restrain my inner-jerk not just in person but online too.
Exactly. Our brains evolved in a complex social environment where saying or doing the wrong thing could mean getting attacked or pushed out of a social group. But in modern society this is much less the case.
And what would it be like if we could train our brains to think empathetic thoughts about the people around us? This is the premise of the book How to Make Friends and Influence People. The results are very powerful and lead us further to fulfilling our aims than fear infused thinking.
Hi, that's a nice book reference. I've ran into this thread a bit late, but do you know if that book is still relevant (it's published in 1936, Wikipedia says) or are there more modern works that incorporate those ideas and work with them?
It is still relevant, They updated the copy in 1985 to keep it modern but also true to the original. The straightforward message of that book is as powerful as ever.
I love how you guys make me feel like I'm not an odd person. I have a hard time explaining what it's like in my head to other people, including my own wife. If nothing else, it's comforting to know other people struggle with interactions because of the multiple internal threads constantly churning.
> I find for example that my imagined conversations are a lot more hostile
Yes, this! I sometimes find myself getting slightly mad at someone for something that I imagined them doing (or thought they were going to do), because I then had a played-out clash with them over it in my head. As soon as I notice what I'm doing, though, I stop being mad, because it's ridiculous to stay mad at someone over something they literally didn't do.
As a man with Aspergers, that sounds so useful.. and while I can often simulate conversations in my head, real-world conversations with real people almost never play out the same way.
It probably has to do with having little ability to intuitively understand what other people would think.
From my experience, I think a lot of it is due to the fact that you can't really surprise yourself. In the conversation in your head, you try to always be the 'winner' of the debuate, and part of that is to try and come up with remarks from your 'opponent' for which you have gotcha replies. Except you know what your 'opponent' is going to say because that's you. In real life, the opponent is someone else and they may surprise you.
Interesting. I tend to think you can surprise yourself. I write stories as a hobby, and my characters often surprise me.
I'd say it's down to two things:
a) Having to imagine a different personality's perspective, and
b) Having some time to think of a better answer than the off-the-cuff one.
Point a tends to happen whenever I make an effort to see the world from someone else's point of view, or make up an imaginary character to have a conversation with.
Point b tends to happen in my own head when I get quiet time - like during a long walk or shower and a thought I'd never imagined before comes up.
It can have some predictive power, too. Imagine, for example, there's an important negotiation coming up. You'll be sitting on one side of the table wanting the things you want. It does help to put yourself in the opposite seat mentally, thinking about what they want to get, and how you'd go about trying to get it. Maybe even trying on for size the best arguments you might make for their position.
True, I didn't want to imply you can't brute force it somehow, but what I was referring to was the general, low-effort, low-stakes conversation we (apparently not) all have in our heads.
My psychologist once thought I might be on the spectrum, but IDK. I do have a few symptoms including difficulty communicating, but I plan so heavily for every situation that others hardly notice.
Really? By far the most useful thing for dating seems to be the ability to be in the moment while conversing and being able to feel the flow of feelings and emotions - that's what makes a good interpersonal intimate conversation good and speeds up any dating goals one might have... Overthinking stuff, or even thinking a lot in general (while conversing) - does not.
You missed the initial point... preparatory thinking; it's not playing out during the conversations, but before; and for many of us, allows us to actually be in the moment with a discussion because we're prepared for standard branches of the possible conversations.
> By far the most useful thing for dating seems to be the ability to be in the moment
That obviously varies a lot. When I am actually spontaneous, bad things happen. I am able to improvise on top of a plan, but winging it is not an option.
My psychologist thinks I might be on the autism spectrum.
For what it's worth, while I'm far from infallible, my strategy on dating was successful enough the last two decades or so.
Is it though? I have found a job and wife that is OK with my foot in mouth disease and think it works better when you sell who you are. Don't get me wrong self improvement is important, but so is telling people who are going to spend time with you what they are going to get.
The fact the I plan conversations does not make me any less of myself. You are mistaking planning with deception.
And anyone I meet will eventually learn all my flaws, but that's an incremental process. It doesn't make sense to just throw each one of them on the first date.
That sounds like hell to me. I don't have an internal monolog. I think in visuals. I am a quiet person. I am a better programmer for it I think. I visualize the structure of a program I am writing and pair programming would also be hell for me.
I definitely am capable of thinking non-verbally, and I agree it can help with programming. But I just can't wrap my head around not having an internal monologue at all. How did you even write this comment? What was the process that led you to put together this particular series of words, if not 'hearing' them in your own mind as an expression of your thoughts first?
Edit: Thinking on this more, I may not have had an internal monologue when I was younger. I recall when I was maybe 11 or 12, I had a sudden, distinct moment of increased self-awareness, after which my internal monologue became my predominant mode of thinking. My first thought was that all of my mental activity up till that time had been in a fog, and that I really hadn't even been a fully conscious being. I crossed some kind of cognitive rubicon which my previous self couldn't even understand. I assumed this was a normal phase of mental development at the time, but now I'm curious if others have had similar experiences.
I spend a lot of my time writing, and when I'm ready, stuff just pours out. I'm always thinking the words as I write them, but there's not lots of intervening internal dialog.
Often it's like I have no clue what I'm going to write, until I write it.
But maybe that's just that I've trained myself to write my internal dialog down, instead of just thinking it. And when I'm stuck, I definitely talk to myself more. Sometimes to the point that I can't write anything.
When I'm really focused on something, on the other hand, it's very hard to stop. I'll be so tired that I can barely think, and yet I can't clean my teeth and wash my face without scribbling notes on scraps of paper. Which, by the way, I dispose of securely ;)
Also, it's obvious that there's a lot going on that I'm not at all conscious of. I can stew over stuff for days, or even weeks. And then, out of nowhere, it's there to be written. Or done, as the case may be.
Damn, this is so weird. I had the same experience, and was desperate and sad by how many years went by without me "actually living" (as I so thought at the time). I went to an extreme of really thinking with this internal monologue for everything that I did, even going to the bathroom. Otherwise I would feel like a robot from the cartoons I watched.
Not the parent, but the general process would be: form a kernel of a thought, this is largely subconscious process. This thought is made up of meaning-and-context-rich symbols specific to my mind.
Refine this thought, resolving contradictions and various logical weakpoints.
Translate this thought into speech, losing much of the information content because language is a tool created to holler at your fellow hominids as you hunt African game and backstab each other when competing for high value mates.
I'm not lacking internal monologue, but this resonated with me.
Often I can feel that I have a complex idea more or less nailed down, but it's an effort to stop and put things into words, even internally.
Other times though even an internal monologue isn't enough to tease out the edge cases or weigh the tradeoffs, and I need to write stream-of-consciousness style.
Different styles of problems lend themselves to different approaches, I think
Language is a way of communicating abstractions from one abstraction machine to another; of course information content is lost, but that is only because it must be transformed and compressed to fit into the narrow channel of audio signals that humans are capable of both producing and detecting.
Well said. And in relation to primal psychology (hunting game on the African savannah and hollering at fellow hominids), our ability to convey abstractions and stories through language is an integral part of what makes us human. So the view that language is just a utilitarian tool and not much more is myopic to me. We are social creatures, and whether you consider yourself an introvert or an extrovert, sharing thoughts with others is inextricably woven into your biology. A rejection of this concept is, to me, a rejection of a deeply important part of life and what it means to exist as a sentient being. It often bothers me to interact with people who have this attitude; it's like trying to talk to them through a glass barrier that they refuse to take down.
This fascinates me as I remeber this moment too - I was about 5 or 6 though and it was going into my grandmothers back garden through an arch and I was like fully 'awake' for the first time - I had vague feelings of memories prior to this but I do remember the voice becoming aware.
I've never had anyone else remember or experience this before and I think its important.
I was browsing the thread, trying to recollect my oldest memory of me having an internal monologue and remembered one time in my grandmothers back garden when I was 5/6, then read this :)
My story was that I was playing around in the garden. I was messing with a pile of stuff placed against the garden wall and as I'm touching something, suddenly I feel a huge electric shock. There was an old electric socket there, probably for pluggin a grass cutter. I remember the strong tinge around my whole body and how it pull me into it. I quickly twitched and jumped back. I remember telling myself "Wow, I could have died there". And, "electricity really gets you stuck" (I remember when I was that age adults would warn you about touching electric sockets, saying you could "get stuck to it", I guess not grounding installations was common).
That's really cool, thanks for sharing! Based on your and another poster's response, it seems like there is some wide variation in the age at which this moment might occur (I'm skeptical that the other poster who said they were 3 had the 'same' moment you and I are talking about, but it seems similar enough in this particular context). This begs the question - are there people who never experience this event??
Interesting. Just curious, are you able to have a conversation with yourself in a mirror without speaking out loud (something that the article says at least some non-internal-monologue-having people say they can't do)?
Yes I can but it sounds somewhat false to me. It's hard to capture in words the real truth of what I am thinking. If I start talking to myself it starts to sound like someone else's voice - my fathers or someone famous
Agreed. As I've grown older, I spend less time running tight verbal loops in my mind, and more time examining things visually. It seems more externally-oriented, and allows for better sleep.
The same for me. Also I have that internal monologue, but it feels like it's just me talking and it's not constant chatter, I can just not talk inside if I don't want to.
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.
Fully agreed. I was like this (overthinking what if’s) for many years, and the amount on energy spent on this left me spent to actually go and live in reality. The upside was having a plan for nearly whatever life threw at me - but discarding hundreds of alternate plans.
Now as I grew older I have learnt to be much looser with life steering, as we are not in full control anyway. Just have a general direction of what you want to do, and spend the rest of your energy here and now...
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.
Living in the moment is somewhat counter to striving. It's hard (maybe impossible?) to be a builder and a creator without spending some time ruminating on the last and future.
I think it depends on whether you want to feel like a good person, or be a good person. Living in the moment lets you feel better, because there's less to consider. Constantly examining yourself and those around you allows you to better react to those surroundings (even if some people don't act on it for various reasons, one of which might be getting too caught up in the examining and never doing).
Like literally every single thing in life I can think of, the truth is likely that moderation is key, as too much to either end of the spectrum is problematic.
This is definitely not true, at least most people don't experience it this way once they learn meditation/mindfulness/etc.
What happens instead is that if you are in the moment, you can much more easily see and feel which things actually exist in the current moment for you to consider, and to actually react to those surroundings that actually matter, instead of those that have been served up by the internal dialog which is based usually on worries, fears, ego beliefs etc.
Living in the moment does not make you live like an animal. It makes you appreciate and focus on that which truly matters for you, instead of distractions that a constantly thiking mind always throws at you and makes you feel like everything is says matters and is very important.
Those things that are truly worth considering, already exist in the moment. If you have a real need or want to do something today - it will be in the moment and it will present itself. It is a total nonsense that a person "living in the moment" can never complete any complicated task, accomplish a complicated goal or plan for the future when that is required. - And that is being a good person, not simply "feeling like one".
I would argue that perhaps your idea of living in the moment is more like mostly living in the moment. To truly live fully in the moment would be to react to stimuli as they were encountered, wouldn't it? If so, then to truly live in the moment would be to ignore most the ramifications of what you say or did, beyond what you could internalize, as to act without forethought is to strip away all we do to try to tame our less desired instincts.
That is what I tries to express by talking about moderation before. At one extreme you have what I outlined above, and at the other you have the person who always seems absent minded because they are always thinking about something else, and are rarely if ever giving their full attention to what's going on in front of them and around them.
I think when most people say you should "live in the moment" they are actually espousing moving that direction on the spectrum, which can be beneficial, even if reaching the end of the spectrum likely isn't. The point of all this is that being more mindful of your surroundings and living in the moment is probably useful most the time, until it isn't, because you've gone too far, where too far depends on the location, company, and circumstances, so there's no real "correct" answer.
The reason I even broached this is because it was already alluded to in this exact same thread, with:
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.
I can relate to that in some respects, even if only for aspects of my personality. In letting go of always being too overly concerned with exactly how I was perceived and interpreted when I was you to being able to let some of that go later in life, I noticed times where my not making sure to explain myself in extra detail probably left people thinking I was dismissive of their concerns (and there are probably plenty of times where I don't realize I was dismissive of their concerns, and I'm willing to bet that's more often now than in the past).
If it is 10AM and I need to plan for my meeting at 3PM, and I need to consider the needs of the person I am going to meet - all of these details exist in my mind "in the moment". I can use those stimuli in the moment to plan out everything I need, in the moment. Even though I plan something in the future, I move those plans in my mind which exist there as a moment, as images or words or etc.
Once you start practicing mindfulness or meditation, you very easily see these distinctions. Yes, there is a way to use those concepts in a literal sense in which "in the moment" would mean that you can never consider anything else than your immediate surroundings. However most spiritual teachings or meditation retreats or people who say that this thing has helped them in their life, mean it in a more practical way.
Perhaps "being in the moment" is not the best phrase to really explain what they mean here and there is a lot of space for confusion and misunderstanding. But it is just the phrase that they usually use.
I think that this is a false trade-off. Being "in the moment", or "present" doesn't mean turning off your brain and not planning for the future. It is possible to be present while you are planning for the future.
This amounts to, when planning, not being overly invested in emotionally anticipating the outcome of your plans. (Both good or bad, as anticipating the good will hurt your ego when the plan fails, and dreading the bad will hurt you now.)
I can comment on this for my wife who suffers from anxiety.
She is very good at planning because she needs to feel in control all the time. You are right that when things don't go as planned and the pressure ramps up she loses her control and makes poor decisions or no decision at all.
It's interesting to me as I am on the opposite side for most of the time.
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.
Have had this issue sometimes, specially when ruminating about a discussion or whatever. What i often do in those cases is going into visual mode. For me I imagine having big long wings and catching the wind from some high mountain descending flying slowly, trying to surround the mountain and checking the views. It's something soothing and takes the attention away from the internal monologe. Though you can fall back to it and when you notice go back to visual.
I also note that there is like two visual modes, one less defined, more controlled by my will, and one more realistic and crowded with details mostly out of my control.
I don't usually have this issue, but when I do I find just focusing on breath, meditation style, helps. As soon as you notice yourself thinking, acknowledge the thought gently, and then let it go. At least for me (with a bit of practice) this can head off any thoughts before they can get started, and eventually allow things to quiet down.
Also, acknowledging the fact that, since I'm in bed trying to sleep, I can't act on these thoughts right now anyway, so I don't really need to have them right now (and trusting that if it's important, they will probably come up again at a more useful moment).
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.
Spontaneity is also thinking. There are two distinct modes of thought. Verbal/abstract and real-time/intuition. These have neurological foundations in the two hemispheres. The right is more highly connected. The left has more to do with speech and rumination.
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.
Do you live on the set of Mean Girls? But me, most people are spending their energy trying to get by, with no time for junior high school drama conspiracies. Maybe I'm too useless to be socially manipulated.
People are indeed complex. The first type of person described specifically is rare, but what is more common is a dangerous combination of aggressiveness and charm.
Tying back to the OP, I think an internal monologue is valuable. If you don’t have one, that’s out of your control. However, I think it encourages pro-social behavior on the margins. Using your internal voice is quite literally introspection. It can make you feel bad about a potential course of action, preventing you from doing it. It can also make you feel worse about something bad you did, by replaying it in your head. Too much of that can bog you down, but I think it’s an important part of the self-policing toolset. I believe reflective people are more trustworthy (not that internal voice = reflection).
I hear you about the people who use their charisma to assemble followers and mark you down as an enemy if they can’t bring you into that fold. It’s very disappointing that you can’t have a normal working relationship with them.
Has there been a deflation of the word "gaslighting" recently? I used to understand it as "making person X or others believe person X is crazy (in order to discredit them)" but I see it used much more widely nowadays and I don't really see what it has to do with the scenario in question.
Setting different standards for themselves, setting other people up, even boasting of sabotaging others openly, surrounded by gullible and oblivious people, limiting number of marks, snide remarks, running in packs and claiming all authority while victimizing themselves. Gaslighting is rare but part of the toolset.
It lost it's subtle manipulation element too. Gas lighting was causing doubt to spread, using manipulation tools the abuser thought were flying under the radar of the victim. The victim fell oblivious to the changes in worldview. It lost all connection to psychotherapy when it became a politicized term.
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.
When I look closely at those sorts of imagined conversations, I almost always conclude that my attention has been misdirected by delusional egotism. I also find that letting them run tends to entrench the delusions, which I am better off without.
Depth first search. Basically he's saying you're playing out each conversation to the end, then backing up to the last branch point and chasing it to the end, repeat until you've exhausted every possibility you can think of
In my experience it typically doesn't work, but sometimes it can work and is good to keep your mind busy IF you have some free time. It's just rehearsing, essentially what dreams are, but in daytime and more controlled.
It doesn't work in the sense of predicting the conversation, but do it long enough, or, do it with iterative deepening, and even though you probably won't nail the specifics of how the conversation goes, it WILL frequently prepare you in broad strokes such that the actual conversation's twists and turns won't throw you, even if they do surprise you.
I found that in my late 30ies I shifted from an exhausting DFS to a BFS mode....and it has surely helped in tackling social and work complexities better. I have also discovered that I was unconsciously not giving my full attention to details ,especially over math/programming problems, I was always in a state of slight 'haze', but the whole thing was extremely well played by the brain...I really thought I was fully concentrated and paying complete attention, but only now I know that I can step to a deeper level, where I play back and forth multiple variables and remember better the connectivity of the problem. A decent analogy would be if you play piano and are going through a challenging part, your hands and mind are fully focused on the movements but doing so makes everything hard and stiff, and eventually you run out of steam very fast, with experience though you learn to microfocus on some parts and keep it loose on others...etc. seems fitting..
I think it's the personal/interpersonal version of "real artists ship". I am one of those people that spends too much time in his head. It's mostly wasted energy if I never pause and let the thoughts out.
Your mention about shaking your head is very interesting. How did you come up with that? Are you aware of Peter Levine's or David Berceli's work on shaking/trembling as a natural stress-releasing mammallian instinct that people are usually repressing?
In the last couple of years I started thinking about this and since then I'm trying to live in the moment because now I'm aware of how much time I spend in my head. It is very hard for me to train this though.
"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.
> 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.
Also do this. Very rarely to "myself", nearly always someone else.
> 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 all the time. It's usually Ben Franklin, but sometimes it'll be someone else. Almost always a scientist who'd be curious and I think fun to hang out with. I don't know how long I've been doing this, but it's probably at least a couple times a year for the past decade or more. I imagine how I'd explain modern technology and how he might react.
Same. I'll be driving along or walking down the street and my mind will wander to "I wonder what Franklin would think about cars. How do I even explain how they work? And let's not even get into cellphones." Faraday is another common target. It's always someone I could picture having a beer with, rather than some interminable boor (I imagine) like Newton.
The "tour" description is perfect; I'm always explaining or showing the person around or something. I imagine there's some ego component here; I only have a popular-science level understanding of these things, and my explanations would only be interesting to someone from the past or otherwise detached from society (which is also something I think about).
This all manifests as a bit of a mind game or thought experiment; it's not as though I'm actually conversing with the person. It's almost entirely one-sided: me imagining how I might explain the world to someone smart and curious but without any modern scientific knowledge.
Ha! When I need to take some idea apart and try to understand it, I often find myself explaining it to a highly perceptive Charles Babbage who has had his wish to see the future granted, albeit without having to sacrifice the rest of his lifespan.
There can be others, but Babbage is the most frequent visitor by far. I have no idea whatsoever why.
As for the rest of perl4ever's comment, there is not a single word or thought or sentence in it which I do not completely recognize and relate to.
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.
Your comment just reminded me of a dream I had, I think last night coincidentally. I am also not a visual person, and while I can visualize things, do object manipulation, and that kind of thing in my mind, it's quite difficult for me to pull up more than a hazy metal picture of something, and anything I do get in detail tends to be ephemeral.
Anyway, last night (I think) I had a dream where I was able to pull up an essentially photographic mental picture of something. I recall spending some time analyzing it and being amazed at the level of detail and permanence, knowing that that's not usually how I experience things.
Of course, recalling it now, I can only bring to mind a hazy picture of what I experienced. (I think there was a field of some kind and maybe trees?) But now I'm curious... did I actually see that clear mental picture in the dream? Or did I only have, like, the idea of doing so?
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 found that about a year of serious mindfulness meditation with some CBT was able to give me the same lasting effect, even though I am not currently regularly meditating
Did you every try meditating? Most styles (that I know of) involve trying to quieten the mind, or train you not to grasp onto thoughts and run with them. Instead just let them arise and fade away. That's assuming you would be interested in changing this. (It's certainly beneficial when someone has annoyed you and you can't get it out of you head for the rest of the day).
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.
The difference is, Superman has a long internal struggle between his desire to do right and his desire to give up in the face of so many people suffering, he may be America’s Boy Scout but he works hard and he keeps a low profile and he is modern day Sisyphus - skipping out on his everyday life to go to unpleasant places alone and deal with unpleasant people, save lives, and come back to .. a journalist notepad and a story about some trivia and no amazing rewards.
Neo on the other hand is a modern day superhero exactly, he’s like the Wanted film main character - he did nothing, doesn’t work hard, doesn’t train at anything, and then sometime while he’s working a drudge job and slacking off, the universe dumps hero on him because of someone he innately is, and then everyone loves him for this thing he didn’t do, but instead is a thing he is.
The equivalent in real life might be considering Dr Jonny Kim, graduated high school, joined the navy, became a Navy SEAL, became a combat medic, sniper, navigator, went on 100 combat missions, graduated with a math degree, went to Harvard med school and became a doctor, and is now a NASA astronaut selected as a possible mars mission candidate, navy reservist, husband, father, decorated combat vet, and 35 years old; and then imagining NASA deselecting him and replacing him with a 35 year old you know who “thought about being the first man on Mars since childhood” and whose favourite film is “The Martian”, and is just waiting for NASA to find him because he’d be the perfect candidate, he could “learn any of that stuff but won’t waste his time until they choose him” [hey that too much describes me!]. Sure maybe Jonny Kim always dreamed of going to Mars and loves The Martian, but he also did things.
Batman went to be Far East and trained hard in martial arts for years, Neo waited for someone else to load martial arts skill into his brain in a safe virtual environment which he could control so he never lost.
Heroes in the past did hard heroic things, rather than dreamed of being called upon to do easy heroic things they could innately magically do. Heroes of the past wanted to win a war, action movie heroes play to a viewer who wants to be seen as a hero and doesn’t care how the saving of people (or whatever) is irrelevant and secondary.
This is an incorrect understanding of the nature of the movie, imho. Neo is a philosophical super-hero, not a physical, and so it's unfair to compare him to physical super-heroes.
The character is established in the scene where he wakes up, having done something on his computer. He has books on philosophy (Simulacra and Simulation). He's obviously been searching for a long time, and his _mind_ is something most minds of his age aren't: ready to see the real world. Morpheus even says that they typically don't extract people his age because their minds can't handle the reality.
I don't think it's "beyond you", I think it's so simple you passed right above it.
A "philosophical super-hero" in the context of Matrix, circa 1999 is something along the lines of:
Everybody's asleep like Jim Careys in the Truman Show. Reality is not what we think it is. We're all slaves, we're all miserable even if we think we're happy. It's all a lie. “They” control us. “They” know and keep us ignorant. “They” are the reason why we suffer so much and we're not even fully aware of it.
Enters Neo. Neo is a cool dude who should have been Will Smith but he declined to do Wild Wild West — crazy sci-fi in the machine seemed less blockbuster-worthy than big machines exploding in the Far West, yeah, that was a bad call. But I digress.
Neo who's not black, unlike Morpheus, is not like the rest of us. No no no: he's AWAKE(ning). He's woke, man! Like F, this should have been Will Smith, that smug look haha. Oh boy, I digress. Not that Matrix itself is boring but.
Then there's Zion. It's really the Bob Marley ideal, because why not, heaven can only be full of hippies of sorts, and the idea is that if humans "escape" the bad guys, they can all go party to Zion. Cue NOT Laureen Hill, that was a fail honestly.
So, imparted with this supreme Knowledge about “them” and heaven and Morpheus' BFF and so on, Neo can do a whole lot of cool tricks because he now "knows". And there he goes, solves the puzzle in a trilogy because that sounds nice, and the good people are now free. Probably. Or not. Who cares at that point. The whole story was never about that anyway.
So, that's the level-1 "philosophical hero". He just "gets it" and that makes him stronger. There's also a big nod to human versus machine in that the Matrix, the bad guy-s, they don't understand "love" the way we do, and Neo.. well, he's the romantic you know, he loves Trinity and that's the key to his ultimate surviving. “A truly original take on what it means to be human”, said nobody ever who wasn't born the day before.
So, yeah, I'm sure you can see all of that, and (rightfully imho) thought it wasn't much "philosophy" material.
HOWEVER! there's level-2. For the "woke" people among us, you know, those who "get it" like Neo. (I'm joking but I think it's a little bit like that, there's a smugness to Matrix fans, even those who seem to indeed "get it".)
This is my liberal interpretation of level-2. I've looked at YouTube videos analyzing the movies because frankly I didn't get it, like you. And then I had my own "awakening" in life, but it's much less glamorous than Neo, it means shitty experiences for stupidly long times and then somehow emerging the other side and being alive enough to tell about it. Long story short, I kinda "get" what they possibly mean. It's as old as the oldest mythologies conceptually, e.g. the "Maya" in Hindu (Sanskrit: “magic” or “illusion”).
So the matrix is an image for "whatever you think is impossible", the opposite of what is sometimes termed "abundance" mindset — I can't do this, I'll never have that, this is impossible for me, etc. It's a veil on reality, and critically self-imposed, of our own doing in a modern interpretation, more agnostic about gods if you will.
Anybody who does something in this world must at some point on the way remove such limiting thoughts, usually much wider than the mere topic — whether business owner, moviemaker, musician, scientist, etc. In HN of all places the sample is skewed as hell, but some of us probably see that most people are self-imposedly very limited in their "possibles".
I could elaborate but you get the gist. Everything else is filling with analogies and good moviemaking, probably, or not, whatever, who cares at this point.
Level-3 exists, some people do that: they take pop content and slap philosophical references because "quotes" and "easter egg". But then they elevate the easter above the egg and we're all dying of an empty brain because Matrix is now officially better than the Odyssey and La Comédie humaine combined.
Did any of this speak to you, should you have read even just 1 paragraph? :D
I think you made a very fair interpretation of what I mean. But then, I saw the Matrix seven times in theaters the first year (1999-2000). Then I saw it many more times on DVD/streaming. But it took until I was about 40 before I realized that it was about something more than just the story. My meta-cognition seems to have been stuck in the early teens level until my 40s.
>superheroes are creatures/concepts as old as stories though, from the oldest myths of Ulysse
Ancient/Mythical "heroes" are not like our modern superheroes which are kind of a mix of gods/demigods and christian saints. Superheroes are people with superpowers plus a drive of serving justice, helping the weak, protecting mankind, etc. Plus always ready to sacrifice themselves for others.
Classical heroes range from purely self-motivated (Ulysses), selfish and self-serving (Achiles) to literal assholes (Gilgamesh). Achiles values are very similar of former-gangster rap stars (or at least the characters they built of themselves). Fighting is most important. Only fights for himself and his glory. Top dog of his culture. Has a particular sense of fairness in regard to his own selfishness.
I always thought the Matrix missed a huge philosophical opportunity.
Instead of humans feeding the Alien/AI need for energy (batteries), they feed their need to be human.
They tap into the dreams, and lives of humans, not for energy, but for their souls.
They need each individual human, and through infinite permutations of life, with infinite combinations of love and hardship, through infinite Matrix's, are the ultimate voyeurs.
They're trying to analyze what makes life worth living, because they don't feel anything. Or, they have been God like for so long, they feel nothing, and need to feel something real again.
So, they limit their own senses inside the construct of human existence, which is less, but in ways they can't understand, much much more.
Ultimately, the Matrix is the AI/Alien search for life.
Neo's path to victory is the only path anyone wants. Every heroes path is the one that makes him a hero, not a loser, and is the only path that matters.
Anything else is a lesser permutation.
It is the path of the soulless, to search for their soul.
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.
Without any insensitivity towards ADHD, another thing that I think contributes to a heightened sense of internal monologue and constant self-excruciation is the expectations and stresses of society.
I have found that in Southern Africa, if you take the time to understand many of the fusion and native cultures, you can learn a lot about stressing less. In my personal case, I do have an internal monologue, but it gets worse with stress.
My one Mozambican friend for example (notwithstanding his amusing "selfishness" with money) has made me realise that not all people handle progress (esp. technological) with underlying anxiety. Sometimes you really are allowed to suck in and enjoy life, appreciate the progress that has been made, and look to our challenges with grace.
I used to constantly think my mind wandered from subject to subject. I never thought of it much (ironic?) until I read an article about meditation. In meditation you make a conscious effort to not think.
As I got older I found I lost that fire as I call it. Now I find most of the time my mind doesn't wander and it feels wrong. I used to be incredibly creative just from the sheer volume of thoughts.
I do think I have mild ADHD I can't concentrate even the slightest noise ruins my thought process. A friend of mine who has been diagnosed as having ADHD has traits I see in myself. Headphones with brown noise, caffeine, night time (now) are the only ways I can concentrate.
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
I have this problem. My mind is obsessed with modelling /predicting other's thoughts and words, continuously testing predictions, improving models. Listening to predictable people is exhausting, and if I zone out they will belabor their point even further.
I have found one strategy in which 'cutting people off' can be mutually agreeable, maybe this will be helpful to you:
While 'listening' to their predictable words, I try to determine then summarize the vital aspects of it. You already know the 1,000 words they will speak, but can you summarize it well in 50?
This can apply to practical problems that need to be solved, information to be conveyed, or emotions to be heard.
I then politely interrupt ("I just want to be sure I understand, are you saying...") and summarize my predictions.
Many people are delighted to have their own rambling thoughts rendered in a concise, well ordered manner, and/or relieved to have solid confirmation that communication was successful.
Even people who are processing their emotions, and who value 'feeling heard' above all else, will often take pleasure in this response, provided I've done a decent job of capturing the essence of their experience. We can then move on to more nuanced aspects of their emotional difficulties.
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.
1. Each time I review a concept or memory it lost information, so the most "honest" conception of something I could have was an unblemished impression lightly touched.
2. So can I just let feelings and thoughts flow around without letting it turn into words?
3. I found that while my comprehension didn't appreciably decrease, I still did fine in classes and homework, I had more trouble explaining concepts to other people.
So I conclude that for certain kinds of thinking it is important to recite it to fine tune your presentation. For others, for most, it is best to let them flow without much attachment.
I now tend to use writing for formal thought consolidation since it's less lossy and forces me to follow things from beginning to end. It required me practicing for half a year to stop myself from trying to formulate my opinions in words. Now I only do it if it's an opinion I want to express.
I don't know if it's possible to train in the other direction, though I've never heard voices other than my own internal voice so maybe I'm in the minority. Maybe a subset can hear only one voice, some hear nothing, most hear many?
I hear voices and see visuals of other people with extreme clarity in my head. I thought everyone had that given I couldn't comprehend how you would discuss and/or reason about things without conjuring up a representation of that thing.
I can only speak for myself, but I use pen and paper if I need to reason about "complex" things generally approached logically. Like I wouldn't do math in my head, at least beyond arithmetic.
I might visualize code in my head if I'm programming, but I don't see words. I know they're there, but they're not helpful to me in reasoning. I'm thinking through the steps of an algorithm which I wrote and how it changes the state of my mental model for the data on the computer -- but I don't literally have a picture of the variable states in my head or anything, nor can I see the code.
If I need to reason in a more intuitive way about why I think things or how I feel about things in the first place I think adding a dialog or visualization makes my reasoning worse. I'm rationalizing rather than feeling, leading to me reinforcing beliefs that aren't... quite... what I actually believe. I find this dangerous.
I want to understand why I feel something, but I also recognize that the feeling is what's true and any narrative I put together is imperfect because words pidgeonhole your much more flexible abstract concept into the constructions available in the language you think in.
I managed to get a PhD in an engineering field, so clearly I can still reason about things ;-) But I kind of... train my intuition and then make better guesses based on intuition, and then go back and use slower verbal/logical reasoning to find problems or do tactical changes. On the other hand, my method of "memorizing" fourier transforms was to do the proof a hundred times and then do the proof on my exams since it was not practical for me to actually memorize a formula. And why I'd make a terrible biologist or doctor or chemist where fluency and memorization play a much bigger role.
Or another way, I use no words for strategy, I rely on training my intuition with practice and then trusting my intuition with verification to improve my intuition later. When it gets to the tactics of how to connect A to B to C I use a rigorous approach but I still wouldn't say that at any point I've experienced something like a discussion in my head between multiple distinct voices. I do have a running monologue of me asking myself questions when I'm in rigorous mode, but it definitely never feels like a distinct entity questioning anything.
When you read a book, do characters have different voices? My partner has no voices since he claims he was taught to read by memorizing what words look like whereas I learned to read from sounding out words. I have exactly one voice, the same internal monologue as for anything else. But that's for books I'm enjoying reading, if I just want to get through something I'm not sure I actually have a coherent voice in my head at all anymore. But my reading comprehension is markedly lower.
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.
It's good to know I'm not alone. Mine isn't that intense; I only do this several times a day, but when driving or in the shower, I am frequently giving speeches in front of thousands, or debating publicly on live television. I constantly call myself out on aspects where I'm weak, and correct myself. I don't schedule time or do this deliberately; it kind of just happens. But what I've found is that is has helped me so much in my face-to-face communication at work.
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.
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.
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.
I know I'm falling asleep when the movie of thoughts and images playing in my head becomes more like watching something play out on its own than thinking it myself. The thoughts and scenarios stemming from myself become more vague and start to come from somewhere else, basically transitioning from inner-monologue narration of images to compiled dreams that I no longer have control of. However, if I think about my own falling asleep as it's happening the self awareness wakes me up.
I don't have "movies of thoughts and images playing in my head" in waking life, but I do start having visual dreams. But I've only once been able to actually observe them beginning, usually I just wake up in the morning with no memory at all of the transition.
I'm not sure if it's the same thing, but I can switch between the two modes, narrated and silent. Most of the time when reading I'll narrate in my head, otherwise I rarely narrate when performing more complex tasks (such as programming - I program much faster than I can speak).
I always find myself thinking out different scenarios, different responses, etc. I too listen to a lot of music and podcasts to drain out that voice - it often helps me work harder.
Also my internal voice is very different from my spoken voice. My internal voice is upper class English and my spoken voice is a rough, course English voice.
Another thing, possibly related, is that my ability to multitask is quite high. Right now for example I am watching a video whilst typing. I can often talk and type at the same time as well, whilst I find colleagues unable to do so.
I feel like this too. However, I've found I can instantly get into non-verbal focus while playing chess. You might want to give it a shot. FWIW I'm not a particularly good, or experienced player either, just someone that enjoys it.
I’ve hadn’t realized it until you just said it, but I am the same way. I’ve played roughly 10-20 games a day for years! That said, I feel I am simply trading one mode of thought for another. I tend to be _even less_ present when playing chess than nearly any other activity.
verbal focus helps my chess. when I think things like "he's trying to mount an attack on my queen's side", verbalized as words, it helps me to understand what I'm seeing in a new way
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.
Your first paragraph, I experience that frequently only mine is entirely verbal in nature.
I also have an extremely weak minds eye. I don't get visual thinking at all. If I have a blank page in front of me I simply cannot imagine a user interface. I would have to physically or digitally start drawing something in order to even be able to visualize further changes to the UI. I also have an extremely weak grasp on local geography. I suspect places form a network in most people's heads. For me they are mostly isolated locations which don't connect to anywhere else. I have an ok sense of direction. I can certainly go back the way I've come. But in regular conversations about locations in my city I have been stumped 1000x when certain place names are mentioned. I always ask where those places are. Everyone around me can tell me how to get there by what is close by or what describe the route. I usually don't know where the things the mention are either. Someone else usually chimes in to help me understand where something is by giving another example. Unless I pull up Google maps I almost always still end up not knowing where they are talking about even though I know the name of the place and roughly what type of place it is. I'm talking about the major suburbs anyone would know in their city. I worked out my ability in this area was sorely lacking when even my little brother who was 5 years younger than me would always be the 3rd person to attempt to explain where something was after my two older sisters had had a go.
But when it comes to peoples voices I can recall their accent, language patterns and mannerisms perfectly. So I wind up doing a lot of impersonations of people.
I spend a great deal of time worrying about what we'd do if a few hundred thousand exact clones of me appeared. Should we congregate, maybe seize an uninhabited island or form a town, or should we scatter to the four winds? How would we deal with our darkest secrets or quirks being public knowledge? Would we cooperate or conflict violently?
I think it's all my internal monologue voices feeling trapped living in one head. At least we're self-aware..
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.
Interesting, that's what I'd typically think of as daydreaming, but it definitely doesn't feel like an always-on thing, as I definitely don't verbalize a lot of things internally. Which does pose the occasional problem when I'm asked to explain something :)
Thank you for this, I have been diagnosed as ADHD at 4/5. But nothing came of it since I maintained a good grade throughout school. My mind is exactly like that, I’ve always discarded that diagnoses as bogus but now it makes more sense.
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 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.
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 people who experience having an internal monologue: Suppose you see a bagel on the kitchen table in the morning and decide whether or not you're hungry enough to eat it. Does that process involve an internally experienced stream of words (whether "audible in your mind's ear" or not) like "I'm pretty hungry" or "I bet that bagel would taste good"? Is this what it would be mean to have an internal monologue? Because I certainly could decide to eat a bagel without experiences any words. Subjectively, it would involve me imagining the pleasant feeling of satiation and the annoyance of cleaning up and weighing them against each other, with no words involved.
I think it's more related with conflict situations. For example, imagine you are on a diet. Then after the first impulse of eating a bagel you think "but I started a diet a week ago" and then you justify yourself "a single bagel won't matter that much" which creates another thought "you said the same last time. You are going to regret it at the end of the month" and so on.
In fact, this internal monologue can be used in psychology when you are dealing with bad experiences by dividing your thoughts into an entity who suffers the pain and another one who is logical and supportive. For example, acting towards yourself the same way you would do for a friend.
For me it really depends. I have two ways of representing my speech.
1) experience the words as if I'm saying them out loud but don't vocalize them. This is similar to how a lot of people read, so I figure I'm technically subvocalizing them.
2) especially when doing math or programming I simply know what I was about to think using method 1) without any specific words springing up.
I can't figure out if method 1 is me having an auditory internal monologue or if it's non-auditory. But at least you have a second experience to contextualize with.
EDIT: I would also like to add that sometimes when programming my mind switches to a graph-like representation that I start to manipulate physically. That is, I'll actually move my fingers in the air and move around the idea of this graph to "view" it from different perspectives and at different levels "Minority Report"-stye. Yes, that is something I try not to do anywhere but at home.
You just made me realize that internal speech is, I think, a better way to understand the internal monolog (at least in my case) than internal hearing. I guess I can hear my internal monolog, but it's more about 'saying' the words in my head than 'hearing' them.
> Does that process involve an internally experienced stream of words (whether "audible in your mind's ear" or not) like "I'm pretty hungry" or "I bet that bagel would taste good"?
Yes. I can also do this:
> decide to eat a bagel without experiences any words.
...but I prefer to think consciously about my actions. Doing too many things without internally verbalizing the decision-making process makes me feel like a beetle.
What if it’s something more nuanced than what words can express in a concise way? Do you have to slow down your train of thought? E.g. the first bite of that Proust’s madeleine probably didn’t last several minutes...
If I'm trying to consciously evaluate my actions, then yes, I might pause to think before continuing. This doesn't usually happen with something as simple as eating a bagel, though I've certainly contemplated the nature of cream cheese once or twice.
For me it's more a discussion or dialogue with one speaker. The same an old theater play would act it a convicted character - s/he will say one position/argument, then the other. There's no description of the bagel (so it's not as if images are replaced by a voice), but there might be (not always) a discussion what to do with it in my head, where I'm trying to formulate my want/choice. So it's the facets of the thinking procesd that might be played out. It's also not always a discussion, it could eg be a commentary or critique (both positive and negative) of what I'm doing. ("One more pushup, come on."; "I think I had too much tea already": "will she notice I've gone to the bathroom three times in the last hour?" ...) Other days or eg when I'm busy/in the flow there might be much less dialogue.
I don't think so (because this can be a short, impulsive decision), but it wouldn't surprise me if some experience it like this.
My personal experience (in the non-audible group) is that the "role" this voice is playing is a bit more supervisory/executive. It thinks about what I need to do tomorrow, or the next three steps on my current project, or that I really need to carve out time to go to the cleaners some morning.
This voice might think about getting food, but mostly when hunger is getting in the way of other priorities. Or when I need to game out how to fit food into a tight schedule.
Yes this is how it is for me. I can eat the bagel without consulting him, but he speaks out the words of this post that I'm writing or any email/report. When I'm on autopilot like driving or playing a game/sport I don't hear him. But if I want to think about plotting a different route or a changing in strategy, the voice will talk me through it.
Mostly what I hear is the internalized "No! Don't eat it! Too many calories!". If I don't hear that (or conjure up that voice) then I end up eating the bagel. It's like that for any bit of food I see laying around.
Additional complexity for me: the prefix "I'm hungry" or "should I have that?" is almost never in inner speech, but the answer upon making a decision always is.
This is why I'm sceptical if the whole thing. It's just way too subjective. I don't doubt that people experience the universe in different ways. But I highly doubt it's as simple as having an internal monologue or not.
I think it's possible that people experience the same things, but observe them differently, so it sounds like they're having a completely different experience. While I can absolutely have a conversation with myself inside my head, I don't "hear" the voice in my ears. Some people might take the "hearing" part very literally.
It reminds me of a conversation I had with my sister as a child. We were both falling asleep in a very dark room. I noticed that with my eyes open, staring into darkness, there was a kind of static noise pattern overlaying my vision. I asked her if she had the same thing. "No", she said. "I just see black". Thinking back, it's likely that we were both experiencing the same thing, but she just wasn't observing the same things that I was.
FWIW it does not seem like any of the above for me. It is more like I am rehearsing what I would say if I chose to do so. That does not come across as a voice to me.
To no-one in particular. It is as if I were going to speak my thoughts on whatever the topic of the moment is. To me, that seems very different to listening to a voice. Thre's no homunculus, virtual or otherwise, telling me what to think.
I wrote elsewhere that this might just be an illusion - how it seems to me when, and only when, I am paying attention to what it is like to think.
The framing feels odd to me. If I'm rehearsing as if I were going to speak my thoughts, I'm concerned with trying to communicate. I'm trying different turns of phrase, levels of detail, and organizational strategies.
The descriptions I've seen so far make me think people who "hear" the voice loosely subdivide into groups who feel like they're talking to themselves and hear the voice, people who feel like they are listening to their own voice speak, and people who feel like they're listening to third-party narrator(s).
When I'm thinking through something lingually, I'm phrasing out the initial problem, phrasing through what I know about it and testing its rigor with counter-points and what-ifs and does-it-help-tos. Language isn't the focus, just the medium.
It's like working something out in a notebook or text document, minus the pen/paper or keyboard/screen. It's also like talking to myself, without the judgmental glances. It isn't as effective--it doesn't scale up to thorny/sprawling problems as well--as vocalizing or taking notes (or both).
It is not really rehearsing, at least not as you set out in your last two paragraphs. It is more like the first draft of that process, and if it were spoken, it would probably seem incoherent.
When I am doing something specific, such as composing this reply, then go on to rehearsing it explicitly as you describe.
There is also visual imagination, but that seems to be secondary unless I am thinking through a physical process. This might explain some of the incoherence, as my monologue does not to explicitly identify the entities in my mind's eye - I can pick them out indexically.
These issues may have some relevance to the philosophy of the mind, as philosophers often seem to assume they can gain insight into general principles through introspection, but with there apparently being several significantly different ways that people experience thinking, any one person's experience will not be the whole picture.
Anecdata to add to this:
In the third grade I took the phrase "voices in your head mean you're crazy" so I actively suppressed my internal monologue (previously expressed in language) and now my thinking is mostly abstract and/or visual. There are two exceptions: imagining a hypothetical conversation or reviewing a previous conversation in my head. Those are the only cases of language in my head. When I read I experience a combination of the two.
I tend to use hypothetical conversations in my head to analyse my thoughts, but otherwise feel my thinking is more abstract than verbal. So I'm not sure I agree with the dichotomy this article is presenting.
IIRC, Chomsky's theory on this is that human language is first internal and is the basis for all human thought. He doesn't mean an internal 'voice', but some primordial, grammatical imperative to producing thought in a certain way. This resulted in all of the world's spoken languages and would explain rapid language learning rates in newborns.
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?
> 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 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..
At least language is a huge help. For me crucial insights won't come readily formed in words, they come as abstract occurrences that need to be converted to words. Some of insight is lost in this conversion, I think, because the mind has to switch over to linguistic mode and serialize the memory content. Still, when putting ideas to words it also makes them more clear and distilled. As they say, you don't really understand the phenomenon unless you can explain it clearly.
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 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 ...
Funny you say that. Growing up, I was almost exactly like that, though thankfully, the habit has shifted elsewhere.
By elsewhere, this amounts to active subvocalization of distinct physical attributes of the person in front of me: shape of head, type of eyes, (ir)regularity of teeth, cut of jib, unusual piercings, color of clothing, etc.
I don't do that with most thought but if (hypothetically) i dropped the screw and had to reach down and search for it, and that took some period of time, i might actually think "I have to put this screw in the hole i just drilled" to remind myself what i was doing.
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 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.
I'm starting to think that I have a weak minds eye. I can not easily mentally visualize ideas, but I do feel them.
When I am thinking about something new there are no words, images, etc. just feeling my way through ideas. It feels kind of like acting on instinct. For example if I am wrestling with an idea I get an impression of "resistance". Feeling my way through the path of least resistance from impression to impression.
I do say words, or see flashes of images but only for ideas that I have already felt out. Words are kind of a breadcrumb trail so that I can retrace the exact train-of-thought that I had taken before and images like mile-markers.
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.
I'm not sure what level of contrarianism this is, but my armchair speculation is:
- "Tulpamancers" are mostly not mentally ill (beyond the ailments shared by a lot of nerds, like social anxiety), and probably very few actually have psychotic conditions
- Some variation of a multi-consciousness theory or adjacent theory has a decent chance of being true
- Even if one of those theories is true, and even though tulpamancers aren't mentally ill, tulpa construction is still basically bullshit self-trickery and not an actual other consciousness you're dealing with
Humans are good at creating fiction and myths. Maybe constructing a tulpa is kind of like when you write character dialogue in a novel. You can really embody the characters and hear them talk and make choices, and they basically start to write themselves. If you spend enough time with your characters, you'll start to feel they're real.
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."
Your disconnection example doesn't imply parallel consciousness to me, it implies extreme flexibility of a general intelligence processor in our heads. This theory seems to be field proven with many example of people suffering massive head trauma yet their brain was able to continue functioning.
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.
Not the parent, but for me I have to actively remember what the target voice sounds like and consciously alter my internal monologue to match. As soon as I relax this acting process my internal monologue slips back into my neutral voice. So those, "you're now reading this in X's voice," never really do anything for me.
Maybe related, I don't always experience my thoughts via an internal monologue. Maybe roughly 70% of my internal thoughts are abstract and nonverbal.
Can you do an impression of Darth Vader out loud? Just curious, because when I do Darth Vader voice in my head, I get a strong urge to do it out loud. Makes me wonder if they're connected.
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!).
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
> Thinking out complicated abstract concepts in internally verbalized words just seems like it would take forever.
I do this but the internal monologue fits the time it takes me to do the thing or I go onto the next thing. It gives me a good sense of progression, what I have accomplished and the goal im focused on.
If the task is routine like buttering toast the monologue is about something else.
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.
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.
The first part of your comment reads like my own thoughts. I still find myself incorporate new fictions into my mental canon. Over time the framework has changed significantly, but its roots are still noticable. Some of my earliest memories are of me playing around with this fantastical dreamscape. Nowadays I generally dive into these sorts of day dreams whenever I'm walking/biking alone, or showering. Music or white noise can help me get into it more.
Neural interfaces will be a game changer. I'm so excited for 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 would always reimagine the movies I just watched or the books I just read
When I was a teenager, I went through this phase where I would dream of myself as the hero of a book I just read. And if I knew the hero would die at some point, I would always modify my dream so I didn't die :)
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.
Yeah, I don't know about that. I definitely have aphantasia but have a strong inner monologue and can (roughly) hear things in my mind.
The only reason I have an understanding of what a "mind's eye" might be like is that I do dream visually. This is apparently not uncommon among aphatasics.
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.
Same here. My “inner world” never stops unless I force it too (I like meditating occasionally for some mental-peace-and-quiet.)
Other than forcefully pausing it that way, it runs 24/7/365 and is incredibly vivid.
I can also have multiple “tracks” running at once internally, but I generally have one “in focus” and another 1 or 2 sort of there in the background dimly. I’m aware of what all tracks are currently up to though at any given point.
Generally it’s just brainstorming ideas, playing back memories, imagining fantastical worlds/stories for internal entertainment, or wondering about things.
It’s not always positive, and keeping it all under control can be difficult, but I definitely think the pros outweigh the cons.
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.
Your comment has helped assuage some fears of mine regarding meditation. I've been meditating most days for the past month now, and plan to continue to do so, but just within the past few days I've realized that I no longer effortlessly see amazing colours and shapes whenever I close my eyes. I'm worried that meditation is diminishing that creative aspect of my mind that produces such vivid imagery automatically. Ideally I want to keep my creativity intact, while also getting my neurosis under control.
No free lunches. You want creativity? Ok, go let your mind be feral like Van Gogh's or Kurt Cobain's. You want sanity? Become a perfect meditator and let those branches of thought die out without reacting to them. In return you can think like Spock.
If I could press a button, I would trade almost all my creativity for sanity/logic.
Not fractals or like a kaleidoscope. I'm not sure I have the words to explain it in any understandable way, and I'm certain that I lack the skill to do it justice. Usually it starts as blots of colour/brightness, as well as gradients (both radial and linear), and some more exotic images. Then if I keep paying attention they'll start to morph into all sorts of different things. These can be abstract imagery (not entirely unlike a kaleidoscope I suppose), but more often the abstract imagery is just a backdrop or peripheral image. Where I'm looking I'll see the images morph into objects, people, locations, etc., and most strangely, concepts. I'm not sure how to explain that last bit, but sometimes in these visualizations I'll just see something that is very clearly a concept/idea itself. I don't have much control over what I see like this, unlike daydreaming where I have almost complete control, or sleep deprivation induced hallucinations where I have control proportional to how awake I am. What I can do is when I see something that I like and want to see more of, I can focus on it. This generally helps prevent it from morphing into something different, but it only works for so long as I can maintain a strong focus on it, so I inevitably lose my grasp on it after some time.
Typing this all out now I realize it sounds strange, and I haven't heard anyone else talk about this in particular. For reference I have low-grade synesthesia (among a whole host of mental abnormalities compared to my peers), my family has a history of mental illnesses, and I'm just about the most neurotic person I know. I have never used any illicit drugs (including marijuana, which is fortunately now legal in Canada). I've considered trying LSD or psilocybin, but I'm worried about having a bad trip. I have however experienced many sleep deprivation induced hallucinations, as well as several fever dreams, dissociative episodes, and panics attacks. I've been told by a trusted source that fever dreams can be somewhat similar to using psilocybin.
I've heard about that sort of thing be experienced through yoga/meditation (and have seen stuff myself on occasion), but who knows what our brains are doing in those states. Perhaps you're naturally inclined to be able to experience those sorts of things...
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).
A lot of that stuff is toxic. People take these drug analogues, get sick, then blame the base molecule their government scared them from getting. Anything that's a prodrug has to be processed by your liver first. It puts extra strain on your liver, whereas the original molecule is already what you wanted.
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 can do all the things you mention. I do also have a hard time "turning my brain off". Actually, I don't think I can do it. But I do have a way to sleep quickly.
It may not be the same for you but you probably can adapt it to whatever suits you. It's about coziness.
There are several cozy scenarios that are ideal for me to sleep. I just teleport myself there and I do stuff.
My favorite by far is the one in the wilderness. I read a book once about a guy from the neolithic who had to run away from his village with his dog. I imagine myself there. There's nothing around me. Only several small villages kilimeters away. I'm alone with my dog. The sun is almost set and it's getting chilly. There's a little cave nearby where I can take refuge for the night. I'll go gather some wood and make myself confortable inside. Then I'll sit by the fire eating some of that smoked meat I have left and I'll just rest my head down. At that point I'm already sleeping.
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.
I also do this quite a bit and recently I noticed it's been getting more intense. When this happens it's usually because someone's been talking to me for 10+ minutes straight without me saying a single word, and I get this physical feeling like they're getting further away or their head is getting smaller. Does anyone else experience this?
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.
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.
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.
"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).
> If you can't describe one of your thoughts with language, I would say that you must not understand that thought.
I've heard that before and it is definitely bullshit, thinking like that will just hold you and others back. It is true that if I can't describe it in words then I can't prove to others that I understand it, but it isn't true that I can't prove to myself that I understand it using my own minds language.
If you aren't fluent in your own minds language then you'll have a hard time understanding your own intuition, feelings etc, how can you learn to understand things like math and programming when you don't even understand your own intuition? My guess is that people don't understand themselves, they believe that the words made them understand math when in fact the thoughts they aren't hearing made them understand math. I see that clearly in my mind, but to people who rely so heavily on words it might be hard to see.
I’m not sure how it would hold you back. On the contrary, it should motivate you to seek further understanding of your thoughts.
To me, it just doesn’t make sense definitionally to say you understand anything if you can not describe it in language. It would be like saying you understand an algorithm but you can’t express it as a computer program.
But this isn’t to say that you cannot act in accordance with your thoughts even if you don’t understand them! It can be useful to make decisions based on intuition even if you can’t describe in words what motivated the decision. Surely we all do that quite often. But it’s even better to be able to understand those thoughts and account for them using words!
To me it doesn't make sense to say definitionally that you can't understand without expressing in an external language.
First, my understanding even of English is nuanced and not entirely shared. There are lots of times where I capture something in prose but feel and even explicitly state that the the words don't really completely capture the meaning and I'm relying on a shared understanding of the connotations of the words to convey what they do not. This implies that we have a strong grasp of our intended meaning that supercedes the meaning captured in language.
Also, there have been many times where I'll learn a new word, especially words borrowed from other languages, and think, "Ah! Now I can more exactly express what I'm thinking!" My understanding hasn't changed at all, I'm just better able to express it in language.
Another example: there are a lot of concepts, geo-spatial relationships between dimensional objects for example, that I never consciously verbalize, even internally, yet I can clearly hold in my head.
It does seem plausible that this is another difference in mental models between people.
Perhaps thoughts is the wrong word, since they as a concept often are associated with words, but the things that go through my mind are concepts, and I often have a word label for them, sometimes it's right there, sometimes it's not. Sometimes I have concepts in my head that have no label, and that I can express, but the concept which I can imagine in a few seconds often requires a couple paragraphs to describe directly.
Another argument for OPs view (with the caveat above) is that these concepts must predate speech. We have an imagination before we have speech, and that obviously doesn't require words.
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'm just sitting here overlooking a mountain and was feeling/thinking/interpreting one of the hills while reading this and realized it actually gets cumbersome if you try to describe it with words, first I thought "hilly", then thought "steep" was more of what I was feeling but after further analysis (of the past moment) the feeling/experience also encompased "rugged", "majestic"...
Super interesting topic overall. I wonder whether these people without inner dialogue are unable to recall music (with lyrics)?
I can easily "transform" my inner voice to be in the voice of Darth Vader (like someone here interestingly pointed out). I find it peculiar that there are people who cannot and their inner life must feel different than mine. I wonder how depression fits into this. I'd think you'd certainly be more prone to get depressed if you are able to tell yourself how stupid/worthless you are. I wonder how that manifests non-verbally.
Someone linked to an article by Feynman in this thread which demonstrated two different kinds of counting - using your voice and seeing the numbers visually. Quite interesting read: http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/607/2/Feynman.pdf
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.
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.
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've always had an odd pleasure at standing at the edge of cliffs. Something meditative about trying to overcome the feeling of unbalance. Think about it, you can be perfectly balanced standing on a cubic foot of rock. But if it's suspended hundreds of feet in the air, you would feel unbalanced (wind notwithstanding).
It turns out that this actually is dangerous. The feeling of imbalance is a "real" reaction your body has.
I seem to remember Sartre saying interesting things about this idea. Something about exercising your absolute freedom or something. As far as I know, it's perfectly normal.
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 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 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.
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?)
> 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’m grateful someone put to words the layers thing. The sublayers seem to move much faster than the top most layer. I try to get my monologue out of its way, but it’s almost prohibitive against it. Like I have to have the same thought twice - once low level and again top. Only then may I move onward.
I do try to “step aside” sometimes though. I think meditation has helped me hone that technique.
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.
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.
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.
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 think you're right. It might also partially be an acquired skill. As a musician I hear a lot more details in music than a non-trained ear normally would. This naturally makes it easier for me to recall music with more detail. If you aren't trained and have a low level of musicality then I would assume you'd only memorize/remember the main parts of the song/passage, like the "sound" of the guitar playing that solo, whereas I hear the piano comping (or is it just another guitar? I remember piano :D), bass & drums, all while picturing how to actually play the solo on the guitar.
Like a non-musician hearing a guitar riff would just replay it as "nana nana na, na-naa" or something simple whereas I would be able to hear it in exact detail and how it interacts with the rest of the band melodically as well as rhythmically.
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.
That's what I always thought originally, but from when I've spoken with other people about it, it's not the normal way of 'visualizing'. In particular, not being able to do things like imagine a persons face is pretty odd. Similarly, when i'm told to "imagine you're in your childhood bedroom" or "imagine you are on a hot desert island", I can't get anything going, while I'm told most people will construct a detailed mental scenery of it.
Like growing up, I always assumed that those scenes where someone's imagination goes wild and they envision other characters doing crazy things (see: the entirety of Scrubs) were just a literary device, but apparently that's at least sort of close to how a normal brain actually works.
The DRAM comparison is pretty good. Or like having a plastic film over the world that you need to press down on to see anything through.
> 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.
That is super interesting!
I would assume that if you audiolize instruments as you making instruments sounds with your mouth, you would audiolize other people as you mimicking them as well...
I mean, when I read your post above, my inner voice does it in a neutral me voice, because I have no clue what you actually sound like. But if I read a text message or something from a friend of mine, I read it in their voice, because I know what they sound like.
If I try to do it right now, I can only really generate a sort of average tone that I associate with them, or maybe a phrase they say commonly. I can't really synthesize a new sentence though, so there's something in there relating to memorability too. If I try to imagine my wife saying things that I know for a fact she said this morning, I just hear myself imitating her.
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.
I also get ear worms, although not as bad as you seem to get them.
One trick that works for me is to over-saturate your brain with it. Got an annoying song on your mind? Find it in spotify, put on headphones, and listen to it on repeat until you're sick of it.
Funny anecdote. Back when I worked at EA, a couple of guys hacked together a system to share music on the internal LAN. (This was before the days of Spotify and friends.) Everyone would put their ripped albums on it and anyone could listen to anyone's stuff. It was pretty rad.
They also added some metrics tracking so you could look people up and see how many different albums they'd listened to, how many times, etc. There were leaderboards for who could cover the most stuff.
I thought it would be funny to "win" by listening to "Butterfly" by Smile.dk[0] more than any other song had been listened to. It listened to it on a loop for weeks. I, for reasons I cannot really explain years later, actually did listen to it and not just let it play at zero volume. It was a weird experiment in neurological satiation. At some point, it no longer annoyed because it just was, like the sound of my own heartbeat.
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.
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 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.
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?"
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".
"The hypnagogic state is rational waking cognition trying to make sense of non-linear images and associations; the hypnopompic state is emotional and credulous dreaming cognition trying to make sense of real world stolidity." [1]
Thank you for the clarification. I've never noticed any distinction between these two states. Perhaps that's why I conflate them. I suppose that stands to my point about the richness of autostimulated experiences.
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 :)
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.
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?
This is the norm for me. If I am awake, I almost always have music playing in my head, from pop songs to classical to little nondescript melodies. Sometimes this can be quite annoying.
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.
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.
Yep, I do this. In fact, sometimes when I'm meditating and focusing on my breath, I start hearing a song. I often ask, "Is that still being mindful or is it cheating?" I usually settle on cheating and my brain tries to focus in on the breath again. Sometimes I just let it play.
You know what's really weird? If I don't know all the lyrics to a song, I can sometimes listen to it in my head and hear the parts of the song I don't consciously remember.
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.
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.
In the aphantasia discussions that are closely related to this, it was revealed that some graphical artists have it and actually can't visualize things in their head, yet they're able to draw things on command.
Which is completely mind-boggling to me.
So there's probably people who can compose music without being able to audiolize it in their heads first, as strange as that sounds.
I find that if I'm in a noisy environment, like a moving car, if I think hard about a song, it feels like I can faintly hear it. I guess it's a side effect of the brain trying to find a recognizable pattern in the noise. I used to especially appreciate this in the days before it was easy to actually hear any song on demand, when I would have had to either buy the album or record the song off the radio.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Interesting. Do you program? If so, can you at the same time both program and comprehend, say, an audibook or podcast? Or even talk to someone?
A colleague told me once that he listened to podcasts while programming and I found that intriguing but baffling. I can do it but only if my task is rote, and I have to turn the podcast off if I'm truly concentrating.
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’d heard that this is, to some extent, impossible, because everybody subvocalizes when they read. Wikipedia supports this, but I guess the goal is to minimize subvocalization rather than to eliminate it completely?
“Micro-muscle tests suggest that full and permanent elimination of subvocalizing is impossible.”
I know this is true for me. If I press the tongue to the roof of my mouth while reading, I can’t stop the muscles from moving very slightly as I read.
Sometimes I wonder how many things we've "proven" because our studies aren't large enough to observe all the edge cases. I sometimes wish I could contact the researchers and volunteer myself as a counter-example.
I haven't hooked myself up to electrodes and measured nerve response, but as far as I can tell I don't subvocalise when I read. I can also turn off my internal monologue; I don't have to hear the words in my head as I read them though I typically do.
I tried this when reading Ready Player One (I counted to eight in my head to stop vocalizing). I did read it much faster (in fact, faster than my partner who is a native English speaker/reader). I cannot vouch for how much I remember of the book though. I think it's less, because I remember watching the movie thinking "oh, right, that's what happened" about a major plot part. That's never happened with other books that I first read, then watched the movie/series adaptation of.
Also, that way you can read alot faster, you just scan all words in a sentence and let your brain handle the translation of visuals directly to concepts.
For me it's a little bit of a struggle to read like that, I need to count in my or use my inner monologue otherwise to accomplish that, otherwise my reading slows down automatically. I'm sure you can train both ways of thinking.
Hrm... I'll have to try it. When I speed read I shut down the internal monologue, but if someone was talking to me I'm skeptical I'd be able to read effectively still, but maybe I'm being too negative.
I think it's just practice. I used to be an internal monologue reader into my 20s until I worked to not be one(because I wanted to increase my reading speed). Maybe I was neurally set up to achieve this - I am strongly left handed and have been told by many people they dont understand my thought process on things(not in a bad way, just sort of "where the heck did you come up with that") throughout my life.
Just start looking at text and don't let yourself say the words in your head.
I switch between the two. If I'm having trouble fully grokking something, I have to resort to the "read and recite every word in my head" method.
Most of the time, I speed read and seem to somehow use another system to take in the information. I usually just absorb the important bits. When speed reading I can definitely simultaneously carry on other conversations much more easily than when I'm internal monologue reading, but one or both is still going to suffer to some degree, for me. That's super impressive if you can really maintain both at 100% simultaneously.
I work in information security, and often rely on the speed reading approach when trying to determine if something is legitimate or not within a sea of noise. For example, there was a malware alert that triggered on a giant JavaScript blob. These alerts are often false positives (or "benign true positives"). My co-worker prettified it and asked me to help take a look. In total, it took up about 20 or 30 screen heights. I took his mouse and just started rapidly scrolling and scanning for anything suspicious-looking, and after a few seconds he looked at me like I was insane and asked how I could possibly analyze the code like that.
I was able to vet it as "very likely clean" in about 10-15 seconds, while it took him several minutes of mentally processing every character in every line. That said, this is kind of like an inverted bloom filter: if there's a match, it's definitely a true positive, but if I don't see anything suspicious, there's some small chance of a false negative. So I "hit the bloom filter" first as a kind of efficient cache. If there's a match, then I've saved a lot of time. If there's no match, and if it's important that I need to be 100% certain with my conclusion, I make the full "database call" (line-by-line read).
mmmm reading w/o internal monologue isn't the problem. It's reading effectively while listening to someone else speak. My brain just then is listening to the person and whatever I'm reading just sort of doesn't take.
I don't know a lot about the subject, but wouldn't it be included in the price you pay for reading slower due to reading+speaking+listening in the whole process the fact you absorb more? (not defending any side, just questioning)
That makes a lot of sense. It's hard to think in speech while talking. And it's hard to think visually when reading. But conversely easy to think in speech while reading, and think visually while talking.
...what? Are you telling me you can do this for some arbitrary period of time and then tell me the number of breaths you took, if asked? I find that really difficult to believe...
I tried this right now and noticed that I count tap for the first time. But the most important thing is that all of them are different and form a repeatable pattern. So brain just remembers the sensation of the fourth tap and I can tap in fourths subconsciously for a while.
The other way to deal with this exercise is just tapping for the odd count in one place and for the even in another. So you know when the fourth tap is because you subconsciously know it was long enough time after the second one and it is in the right place on the table.
you don't think "one" every time you do something once. just like that you can train to not think "one-two" and not to think "one-two three-four" and so on. gets harder the larger the number, but it's a matter of practice.
Like bars in music? Like I can put on the metronome to, say, tic-toc-toc-toc (different sound on 1 vs 2/3/4) and will intuitively know when I've hit 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 bars. I just feel it. I might be able to use this method for counting, just hearing clicks, and count to 16 bars or something, while doing whatever else, even though I am like Feynman in not being able to talk out loud while counting.
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 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 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 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).
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.
I often recite rants in my head like that, but I definitely don't do it for everything. I figure my body is responding to things I am more emotionally charged about by preparing to speak. Sometimes I even do start speaking quietly to myself if I'm especially worked up - but I also generally take that as a que that I need to focus on relaxing.
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.
What you called non-verbal thinking is called "flow" and is more like a state of mind, rather than a way of thinking. Named by Mihály Csíkszentmihályi.
No, there is also non-verbal thinking. Just like I can communicate via gestures and facial expressions, I often think things through without putting anything into explicit words.
Yeah, I think people can move between both states. Meditation in particular, if practiced deeply/for long enough, can lead to the non-narrative state. Ever since I did a ten day vipassana meditation course 18 months ago I've been able to spend long periods without verbal thoughts though I still feel sensation throughout my body.
For example, I have a concept in my head that's like a hashtag but would translate to "over-optimized 80s/90s technologies that have aged poorly". It's a categorization that overlaps with a sense of frustration (typically because I'm using one) and joy that I'm seeing fewer of them these days...
I have a lot of similar "feelings" that are felt instantly, but would take dense English to express. It is kind of like observing some behaviour in a large codebase and trying to remember what's causing it. Connecting all the dots to find a satisfying explanation isn't always immediate.
That's a great article. I'll extend this even further to include feeling sad for people whose lives I tangentially encounter. I felt unbearably sad the other day watching a middle-aged woman walk along in the rain holding an umbrella with an oversized signature of the painter Renoir on it, thinking this is her favourite umbrella, and the world doesn't care about it. Some kids, maybe her own, probably gave her shit about it. But she's still holding it and showing the world that she loves Renoir. Heartbreaking.
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 it is a good idea to try to give things names. The named thing need not be very precisely defined, and it can change, or we can find a better name for it or both.
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'm Flemish and my mother tongue is Dutch. Therefore I mostly think in Dutch, but sometimes I think in English. Then it regularly happens I can't think of the right word to describe something (actually that happens in Dutch too, but less frequently), while still knowing very well what I mean.
I think that can only mean that my 'real' thinking happens without words or language, and is then 'translated' into Dutch or English.
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.
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 understand thinking in concepts but not words, and I understand having an internal monolog, but it seems like you're describing a third option, unless I'm just misunderstanding. Obviously everyone's internal monolog is literally silent, as they're not speaking out loud, but it's most naturally described as 'hearing' the words in your head. (As opposed to literally hearing with your ears.)
It sounds like you're saying you will 'verbalize' your conceptual thoughts, ie put them into words, but not actually process the sounds of those words in your head? In what way do you think of the words then? As text? Or do you somehow think of words themselves using, like, the concept of each word, without mentally hearing their sounds?
If so, that is unfamiliar to me. Maybe I do it, but it's not something I recall being consciously aware of.
> Obviously everyone's internal monolog is literally silent, as they're not speaking out loud, but it's most naturally described as 'hearing' the words in your head.
I'm not sure it is that clear cut and universally same. So in my case, when I do the verbalization I do imagine the actual sounds, as opposed to written text or something like that. However those sounds are silent in the sense that they are clearly conjured up via some other pathways than what would be used to hear external voices of other people.
When thinking about images from my memories, they are extremely vivid and colorful. I can remember visiting a local supermarket and in this memory I have an immense amount of detail. I can remember individual small shapes and colors that were playing on some random advertisement TV screen hanging from the ceiling, I can remember walking past the shoe isle and I can still see the individual shoes and their texture and variation of colors in a single shoe. When I think of friends, I can see their faces with rather extreme precision. I can see individual facial hairs, birthmarks, wrinkles. This type of visual memory isn't limited in time either. I still have extremely vivid memories of at least a hundred events from when I was around 7.
When thinking of these visual memories I have, they appear in my mind's eye. It feels as if I'm at several places at once. I'm in the present, seeing whatever is in front of me. At the same time I'm also in the past, in my memory, and I can see these memories with great precision. To me, thinking and seeing these memories seems to use the same area of the brain. It feels very similar to see something in the present vs. seeing something in my past.
When I've talked to friends, I've found that the kind of precision I have in my memories isn't that common. However others still can visualize things pretty well. However there are also people who can't visualize anything. You tell them to think of their mom's face and they only see blur, perhaps making out the color of hair at best. There have been some studies into this mind's eye capability. [1]
Coming back to me saying I can't actually hear the verbalization in my head. When I say this, I'm thinking that it wouldn't surprise me at all if there are people out there for whom the verbalization seems like an actual sound. Very vivid and clear. While for me it's rather muted and feels nothing like hearing.
Interesting! Thanks, that analogy is really helpful. I definitely don't have that level of photo realistic mind's eye. As you say, I can visualize things, but it's not remotely like seeing things in the real world. The way I hear things in my mind is much more like hearing the real words. So I guess by analogy I can kind of understand what it might be like to have a similar internal auditory experience to my visual one.
FWIW reading other comments here I also realized that a better way to describe my internal monolog than internal hearing would be internal speech. It's really more like 'saying' something in my head than 'hearing' it. Even if what I'm remembering is someone else talking, it's kind of a mix between hearing them in my head and.. something like me doing an impression of them to myself.
I wonder if learning multiple languages as a kid has any influence on the way we think (I was raised bilingual and now I can speak 4 languages quite fluently), but also if the way we think determines what we are good at and the path we choose to live. I'm an engineer and I always enjoyed doing math and science, whereas I'm not that pasionate about art and humanities. I know some people can be really great at both, but most of us will only shine on one of these fields.
I think in words out loud by default, but I can intentionally interrupt my narration to get access to the instant, non-verbalized fuzzy representation. It feels weird.
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 can only speak for myself apparently(I had no clue some people didn't have "conversations" in their head) but I can do both.
Frequently I will have "hunches" or "gut feelings" and so no that I can't put into words. Since this is HN, I will say that frequently occurs with programming. Sometimes a bit of code, or design, or decision will not site right with me. I can't explain it to myself internally or to others.
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?
I'm glad the top post in here kind clarifies it as "walking through situations in your head in which you have to explain things to people". Because I constantly do that but I don't need to "talk to myself" to make sense of abstract concepts. I tend to just visualize them however convenient. The "inner voice" part is just for preparing to having to explain the process to someone else, which can be helpful to order your thoughts but it's more of a byproduct than "the only way to think" for me.
I'm not sure if there's any science to this and I have doubts the questions about it have ever been formulated clearly enough for people to have an exact idea what we're even discussing here. I imagine most people can play through a potential interview in their heads and most people can think through an abstract problem (i.e. something with math/geometry) without having an inner monologue about it. It's more about how important it is to you to prepare for hypothetical conversations.
At least in my case, I have visual as well as auditory thoughts. I recently watched a video on how a Stirling Engine worked, and if I wanted to think about how it worked, I wouldn't talk myself through it, I'd just imagine the animated diagram.
Often there are shortcuts, so the internal monologue or visualisation can skip details or words if the end of the sentence is clear. Much like the way speed readers might hit a few key words to get an understanding of a sentence. It makes me wonder if the internal monologue only happens after the thoughts occur, like a narrator, though it doesn't feel that way.
There are still thoughts that are not narrated, like intuitions or moments where I can act without thinking things through. I just tried to work without an internal monologue, and I found it hard to chain thoughts together. Like I could sense what I wanted next, but I needed to have some auditory or visual hook to connect to it.
I do think in both and I feel there are multiple good answers to your question, but one that I find especially interesting is that while I do use words, they don't always mean what they mean in the general language.
So for exapmle when I use them to speak to someone, I usually use them in the common way. I transcribe my thoughts into words only in those ways in which those words are exactly used by other carriers of that language.
However, when I dream or reason about some new or abstract concept, I do still some of the words as anchors to hold on to specific parts of that concept, but I am not too strict about using the words that mean(in the common sense) - those exact parts of the concept. I just find the word that somewhat closely resembles something in that concept and use it. But it is just used as an anchor, to let my mind navigate around that concept. Many times, if I was to try to explain this concept to someone else using those exact same words - they wouldn't understand it, because they would be missing the very specific connections that my mind made just for this concept, for this thinking session. And those change all the time.
If the concept proves itself useful, I will just translate it into regular English (or other language) and write or remember etc. But it happens much later, not during the conception and reasoning stages.
> Are you afraid that thinking in language categories prevents you from accessing deeper truths?
I am not afraid of that and I don't think that it does so necessarily. Because if you use words simply as anchors, you can basically anchor them to any imaginable (as deep as you wish) information or concept or part of the internal world, you are basically not limited by the language. You are just using words as pointers, with arbitrary precision and pointing capability. If I am not limited by the implied requirement for those words to be used in the same way by other people (which I am not during this early stage of thought) - then words can basically be infinitely flexible.
Now I don't usually just use random words either, I automatically finds ones that sort of fit approximately, but this non-strict usage just allows to bend the boundaries and achieve great flexibility.
I do sometimes think without words though, when that just seems more efficient.
Whenever I am encountering an abstract concept internally, it does not appear as a clear visual representation but rather as its gestalt. Then there are two things happening. 1. most of these seem to bring their own set of keywords with them. 2. on the basis of these keywords I can further probe the concept using my internal monologue, like using a spotlight to get more details and pulling it out of the twilight of its gestalt. Step 2 is only necessary to explain the concept to others or put it in writing. All in all the transfer from gestalt concept to language sure leaves something behind but it also adds something that it could not have on its own.
> When I was a kid growing up in Far Rockaway, I had a friend named Bernie Walker. We both had "labs" at home, and we would do various "experiments." One time, we were discussing something -- we must have been 11 or 12 at the time -- and I said, "But thinking is nothing but talking to yourself inside."
> "Oh yeah?" Bernie said. "Do you know the crazy shape of the crankshaft in a car?"
> "Yeah, what of it?"
> "Good. Now tell me: how did you describe it when you were talking to yourself?"
- "What Do You Care What Other People Think?", Richard Feynman
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.
Verbal thinker hear as well. Weak mind's eye, but imagined scenes or objects are actually easier to visualize and describe than memories of real objects or places, most of the time.
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, ...
Strongly verbal thinker here: weak "mind's eye" (or nose, or ear). I can remember and later identify images, music, etc with a high degree of accuracy, but when I call something up for "internal recall" my memory will almost always lack the fine detail of reality. It's very rare that I can "play back" or "conjure up" something in my head vividly. I don't absolutely require an internal monologue to think. With some things, like sports or gaming, there's a lot of non-verbal processing going on.
I can do reasonably complex verbal, mathematical, or IT work just in my head, and often have an internal monologue running while doing so. It not that my working memory[1] is especially good, it's just that if I'm spending more than a couple hours on it, I've mostly memorized it, so I can think about the solution, or at least the next step or steps, and then type or write them out. (Closing my eyes can help eliminate distractions, but isn't required. Good headphones playing something non-intrusive and blocking out audible distractions are at least as important, probably more important.)
What I can't do in my head is solve complex problems in real 3D space. If I'm trying to fit components into a box for a hobby project, or doing some moderately complicated carpentry for a home-improvement project, I prefer being hands-on. Need to be hands-on, really. I can't fit the pieces together in my head, even if I'm looking at a page full of all relevant measurements. 3D modeling software is okay, pencil and paper and drawing tools a very poor and painful substitute.
Interestingly, when I'm working with a hands-on project is one of the few times when I can make a very sharp mental picture. I can be looking at a piece of lumber, or a bare enclosure, and know it exactly what it will look like when I'm done.
The Buddhist concept of “emptiness” comes to mind. I’ve read a lot of descriptions of it, but only really grasped the concept through the subjective experience of meditation.
Further to that end, the clarity of a totally calm mind. Words can be used to poetically convey that state — but while they get close, I’m not sure they can adequately describe what pure thought is.
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.
> 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.
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.
Neither; having an internal monologue doesn't necessarily mean you're constantly using it for everything, much like having speech. Though I would say it's harder to prevent oneself from "monologuizing" too much (particularly in situation of anxiety, and such) than from speaking too much, hence the meditation techniques designed to help with that. But no, at least for me there's no automatic verbalization of all thoughts.
> The latter seems a bit more likely to me, but I imagine it must be very lossy at times.
I would say that my internal monologue is kinda a summary, and is a bit lossy.
> I often have thoughts that take only an instant, but would take many sentences to verbalize.
I would not say that my internal monologue happens at speech-speed either, it can be much faster, and the actual idea or thought is still instantaneous. The monologue is more about rationalizing or understanding your thought.
This is good question. Personally I have a hard time imagining what it's like to have a deep understanding of something non-trivial without having arrived at that understanding through language.
Let me ask you this though: how do you know you understand it? If you've never rendered your idea into language, or seen/heard it put that way, then it has never been criticized or vetted by anyone else.
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.
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, for example there's the movie trope of becoming able to hear "the thoughts of others", and then the person goes in a bar and hears these sentences, like "hm I wonder if she ..." and so on.
I pointed out how unrealistic this is and you obviously couldn't hear such things, as thoughts aren't literally sentences like this. And my friend was just brushing my comment off as if I was not making any sense, since thoughts are obviously sentences like this (for him)...
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?
Other person here: I can only hear realistic sounds and visualize realistic images when I'm in a half-asleep state or in dreams. Otherwise it's very blunt. For example I cannot realistically hear music in my mind, I can imagine myself humming it though (and my vocal muscles ever so slightly tense up if I do), and I can imagine myself speaking in the same way, but it's mostly a very faint thing, and is mostly about imagined movement of my mouth etc., rather than sound. E.g. imagine clapping your hands as a motoric action, but imagine them in your hand, not the visual of it, but imagine what it would feel like in your arms and hands. It's a bit going in that direction with my imagined speech.
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.
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.
Once while walking home I had an almost revelatory experience. I looked at a car in an intersection and I felt speechless and toughtless, just looking at the car. Of course I don't know how animals "feel" internally, but I felt like this must be how dogs or deer see the world. It was very brief and is hard to explain. (No I didn't take any drugs.)
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.
Okay, let's say you decide to stop justifying it. Does that result in any material difference in the real universe? If yes, congrats, you just made a fully voluntary impact on the world.
If you mean you're an observer and your judgement is fully isolated from any future behavior of the unconscious, then I'd be interested in hearing an elaborated version.
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.
If you consider a young, attractive person who identifies with their beauty, eventually when they age and likely lose that beauty they once perceived, they end up feeling like they have lost themselves--or at least some huge aspect of themselves--and suffer greatly because of it.
Alternatively, if they recognize their looks are just a transient thing that is not their identity, then losing that perceived beauty is much more benign and life is more peaceful. It's because there was always much more to them than their perceived beauty.
It's the same thing with emotions and cognition. Identifying with mind chatter--or thoughts in general, in their supremely transient nature--is to impose a limitation on ourselves and invite suffering.
Not to pretend that I'm this untouchable entity that is above all of this, but I've found this to be a very healthy practice that makes space for a peaceful, harmonious way of living.
I know what you are talking about. Did zazen daily for years when I was younger.
Personally I found that detachment and identification are two different things. I do identify with mind chatter or emotions as part of me but I try to not get carried away by those things. As they say, this too shall pass.
I also have ADHD and OCD but I'm a mostly non verbal thinker. It took me some time to modify the expositions techniques to treat OCD to my kind of thought experience. But for the most part it worked and I am usually unaffected by this intrusive thoughts.
I actually didn't used to have this "internal monologue". Until a couple years ago - when it just sorta showed up. And at some point I became consciously aware of it - and its ...power, I guess. Without the inner monologue it had been impossible for me to have "insincere" conversations. Using that word for the lack for a better one - I mean where I am talking to someone and consciously controlling what I say instead of just freely saying whatever - now the monologue can sort of "front run" the conversation and help me control what I say. I had never under stood earlier how people managed to pull that off...and when the monologue showed up it was an "enlightenment under the bodhi tree" level event.
From the other comments:
1. I hated audio books before the monologue, and I still do after.
2. (from @echelon's post) I was quite imaginative before the monologue - but more in a sort of a fuzzy, visual way. I had entire fantasy realms just "visible" inside my head. After the monologue showed up, my imagination is more like @echelon describes - I can talk to/against myself, go off on variants of movies etc. I am not entirely sure, but I _think_ my visual imagination has gotten weaker though, and I find it harder to enjoy fantasy now. Could be just age though.
3. Can't seem to be able to turn it off, or control it entirely. The monologue is my worst critic - not a bad way, but it'd be nice for it to not _be_ there all the time.
> 3. Can't seem to be able to turn it off, or control it entirely. The monologue is my worst critic - not a bad way, but it'd be nice for it to not _be_ there all the time.
For me, I've always had it, and I can't control it either. however, it does go quiet in one of two circumstances, when I'm very, VERY relaxed (so, rarely) and when I'm deep in "the zone" of concentration, which is really nice.
I would say I don't have an internal monologue. But that doesn't mean my mind isn't wandering all over the place. I don't talk to myself, I don't play out conversations in my head. Instead it's more like a collection of "thoughts", or "images", or visualizing myself "doing". I can get extremely caught up in this. There's also an awful lot of contemplating objects, observing features, visualizing how they interact.
Very little "words", however, unless I'm actually talking aloud or writing.
Come to think of it, I wonder if this could have anything to do with why I always found "reading comprehension" tests curiously difficult & strangely capricious in school.
Say you're planning to write a letter (or an email), but you're not actually sitting at your computer to do it right at that time. You're in the shower, or walking around or whatever. Will you play out specific sentences you intend to include, in your mind? Could you do that if you wanted to?
Not OP, but their description fits mine perfectly. When I write, I don't know what will come out until it does. This goes for this comment (funnily, typing this is not harder because I'm aware of the process - it just pours out) as well as the novel I'm writing. When I'm not writing the novel, but thinking about it, there are two different stages: "thinking about the chapter I plan to write" when I form the sentences, but that quickly becomes impossible because I can't keep more than a few sentences in my head.
When I'm not in front of the computer, I often abandon this process and instead focus on the larger concepts: the alien species and their evolution and civilization, the plot and the major events that need to be there. These are all concepts or scenes. I don't want to say they're "visual", they're more "concepts".
I can compare this to wanting a cup of coffee. I don't think "I would like a cup of coffee" (although that is what I might say if I have to vocalize it). It's more a feeling (wanting) and a concept (a cup of warm coffee). The label underlying the concept is secondary.
When I think of my novel in the shower, I haven't the slightest idea idea how I exactly will get to the major event at the end (because there are several major events before that which I haven't gotten to). This can only unfold when I write.
Edit: I just did the "Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire" and I don't have aphantasia, but I realize that when asked about scenery that I've seen, it's easier to have a clear picture, whereas completely imaginary scenarios are concepts, rather than vivid images.
> "thinking about the chapter I plan to write" when I form the sentences, but that quickly becomes impossible because I can't keep more than a few sentences in my head.
I mean, I doubt I could keep more than a few sentences in my head without any mistakes, although if I were to mentally rehearse more than that they would likely come back to me to some degree as I went to write it out. As you form the sentences, is it like silently talking to yourself (how I'd describe my experience)? Or something else?
Yes, when I put things in words, it becomes a monologue with words. I can start it, but especially with fiction, it quickly becomes impossible to keep it in my mind. For lack of better expression: words are secondary to me. They are the labels that are needed when I communicate with others, and on rare occasions with myself. But most of the time it's a stream of concepts, rather than words.
More like I will peruse concepts I want to discuss, storyboard or outline style. I could compose a sentence AFK but it's not my natural thought pattern, I'd only do that if I considered it of particular importance.
The reading comprehension point is interesting. I'd like to see some studies looking into testing differences between those with a verbal monologue and those without. It'd be interesting to see the different areas where each type of thinking shines, if there even is a statistical difference in any area.
I don't see photorealistic pictures on the backs of my eyelids or anything, I don't know if people can do that. For me it's sort of abstract, like a Picasso or caricature, or like looking at something out of the corner of your eyes. I am aware of the nature of the thing but I do not see a camera picture inside my head.
I like to think that I have "hardware acceleration" for typing on QWERTY keyboards because I am so used to it that I do it unconsciously.
But when I smoke weed, I have to actively think about the position of keys in the keyboard in order to type coherent things. I have to type "by software".
The point is: maybe for some people, their spoken language is "hardware accelerated" and for others, thinking in words is too computationally expensive, so they resort to less expensive methods.
Or maybe it's the opposite. Thinking abstractly is the computationally expensive method but the improvement in decision making isn't worth the effort.
Disclaimer: I know absolutely nothing about psychology or neuroscience. I just like to think about it.
YMMV, but I find cannabis consumption requires that _pretty much every subsequent action_ be done at a conscious level for the duration of its effects. Reading, coding, speaking, typing, etc. This can occasionally yield interesting results by forcing you to think through minute aspects of everyday things - and sometimes by extension craft questions you might not normally think to ask - but at least for me it seems to disable the majority of unconscious "muscle memory" systems. "hardware acceleration" is a perfect phrase to describe them though!
It is the observation of linguists that some language processing is hardware accelerated. But hardware acceleration comes in a great many varieties, anywhere from having a slightly smaller partially specialized neuron group in the frontal lobe, to having genetically preconfigured sections in lower brain, to not needing the signals to travel to the brain at all, as demonstrated by headless chickens, and government officials.
The "inner dialogue" is called the default mode network in neuroscience. It doesn't have to be thinking in "words" necessarily; you could also skip the words and still be thinking in a resting state. It serves the purpose of ruminating, reflecting on memories, doing introspection. Paradoxically, your brain actually consumes more calories doing this type of resting thinking than you do in task-oriented thought, like when you're replacing a broken pipe or solving a leetcode challenge. Depressed people tend to have too much default mode network activity.
I think it's maladaptive. You are better off having no default mode network activity.
Of course it's another thing entirely if you're too stupid to have an inner dialogue, verbal or not, but I feel like even non-human animals are capable of an inner dialogue. It doesn't add anything useful.
> I think it's maladaptive. You are better off having no default mode network activity.
> Of course it's another thing entirely if you're too stupid to have an inner dialogue, verbal or not, but I feel like even non-human animals are capable of an inner dialogue. It doesn't add anything useful.
With all due respect, I disagree completely . I think it's incredibly helpful to be able to talk to yourself and examine ideas and concepts verbally without having to physically verbalize.
Not having the ability to "talk" to yourself (either in words or in the abstractions that underlie the words) is a different issue. That is a serious handicap.
What I'm criticizing is having this going on all the time--constantly ruminating at rest except when attention is focused on some high-bandwidth task.
With all due respect, rumination is a well known symptom of depression and depressed people's internal dialogue tends to be warped in negative thinking patterns.
>I think it's maladaptive. You are better off having no default mode network activity.
I vehemently disagree. Introspection from normal mode activity is a critical source for self improvement and creativity. Yes, it can be hyperactive, but some degree of introspection is one of the primary qualities that differentiate us from animals and make us decidedly human.
I'm not saying introspection is bad. Introspection should be siloed off into its own activity. Constantly doing it involuntarily makes you a slave to your own mind.
I'm pretty sure non-human animals can daydream too. It isn't what makes us special as humans. We are special because we have thumbs and can do math.
Granted, you will probably lose out on creativity (in the messy, artistic sense) by shutting off the default mode network. But again, you can silo creativity into its own brainstorming session.
If you think you are having no default mode activity, you are likely fooling yourself. It is externally observable when humans have a quieter default mode, through subtleties of behavior, one can notice a calming presence, like that of non-linguistic animals. Even without language, default processing loops can be quite complex, not even taking into account multiple diverse parallel processes. Inner dialog can be very useful. Not having inner dialog is not stupid. I agree though, that in many situations, or for some people, default mode inner dialog can have a debilitating effect. But in an evolutionary way, thinking "I can survive" in a perilous situation, likely outweighs thinking "wtf I am I doing w/ my life?" when sitting on the couch. But consider the evolutionary effects of the modern externalization of inner dialog through devices.
> But in an evolutionary way, thinking "I can survive" in a perilous situation, likely outweighs thinking "wtf I am I doing w/ my life?"
My hypothesis is that the inner dialog genes proliferated by providing higher status. People with an inner dialog are more likely to be charismatic, entertaining, etc. because they are constantly practicing without knowing it. Think the prehistoric version of a big account on twitter. I can't imagine it's possible to become a successful writer, elected politician, or a war general without having internal dialog genes.
The externalization via devices will just magnify this effect.
Whenever something is highly selected for in isolation, there tends to be a long tail of unforeseen consequences. (See: sickle cell.) Some people will have too much of it and end up with some type of schizophrenia or schizoid state that puts them in fake dream worlds. If you get a lot of these people together in a room, you could make them believe some crazy stuff with the same conviction as ours in gravity. (How religion started?)
Similarly, not everyone can visualize things in their mind. Pixar's founder Ed Catmull did a survey of Pixar employees and, interestingly, there wasn't that big of a skew of artists who are able to mentally visualize.
I'm a very visual person, but I can't visualize faces at all. I have no problem remembering faces, but I can't visualize them. When I'm fully awake, I can sort of visualize other things, but it's never perfectly clear. But when I've just woken up, I can lucid dream, and then I can consciously visualize really complex 3d structures, and design mechanisms in my head much more easily than I can using CAD software when I'm fully awake. The brain is truly amazing and very odd sometimes.
What about visualizing the picture of a face ? Or alternatively, like you seem to be able to visualize 3d structures, can you imagine a wax or clay sculpture of the face of the person (i.e. if you have a sculpture laying around which has a face take a look at it and try to visualize it in your head), or a coin head profile.
Once you get it to successfully visualize with one way morph it continuously into the case you don't successfully visualize yet and push the frontier. For example if you get it to work with a small sculpture try it with a bigger one.
Or try to look at a real person face as if it was a sculpture or an object. Try changing the way you gaze at the face. Sometimes, even more so with people we care about, we don't look at them like we would look at an object but we are rather trying to look at the soul behind the mask.
With faces, it's odd. When I go to visualize someone, I kind of get a fleeting glimpse, and then it fades and I can't make out anything except, somewhat blurred, their hairline. No face at all. I'm pretty sure I know exactly what they look like - the recognizer is absolutely fine - but if I try to construct an image, it goes away. On the other hand, if I had to, I could probably draw a reasonable likeness from memory by a process of successive refinement, or I could sculpt a likeness from clay. But visualize internally - no, can't do it.
I think it might be that when I'm fully awake, I can't maintain detailed visualizations very effectively. Faces are really important to us, but perhaps imperfect visualizations of faces fail to pattern match well enough against my recognizer, and so it blanks them. Like I say, I get the briefest glimpse in my visualization, but then it blanks. But maybe I'm over-rationalizing, and my brain is just weird.
I can visualize but not very well, if I were to try to actively visualize a structure I'm pretty sure it would be rotated wrong or have different problems. When I was in high school I had a test that put me in the lowest 3% of the population for visual understanding of things (like put these blocks together to make this shape) and the top 95% for reading comprehension.
Generally instead of visualizing something I would tend to have an internal monologue on how it should work. Even if I am drawing something programmatically I would describe the logic for getting what I want, rather than visualizing what it should look like.
"I can visualize but not very well, if I were to try to actively visualize a structure I'm pretty sure it would be rotated wrong or have different problems"
Some claim that's nearly everyone. Someone did an experiment where they asked a bunch of people to draw a bicycle, which they had all seen in their lives, from memory without a model. Not a particular bicycle, just "a bicycle". The configurations were very diverse and different from the geometric/physical arrangement of real ones.
My wife has this. One day we had a similar realisation as the article’s author. It was fascinating to discuss and explained so much about how we went about making choices over anything visual, from clothes to home decor (I tend to be in charge of both for our family as I can visualise).
I use visualisation a lot for work, especially when designing or understanding process flows, so not having that ability seems so alien to me.
I have both. My mind's eye is blind and my mind's ear is deaf. The inside of my head is a pretty empty place where I inhabit it, cue the jokes. Thoughts just pop into my head from some other part of my brain. When I'm thinking about how to word something, I feel my mouth start to form the words, though my mouth doesn't move. Maybe I'm sub-vocalizing, I don't know. When I'm thinking hard about something, I just sort of "go away" for a bit and come back, hopefully with an answer. I thought this was normal for everyone, until I read about aphantasia a year or two ago.
I suspect this is why sounds or pictures are so distracting to me. The thing that everyone does where they play a tv show in the background doesn't work for me. If I hear it, I have to concentrate on it. It takes a mental effort to ignore it. So when I'm at home I keep everything off unless I'm ready to watch or listen to it.
That is nice. I can't conjure an image like that at all. Also, seeing a graphic image doesn't stick with me very long since I don't keep seeing it like a lot of people apparently do. People with aphantasia would probably do better moderating images than those without. Still not great, though, because while I can't see the image again I would still remember the circumstances involved.
Interesting. I have very little mental visualization and find ignoring TVs to be extremely difficult. I had thought it was because I grew up in a house that did not have a TV on very often.
It's very possible that it's not related. I frequent r/aphantasia on reddit and we're always asking the community if they have certain quirks to see if it's related and the results always end up mixed.
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.
exactly! I'm so tired of this ongoing voice in my head which is more like a constant noise that takes control of my emotions and disrupts my productivity.
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.
I cant find it, but it turns out I can still do it. As I recall, that author had described the experience as being animal-like. My approach:
Have no music on - following a melody feels similar to following speech to me.
Dont be around people who are talking. With practice you will be able to have them present and utterly ignore their words, so make sure they're not talking to you first.
Take a wide eyed look around your environment. Visually (or any way but verbally) imagine you are an animal (you are of course but one that doesnt speak). Look at objects purely visually and repress the urge to "name" them in your head.
If you find your inner dialog active dont "tell it" to stop, just focus on a the visual or other sensory experience.
I find when this works, some muscles spontaneously relax that hadn't noticed were tense. I'm not sure I'm getting as far as that blog I recall, but it really is interesting to observe things without that dialog. You can even perform tasks, unlike during meditation.
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.
It's hard to explain, it just feels like.. reading. All I can say is that my mental focus is on the text in front of me, and not on an aural narrator in my head or a movie-ish visualization. I would say it's non-verbal but not really abstract.
I had an internal monologue in my youth. Constantly searching for the next witticism in my mind before I said it and putting thought into structuring my words carefully for school. I later spent some time alone and developed a simulation of other people I could ask and have conversations with in my head.
Then I went to therapy and they told me to stop doing that, so I did. I also worked with people who barely speak english too often and my need for high level english faded. Now I mostly see a battle of ideas and artworks through a misty haze in my mind.
I tried out turning back on the inner monologue and I know I can. I used to have vivid dreams about playing starcraft and that's gone too with the skills. I think you think what is valuable to you.
It was just said & implied to be negative. A lot of therapists will refuse to discuss their diagnosis with you and their methods beyond fairly simple questions. The best clue I got was the diagnosis as an identity crisis. Once you've been through enough psychotherapy you begin to see it's flaws.
It's primarily a relationship between two people and I know that for all the descriptive psychological terminology it was mostly her character that guided her advice giving. I think it's something she didn't do or didn't value and passed that on.
If one builds an internal reality of mind that has others "speaking" in it, as if one has seen them do it, one is allowing one to remove their choice...at least internally. If one repeated what you saw to others, then that could also be spreading the behavior to others, thus removing the choice from target. Shame works this way, for example.
Could you rephrase this? I'm interested in your point, but the use of 'one' as an ambiguous pronoun (and contrasted in one phrase with 'you') makes this super difficult to parse?
I think they're referring to transferring responsibility of thought/action to an "other" in the mind. I assume they were told to stop that style of habit because you don't usually see healthy things from that ("Not my fault, the voices told me to" or similar). Might be a cause of a condition or a symptom of trauma, etc.
I've been fascinated by this concept ever since I studied American Sign Language in university. When I spent enough time signing, I stopped thinking in words.
My thoughts became more abstract, quieter. It was actually kind of nice, peaceful. I don't know that I was any smarter or able, but it was a notably different experience in a minor way.
But then I graduated, moved, and stopped spending 1-2 nights per week at the campus pub signing with other students. And it all slowly went back to a loud internal monologue instead.
I guess that's probably related to the way people internally vocalize or not when they read. Teaching people to read probably scars many minds at a young age.
People who vocalize are working with the slow side of the mind. You are not vocalizing your thoughts when you need to drive fast.
Imagine for a second having the focus of your thoughts being forced into being single-threaded vocalized process. Having to serialize your thoughts so you can hear them. Horrible isn't it ?
It's like having to make SQL queries to get your memories back, instead of just letting them flow in, interact and transmute together.
I think some people are just wired to be super verbal/auditory and don't have as strong pattern or visual/symbolic skills.
For example, a friend of mine who is a fantastic poet - VERY skilled verbally - told me that she was one of those kids who had to move their lips when reading, and she never actually learned to read the way I do (where words are just visual symbols that form patterns and have not that much to do with sound - I can read very quickly), she just trained herself to stop moving her lips. Just something I've always found interesting.
I looked at your VR expression platform (not yet tested in VR) I see it as a kind of non-linear language experience, where you pick objects and conjure them to express yourself, that I would have greatly enjoy when I was a kid instead of reading/writing. (I'm not yet sure the UI is still mature enough to not get in the way of the thoughts).
Snapchat with its way of communication with pictures also got this right.
My inner feeling is that we new technology we should be able to alleviate the need to speak in a serialized/sequenced form between people that was kind of imposed by nature and exchange mental pictures directly.
Hey, thanks! Yeah, my main talent is translating written information into symbolic/visual content/mental models... One of my goals is to allow people who have different brain styles access to the same models. Particularly in biology, where the prerequisite to understanding is to first learn a bunch of jargon - I think this is totally unecessary and shuts a lot of brilliant people out.
>I think some people are just wired to be super verbal/auditory and don't have as strong pattern or visual/symbolic skills.
I think it depends on the context. I internally vocalize when I read and I'm not entirely sure how anyone is able to not do so. To me reading fast means hearing myself talk fast, which I just can't comprehend. But it also means reading for me is hard because I need to take breaks in reading to visualize what I'm reading.
But I'm also a graphic designer so I certainly have strong pattern and visual skills. But when I'm designing I'm not trying to comprehend words on a page, so it's quite easy.
Agreed, it's definitely a spectrum - there are times I'm reading and I can definitely hear myself vocalizing. But, when I get really deep into a book, that voice almost completely goes away.
Another interesting note is that I have a VERY hard time reading poetry in my normal reading style, and have to stop and pretty much sound it out in order to comprehend it.
Translating thoughts to language does seem like a major bottleneck. But if your goal is to implement thoughts in socially communicable concepts (spoken word or text), or in mathematical or programmable concepts (algorithms, software), an internal monologue is a rough draft of the implementation that is continually refined during the reflective process.
Further, the internal monologue is just one representation in mind, it does not replace the full (non-verbalized) thought. Both are present and complement each other.
My objection is mostly with sequential languages. It turns people into effective but linear thinking automaton following task-lists.
There is this inner monologue orchestrating the actions occasionally listening to intuitions and random thoughts popping in your mind.
Whereas the mind in its natural form is highly non-linear, like a multitude of information processing filters, and independent processes. For example you can train your mind to set a mental clock. You can put some things in a corner of your mind to have it being sorted to make sense out of it. You can orchestrate it, but you can also let your mind orchestrate itself. You can let it fly.
Some kids have imaginary friends, some people see auras, others have Spyro the dragon roaming their room as they type. Every day now with neural networks we can have a glimpse of how machines thinks and visualize things, and with a little training and imagination, most of these techniques are.
Our languages today are bad! They are thought limiting! They are not there to express our thoughts but to communicate effectively between people, and that's the fundamental bottleneck.
Don't let a bad language ruin a good mind, have this monologue orchestrate in silence like a good conductor.
Had a writer say "We think in words. Without language, we could not form thoughts". Which is instantly nonsense. I can think of a blue elephant, then the Gettysburg Address. If I'm asked "What did you think of first?" I'd say "a blue elephant". So where was that blue elephant in the mean time? Still in my mind, still a thought. Just not at the surface, not words.
I look at code projects by scrolling through all the source files. When I'm done, I have a shape of the code in my head. Not a thought; not a memorization of the words that scrolled by. Some kind of abstraction. Now I can work on the project. That is certainly "thoughts" but not words.
I'm with you on the blue elephant, it's big clear visual and concrete. But more abstract concepts I feel a word helps me maintain clearer distinction between variations of related concepts, such as between 'duplicitous' and 'dishonest'.
With layered concepts, I feel a word allows me to work with a concept as a symbol, without holding the full complexity of the concept in my head at the time : 'cross site request forgery', 'franked investment tax credits refund', 'microservice' or 'monolith'.
I know that I don't _need_ the word to think of concepts, but my experience is that I _do_ use them, it feels like I'm actually using higher level concepts that are organised around or at least paired with words, and that having a word somehow becomes my entry point to vividly reconstruct a complex concept. As your example illustrates, if something can be illustrated with a visual image, or a another sensory experience, this happens wordlessly, but a word can substitute for a concept that has no sensory association.
I'm confused -- are you saying the writer is wrong because of your anecdotal process for coding?
As someone who writes I would have a very hard time imagining writing without the ability to have a mental monologue. I do know Alan Moore said in an interview that he would talk to himself in the mirror. Maybe he's an instance of a writer who doesn't think in words.
I would not think of a blue elephant as the word 'blue elephant' it would be the mental image of one. However, when it comes to thinking about a multiple choice question on a practice test or a quote I've recently read I can recall the words on the page of paper and the words mentally "read out".
The fifth natural language I learnt any conversation in was BSL (British Sign Language)[1]. Later, doing further language training, when I was trying to recall words (particularly in German) I would recall instead a sign. Not an image in my mind of making the sign, but a feeling that if I let them my arms/hands/fingers/face would make a sign.
Can you imagine writing through an interpreter without any audio/vocal use at all, as a BSL user could?
Without using a word, can you think what your favourite vegetable that isn't a carrot is? Like, can you call it to mind without using the word?
[1] Kinda, fwiw I just know smatterings of lots of languages.
How would a writer decide what a character will say? By trying random words until something makes sense? Or by an idea of what their values and emotions are at the point in the plot? Lots of thinking going on, without rehearsing "she's in a paint factory, its dark, she's stalking the victim…" as words in our mind.
I've come to believe that the internal monologue is just an "echo", or "audio" so to call it.
i.e. it's not your real thought process, but a mere trace of it.
It's easy to attach oneself to this voice, to believe that that voice is you. But once you see how this voice is analog to e.g. "playing" a song in your head, you might question the notion.
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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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).
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.
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.
Something I've done most of my life is to actively pre-imagine the way I would phrase different concepts to people with different backgrounds, before even having a context in which to use those wordings. Like as soon as a nonverbal concept enters my mind I start trying out an explanation, testing it against a hypothetical person, seeing how the words "sound" together and guessing at what misunderstandings they might have and adjusting and refining it until I feel like it would come across clearly, and then I just tuck those words away in the back of my head in case I end up needing them.
Hmm actually now i'm not certain which one of these I have.
I'm a software developer and I have kind of like two different "address spaces".
There is the normal visual + auditory address space.
And there is the "intuition space" which is similar to the first one (e.g. I can imagine a 3D object and rotate my viewpoint around it, simulate conversations, etc), but it's with limited detail, more like black and white unless I concentrate more. I can "hear" there but it's separate from normal hearing.
It's super-useful in programming, as i can imagine code in some kind of 3D space, where I can move in and out of different functions calling each other (I still imagine them mostly as text though), so I can remember them pretty well.
Visualizing code is a pretty useful tool. I can't do it as easily for problems that I have yet to solve, but I can do it for problems that I understand well.
Interestingly enough, however, it's the playing around with the 3D structure in my head that makes it fun for me to solve problems. It's a pleasurable activity to noodle on problems that way.
I was always very confused as a child when characters on TV couldn't tell whether they were dreaming. I thought it was obvious! Things were 3-dimensional and they could taste and feel and hear and see, which no one does in dreams.
While reading a great discussion similar to the link[1], a comment made me realize people actually do have realistic dreams that are comparable to waking life, which absolutely floored me. I was so astonished that it felt like I had been hit in the face.
It's probably less of a difference than you might think. Dreams are generally less detailed than you might think from their portrayal on TV. What they are really good at are convincing the dreamers that they are a great deal more detailed than they really are, because they're on the "inside" of the cognition; you might "see" a vaguely round blotch of color like what you may see when you close your eyes, but you cognitively "know" it's a ball or a face or the vanguard of the invading alien fleet that have been sent to Earth to determine whether or not your family shall live or die based on whether or not they brush their teeth for a prime number of seconds or something. People can't tell they're dreaming not because the dreams are amazing 8K HD accurate displays with surround sound, but because the critical faculties needed to know if you're dreaming are just off.
(I've been keeping my eye on those efforts to reverse visualize dreams via neural scanning. I have a pet theory that they're already nearly at the maximum resolution they'll ever have, because in reality there isn't that much visual data in the dream. I suspect the vast bulk takes place higher in the cognitive stack.)
How do you differentiate between the dreams being detailed and the dreamers simply being convinced of the dreams being detailed? It's certainly my impression that my dreams are extremely visually detailed, to the point that I'm often able to read things in dreams (and remember it later).
This is interesting. I hear from others that their dreams are very mundane, i.e. very similar to real life. Mine are very crazy, absurd adventures. Very fun and mind-blowing to remember them when waking up, so I am training my dream recall. In my dreams familiar people from all stages in my life meet together. I always thought I dreamt them in great detail, but I have now learnt that only their 'essence' is there. Just enough for me to know as a fact it is them.
I am also trying to become a lucid dreamer (with full awareness during the dream). I succeeded several times, but only very briefly. The excitement causes me to wake up. But the best way for me to know I'm in a dream is when I am reading some text. Texts are inconsistent and when I reread a sentence it might be completely changed.
> But the best way for me to know I'm in a dream is when I am reading some text. Texts are inconsistent and when I reread a sentence it might be completely changed.
This is exactly what happened to me just last night. I was able to read a page from a book, which was visually perfect, as if I was reading a real book. However, once I read it and diverted my gaze, then looked back to it, some of the words had changed (not all). This made me realize I was in a dream.
Do you have these vivid and fascinating dreams every night or is it less frequent than that? What may be going on is a cognitive bias where you only remember your more memorable dreams, and the mundane ones are just forgotten.
And I never experience dreams with that kind of visual detail. Occasionally I dream a dream that leaves an impression of being very realistic, but even those don't have any visual details to the point where I could read letters.
My waking ability to visualize is poor too. I have a very vague mental picture of what my wife's face looks like, and I cannot see it all at once. Nor can I visualize an entire chessboard in my head, despite being able to play chess blindfold well enough to beat novices.
"How do you differentiate between the dreams being detailed and the dreamers simply being convinced of the dreams being detailed?"
A good question. I've developed the same test that the "rationalists" sometimes use to tell if you have an opinion. If you can remember something in one way, and it seems to fit, but you can remember something in another and it equally seems to fit, then you don't really remember the detail of the two ways it seems to fit, you just have a vague idea.
I can draw you a map of my (real life) office. It will be fairly accurate within what I can see, and I can put down specific names. If you swapped two names, I could figure out that does not corresponding to my memory of the office. I remember when we went out to a team lunch two months ago, and I remember the specific order we sat in the booth, and many details about the specific booth we sat in. And to be honest, I would rate my memory as below average.
By contrast, I call to mind a dream right now in which I encountered a crowd of creatures on a hill. I definitely remember it was a "crowd". But... were there a few of them? Yeah... I suppose that fits. Or were there hundreds of them? Yeah... I suppose that fits. I remember they were about 1 foot high and basically the critter from Aliens... but did they have claws or hand-like things? Either fits my memory. Did they have long tails? I think so, yeah. Were they articulated or solid? Yeah... either way, really. I remember them as a "crowd of creatures like the aliens", but when I really drill down... I don't actually have that many details. Were I an artist, I could draw you a picture that fits my dream fairly well... but I could then turn around and draw a picture that in the waking world and light of day would be fairly substantially different, but that my brain would say matches the dream just as well.
I've read things too... but... what color were they? Usually I don't have an answer to that. (I think the common idea that "people dream in black and white" is inaccurate... people dream in not color. They encounter concepts like "words written on a sign" and they just plain don't have color at all. I occasionally do remember explicit colors, but it's an exception.) What was the font? Was it all uppercase? Yeah... maybe. Was it spread across multiple lines? I dunno, I can remember it either way pretty equally fluidly.
Don't get too caught up on these specific examples; for instance I can call to mind a specific instance where I would say concretely this text was on two lines, specifically. I'm not saying these details never appear. What I am saying is that for most people, I suspect if they examined their own dreams like this they'd discover it has less concrete content than they thought.
I would also suspect that there are the exceptional people out there who do dream highly specific dreams every night. But I bet they're the exception. Hard to know. Given the evidence that the act of recalling memories involves destructively reading them and then rewriting them back out, I would also suspect there's another group of people who actually have vague dreams and turn them concrete in the very act of remembering them, but I won't be able to prove or disprove that hypothesis pretty much until we have full brain simulation, so take that with the appropriate levels of salt.
(This is also useful for real life memories. I chose concrete memories I'm confident about like my office layout. By contrast, something like "the wall color or pattern of the hotel I visited a couple of months ago"... well... I know it's in the "boring beige" spectrum but beyond that I can mentally decorate it in any number of specific ways without it triggering any conflicts with my memories, so, I don't remember that. By contrast, I do remember the layout reasonably well. But I don't remember the counter colors, or even whether they were formica or granite.)
After having read your comment, I can say with certainty that this is not the level of doubt I have. I do in fact dream by experiencing actual visual qualia. And not just visual, really, but of all senses. This does not happen every night, but the feeling when it does not is one of forgetting the dream after I wake up, not of the dream not having detail. Sometimes I'll remember the actual sensory details of a dream immediately upon waking, but forget it later on in the day, leaving me only with vague impressions like you say.
It also does not feel as if I am fabricating the details upon retrieval of memory, since the memory of the sensory information is immediate and fades with time, the same experience as when you see something, but then look away. At first, you'll have a strong memory of the sensory experience, but gradually it fades. So unless I am for some reason able to instantly fabricate strong sensory information from a vague concept only upon waking up, but not, say, hours or days later, then this theory does not explain my particular experience. For some particular dreams, I remember vivid imagery and other sensory information years after they happened.
Meditation and dream journals seem to increase the effect of either having or remembering dreams with vivid sensory information for me.
Your comparison with waking memories and experience seems apt, because the two phenomena (dream experiences and waking experiences) seem like they are one and the same, perhaps only differing in average ability to retain memory or salience of experience. And just as some dreams are less salient than others (at least if going by strength of memory), waking situations tend to also differ in this regard. When you are on autopilot or lost in thought, your awareness of your surroundings and of the happenings around you decrease, and so does the salience and strength of the resultant memory of the experience. This makes me think the only real difference between dream experience and waking experience (for me) is the level of awareness/consciousness, which tends to be lesser for dreams, but not necessarily so (i.e. there is overlap).
It seems like part of what makes it _feel_ real is your brain's own ability to rationalize and explain what it's "seeing" under the assumption that it is real.
For example, some say you should try to look at a complex object like a watch or a phone since your brain will often get the details glaringly incorrect. However, I find my brain can often "explain away" exactly _why_ I don't have my phone with me at the moment, or why the watch that I'm suddenly wearing isn't accurate. Sometimes the dream then shifts to be about solving that problem - e.g. trying to retrace my steps to find my phone.
Your example of a dream problem scenario was amazing, by the way.
My dreams are always a mishmash of real and imagined places, scenarios and people. For example studying for exams but in a completely different city or country, stuff like that. My mind just accepts it, never seems to have any issues with it. I only realize the craziness after I wake up (if I remember the dream that is).
Yeah my first clue that I am dreaming is usually when people start to "talk" and they don actually say anything I just know what they are communicating to me. Then I start to notice other for lack of a better term rendering errors in the dream. The more problems I notice the faster the dream seems to deteriorate around me.
Agreed; I switch between them as well. When I have a monologue running, the most common content is trying out and editing drafts of sentences meant to express thoughts or feelings that have arisen without words. I've worked as a technical writer for somewhere around half of my career. I wonder if that career and my frequent self-editing are somehow causally related (in one direction or the other).
Also, I occasionally seem to stop thinking entirely and just experience sensations, perceptions, and sometimes emotions. I rather like those intervals, and am prone to try to sort of savor them. They generally don't last very long before thoughts start popping up again.
I went to a Buddhist college for a while, and the curriculum included quite a lot of meditation. I wonder sometimes if those episodes without apparent thought are related in some way to the many hours of sitting I did (and still sometimes do). I don't really know, though. Maybe all that sitting taught me how to allow thinking to peter out. Or maybe it taught me to notice when it does and not interfere with the process. Or maybe it's completely unrelated.
I find that I primarily am in the abstract, and the way I think of it is "sub" language. If I want to, I can try to translate the abstract into language, but the more abstract the thought the more difficult that translation becomes, especially in considering what context is necessary for that communication
I'm like this, but when I have too much caffeine I notice that it's harder to turn the monologue off. It becomes a little shouty in fact. Brains are weird.
Brains are so weird! When I get deep into thought sometimes my internal monologue doesn't turn off but it sort of spinlocks by repeating bits of songs that are tangentially related to whatever it is that I'm thinking of abstractly. I have a sense in general that there are two parts of my brain that are semi-independent.
I play time-attack puzzle games; and some of my best times have been while I'm listening to an audiobook, music or deep in thought about some emotional problem. It feels like I actually perform both tasks better if I'm doing them simultaneously because my "vague processing" isn't interrupted by my "sharp processing" and vice versa.
When I have too much caffeine I've noticed that I have very strong ability to recall auditory information, specifically tunes. I get a sort of perfect-pitch effect where I can consistently recall music in the proper key and replay it in my mind. It also happens late at night.
How do you remember music? Can you try to describe how you recall it?
I have this problem with music/sound specifically. I cannot remember it at all. For example, I have favourite artist that I heard all of his albums 50+ times. If you play a random track of his to me I won't be able to identify it. Another example; My favourite all time soundtrack that I heard countless times, I cannot recall how it goes. If somebody asks me to "sing" the melody I will fail miserably. Oh and I don't know lyrics of any song. Any. I tried to learn though...
I still get tired of listening to the same tracks over and over again :( .
Me too. Sometimes I notice my internal monologue is slowing me down, so I turn it off and let the thoughts flow without converting them into words. Other times, I feel like the abstract thoughts are coming too quickly, so I'm like "woah, slow down there!" and work my way through the same thought process again in words, to assure myself that I'm not skipping steps and jumping to conclusions.
That sounds like my experience. Though the slow working-through doesn't always have to be in words. It can be in pictures or in orderly logical lumps of knowledge that I don't have a good name for.
This is interesting, because this is close to how I'd describe my thoughts. Occasionally I can go fully abstract with good focus, but most of the time I'm monologuing. Do you ever find yourself struggling to switch over to abstract thought because the monologue is just a duplication of effort?
Yes. I find monologue useful for analysis, but abstraction necessary for creativity. Sometimes I have to distract the analytical part of my brain with a simple puzzle game or something in order to think abstractly/creatively.
I'm like that but when I go to thinking abstractly world I struggle with interacting socially and sometimes even with navigating physical space. I also sometimes need to voice my thoughts out loud if I'm in that state.
I agree. If preparing a talk or ”testing” sentence, I can turn on the internal monologue to do a quick check on how it sounds.
My default is non-verbal, however.
I feel like I might actually fall somewhere in between.
I can definitely think "in my voice", but I almost always do this when I am reading, writing, or formulating something to say verbally. It is almost always a conscious effort, but it makes sense to me.
I work in networking, and when I am troubleshooting, I absolutely do not think in "words". I think with much larger concepts. To compare my brain to a bunch of Docker containers exchanging compatible datasets for analysis might be overkill, but it's the best comparison I've got.
And when I am brainstorming new ideas, I feel like my thoughts are far more visual. The "concept map" comparison feels right at home here. There might be some inner dialog, but only when I am thinking of how I would explain my ideas to another person.
I recently started a Twitter account to give a stab at being funny online. I found that I am WAY better at being funny when responding to tweets or quote-tweeting people than I ever am just tweeting new thoughts. This is likely because I come up with better content when given a prompt, and rarely think up original thoughts in the English language where I could decide to tweet them for reactions.
Could internal monologue a vestige of bicameralism?
>Bicameralism[Note 1] (the condition of being divided into "two-chambers") is a hypothesis in psychology that argues that the human mind once operated in a state in which cognitive functions were divided between one part of the brain which appears to be "speaking", and a second part which listens and obeys—a bicameral mind.[0]
Weirdly, I think that his theory makes sense without leaning on bicameralism at all. Internal monologues could be a recent development with very few obvious physical changes in the brain that caused it, and the cultural interpretation of it could have changed.
People think of the idea of 'the mind' and 'the self' being obvious and self evident, but they are anything but, and it took a lot of brilliant philosophers and poets to come up with words to talk about it and metaphors to use. It seems completely believable to me that bronze age people did not have a clear understanding of what thought was and what was doing the thinking.
My opinion is that the "internal talk" is a result of our adaptation to human culture from the last thousands of years. This happens because several thousand years ago we had no language, at least not as developed as in the modern world. I guess the same is true for hearing music inside your mind, since there was no music (as we understand nowadays) a few thousand years ago.
I found the revelation that people don't do this fascinating. I guess I assumed it was part of the human experience.
I had a conversation with a buddy of mine about what language he thinks in one time, due to English being a seconds language for him and it is funny because looking back on that conversation we both assumed that internal monologue was just a default.
I did notice a pattern in the minority of people that do not internal monologue, where overwhelmingly populated by females.
I didn't until some time in my childhood when one suddenly developed (I remember feeling puzzled when it happened, though I don't remember exactly when it happened). I still don't know if mine's "normal" or even how to find that out. I wouldn't say it's constantly active, exactly, if that's what normal is.
On the topic of internal speech, I've recently developed a weird quirk, if you can call it that. Basically I'll hear fragments of speech in an internal voice distinctly different from my own, about random things that have nothing to do with anything I was thinking or doing. And sometimes, rarely, the fragments will contain information that I wasn't consciously aware of.
For a while I actually thought I was hearing other people's thoughts, but since then I've come to understand our conscious minds as being a collection of multiple subconscious entities that communicate with each other and from which our sense of integrated consciousness arises. And somehow, parts of my brain that don't normally handle verbalization got internal speech privileges. That's what it feels like at least.
Interesting, about how old are you? Distinct voices that make orders or comments is symptomatic of schizophrenia, which typically is onset from late teens to mid twenties.
So far it has been really difficult for me to see the distinction between on one side the "hearing voices" described in schizophrenia, and on the other side the internal monologue as e.g. described in some comments here.
shrug I do both. Depending on the context, I might think about some subjects verbally and about some subjects non-verbally. If I am thinking about something social, having to do with people interactions, I will generally verbalize things in my head, replay or imagine dialogues, etc. If I am trying to understand something I just learned, I will often try to explain it to myself in words. But if I am solving a logic puzzle or trying to work out an algorithm or look at something beautiful like a painting or statue or a flower, I don't verbalize my thoughts. I can still feel myself thinking, I get the results of the thinking process, but I only start verbalizing again when the non-verbal part is done.
Very interesting. I am not sure that I am one or the other.
My thoughts form in a soup of cognition. Then if I pay attention become words, or smeeld, sounds, tastes....
Related: I play guitar in two rock bands. I have to reach a state in my mind between attention and inattention to do well. For example if I count beats I loose my rhythm. But if I stop paying attention I loose... So I need to be in a intermediate state.
My mind is also blown by this - although in a different direction. I knew some people have an internal monologue but thought it is reserved for the deepest moments. And I definitely did not think that they might be a majority, as author's own mini-research implies.
I would presume that I would have to think at the speed I talk and that seems inefficient to me - I am usually not a fast talker.
I never thought it was meant literally _at all_. I can "will" a rehearsal of what something would sound like, but it has nothing to do with my personal thought process or conscious experience...
For me, it's definitely the internal monologue. Worse is that I have a form of OCD (repetitive thoughts) so this monologue gets stuck in a 'loop' and I end up just repeating the same sentence, or part of sentences to myself. Drives me nuts.
Makes me wonder if people without this 'internal monologue' experience this kind of OCD in the same way..
Similar experience here.
I find that as my internal dialogue begins to loop, my frustration grows with being unable to break the cycle. I have an awful temper (see: anxiety disorder) that seems to stem from this. Often if I've just lost my temper, postmortem introspection/analysis indicates that I was thinking the same <5 thoughts in a row in quick, vicious succession until something "short circuited" and I quit thinking altogether - just angrily reacted.
I'm OCD but I definitely don't internal monologue. I do get stuck in what I call a "simulation loop" as I play out possible scenarios in my head and I can totally talk in those, but I have to intentionally "pretend to talk to myself" to talk to myself. In general the only time I hear "a voice in my head" is when I imagine/simulate saying something to somebody else.
I wonder if that's the same thing going on inside a brain as getting a song stuck in your head? That happens to me fairly frequently - the voices in my head will be repeating the same line or verse of a song over and over...
Until you've 'said' it just right? I definitely have OCD tendencies, and this sounds like me in my 20s. What helped me was distracting myself with another line of thought.
The topic is fascinating to think about and I was unaware that some people do not "hear" their thoughts or use an internal voice. But I got stuck on this amazing perfect storm of millennial blogger cliches. I thought it was a joke. After this I could not stop reading it as a parody. The word "literally" is used four times.
> I was taking ibuprofen at this point in the day because my brain was literally unable to comprehend this revelation. How have I made it 25 years in life...
I've always been able to do both, really I would call it all three (abstract, visual, sound). Maybe 4? (I can also imagine taste/smell) Maybe it's because I was bilingual from an early age, but I always knew I was a bit different as I tended to think more visually than others. I can talk to myself and it's more now that I'm older but it's still more visual. And there's also what I would categorize as a third type of thought (which I used confused with visual before but have since noticed it's different) that I use when translating. I don't translate from language A to B directly, but through C, this abstract representation of a sentence. It is sometimes visual but not always (since not all concepts are visual, in which case I just feel an "intent" like in the case of a action or feeling). It is also very rare for me to mix languages in one sentence. I never understood people who did it. To me it's like a literal switch I have to flip, and my thoughts flip to that language as well. I can switch back and forth but it feels computationally expensive. Also now learning a new language I find myself in modes C and the new language, say X when trying to switch to it, instead of my dominant language and X.
There’s a similar thing with the “mind’s eye”. Most people can think of something and “see” it quite vividly in their mind, but some percentage of people have aphantasia which means they simply don’t have the ability to visualize things like that.
When I became proficient in my third language (over 20 years ago) and had to listen, speak, read, and write in all three languages on a regular basis, my mind adapted to thinking in concepts, and lazily evaluating the concepts to the words in the needed language, as the situation required.
A few years afterward, I was discussing this with a co-worker. He had a really hard time fathoming this. He asked me an excellent and hilarious question: "When you call yourself an idiot because of something stupid you did, what language do you use?" After having a good laugh, I thought about it seriously and realized that I don't criticize myself. Instead, I internally model someone who would be likely to criticize me and hear their voice in the language they would normally speak. For example, it might be my parents scolding in my primary language, or a teacher criticizing me in English. We discussed this and he agreed he does the same thing.
So, I suspect that many of us have only an internal monologue, but a whole internal society with various conversations going on.
I wonder if there's a connection between people with strong internal monologues and people who dislike audiobooks?
I _hate audiobooks_ as it's essentially a constant interruption of my own inner monologue and breaks my ability to visualize the world the author is painting. It also feels lazy to me, like by relenting I'm outsourcing my internal dialogue to a voice on my phone...
Sample size is just me, but I have both a strong monologue, and also love audio books and podcasts. Though sometimes my own thoughts will distract me and I'll miss pieces, especially if I'm on a walk or something.
Does anyone else use the pronoun "we" to refer to themselves in their internal monologues? I'll often find myself switching between "I" and "we", for example, this morning I had to run the dishwasher and my internal thought was "We've got to run the dishes today" and then I laughed at myself for using "we"
Some of this, I suspect, is about differences in how people understand "speak" and "hear". I mean, I have an internal monologue, and sometimes even dialogs or arguments. But I would never confuse them with something I actually heard. Even what I might whisper or subvocalize.
I also occasionally hear voices or whatever, usually just before I fall asleep, or when I'm very tired, or stoned. But that's a very different experience. That actually seems like hearing, and not at all like my monologue.
One of the Landmark distinctions is about internal dialogue. That is, distinguishing it from who we are. As a subsystem, as it were. Very automatic, and based on our programming.
So there's the practice of hearing yourself, thanking yourself for sharing, and then choosing how to be. Just as you might respond to an upset child.
I admit, though, that I'm often harder on myself than I'd ever be with children. But it's all in good fun.
And I do vaguely recall that some participants denied having internal dialogues.
As others have stated, I have an internal monologue but it's optional, most of my thoughts occur without a verbalized internal dialogue.
Interestingly, I have an internal soundtrack sometimes too. A lot of time when composing music, or even playing live, I'm really just transcribing what I literally hear in my head. A lot of my musical education has been for the purpose of being able to perform the "internal verbalization" fast enough to be able to accurately transcribe complex harmonies and melodies before the aural image fades.
Over the course of my life there are two instruments where at various times I've gotten to the point where I can directly play what I hear in my head without translation, transcription, or analysis. I often find myself recording my playing so I can analyze it later. When I've not been practicing with enough regularity for that direct "mind-sound to performance" connection to work I get extremely frustrated with my playing.
I think there are also two types of people when it comes to navigating. One type gives and understands directions along the lines of "go along this street until you pass the Red Lion pub, then turn right. After 50 metres, turn left". Most people seem to be in this category. Then there are those of us who have an internal map, and have no problem with "go north for half a mile, then turn east". I'm the latter - I always have a mental map which is oriented absolutely. No matter where I am, indoors or out, I can pretty much always point north. I have no problem navigating along routes I'm never taken before, because I can visualize where it will come out. But if you give me relative directions, I'll have to make quite an effort to map them onto my mental map before I can make use of them. I've only met a few other people who navigate in absolute terms - most people I've met seem to be relativists.
My mother is a step-by-step navigator. She wants detailed in-order instructions.
I'm a spatial navigator. Give me enough information to locate the destination on my mental map, and a few local details I can use to double-check that I'm in the right place.
My mother will follow the directions step-by-step. I will travel in the general direction of the location of the destination and start checking landmarks and addresses when I'm in the right area of the map.
I cannot navigate at all when engaged in a conversation. I can drive safely, but if you occupy my attention in conversation, my destination will become random. My daughter used to exploit that quirk for laughs when she was a teenager.
Unfortunately, I have sort of the same issue with conversation and logic problems. I tend to perform pretty badly in tech interviews because I can't think about programming problems very well while participating in a conversation.
> Unfortunately, I have sort of the same issue with conversation and logic problems. I tend to perform pretty badly in tech interviews because I can't think about programming problems very well while participating in a conversation.
Same with me. I've been learning to tune people out, and I tell the interviewer that I'll probably tune you out when I need to focus but you can interrupt me if you need to.
> No matter where I am, indoors or out, I can pretty much always point north.
That’s a very specific claim and it’s something that I’ve felt to the point that I’ll test myself when indoors
Another part of the driving is that I’ll often ‘skip’ over the boring middle parts, reach my destination and not remember the series of decisions I made to get there.
I often listen to books or podcasts when driving and when driving over the same area I’ll remember what part of the book I listened to at that particular spot
What does the author mean with "hearing his voice" though? People can have different interpretations of what it means to "hear".
In what sense can it be compared with hearing actual sounds? Does it have the same quality. Does he perceive his mental dialogue like an overlay on top of "external" sound?
I've been wondering the same thing when people say they "see" or "visualize" something: do they actually, visually see it in front of them, or not?
For me, the internal monologue and visualization are all just "mental" events. It doesn't share any qualities with the other sensory faculties: they are all quite distinct for me. Just like seeing and hearing, mental events also have a "spectrum", ranging from nothing at all (no thought), to "quiet" (abstract thinking and forming mental facsimiles of sensory perception) to "loud" (mentally "speaking" full sentences to myself, which I do the least).
Yeah, I'm a bit perplexed on this. I sometimes have conversations in my head, or imagine a conversation with someone else I might run into. But by the same token, there's no "voice" to the conversation; it doesn't "sound like" anyone; sometimes i think through something before saying it, other times i just say things without saying it in my head first.
Relevant bit from Feynman talking about how he found that a simple act of counting in one's head can be different and all its implications. I suggest watching the other videos from the same interview. Lots of fun.
I have a vague internal monologue, sometimes it's almost non-verbal, hard to explain. That isn't to say that I am not aware of my internal thinking, it is mostly abstract/conceptual, visual/sensorial. Having said that, I am somewhat introverted and never felt that expressing my thoughts into words sounded like it was in my head, especially with written word. The more I think the harder words come out. I've toyed with creative writing and I do best when I don't think at all and write whatever comes downstream. I've always been like this or at least I remember I was like this when I was like 7. Sometimes when I am stressed out, I use words to ground myself or find a solution but it's all involuntary. I'd ask myself "what have I learned from this or that" and the answer is like a video playing in my head, with images and sounds but not quite words..
>I have no language-based thoughts at all. My thoughts are in pictures, like videotapes in my mind. When I recall something from my memory, I see only pictures. I used to think that everybody thought this way until I started talking to people on how they thought. I learned that there is a whole continuum of thinking styles, from totally visual thinkers like me, to the totally verbal thinkers. Artists, engineers, and good animal trainers are often highly visual thinkers, and accountants, bankers, and people who trade in the futures market tend to be highly verbal thinkers with few pictures in their minds. (...) A horse trainer once said to me, "Animals don't think, they just make associations." I responded to that by saying, "If making associations is not thinking, then I would have to conclude that I do not think."
I have internal monologue but not as much as before, sometimes significantly less or completely absent. First time my monologue stopped during long meditation retreats. It seems reasonable because I didn't use verbal thinking during meditation. You don't use it, you lose it. I'm surprised how little the inner monologue has to do with abstract thinking. You don't have to have sentences in your head to do stuff unless it's writing or reading related. Decisions, no need. Math or programming, no need at all. Logical thinking, no need or very little.
Totally verbal thinkers are often aggressively against even considering my experience: "That's impossible", "You can't think without words". Maybe these kind of people are the opposite end of 'spectrum' from visual thinker autistic like Temple Grandin.
Does it count as “verbal thinking” if, when doing some math, I’m thinking of a sequence (or structure of some kind) of characters, but don’t have a distinct subvocalization for all the characters?
Like, if there are 3 different F symbols that refer to different things, I’ll be thinking of a way to manipulate these symbols, and I will subvocalize each f symbol as “eff”, but will have the specific symbol in mind.
Like, if I’m thinking about, say , “F(x)-f(x)” I might rearrange some expressions in my head, but I don’t necessarily subvocalize “small eff” or “big eff” so much as “eff”.
I guess this is still verbal, but the verbal thoughts might not capture the entirety of the thought?
Unless thinking in a sequence of symbols, even without any subvocalization, would still count as verbal?
Very few people are aware how other people are different. It seems we're mostly hardwired to assume others think exactly like us. Superficially, we socially agree of similar forms, but once you take notice, each person offers their own universe! If taken aback others can be different, maturity still not there. Still waiting to bloom.
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?
To use a software analogy, thoughts are the model. English words are one possible serialization.
(Other possible serializations include other phrasings of English words, Japanese words, mathematical formulas, drawings, musical notation, and so on.)
It's nonsensical to ask me for a more fundamental form of a thought in my brain. It'd be like having a program where you have a reference to a directed graph in memory, and asking "So what form does this graph take? Like XML, or JSON, or what?" It doesn't have any other form. I could serialize it into one of those forms, if need be, but right now it's just a bunch of connections in memory.
Thanks, first explanation about these voiceless thoughts that I could understand.
I think I can produce the same voiceless thoughts. But my voiced thoughts are crisp, clear and easily hold in memory compared to other modes of thinking.
I wonder, maybe that's why I'm excellent at talking about problems, understanding them at high level, but have so much trouble with acutal engineering.
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.
People without an internal monologue: Are you able to listen to a spoken sentence and then replay that sentence in your head? Do you have any audio-type memories?
If so that's basically what it's like for the rest of us, just with the words rearranged into whatever sentence we're thinking.
I would say I do both...but also what about "visual"? :-)
E.g. when programming I often "see" patterns and shapes of code/data. Its not like a photographic memory and its hard to explain - I'm not "seeing" something I am used to seeing with my eyes (like actual code or whatever) but I have this sort of visual concept in my head of what the data is "shaped like" and I can "see" it.
Hopefully this wont be taken as a binary either-or thing in trainings in the future, e.g. with introvert vs extrovert it is often labeling people/colleagues "you are an extrovert" or "you are an introvert", when in reality it is often shades of grey and there is a lot of flexibility based on context. I would imagine this is the same.
It is not "seeing" in the same way as visualising things. The way I would visualise assembling a flat-pack wardrobe or something feels totally different to this.
It is hard to explain. The best I can think of is sensing (without visualising) a shape or pattern. You cant actively "see" it in your mind (e.g. if I imagine an apple I can actively see an apple in my mind) - this is more fleeting and defies any focused thought.
Count me as another inner monologue person who can't comprehend not having one.
Walking down the street, you see a car that is a really nice color, what goes through your head? For me, it's literally "cool car, nice color."
My wife just informed me she has a monologue, but when she meditates, it goes away. Again, mind blown. When I meditate, it's just a constant chatter... "I'm relaxed, lets think about a quiet pond, oh look a bird." I verbally build a little relaxing world for myself. It's part visual, but I'm still thinking in English.
Like the author, this really breaks my mental model of people.
I'm one of the people who doesn't have an internal monologue.
It wasn't until sometime around the age of 25 that I realized that when people talk about having an internal monologue, they aren't speaking metaphorically.
For mental-picture people images from the movies or the comics pop up. Via the movies "Captain America" is closely associated for example. The method of loci [0] exploits this somewhat.
Do you rather associate sounds, music, smells instead? Is it purely abstract?
I never even considered this might be what it’s like to have pictures in your head! I guess because I have no idea what that’s like. I have a lot of voice in my head. (Just my own!) and I talk to myself in my head a lot.
I should say that I do have a strong mental _something_ that is good for imagining connections between stuff. When I’m coding I can ‘see’ pretty much instantly how everything should be connected together. What the user agent and server and database and api etc will all do and what they’ll pass back and forth and store just comes into my head very effortlessly all connected together. So I think the visual bit of my brain is being used for that instead.
I've experienced both. From 0 to my teens or early adulthood (hard to tell exactly), I had no voice in my head really, only intuitions, images, not sure how it happened exactly, but I didn't need to consciously phrase things.
Fast forward a few years and my head is literally always a chat with myself, sometimes with others, sometimes about the past or the future. And I can tell that I very much liked it the other way more.
Edit : I also wonder if this can be trained one way or the other. I know that when I meditate for a while the chatter slowly declines.
Was just discussing this with friends on social media.
I noticed a few things:
1. The question of whether your mind races with thoughts is separate from the question if whether you hear an internal monologue. Some of us have a lot of thoughts racing but they aren’t necessarily in the form of a coherent voice we hear in our heads.
2. Some of us do run through conversations or monologues in our heads sometimes, but we mouth the words or even say them out loud. (And by “some of us”, I mean me. My preschooler has caught me doing this several times already :) )
3. Raising the question of whether we have such a voice or not can influence whether we have it. As with everything, observing something changes the nature of what’s being observed.
I, for one, have many racing thoughts - and yes some of them verbal, if I’m preparing for a conversation with somebody - but others are more abstract or visual and spatial. For example, I can’t really make a decision with verbal sorts of thoughts. If I’m listing pros and cons, by the time I get to the end of one list I’ve forgotten the start of it... I think sometimes I need to imagine things more spatially to see them in my head at the same time.
Also - Somewhat related, I read awhile back that not everyone can visualize things in their head. Like, imagining something you’re inventing or haven’t seen before. This really surprised me! I can’t believe somebody CANT do that, maybe they just have a harder time doing it?
I wonder if this is related to (forgive the term) grammar-nazi-ism. I'm pretty sure I don't have any inner-monologue, at least the concept of it sounds weird to me. I'm also super picky about grammar: if someone writes "its cold out today" I have to re-read the sentence to try to understand it. I don't "hear" "it's cold" in my head, I parse "its (posessive) cold" which doesn't make any sense, and I have to go back and re-read it to fix the writer's error.
I have internal monologue sometimes, and I also have the characteristic you're describing here. It's sort of pleasing somehow to discover that someone else has similar parsing issues.
I tend to get stuck on failed parses, which sometimes makes conversation awkward. Some failed parses are funny, or they might prompt me to substitute homophones in a search for a parse that works. Sometimes the results make me laugh, and that can lead to occasional awkwardness.
For me it's more about a and an, if someone were to write: "I installed a HDMI cable" my inner monologue will actually yell as it passes over the "a" to heavily emphasize the mistake.
Depending on how annoyed it is, it might even respond... "Really? Did you really install _A_ HDMI cable today? Really? Maybe you installed _AN_ HDMI cable?"
Acronyms are generally the worst for a/an situations as depending on if you personally pronounce the acronym as a whole word or spell it out in letters the rule might change.
I have experiences like those of the previous poster, but I also experience when listening to speech, so it's not specifically visual, at least for me. And no, I don't experience speech visually (unless I'm reading a text transcript).
I can testify that both rumination and worry can occur without an inner monologue. I have a monologue sometimes, and none other times. I can ruminate or worry in either case.
This furthers my hypothesis that it is entirely possible we live in a completely different "reality". My red is different than your "red", so on and so forth. Just like its incomprehensible for me to imagine what additional color is there outside of my human range; your reality could be unimaginable to me too.
That is, I do not know what its like to be you. I don't think this necessarily mean that we live in different physical reality, its just that we come to interact with it through completely different means.
Verbalizing your thought process is invaluable for validating that what you are doing/thinking actually makes sense. For developers, just think about all the times you have started explaining some code problem to a colleague, and instantly come upon the solution, simply by verbalizing ideas. The other person doesn't even have to say anything. There is even the concept of 'rubberduck debugging', where you explain things to a rubber duck, and it helps solve the problem.
I have often thought about what the experience would be of living entirely without verbalized thoughts. Like, obviously ideas and concepts exist separately from their verbal representations, so skipping words would be a more pure and effective form of thinking, right? But lately I have come to the belief that words are a necessary scaffold for organizing more complex ideas. Without them, I think we would simply be unable to put together complex enough models to understand things at the level we need to function in our complicated world. Like making diagrams helps with analysing domains.
It is proven that lack of verbal stimulation leads to slower develoment in children, possibly for the same reason. I think it is also the mechanism by which people who spend a lot of time alone (think castaways) eventually go insane - due to the lack of an external validation mechanism.
This understanding would seem to indicate that people who don't have an internal monologue would be less capable of expressing/understanding complex ideas. I would be very interested in knowing if that is the case.
So I'm one of these seemingly non-verbal thinkers, including when I code.
I think it makes me more capable of _making use of_ complex concepts. I came into programming through mathematics, and I treat them both as aesthetic exercises. When I'm building a system in my head the solution usually appears visually, and ideas overlay themselves over the problem as aesthetic "feels". Yes it's a lot like being a visual designer: I can step back, view the solution, and just 'see' if it looks right.
Why should we structure our solution like this? I can't easily put it into words but it just... would be more natural like this. And then a few days later the reason it was correct becomes liminal and I can explain it properly. It lets me hold more ideas in my head and make use of them all at once. When picking up a new idea I can grasp the underlying concept, see the symmetry with ideas I already understand, and slot it into place.
Of course it has major downsides too. It's an effort for me to put my full ideas into words. Coding, like anything worth doing, is a team sport. If I can't vocalize my ideas then half the time that makes them worthless, especially when the decisions are important and therefore contested. I tend to make mental jumps that lose other people, and lose track of what state other people have.
Also, and this is in line with what you said Aedron, it does make it harder to check the details. I'll make silly mistakes because checking them isn't part of my mental construct. I can chase a half-formed idea for a day before realizing my mental picture was off, and I didn't catch it because I never put the problem into words. Pracical-but-ugly hacks don't occur to me because they aren't aesthetic. I'm worthless at remembering my girlfriend's friends' names.
This year I'm focusing on moving slower, writing more things down, and talking to people more. So far it's been really helpful. But I don't think I'd have got to where I am now, or be able to solve the kinds of problems I do, if I was a mostly verbal thinker.
I will wide this question a little bit based on my own experience...
1. Some people report that they can have multiple conversations at the same time in their minds. I find that really hard to do. For example, if I simulate a conversation between two people in my mind, I can't easily make one interrupt the other (and make both to talk at the same time). Is this an easy task for you?
(However, I can think on a song and put that as a background music while I'm talking without losing any thread)
2. About the comment in this blog of "I saw in TV and would wish that to be a thing", that kept me thinking; I'm not good at drawing, can you "draw" in your mind? (In my case, if I start with a face, I make the hair, then their eyes, then the nose, but I started to forgot how the hair was drawn. Can't keep my draw in my mind...)
3. Meanwhile, I do have experience coding, and I can make some pretty persistent "sequence & activity diagrams" in my mind. I've found myself using that kind of "diagrams" in my mind to drive the thinking of other people when I try to explain myself about an idea. Now I'm thinking that is not the best way to do it... But, Can you do this also pretty easily? It is possible to sense if the other person is able to do something in his mind that you can not reproduce?
4. So, my experience is coding, what about your own experiences? What can you do in your mind related to that activity? For example, do musicians here, able to make music in their minds while keeping/updating its sheet music? What about other roles?
I speak 3 languages (Spanish being my mother tongue). I just came to the realization that when I read in English, the words sound crips, clear, and the voice that's reading them in my head is not really my own voice. I can't really describe it but its a very neutral voice with no accent. When I speak in English I have a thicker Spanish accent. When I read something in Spanish the voice in my head sounds a lot closer to my own. Now my brain hurts.
I have an inner monologue, but I wouldn't say I was like "hearing" anything. For me it feels a bit more like the muscle movements in my larynx are played out as though I was going to speak the words. I can imagine a voice speaking at the same time if I want, but that's not how it is normally.
I tried reading at the same time as thinking of different words. I can certainly read the words whilst thinking of different ones, but I can't understand what I read very well. Probably it could be done with practice.
However, if I have planned a sentence that I want to type, I can type it whilst listening to someone else or thinking about something else. It's slightly more error prone though.
I can certainly imagine pictures in my mind without any monologue running at all. But this also isn't my normal mode of thinking. It's not helpful because I don't normally associate abstract concepts with pictures, but with words and symbols and abstract memories of things that worked in similar situations before.
I believe I can recall all my senses or imagine them in my head. I don't seem to dream in words though, but in pictures, mostly. I'm also a much more visually stimulated person than an auditorially stimulated one.
I think without explicit sentences, usually, in abstract thoughts. It's just faster, I suppose? The words kind of flow out as an internal monologue-ish thing in semi-structured overlapping sentences more as a side effect. Doing full monologue is too slow for actual thinking. (I can visualize it as written words as well, why not...) The monologue seems more as a way of preparing for communication, than for inner thoughts.
I can imagine a complete monologue in my head, but it's always intentional, and I only speak to myself when trying to coach or motivate myself into doing something (it does not always work).
Most of the things I think, especially at work... I have no idea how to express them in words. A recursive algorithm to traverse a graph, a strategy in a video game, a scene in a book I'm writing, insight about something I'm feeling...
I think the author should be more explicit in their definitions.
1. On one end of the spectrum, people may think and act without tying words to concepts at all.
2. Then, they may think by forming words in sentences, but not consider it "talking to themselves" or consider themselves as "hearing" a voice in their head.
3. Next, one may say words and sentences to themselves and seem to hear them, but their audatory nerves are not involved in any way.
4. Finally, there may be people who actually "hear" the voice, but somehow know that it isn't coming in through their ears.
I would be in camp 3 whenever I am "thinking" but in camp 1 whenever I am just doing something I've done before and don't need to think about it. I talk to myself out loud, and to my dog, and sing and crack jokes when nobody is listening.
People in camp 4 who also don't associate the voice as coming from themself are generally considered mentally ill. Sometimes on the edge of wake and sleep you might hear a voice, not your own, clearly aurally, but that's not too unusual of a hallucination to have.
I've heard that in the early 20th century, anyone in camp 3 or 4 was considered insane, perhaps even camp 2 was unusual, and that normal people were in camp 1, and anybody who talked to themselves out loud was definitely insane. And I suspect that television and a lack of long boring quiet work changed how we think. And I suspect being in camp 3 or 4 is associated with anxiety and depression, but also with higher intelligence. I have no data to back up any of these suspicions.
Oh, and Buddhist style meditation drops you back into Camp 1.
No one thinks in spoken language. The construct of words is not the kernel of thought. More like the parsing of your subconscious thoughts (neurons firing) into human-readable language.
Think of raw thought as machine code and internal monologue as a high-level programming language. Binary vs JavaScript. Some people are able to interact meaningfully with their subconscious machine code while others must abstract it into spoken language. There is an infinite spectrum between the two extremes that we all constantly tread.
Infants who don't know how to talk yet and animals (as well as hominids before language) do not think in words. Brains are not constructed in such a way as to use spoken language words as the fundamental component of thought.
I, personally, almost never think or reason about things in human language unless I am talking, practicing a speech, or writing. Then I must manually construct each word. I think deeply about things quickly and make useful logical connections between disparate topics that others tend to miss, but I tend to be slow at communicating.
A lot of times I hear music in my head. Usually it's the last thing I listened to, over and over unless I consciously start another song. Some blessed times it's a totally new thing and I scramble to write it down. I can stop this by actually listening to something (with my ears).
I do have times when I dialog inside my head but I don't think it's my normal mode of operation. Usually internal dialog happens after I've had a discussion that didn't go the way I would have liked, and I replay it over and over fine-tuning my arguments. It's too late but often those arguments come out later.
Instead of a dialo when I need to decide or cogitate on something I often turn on the internal music and the answer comes after awhile. I understand it something the agents in Minsky's society of mind. The agents are scurrying around looking for the answer while the supervisory function listens to a tune. The process doesn't work as well if I try to do it as an internal dialog - the dialog seems to get in the way.
So I'm mostly one of these people. I can plan what I am about write/say (but I don't have to) and I can "hear my own void in my head" but only with intent. I have to TRY and have a monologue. It gets kinda tiring after a while.
All these questions about "how can you think and reason". In general you just know things and do them. Even when I am meditating and reflecting I don't really use language. Language is the annoying translation layer at the end to communicate with others.
When it comes to reasoning, I have a PhD. I seem to be able to work things out. I'm not a philosophical zombie. This whole "language is essence of reason" idea is BS. Writing/speaking out big arguments does help keep them organized. I did often have difficulty with "knowing" something without being able to explain or reason why when I was growing up. I've gotten better at introspection as I got older and it has helped. Often the answer just is: "the magic heuristic in my head said so"
I could always do both. I have the internal voice, that talks and thinks and analyses things all the time. But I can also willingly turn it off, pause it and think purely visually, which is much faster than narrating (I can do it in two languages). Thinking visually, like playing silent video or manipulating objects in your mind is useful, but in the end the inner voice always continues with some conclusion. The best example I can give is playing chess. I can play blind chess (no board or physical chess set needed). It is much faster to think visually. Move pieces in your head, imagine positions well in advance, take things back and explore different variants, than it is to narrate: if I play kings pawn forward two squares my opponent will play bishop to e2. Narrating is limiting in this case, and would slow things to a crawl. But when a particularly good movie is found through visual only thinking the voice still kicks in with “Aha that is a good move”. It’s inescapable.
Interesting. I've been actively suppressing verbalization whenever it comes up as far as I can remember -- it is annoying af, as annoying as those silly tunes that get stuck in your head.
Not sure if that actually affected amount of internal monologue I do have, but I definitely don't have it on all the time. Mostly when rehearsing an actual past or expected conversation.
Do you have any tricks on suppressing verbalization? I've found that it feels really wasteful when I realize that half my thoughts are just acting as a translator for the abstract side, instead of keeping it abstract until I get to something I need to verbalize.
Maybe try reading using a speed reading app. I use Comfort Reader [0]. When the words fly by really fast you have to stop sounding the words in your head or won't be able to read the full sentence. For me thinking is like writing and reading to myself so it helps.
When coding, I have a mix of imagery with monologue. Kind of like watching a very technical documentary with a narrator explaining what is happening on the screen.
I also tend to remember a lot of facts after I watch documentaries, sometimes I can recall facts from a documentary many years later. It's similar to how my mind works so it's easy for me to digest.
I can visualize a very complex concept but I need my inner voice to dumb it down so that I can make an actionable decision. Sometimes I talk myself through the same visual concept in different ways to make sense of it from many angles.
I can imagine what it's like to visualize concepts with only abstract imagery, but I feel that in order to actually make decisions, a person needs some kind of mental mechanism to dumb it down. For me, the internal monologue is the best way to dumb down complex concepts and actually make decisions.
Decision-making for me is all about dumbing down very complex inputs and producing a single yes/no output.
I have an endless internal dialogue, and I let it externalize to the point of practicing what I'm going to say out loud. Sometimes it helps me be more articulate, practice jokes, or even technical explanations. Other times it helps reason logically. Sometimes it's not helpful at all.
I have no idea how healthy it is but it's only when I'm alone.
I talk to myself aloud a lot as well. I almost never have any dialog entirely in my mind. I am so used to talking to myself aloud that I have to consciously internalize it if I'm not alone, and I find it very challenging.
Yup. "Do you think in English or in Russian?" -- "huh?.. neither". I can force myself to think "in words". However, most of the time it is something that could be described as colors being kind of physically stretched into shapes or even complete pictures. Converting those in words is a laborious process.
Unlike for author I am fascinated by it, because as I remember my whole life I am thinking in words. Maybe because I was reading since quite young age. I can imagine pictures as well, like people who have songs in their minds, I can imagine Rihanna singing "Umbrela" while imagining pictures from music video. I can imagine a lot of concrete things or songs but I cannot draw those or make such music. Only thing I can imagine and create is what I write.
But thinking in abstract shapes that is something I imagine I would get after taking some psyhodelic drugs, where sounds, and words would become shapes.
Is there something you grew up you could point to the way you are thinking maybe?
My earliest memories stretch before I started talking (which I figured out quite late). I remember certain feelings, colors, sounds, smells even after all those years -- even though I had no words for describing them back then. I believe this is how animals see the world.
Not only that but my inner voice can do impressions: I can have "it" do accents or imitate specific people whose voice I know well.
Also sometimes (albeit rarely) a thought might actually make me smile or even laugh out loud a little out of surprise with no external input so to speak.
Quite weird, come to think of it... do others do this too?
Yes. A lot of my job includes doing voices and impressions, replicating sounds. I've always been a mimic and had a curiosity about sound. So I guess when I'm thinking about an accent or particular voice I'll be going over knotty bits in my mind, trying to nail how to attack a sound with the musculature of the mouth and throat.
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 have both this and aphantasia. Meaning I don't normally hear my thoughts or see anything in my mind. I am able to kinda hear myself, but i have to almost hum. I can not see anything at all the vast majority of the time, but sometimes I feel like I start to see something simple and it quickly goes away
I consider myself lucky in that I can do both of these things seemingly at the same time. The way I describe it is that while my "conscious mind" (i.e. my inner verbal thought train) is engaged in one thing, very often my "subconscious mind" will simultaneously and "spontaneously" provide me with sort of injections of unrelated ideas or solutions to unrelated problems. It's not unrelated to the feeling of waking up in the middle of the night with the answer to a programming problem. On the surface it seems (and can be) distracting, but I liken it to the way Geordi Laforge described the information he gets from his VISOR, sort of picking and choosing what to focus on and what to ignore (like recognizing your name at a cocktail party). Incidentally, I also have ADHD.
Feels like I flip flop a bit. As in, I can hear myself thinking while I type this, but most of the time my thoughts are more abstract (as in, I'm having a hard time writing out an example of one since they're not verbal). I find that after reading a lot, my brain is more talkative.
While the fact that there are two types of people in this respect is interesting, the article seems to be over the top with the "it's ruining my life" bit. Yes, people are different, and some of the ways in which they are different are very fundamental. Deal with it.
My internal monologue doesn't even stop when I'm dreaming. I don't lucid dream, but the internal monologue critiques how things don't make sense (pointing out discontinuity errors etc). It took awhile to find out this isn't ubiquitous
Previous HN threads have talked about how people notice a reduction in their verbal skills shortly after programming for awhile. There's a lot going on in programming that's non linear, so it's useful to not serialize your thoughts then. I've found that listening to music is often a good way to distract the monologue. When I was younger I only listened to instrumental music because I found I couldn't think with lyrics in the background
I have an internal monologue and recently learnt from a colleague that some people, like him, don't. But it didn't blow my mind. I don't get what the big deal is. Do people really think that others experience the universe just like they do.
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.
God I wish. Sometimes I just want to shutoff the voice in my head. Alcohol did wonders for me in this area, unfortunately I can't drink anymore so I have to try suppress it differently, but I have it admit, nothing worked better than alcohol :(
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.
I have my inner voice. When I am thinking, reading, writing or typing I imagine neutral young male fast-speaking voice. But I can imagine other voices and tones.
It is hard to stop this inner voice. But I know a trick. I can start to think in foreign language that I know, than switch to another foreign language in which I know only 10 words. The voice is stopped for a few minutes.
Now I understand why I dislike my own audible voice. Because it is not MINE! MY voice is inside my head and it sounds different. I do not speak much but think a lot.
Moreover. When I going to say something non-trivial, I usually saying it silently inside my head and only after it I can say it aloud. I looks dumb in that moment.
I wonder if there are any notable differences between the two demographics.
For example, I take a while to fall asleep because I can't not have a conversation with myself. Do people without an internal dialog tend to fall asleep faster?
Does the monolog make you more extroverted because you tend to recite statements in your head and therefor have more confidence? Or does it make you more introverted because you tend to question yourself more before speaking?
Does the monolog impact the kinds of jobs or interests you're more likely to persue? Are some subjects easier to understand with or without it? Just how much are personalities impacted by it?
Great, now I'll be up all night thinking about this.
The concept of this conundrum occurred to me years ago when I developed a friendship with a woman who had been deaf since birth. I don't remember what triggered it exactly, but I remember thinking exactly this, "If she's never heard herself speak, then what does her internal monologue sound like? Oh, wait... she's never heard anyone speak, so... <brain melts>".
Similar to the author of the piece, I just have to stop thinking about it every time it pops back into my brain. It's like I get into some recursive loop and eventually blow the stack, unwind the stack trace, abort, and resume my regularly scheduled processes.
This reminds me of some other recent articles about topics like aphantasia (no visual imagination) and severely deficient autobiographical memory (SDAM). People who have these conditions do not realize how different other people think.
I'm one of those that has aphantasia. No visual or auditory imagination for me, so no running monologue in my head, or view of sentences. Or, if it's happening, I can't hear it or see it. Thoughts come to me as concepts, and sort of just pop into my head. Had no idea until a year or two ago that this wasn't how it worked with everyone.
You noted the possibility that you might have mental images or monologue but don't experience them. That's interesting.
I expect someone will object that it's logically contradictory to propose that you have an inner monologue but don't experience it; I don't think it is, actually.
I get migraines. I've experienced them for about forty-five years. They're not just headaches. They're some kind of unusual neural and vascular activity in the brain that can cause a whole slew of weird effects.
One effect that I've experienced many times is called scotoma. It's a phenomenon where a region of the visual field is taken over by a vivid abstract pattern. Scotomas take various shapes, but they generally have a few things in common: they are more vivid than real seen objects; they often flicker rapidly and may move slowly; they often have high-contrast black-and-white-striped zigzag patterns; they may be surrounded by faint or vivid colorful auras that pulse or stream.
I've seen lots of scotomas over the years with all of these attributes.
One time just a few years ago I was reading a good book and I began to notice the mild visual distortions that alert me to an oncoming scotoma. There's nothing much I can do about them, and I was really interested in the book, so I sort of shrugged and figured I'd continue reading until I had to stop.
I never had to stop.
The scotoma came on full-force and took over the center of my visual field. I couldn't see anything except the scotoma directly in front of me.
Nevertheless, I was able to continue reading without any trouble. Well, the scotoma was distracting, but it didn't prevent me from reading.
As you can imagine, I found this really weird. If you don't believe me, I don't really blame you. I found it so surprising that I started reading the book aloud, as if that would somehow serve as a reasonable test that I wasn't simply making up the contents of the book without realizing it.
I continued reading. The scotoma eventually faded away, and I could confirm that, yes, the pages I had read while I couldn't see them were just as I had heard myself reading them aloud.
This experience suggests to me that seeing the book is one process, but consciously experiencing the seeing of it is another, completely separate, process. The migraine sabotaged my ability to consciously experience seeing the book, but it didn't interfere with the process of actually seeing or reading it.
If that's true, it suggests that the process of running an internal monologue, or of constructing internal images, could be separate from the process of being conscious of them. Perhaps you indeed have an internal monologue and you simply don't experience it?
That's really interesting. I can believe it happens. Some portion of your brain is still seeing the words, since the retina and optical nerves aren't affected, it's just that your visual field is getting interference from somewhere else. Like getting interference on an old CRT monitor with a magnet. It affects what you can see, but it doesn't stop anything from seeing the data come through the graphics card itself.
The reason I wonder about whether I am seeing things on a "screen" I can't access has to do with my ability to recognize things. When I see something I've seen before, I immediately recognize it, just like normal people do. So it's saved off somewhere, I just can't access it in the meantime. So it's possible that when I try to imagine a beach or whatever, it's appearing on a screen I can't see. I think of it as if my visual projector has a burnt out bulb. It could be showing it to me if I could somehow change the bulb, possibly.
How many thoughts/ideas/things can you process simultaneously?
I can probably do up to 8 different subjects/thesis, but I also can imagine in: audio, touch, sound, color, space, abstract, visual, time, taste, smell, linguistic, and hyperdimensional. Couple of these things I had to practice though.
That's a hard question for me to answer. I know it sounds weird but "I" am not the one doing the thinking. It happens elsewhere in my brain; I only get notified of the results. So my answer is either 1, 0, or "no idea", depending upon how you look at it. I can keep track of a lot of pieces of a large process or program all at once, but it's happening in the abstract, I guess. This might just be a communication problem, though.
In terms of the senses, I can walk into a busy scene and take everything in. The sounds, the sights, the smells, etc. I seem to be more situationally aware than a lot of other people I interact with. Just no record button. Notes I make to myself or overall impressions stay, but I would not be very helpful as a witness to a crime if I wasn't trying to memorize what I was seeing in the specific.
This is a difficult thing for me to "look at", in some ways I don't do much thinking at all, but am still successful and am thought of as that guy that can figure out the problem when others are stuck.
I realized a few years ago that I have aphantasia, and it blew my mind that most people could conjure images of things when they closed their eyes (to some greater or lesser degree, but more than my zero degree).
I didn't realize that, for example, "mental image" was not just, like, a metaphor for thinking. When I close my eyes, it's black. Just, black. Well, you know, depending on how bright the lights are, etc.
>When I close my eyes, it's black. Just, black. Well, you know, depending on how bright the lights are, etc.
Maybe you already know this, but non-aphantastic (heh) just see black too. When we visualize something, it's a very different experience from seeing anything at all. It's more the knowledge of "if I could see this thing, this is how it would look".
I'd be very interested in knowing what really happens in our brains. It feels like stringing together a bunch of information and assembling a spectral "print preview" that you can't really see.
> I realized a few years ago that I have aphantasia, and it blew my mind that most people could conjure images of things when they closed their eyes (to some greater or lesser degree, but more than my zero degree).
Then it might blow your mind further to know that I can visualize things easier with my eyes open. I overlay them onto my visual field and they're _far_ more vivid with my eyes open than shut, by an order of magnitude at least.
That would have blown my mind a few years ago before I knew about aphantasia, but not any more. I have spent a while digging deeper into it, and it has even come up in my recent graduate studies in cognitive science (to the great amusement of my program colleagues).
I am 100% jealous of your ability to do that, however.
I have recently learned that it might be possible to train myself to invoke mental images. There is a technique where a person with aphantasia sits their eyes shut and starts by imagining, e.g., a green apple. But you don't imagine it fully at first. You start with its different qualities, like imagine roundness for a while. And then greenness. Then shininess. Then some gradient. Then a stem. Then more detailed shape. Et cetera.
I have had a tiny bit of success with this technique, or at least I have fooled myself into thinking I have? If I try this, after a while I can start to picture a green apple, though it is like a faint, faded ancient photograph with almost no color or detail and certainly no vividness. But there does seem to be some little bit of something there.
I used to have an internal monologue when I was a kid, but it felt less efficient, so I trained myself out of it by around 20. By most objective measures it did make my thinking more efficient but reduced my wit and articulation.
I do imagine conversations with people though, usually when I'm trying to work out how to say something. When I figure it out, I stop the imaginary conversation. Occasionally these imaginary conversations become so vivid that I'll actually speak out loud. It's a quirk of mine that my friends and family giggle about. In my defense, Adam Smith did this too, so I'm in good company.
One thing that I noticed when I was a child was that I didn't internally sound words out when I read them. I have to consciously switch to "hearing" the words in my head when I read. My elementary school cohort all told me that they always heard the words when they read and I have found this to largely be the case when I talk about it with adults now.
I think this allowed me to read faster at an early age as I was not limited to the tempo of speech when reading. Certainly this is true for many people.
One drawback I have noticed: I don't get puns when I am reading unless I slow down and voice out the words.
I rarely have internal monolog, but instead have an internal dialog. Most of the time I'm explaining ideas to people, sometimes arguing with them.
I've found this is how I think through things. "Talking" things out with the various models of people I have in my head can be useful...
I've found when there isn't conversation happening, its typically replaced by music. I can hear and play songs perfectly in my mind. Listening to music with headphones helps turn off the conversation so I can focus on other tasks more fully.
I used to be concerned I was crazy for having these dialogs, but, I get along ok. :)
I've never heard my voice in my head. When I hear folks talk about it, I assume something like this scene from a game where the character Jaina is blaming herself for numerous failures. Though perhaps the 1984 version of Dune would be closer? [2]
I can, but never have by default. I assume folks are talking about a behavior that is not induced consciously, as if they have their own situational narrator.
From what I can tell, if you don't have imagery, you don't have audio. If you happen to be someone who can hear audio internally (audio hallucinations) yet don't form imagery internally (historic iconic memories, faces, shapes, creative viz, etc.) hit me up on email.
I think in visual outlines when thinking visual things, and have to think a bit more if I want to fill it in with detail. I use audio when reading words, but otherwise think abstractly (like not audio or video, etc). Sometimes I self talk, many times I don't.
Talk to ham radio operators who know morse code, for them its fairly common. After awhile, especially in a competitive contest, you start to hear stuff in the static. Sometimes because there's an actual station there trying to reach you, sometimes not.
Hams and hunters are the only people I can think of in modern life who listen very closely to silence, or noise anyway.
The trick will be finding one with Aphantasia, given my "proof" requires looking for someone who doesn't visualize AT ALL, yet still hears regular audio hallucinations.
There's a somewhat controversial book called The Origins of Consciousness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind which seems to indicate audio hallucinations were quite common in earlier periods.
Radar & Sonor Operators, Radio Operators, Anyone in combat, Anyone on watch/sentry, Datalink Operators (watching messages go by was a little like Cipher watching The Matrix), to name a few...
You're right. After coming home from any big 48-hr long CW contest I swear the quiet whirring of my refrigerator's compressor is trying to speak to me in morse.
Huh. I wouldn't say I can't visualize "at all" but it's a faint, crude version of actually seeing, like 1% of what it would actually be like, with great effort. On the other hand I can "hear" a voice clear as day if I want to.
I'm not in the habit of "talking" to myself as many people seem to, the soundtrack of my mind can easily be silent. But if I want to rehearse what I want to say or something I can imagine it clearly.
Diagnosed ADHD here. I just have this constant low-level music video / hurricane of ideas / songs / designs / trajectories going in my head. Started high-school at 11, university at 15. Played tennis competitively to provincial level.
That's a really crude approximation ... will try to clarify. I do have an internal monologue, but often I'm not speaking to myself verbally. As I'm writing this, I'm hearing it in my own voice, in my head. EDIT> "hearing" is approximate because I don't feel anything in my ears, and it's different from hearing a recording of my voice. I don't feel my ear-drums moving, e.g. I just have the very clear sensation that I am speaking these words, and I can even feel them on my tongue, although my tongue is not moving. <EDIT
When I'm thinking, but not writing, it's more visual / tactile. The impressions of ghostly visuals, but I'm not actually seeing anything, just feeling that they're there. Like I can feel and spin a cube in front of me, but I'm still seeing the monitor, not the cube. I know where all the vertices, are though.
Often have that anxious feeling in the chest like I want to blurt something out, but am keeping it in. So ideas fly in, but too fast for words. Words are much too slow for thinking. But a feeling of um .. ah ... er .. um is about the only internal vocalization I can get as these ideas crash and pull in different directions.
I often have to explicitly speak out loud or monologue to give some momentary permanence to my thoughts. Otherwise they just kind of get whipped away and tattered in this mental hurricane.
And yet, I can just happily sit and look out a window, but I'm experiencing some combo of really, really, looking at things and bouncing around in my head.
Speaking of not really understanding how different other people's experiences are -- my vision is starting to deteriorate now that I'm in middle age. It's so crazy to me not to be able to see everything. Like, people would tell me that they can't see my face without their glasses, but I had no real appreciation of of how different this would be. I'm bummed out that I can't see individual hairs from across the room, lol.
I have found myself in this mode of thinking for quite a while, sometime in recent memory I started thinking through writing and taking an honest look at my information diet. As a result, seems that things are much quieter with the internal dialogue. I can also attest to this change seems to be a consequence of staying active as well. Not sure why that's the case, but perhaps I'm not as reliant on thinking in that way as I used to be. I can definitely see how it would be an advantage give the onslaught of information being processed.
To answer some of the questions that the author posed, how do people without an internal monologue formulate ideas, maybe think about it this way: Those voices in your head, how do they formulate ideas? Before the words form, there's a construct - slightly out of reach, an uncontrollable yet influenceable bubbling. That voice in your head is not your brain - it's not your thoughts, it more like a second mouth and your brain pulling the strings.
I presume.
Of course, I'm not in your head, so I couldn't tell you for sure.
I've never realised that there was this divide between people, but it actually makes a lot of sense to me. Some people have a barrier, a pre-speech-speech, other people don't. Some have more neurons or less neurons in this half-way house. I have a vague recollection of people reporting losing their internal monologue after a lobotomy, but I may be wrong on that.
If I had to guess, with my programmer-with-very-little-neuro-science background, it seems like a natural way that our brains form. Sometimes all the neurons specialise for speech directly connected to your mouth, other times a cluster of neurons specialise for speech with a disconnect. I suspect like most things, it isn't fully genetic - though it probably plays a part.
Personally, I find myself monologuing the first few words that I'm typing, and from then on I'm reading it off the screen. I have an idea of where I want the sentence to go, then I re-read it and decide better of it.
It does mean that writing emails especially, takes me an absolute age to say something remarkably simple. Speech is unaffected, though I'm never the loudest voice in the room and am particularly hesitant to butt in (and feel really bad when I try)
When I replay arguments with a particularly frustrating person, I often find myself quietly vocalising as the emotion rises.
And when I have a mental block on a word (which happened a couple of times writing this - "construct" is still not the right word above, but I can't find a better one), often the voice in my head will still keep playing with words to try and prompt the rest of my brain to do its job. I would love to see whether internal monologues make for better or worse wordsmiths. Or the effect the divide has on meditation.
Also, possibly related, I find it very very difficult to visualise pictures in my head. I dream fine (possibly in black and white - which was how I trained myself out of bedwetting as a kid), but asking me to imagine a picture of a beach, the picture is horribly hazy.
I sent the link to my girlfriend, and she didn't find it very interesting until I told her that I don't have this internal monologue, and it turns out she does. Neither of us knew about the other scenario. I visualize and feel things and only use my internal voice if I'm picturing talking to someone else. Even when I'm reading, I don't hear an internal voice. We've watched the Dexter series together and I thought that all of his internal voice was for added drama!
First, if you liked this, check out "Neurolinguistic Programming", it's like the "machine code" of subjective experience.
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Second, I'm an internal-dialog person (FWIW), when I picked up one of the Star Trek (original series-based) novels and read it my mind spontaneously (as in it surprised me) used the actors' voices for the characters dialog. E.g. when I read Kirk's dialog I heard it in Shatner's voice automatically! Same for the other characters. It was pretty startling.
Very interested in trying LSD or other psychedelics for this reason. I'd love to be able to experience what it's like to shut off my default mode network.
Sometimes I do have internal monologue (although I cannot actually hear it) and sometimes it isn't. And sometimes I don't know the words for what I think of. When reading English writing it is a kind of pronouncing, but if it is Chinese (or other ideographic kind of language) then it isn't. When thinking of my own stuff is again different from this. (English is the only language I can write/speak well; the others I am not so good at.)
I was thinking about this the other day. I was wondering how people that were born deaf think, because I think in my own voice... This is pretty interesting.
When I’m not reading or writing though I think very spatially. Usually no words are in my head and I can kind of place thought in my visual space. Let’s say I need to remember to do something when I’m done working at my computer. I can look at say the door or a chair and “place” the thing I need to remember there.
A small observation: I’m Norwegian, but can speak English fairly well. When I lived abroad for a while, after some time I suddenly noticed that my thoughts had switched language (it switched somewhat back and forth, though). This still happens when I have longer conversations with foreigners, thus typically speaking English. However, thinking in English goes slower and is a bit limiting, as my English is still way worse than my Norwegian.
I don't have any internal monologue. I would have to read something phonetically or deliberately subvocalise to achieve that.
I begin to understand why other people (such as the ms) might not be happy that I have a podcast on while reading, and able to listen and talk to her at the same time. She might have an internal monologue but it's something nice never thought to ask. From her perspective it's a cacophony, for me it is almost soothing.
And then there is Aphantasia[1]. I didn't realize this was a thing. When people spoke about picturing something in my mind, I always assumed they weren't being literal. Discovering they were was shocking. It's such a foreign concept to me, to picture something in my mind literally.
I went to an English-speaking school where the majority of the students did not have English as their first language. I remember asking them what language they would think in. Everybody understood the question (so maybe they all had internal monologue?) and the answer would generally be that they thought in their native language for “everyday” things, but in English for the “academic” things that they had learned at school.
There is a science fiction novel by Robert J. Sawyer titled "Quantum Night" which touches on this. Basically, "three states of minds" which amount to "normal, zombie, psychopath".
The story explores "flipping the switches" on a global scale, among other things.
The hardest thing for me to come to own up for myself is not just taking responsibility for my own inner monologue, but realizing that thoughts encompass much more than my inner monologue. I have wordless thoughts are deeper, more subtle and these things are thoughts too. I have to take responsibility for these as well.
It makes sense once you think about animals, who don't have a formal language yet clearly are capable of thought.
TIL the phrase "internal monologue" is not figurative for the majority of people.
I never "hear a voice" in anything comparable to a literal sensory experience. I can choose to internally "articulate" language that way, with the same sort of effort of choosing/willing to summon a visual image...
...but that is an effort and an act, not a side effect.
Are people hearing themselves think in something like real time???
Wow! Is this a hidden science that we missed to research as a society? Understanding these elementary pieces of thinking seems to me to be a science probably hugely important for AI research and tons of socially relevant questions. Anyone know of scientific papers on this? A catalogue of human ways of thinking, experiments to prove them, analysis of their impact on daily life or career etc..?
> Is this a hidden science that we missed to research as a society?
Yeah, it's called Neurolinguistic Programming, and it's not quite a science yet. (E.g. the Wikipedia entry just straight-up calls it pseudo-science.)
In brief, it started with linguistic analysis of transcripts of videos of therapy session with some very talented and successful therapists. (The analysis was informed by the same Transformational Grammar of Chomsky that also informs formal language design.) It was noticed that some people tend to favor "preferred" sensory systems, and a model of subjective experience was developed that allowed for eliciting and encoding subjective processing "strategies". (E.g. most good spellers use visual memory to recall a picture of a word, and then check it kinesthetically for correctness ("it feels right"), and read it off from their minds' eye. Bad spellers typically do something else. Teach a bad speller the good "strategy" and they can suddenly spell well.)
That was nearly half a century ago.
"The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed." ~William Gibson
I surprised me as well. And something I've always done is ask myself "why do I think that?" or "believe this particular thing is true?" and take apart my own reasoning to see where it came from and how it came to be.
An interesting follow-on investigation would be to check to see if couples fare better or worse if the partners match in the presence of an internal dialog or not.
I used to do more internal monologuing. But if you sit quietly and observe your thoughts, you may notice that whenever you "speak" a thought to yourself, that thought was already in your mind beforehand. The speaking adds nothing to the thought, except to reinforce it or loop it back. That is not bad, but a lot of the time it's unnecessary and in fact slows you down.
I have no inner monolog, although I once did. I consider it an achievement.
Verbal creativity is the shallowest kind. Freeing yourself from words enables thought that cannot be represented in the words you have. Most potential ideas can't be, at their beginning.
To communicate new ideas, you might need to invent new language for the job. That is where all language comes from: idea first, then the word.
I've noticed that I always use internal monologue for all System 2[0] tasks and that I've never used it for any System 1 task. As for internal imagery, I seem to be using that for both System 1 and System 2 tasks. I cannot think of any counterexamples. But if you can think of one, I'll be surprised.
[0] System 1 vs System 2 as described in Thinking, Fast and Slow
Very interesting: this is one possible explanation for all the times I've heard someone say something that doesn't make sense to me, and I go "Can you hear yourself right now? How did that sound to you when you thought about saying it".
And I guess the answer is no: they can't. This might genuinely be the first time they've heard those words uttered.
Sorry for the unsolicited feedback and I know that it was an example, but to me saying that in particular is quite rude.
If you did not understand what your peer said you would likely get a better response if you said you did not understand and try to ask a question to have it phrased in another way.
No apologies necessary: I generally try to be as generous as possible when interpreting people's words. In pretty much every case where I've actually done that the person I was talking to agreed that the words didn't quite match the intended message.
For those with an internal monologue, what person do you hear it in? For example, I always think in 2nd person, as in "we should eat eggs for breakfast", but almost no one else I've asked about this has had that. I'm curious if thinking as "I should do X" vs "You should do X" correlates with other personality traits.
I think in second person too! I also coach myself and reassure myself pretty often, e.g "it's not a big deal", "you'll get over it" and so on.
I think the idea that there's such variation between individuals inner monologues is really fascinating. Particularly because I'm certain I can't point to a reason why I talk to myself the way I do.
First person for me. I had never even considered a different perspective. Trying to make myself think in the second person just feels alien, but I have no idea if I'm the abnormal one.
> I would tell them that I could look at myself in the mirror and have a full blown telepathic conversation with myself without opening my mouth and they responded as if I had schizophrenia. One person even mentioned that when they do voice overs in movies of people’s thoughts, they “wished that it was real.”
I think this author has an inaccurate understanding of people who do not have an "auditory" inner monologue.
Think of it this way: a lot of people don't vocalize text as they read it. I do not. I am still able to read, and I still "understand" what is being read, but I don't need to turn it into voices and sound it out, to gain that understanding. Tbh, I find it slows me down.
Inner monologues are the same way. People still have rich inner "conversations" even if they aren't vocal ones. Which is what I do -- I'm not really sure the best way to describe it, but I'm able to have a "debate" between inner arguments without mocking it out as two people talking to each other (I mean, I can if I want to -- but I find it unnecessary and slow, personally). I'm sure a lot of people are the same way.
I think the author is getting a bit high on the idea that he has a richer inner life than the people around him, and needs to think about alternate interpretations.
My interpretation is that the author isn't referring to people who suppress vocalization by choice but rather to people who can't enable vocalization in the first place.
Barely related: I told my father that instead of sounding words or hearing a voice, I "see" words on a page scrolling by very quickly. He didn't believe me. As I got older it turned into a voice, which I preferred because the voice is able to be changed to anything I want. My grandfather, Captain Picard, myself.
Love this thread. Aside from being an ADHD love-in it's reminded me of the usefulness of trying to think in different modes. Now I'm wondering "How do I really think of this or that programmatic object?" Could thinking about it in a different mode help me hold the idea better, get more insight? Thanks!
I remember asking my French teacher if she ever “thought” in French, and she had no idea what I meant. She apparently had no internal monologue.
I assumed there was something with me for “thinking” in words. I tried to train myself to think more abstractly, and maybe it worked to some extent, but I’m not sure this was for the better.
Perhaps the same thing with day dreaming. I get the feeling there are vastly different experiences.
I once read about someone who said something like 'After taking the medicine [or something like that], when I stared at a clouds to daydream, nothing happened'. And I thought; what do you mean, what should have happened..?
(this was posted ages ago but) have you ever held a concept in your mind without knowing the word for it? And you can feel the concept just as well as if you did?
I imagine it's a bit like that. Maybe these people have exactly the same experience, but it bypasses the auditory feedback (or whatever) parts of the mind.
The part of the brain that is your thoughts is the activity of a nuralnetwork.
It can manifest in a wide range of ways.
Using the narrative of the internal dialog is interesting way of conceptualising thoughts. And I suppose there might be benefits to those who use the concept of internal dialog to understand themselves.
Absolutely shocked about this, that some people don't have one. Re-read the article a couple times. Went down a wikipedia rabbit hole and found this[0]. Makes me wonder if there are leftover developments in consciousness that are sticking around.
My inner monologue is basically a consciousness I'm trying to control. It's not a split personality, per se. It's "me", but an OS running my random thoughts all the time. When I dream I sometimes dream in a different language that I (mostly) don't speak (Spanish, or German ... sometimes Japanese which must mostly be from memories there because I haven't studied it). The dreams make me think there's a latent function that keeps popping up for a reset.
I genuinely don't understand how someone could function without being able to "talk to yourself" and essentially narrate your life.
I swear, a few years ago, I never verbalized thoughts in my head. It wasn't a thing to me. Then, I remember very much when I started "speaking" in my head with words, and since I started having these monologues, I haven't been able able to stop...
I remember when I had the same realization, it wasn't just that some people couldnt have internal conversations it was that some people were unable to feel empathy and others felt too much.
We are not the same and its quite a shock to realize
I have an internal monologue. I also find that I can "sing" music in my mind, and that while I do this, I can feel a sense of fingering one of the instruments that I play, and breathing, without actually moving a muscle.
interesting stuff. my internal monologue is encoded into a pseudo-language to the point that were I ever to speak aloud, it would seem mostly unintelligible. this stems from a secret language a few friends and I had at school, to communicate silly phrases without other pupils or teachers eavesdropping, and has undergone evolution in terms of vocabulary and complexity since then, at least for my internal self. sometimes it freaks me out, but it does make coping with the inbuilt prejudices easier. I am quite fearful of something like dementia causing a leak in the hull..
I really want to know if stuff like introversion/extroversion and depression has any correlation to this. I feel like my inner monologue keeps me company most of the time and I’d be much lonelier without it.
Mine doesn't. I also barely read growing up. I figure they're related as a past girlfriend was a lit major who read books all her life and couldn't imagine me not having conversations in my mind.
So, if people "see words" when they think them - what did they see before their inner eye when they were kids and couldn't read yet (and therefore couldn't assign meaning to written words).
I figured everybody had internal monologue. Sometimes when I'm at work and in the zone, in the moment I realize I'm not sure if my voice was in my head or if I said it out loud on accident.
Uh. How do you learn a new language if you're unable to maintain an inner dialogue? Most of my learning happens by myself in my head, constructing sentences, thinking about grammar concepts.
I have a friend who has no mind's eye - it wasn't until he was in his late teens that he realized that other people can imagine places/images in their heads. And was flabbergasted.
I'd posit that the strength of the internal monologue is tied to one's propensity and skill in language. People that think primarily in linguistic terms probably have an easier time forming their thoughts into the structure of language, whereas a person who interprets the world in primarily in visual or spatial terms would see more mental images, maps, or connections.
Unfortunately, we live in a society strongly dominated by language, so the "cultural toolset" for understanding and controlling thoughts is optimized for linguistic thinkers. I often wonder what a society structured around visually-oriented people would look like.
And I'd posit that you're wrong. :-) The reason? I do neither.
I do not have an internal monologue. I can construct one if I want to, but I do not have an "inner voice". When I type this, I do not prepare the sentences before I type them. They come to me as I type. I know exactly what I want to convey, but the sentence doesn't exist inside my head as a recognizable language or as any structure I can describe. The funny part? I don't think in neither English nor Norwegian (my native language), and I never have.
When it comes to imagery - I cannot construct a clear image of much at all in my head. I can, if I try hard, construct vague images of my mother, father, wife, daughter and very close friends in my head - but they're vague. Very, very vague. I have no problem recognizing people, though.
I do have fantastic spatial skills. If I walk through an area, I can see imagine it from different angles and positions - but not as a picture. It's abstract, without imagery. It's difficult to explain how it's processed in my head. I can spin things and know exactly how things will "look" from a different angle .. but I can't "visualize" it. This seems self-contradictory - but let me try to give a real life example. I visited Manila some 15 years ago. 10 years ago (5 years after being there) - I was going to show someone where I'd been on google maps. I had never looked at the area on a map before. I could just zoom in on the city, start from the airport, recognize the patterns from above, and zoom in on various things I had visited - switch to street view and show it from the angles I wanted. In seconds.
I can visit woods I've been to 20 years ago, and recognize where I am, and know the paths.
Still, no inner monologue. Not much mental imagery. Heck of a lot of connections though - but very very abstract.
I was saying more that "language" is just one way of processing, along with "visual" and "spatial" and perhaps innumerable others. It sounds like you have a spatial method of processing the world.
> I can spin things and know exactly how things will "look" from a different angle
This is essentially the spatial equivalent to the inner monologue of the language-oriented processor.
Interesting. When I've seen other describe this kind of spatial skill, I've always imagined it being with imagery. Which I don't have. I wouldn't be able to draw an image of it, except xkcd-like 2-d stuff.
my mind is not racing, unless I am trying to solve a problem or if I am having irrational thoughts (from a bad interaction, a breakup, etc)
My mind feels more reactionary at times, as if some stimuli is provided and then I think about it. I definitely have the internal monologue but it's not happening all the time.
I'm also the type of person where you tell me something and I'll have to think about for a few hours/days before I can get back to you.
it might be more accurate to say (as a hypothesis), is that whatever this "inner monologue" thing is, people don't seem to experience it the same, even if it does exist/not-exist
does it make sense if sometimes i'm "talking" inside in my head and other times i am just doing things "silently", like understanding stuff without any voice in my head??
What about this revelation ruined that guys day? Why did his previously-uncontested worldview about internal dialogues require it to be applied to everyone around them?
I hope that others get out of the amazing comments and conversations here that we all think alike in some ways and differently in others.
More importantly, I hope more people can be convinced to reach the conclusion that different ways of thinking and/or doing things in no way automatically mean they are superior/inferior, but rather, that for how amazingly complex we are as creatures, different ways of doing things may be better for different people.
People with internal monologue basically think in language. They are often very articulate. Jordan Peterson said he thinks in words, and he talk very fast.
I think in abstract and concrete imagery, and only found out recently that other people think in words.
I think thinking abstractly hinders my verbal skill as there is a translation layer from idea to words.
It's indeed mind blowing when you first realize how other thinks.
So I'm gonna sound jaded but this isn't news to me. It was never in an "official" capacity (student at best) but this "result" turns out in interviews, discussions, in social sciences (cognitive psychology first of all, but certainly anthropology as well, philosophy too, it's a cross-domain topic). You just have to listen carefully and someday you hit this weird fact.
It's too long to explain here, but there's another realization that somehow helps describing such discrepancies between human beings. The question is that of 'normalcy', versus the 'abnormal', the notion of 'deviance', which leads to 'pathological', 'syndroms' and other supposedly 'undesirable' mutations.
Well, the history of evolution itself is that, among a population of "normal" beings, the next stage for any species always begins with 1 mutation, 1 "freak" who has a new thing, and will eventually spread to the whole species if that trait is worth it for survival and better adaptation.
There are enough accounts of historical psychology research to affirm that biologically, cognitively, psychologically speaking, there's virtually no difference between human beings 4,000 years ago and today; a baby from then raised now or vice versa would grow up just normal in context — we know this because every witness from the past said so, there's a recurring chain of normalcy if you will, and reading Ancient texts yields fairly "normal" psychological profiles. (Also think that 1,000 years is but 30 generations or so.)
And yet there are tests measuring dramatically changing cognitive abilities over just a century — take attention span in the last 40 years, it's appaling.
This means, IMHO, that minute change keeps occurring much more than we might suspect, continuously, but over long enough periods that human history is dwarfed by meaningful special (species) evolution. It also means that right now, a minority among us have evolved to what is the next stage for all of us, but it will only be obvious in hindsight.
The 18 over 91 quoted by OP has having no spoken dialectic (rather through other forms of encoding than language/speech) may be a dying breed, an artefact from the past (the animal in us who hasn't fully integrated speech maybe); they might as well be the future, how human brains would evolve as they adapt ("beyond-speech humans" in that case). Maybe the real path is people who have the ability for both, a switch.
A fair point was made in a previous to-level comment about the "speed limit" of speech, in terms of bandwidth or information density, and this is echoing how e.g. the math genius in us tends to think, when notation becomes object beyond than abstraction in and of itself and there are no words anymore but concepts, often impossible to visualize anyway (e.g. it's not a "function" or "f" anymore, in context it's become a "..." — no word but a feeling of what it is and what it does and how we could manipulate this specific thing).
I guess the take away is there are many discrepancies that we would never suspect had we never talked to others, and a lot of what we take for "granted" about human nature is typically a strong hint for something that's very subjective. At least in perception, if not in value. And that while we are entitled to our own hierarchy of values in the present, we simply cannot possibly judge the endgame, we can't tell today who's embodying the shape of things to come — just that some of us are, some of us must, if we are indeed evolving.
There's no way this doesn't have some sort of influence on other skills and abilities. Possibly good or bad. Studies on such effects in monologue lacking people would be fascinating if they showed differences.
