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Comment by StavrosK | Hacker News Reader

I can attest to this. I don't have an inner monologue (not that I can't, I just don't), I stopped in my teens. Nowadays, if I do talk to myself internally, I can feel the idea forming initially in milliseconds, and then the internal monologue just puts it in words, but it's just for amusement, it's not something necessary for thought. Most of the time (like right now, when writing this comment) I skip the monologue entirely.

It makes sense to me that this is exactly how we talk. We don't think things out at first in our heads, we just form an idea and then say the words to communicate it.

I was talking about this with a friend, entirely incidentally, and it turns out that he does the same thing too. I find it hard to believe we're that rare.

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Me too. Thought is more fluid; putting it into words concretizes it, collapses the possibilities of the waveform. Somewhat, formalizes it.

Words are a serialization format for thought. There are different formats; there are also different bindings possible for the same information in the same format. Grammars are used to describe both. Actually, important early work on regular and context free grammars was done by a linguist.

Of course, none of that shows that thought is analogous to graphs of data structures. But I suspect if we ever develop direct brain-to-brain communication (i.e. prelinguistic telepathy), we'll see similar problems to interoperating programs written by different people at different times in different contexts for different purposes.

> Thought is more fluid; putting it into words concretizes it, collapses the possibilities of the waveform. Somewhat, formalizes it.

That is a very good description.

I discussed this topic with a colleague recently, and we both agreed that putting thoughts into words takes conscious effort. Though I suspect that is not so for the majority of people, whose default mode of thinking is distinctly verbal, even when not talking or writing.

Yes but I think you might also find that a lot of times this mental abstraction/short hand is where bias lives. This is why it's so effective to verbalize problems. You frequently see patterns and logical fallacies only once you verbalize a train of thought. Therapy in general is a great example of this, but also the "rubber ducky trick" in software where you explain the problem to an imaginary rubber ducky sitting on your monitor (or call over a colleague and explain it to them etc.) and you magically figure out the problem just by verbalizing. Happens all the time for me at least, speaking of bias :)

I'm incredibly thankful I don't have this most of the time, but just a few days ago I got one of my occasional migraines where I get temporarily a type of aphasia that makes it so I can't remember a word other than to know the sounds coming out of my mouth are not correct, I can't parse written language, and I forget a lot of words.

It's fascinating to me because it lasts only 22 minutes, but man is it incredibly frustrating. Being intermittently aphasic is really fascinating intellectually though because I can feel/watch as the part of the brain you're describing is temporarily shut down or working improperly.

I can often say one or two words and then eight of gibberish, knowing exactly what I intended to say (in meaning, but with no valid internal monologue) but the words just coming out garbled. I can focus really hard and make a specific sound, but I can't do things like "awk" because it's too complex of a physical motion to make with my jaw and tongue. I can basically intentionally make baby sounds, occasionally a word escapes as intended, but mostly it's just bizarre obviously wrong sounds -- slightly different each time I say the word but mostly similar.

Brains and language are really weird.

With regard to your comment about thinking without monologue, I tried doing that for about a year by using some meditation techniques since it seemed like an interesting idea to avoid "mistranslation" of an idea I fully grok already into language. I'm now convinced that what happens when I talk it through to myself is that data compression is occurring that lets me store a lower fidelity, but longer lasting and more communicatable version of the concept. My memory suffered a lot that year, and many of the concepts were fully lost.

Not to be that person, but if you haven't already, you might want to get a professional to look into that, just in case.

Yeah, migraines doing this isn't unusual. Nothing worth worrying about =) Thanks for the concern.

I've noticed this when speaking about complex topics. The unvocalized thought will be a the edge of my brain, and while, with simpler topics (such as this), I pre-vocalize it internally before speaking, with complex topics, I am unable to, and instead, the final vocalization just happens unconsciously without any internal "rehearsal".

Some insights I even have trouble putting into words, and I stumble for a bit trying to explain them to co-workers.

>It makes sense to me that this is exactly how we talk. We don't think things out at first in our heads, we just form an idea and then say the words to communicate it.

This sounds pretty familiar to me - I feel communication is like serializing my thoughts, which happens without internal monologue. It seems to me like everyone would think this way, but I have no idea.

I'm really curious about this. Was stopping your inner monologue as a teen a conscious decision or did it just happen? If it was a conscious decision, how did you do it?

It wasn't a conscious decision, I remember noticing that I had no inner monologue continually, it'd almost never stop. Years later, I realized I just didn't speak out loud in my head except for a few occasions.

I think it may be related to the fact that I don't subvocalize when reading, maybe. Even right now, when thinking about this reply, I can feel what I want to say forming in my mind, but it's not words, it's just a concept and then I put it in words while typing it.

I'm sorry I couldn't be more useful, alas.

I have internal monologue only when I'm trying or planning to talk, to write something or debug something with rubber duck. And even then it's more like dialogue.

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