Not everyone has an internal monologue
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ryanandrewlangdon.wordpress.com
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.
- 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.
For 2, there needs to be reciprocity and honesty (even silent). We shouldn't regard ourselves as below/above, but may be ingrained and diminishing.
While I say the world is round is the correct perspective.
Are we gas lighting each other?
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).
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.
Gist: don't think too much, it's gonna be okay.
Is it? Buddhist monks would likely disagree with you.
Everything in moderation I guess
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.
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.
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 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.)
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".
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).
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.
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.
It probably has to do with having little ability to intuitively understand what other people would think.
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.
A few links:
https://bookofbadarguments.com/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-informal/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetoric https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-rhetoric/
Makes it sound like you make foot fetish videos!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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
Learned myself to read before getting to primary school.
Also can bypass verbal thought. Can internally hear and visualize mostly anything. Don't recall not being able to internally hear or visualize things.
I've never had anyone else remember or experience this before and I think its important.
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).
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.
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.
https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2009/03/what_was_the_matrix....
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
Of maybe I’m just weird.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Edited to be less long winded. :)
Sometimes when I’m very sleepy, I can simulate friends and relatives talking to an uncanny degree, but not at any other time.
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.
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?
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.
Also do this. Very rarely to "myself", nearly always someone else.
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.
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.
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.
Careful with this, hearing damage or tinnitus (ringing in the ears) are both dangers. They often come along with each other.
*weird to get a downvote for warning about these dangers... I have both of these and want to help others avoid my mistakes.
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 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.
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.
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 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 think it's all my internal monologue voices feeling trapped living in one head. At least we're self-aware..
- 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.
I wouldn't include thinking through upcoming conversations, texts, tweets, emails, posts, presentations, or phone calls.
Let's say you need to run three errands and eat dinner on the way home. How do you decide what to do when, and make sure you have what you need?
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 ...
"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)."
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/language-thought/#MentCom...
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..
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.
It is much sexier though than irl. I wonder why is that?
On the other hand, I can speak much faster yay. Why?
Is your voice reading this comment too? Maybe.
Do you feel like you are conversing with an oddly being? Maybe.
I am alive. Where is my mind reading tech?
Well, now it is. Thank you (and me I guess for being so susceptible).
Now I wonder if your reading speed can improve by choosing a voice from here https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MotorMouth
Can you remember someone saying something they said, in their voice?
Start with the memory, and then tack on the new sentence at the end of it.
Search your feelings, you know it to be true. Now you read the rest of this sentence in Darth Vader's voice.
Maybe related, I don't always experience my thoughts via an internal monologue. Maybe roughly 70% of my internal thoughts are abstract and nonverbal.
Arnold Schwazenegger: "I'll Be Back!"
Aqua Lene: "I'm a barbie girl, in a barbie world. It's fantastic, it's all plastic!"
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.
Just at the realization struck me, my inner voice said knowingly "Heeeellloo there". Ahaha, I'm going to bed now.
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.
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.
- "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.
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."
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?
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.
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.
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.
FWIW, my experience lines up very closely to yours.
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.
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 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 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.
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 :)
Neural interfaces will be a game changer. I'm so excited for them.
It helped me through school though. I cannot imagine going through classes without daydreaming. It sounds like torture.
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.
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.
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.
If I could press a button, I would trade almost all my creativity for sanity/logic.
Are they fractal shapes, or like you'd see in a kalaidoscope perchance?
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.
Ze Frank has a good video on this where he quotes Jung's work. https://youtu.be/u2cMjeSvZSs?t=184 Artists say life begins when you leave your comfort zone, in regards to making good art.
I find it still an important driver in life to follow that burst of ideas. The only way for me to raise up an idea structure or skill is to follow that buzz upwards. My capacity to imagine is jammed packed with meaningful content now and it grows a weight of it's own.
I 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.
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.
If you try this, report back.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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).
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Of course, if they're causing you anxiety, you find them intrusive, or you fear acting on them, you should discuss it with somebody.
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).
[0] https://www.wbur.org/endlessthread/2018/06/29/the-call-of-th...
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 think it was Feynman who said you don't understand something unless you can teach it.
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.
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.
On layers, it’s like there is a second contrarian thread that pops up during controversial topics. Like some safety or auditing function.
You shouldn't feel guilty for having a brain which gives you outrageous ideas. You should only worry if you can't filter them appropriately.
My understanding is that part of schizophrenia can be experiencing those ideas as an external voice.
> 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?)
Link to the scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3P4_E3GhUv8
I do try to “step aside” sometimes though. I think meditation has helped me hone that technique.
...can anyone else do this? I actually find it supremely weird.
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.
[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've tried that and 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Can you also imagine your friends' voices?
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.
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.
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.
Edit: As I was typing this, "La Macarena" popped into my head.
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...
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.
Since I don't know the song it is of course just the chorus.
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.
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.
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.
Works reasonably well for me.
Isn't this the experience of getting a song "stuck in your head?"
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 should add that I find myself with a song stuck in my head all the time as well.
But have you heard of Bob Milne? He can listen to four different symphonies in his head at the same time: https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/14867...
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.
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.
I do it frequently. Sometimes I can't stop myself from doing it, which can be annoying.
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 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.
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.
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/14867...
I can even hear the vocals, they're just gibberish until I make a conscious effort to memorize them.
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?
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.
http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/607/2/Feynman.pdf
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.
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.
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.
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'll give it a try.
“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.
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 feel like that experiment would be easy to contaminate..
Sometimes if I'm stuck in speech/subvocalizing mode it can take awhile to get out of it.
I think the easiest way to tell if I'm subvocalizing or not by checking my current reading speed. Subvocalizing can slow things down.
Also I think I'm more liable to subvocalize during fiction, with lots of dialogue involved. Acting out the characters in my head slightly.
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.
Just start looking at text and don't let yourself say the words in your head.
Maybe I haven't tried it enough.
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).
- count
- count some physiological process within you (breathing or heartbeat)
- recognize that you can count it without thinking numbers
- recognize that same “emptiness” can continue for a while even after you stop following the physiological process
- rinse and repeat until you can drop into that “emptiness” and stay there at will
> count it without thinking numbers
...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...
Same way you can tap your finger four times without counting, and you can do four taps four times without counting those.
Maybe more a musical skill.
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.
> 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.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22037240
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001094521...
[3] https://www.facebook.com/notes/blake-ross/aphantasia-how-it-...
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.
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 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.
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!
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).
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 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.
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.
This write-up on "clueyness" is a similar example to what I experience from time-to-time: https://waitbutwhy.com/2016/05/clueyness-a-weird-kind-of-sad...
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Does this resonate with you too?
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.
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.
--
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'm certainly a "think in whole words and sentences" person, but if I think of it, I also have had moments realization/emotion that I certainly couldn't put into words.
I think this 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'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 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.
Sounds really cool! I do that too!
> "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
> "'The crazy shape of the crankshaft in my car.' What's your point?"
> "Uh, I don't know. I didn't plan for you actually having an answer."
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.
There may be candidates in qualia, the subjective experiences that tend to tie the philosophy of mind in knots, and which, being subjective, cannot be communicated precisely in language (can you tell a blind person what it is like to see red, such that they can learn it from your words?) In these cases, however, our internal monologue could refer to them indexically ("seeing red is like that", where that picks out an aggregation of memories.)
Bizzarre as this may seem to you, I can assure you that it feels very natural, easy and straightforward, though it might be something of an illusion, merely the way we explain thinking to ourselves when we pay attention to doing it (see my other post.)
I am very unusual, but for me, yes.
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.
Surely, we develop thought before we develop language?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Wow. I don't know what to think.
I cannot visualize faces whatsoever, even if the person is right in front of me and I close my eyes suddenly.
How does this relate to what you're saying? Are you considering this visualizing things or not?
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.
I never imagined that that was the actual thought!
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)...
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 :)
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 might not be that some people don't have an inner dialog, it could be that those people aren't capable of directly observing it.
Do you consider that the parts of yourself that are not conscious are in fact not part of yourself?
Otherwise it cannot be involuntary. Some part of you has decided to have those thoughts.
Ex nihilo nihil fit.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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 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 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.
> 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.
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?)
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-47830256
I wonder if there's an intersection of people who do not have an internal monologue nor a "mind's eye?"
I use visualisation a lot for work, especially when designing or understanding process flows, so not having that ability seems so alien to me.
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.
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.
Most visual information is processed by your Occipital Lobe.
But facial information is processed by your Temporal Lobe.
To be fair, facial recognition is a major part of human cognition, so this isn't all that surprising that it's specialized.
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.
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.
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.
> Kopfkino happens when you involuntarily use your imagination to think of troubling or disgusting things in graphic detail.
> From the german words kopf, head and kino, cinema.
> After i heard 'granny pussy' i had the most disgusting kopfkino.
(Just realized, I need to remember this one as a nice german word with no english equivalent)
It was unnerving.
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.
In my concussed state, all my trains of though, critics, and general random thoughts all stopped. It was like a holiday.
:-)
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.
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.
I am not a shrink
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Keep up the good work :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.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.
'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?
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.
For me, the thought exists in concepts/feelings/imagery until I perform a "reduction in dimensionality" by bringing it down to actual verbal speech.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
1: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/baTWMegR42PAsH9qJ/generalizi...
(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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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).
Your example of a dream problem scenario was amazing, by the way.
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.
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 :( .
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 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.
>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]
> The primary scientific criticism has been that the conclusions drawn by Jaynesv [i.e., bicameralism] had no basis in neuropsychiatric fact.
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.
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.
Prior to this I had made the assumption that everyone has an internal dialogue.
I'm 36.
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.
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.
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...
Makes me wonder if people without this 'internal monologue' experience this kind of OCD in the same way..
Glad you found a way to deal with it though!
> 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...
Anybody experience anything like that?
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 _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...
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Getting better at it as I get older.
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).
Fascinating topic!
>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.
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?
When I have verbal shower thoughts, they come out verbally and I sing or 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.
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.
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.
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.
Just like a mechanic is seeing or, a sportsman is seeing his next moves and so on.
Even blind people "see" the same way, they still have a visual cortex and understand spatial relationships.
So I'm pretty sure if someone did not have this type of "sight", they would have very low IQ.
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.
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.
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.
I was like WTF? All these people can make pictures in their head? This is not fair!
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 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.
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.
And as a visually-oriented person you would also be less likely to have an inner monologue.
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 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
Apparently, there's been studies showing that is actually true: https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2014/aug/21/science...
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...
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.
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.
I generally do. I see the words as I think them. Spelling and sound. It’s weird I guess, though I never thought of it being weird until now.
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 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.
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.
I find that both have kinda the same effect -- all useful thought process get interrupted, including the abstract part.. :/
[0] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.mschlauch.comfortreader/
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 no idea how healthy it is but it's only when I'm alone.
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?
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?
It's called "visual thinking". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_thinking
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.
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
> 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.
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 sometimes hear the voice (for reading and certain types of thinking), but sometimes I don't / can't.
For example, I always do when reading, planning, or consolidating ideas. I can't do it when writing code, or thinking design ideas.
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.
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.
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.
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 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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'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. :)
Cute.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDj2aaxixxo [ WoW Spoiler: Realm of Torment]
[2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A54yfyi00dI Dune: Fear and Pain
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
- - - -
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.
Anyway, I'd like to know more about the visible / observable differences between people who have inner monologues and those who don't.
I've never heard this from anyone I know who's tried the substance n=dozens
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.
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.
I feel like yapping to myself all day was critical to developing writing/verbal skills.
The story explores "flipping the switches" on a global scale, among other things.
It makes sense once you think about animals, who don't have a formal language yet clearly are capable of thought.
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???
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
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.
[0] System 1 vs System 2 as described in Thinking, Fast and Slow
And I guess the answer is no: they can't. This might genuinely be the first time they've heard those words uttered.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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..?
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.
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.
Fascinating.
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.
This really confuses me... How do you even remember things like that? As spoken words? But what if you also happen to not have the inner voice??
https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/17/what-universal-human-e...
Also really, read the comments as well, lots of mind blowing stuff!
Now here's another one to bake your noodle:
Ask your friends who aren't native speakers of their day-to-day language if their monologue is in their first tongue, or day-to-day tongue
Interesting that not everyone can do it, I thought it was just common for everyone to do it
"It's the final quarter, and the home team is down by a point. He's got the ball, he shoots and....."
Thinks the kid in the driveway with the basketball.
I thought it was an extra ability. Is that true for anyone?
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.
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 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.
What did she see before she could read and write, though ...
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 would be interesting to know whether Claude Shannon, etc had internal monologues.
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.
tl;dr Different strokes for different folks.
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.
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.
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.
If someone talks then I can't hear my thoughts clearly to type them on keyboard.