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Comment by jessriedel | Hacker News Reader

For people who experience having an internal monologue: Suppose you see a bagel on the kitchen table in the morning and decide whether or not you're hungry enough to eat it. Does that process involve an internally experienced stream of words (whether "audible in your mind's ear" or not) like "I'm pretty hungry" or "I bet that bagel would taste good"? Is this what it would be mean to have an internal monologue? Because I certainly could decide to eat a bagel without experiences any words. Subjectively, it would involve me imagining the pleasant feeling of satiation and the annoyance of cleaning up and weighing them against each other, with no words involved.

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I think it's more related with conflict situations. For example, imagine you are on a diet. Then after the first impulse of eating a bagel you think "but I started a diet a week ago" and then you justify yourself "a single bagel won't matter that much" which creates another thought "you said the same last time. You are going to regret it at the end of the month" and so on.

In fact, this internal monologue can be used in psychology when you are dealing with bad experiences by dividing your thoughts into an entity who suffers the pain and another one who is logical and supportive. For example, acting towards yourself the same way you would do for a friend.

The considerations I mentioned were conflicting. (Satiation vs. cleanup.) Maybe you think it's about the degree of abstraction.

For me it really depends. I have two ways of representing my speech.

1) experience the words as if I'm saying them out loud but don't vocalize them. This is similar to how a lot of people read, so I figure I'm technically subvocalizing them.

2) especially when doing math or programming I simply know what I was about to think using method 1) without any specific words springing up.

I can't figure out if method 1 is me having an auditory internal monologue or if it's non-auditory. But at least you have a second experience to contextualize with.

EDIT: I would also like to add that sometimes when programming my mind switches to a graph-like representation that I start to manipulate physically. That is, I'll actually move my fingers in the air and move around the idea of this graph to "view" it from different perspectives and at different levels "Minority Report"-stye. Yes, that is something I try not to do anywhere but at home.

You just made me realize that internal speech is, I think, a better way to understand the internal monolog (at least in my case) than internal hearing. I guess I can hear my internal monolog, but it's more about 'saying' the words in my head than 'hearing' them.

> Does that process involve an internally experienced stream of words (whether "audible in your mind's ear" or not) like "I'm pretty hungry" or "I bet that bagel would taste good"?

Yes. I can also do this:

> decide to eat a bagel without experiences any words.

...but I prefer to think consciously about my actions. Doing too many things without internally verbalizing the decision-making process makes me feel like a beetle.

What if it’s something more nuanced than what words can express in a concise way? Do you have to slow down your train of thought? E.g. the first bite of that Proust’s madeleine probably didn’t last several minutes...

If I'm trying to consciously evaluate my actions, then yes, I might pause to think before continuing. This doesn't usually happen with something as simple as eating a bagel, though I've certainly contemplated the nature of cream cheese once or twice.

Ahah makes sense, this is very interesting, thanks for replying

For me it's more a discussion or dialogue with one speaker. The same an old theater play would act it a convicted character - s/he will say one position/argument, then the other. There's no description of the bagel (so it's not as if images are replaced by a voice), but there might be (not always) a discussion what to do with it in my head, where I'm trying to formulate my want/choice. So it's the facets of the thinking procesd that might be played out. It's also not always a discussion, it could eg be a commentary or critique (both positive and negative) of what I'm doing. ("One more pushup, come on."; "I think I had too much tea already": "will she notice I've gone to the bathroom three times in the last hour?" ...) Other days or eg when I'm busy/in the flow there might be much less dialogue.

I don't think so (because this can be a short, impulsive decision), but it wouldn't surprise me if some experience it like this.

My personal experience (in the non-audible group) is that the "role" this voice is playing is a bit more supervisory/executive. It thinks about what I need to do tomorrow, or the next three steps on my current project, or that I really need to carve out time to go to the cleaners some morning.

This voice might think about getting food, but mostly when hunger is getting in the way of other priorities. Or when I need to game out how to fit food into a tight schedule.

> a supervisory/executive

Yes this is how it is for me. I can eat the bagel without consulting him, but he speaks out the words of this post that I'm writing or any email/report. When I'm on autopilot like driving or playing a game/sport I don't hear him. But if I want to think about plotting a different route or a changing in strategy, the voice will talk me through it.

Mostly what I hear is the internalized "No! Don't eat it! Too many calories!". If I don't hear that (or conjure up that voice) then I end up eating the bagel. It's like that for any bit of food I see laying around.

Additional complexity for me: the prefix "I'm hungry" or "should I have that?" is almost never in inner speech, but the answer upon making a decision always is.

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