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Comment by loves_mangoes | Hacker News Reader

I'm super curious, could you explain more what kind of experience you had where you couldn't hear your inner monologue? Were you unable to access the inner voice at all, or somehow unable to think in words at all? I'm not familiar with meditation, though I've always been able to blank out my thoughts for a little while. But that's never been my experience on acid, I can hardly stop the racing thoughts for a few seconds!

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It's obviously hard to describe, but yes, I had a very hard time thinking in words, but simultaneously I also had intermittently very racing thoughts. But as an example, imagine you're sitting home alone deciding what to eat for dinner. I have quite a verbose thought process where I almost pose questions and answer them to myself, like "Pizza? Naah, I had it yesterday, and it's quite fattening, I haven't worked out all week, I should get a sallad instead".

That was totally impossible to do. I could speak those things out aloud, but I couldn't really do them inside my head. If someone asked me a question, I couldn't prepare an answer in my mind before speaking. And those existentially depressing places my thoguths sometimes goes to were also not accessible.

I expressed it to those around me as "I can't think", which was obviously not completely true, but I think I was so focused/grounded in the pretty overwhelming experience that my mind couldn't really waste CPU cycles on wandering or evaluating what the best answer was to a question.

Do you always have a monologe going on? Say you now put down your phone or close your laptop and just stare out of your head and look at what's in front of you.

Will you have linguistically formulated sentences "coming to you" without pause?

I pretty much do. It's not entirely without pause, any sort of flow state will completely usurp it, and I can definitely zone out, but both of those situations are noticeably outside the norm.

Notably, when I'm my loosest and "most authentic" socially, it just feels like the inner voice is speaking directly out, whereas most times it's more like the inner voice is giving instructions to a much less verbose underling.

Not while sober, no, I can pause. At least for a few minutes, until my impatience takes over and I go do something else.

I can think without formulating sentences in my head, but that's atypical for me. I'll even 'argue' in my head to help me make decisions!

I've never been in a situation where I couldn't use my inner voice, thought.

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