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Comment by chownie | Hacker News Reader

> Everything I know tells me that most people, because they seem capable of doing the same things everyone else can do, all have extremely similar minds and don't differ in major ways like this, at least not in terms of potential.

I had conversations on this subject with a friend who has no mental monologue, I don't think you're correct. I think we get by through making use of the thinking processes we have available, but that doesn't mean that there's no major differences in how we find out our answers, just that we tend to get to roughly the same answers no matter which route we take.

For one thing that doesn't take into account how long it takes for your thought process to reach conclusion, if you're incapable of creating mental imagery and have to solve a spatial problem through mental monologue alone might that not take longer to intuit?

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The mental monologue debate is just another case of "what if the red I see isn't the red you see?" There's just no way for you or your friend to prove anything to each other. It's a fun conversation, but you're not going to get any answers.

The question of whether someone "has" a mental monologue is also complex. Is your friend saying they don't usually talk to themselves when solving problems, or that they never do? Are they saying they can't talk to themselves? If they don't do it often, and you do it more often out of habit, that's a different thing than "not having a mental monologue". The problem with these articles is that people conflate all of these concepts.

Also, a lot of data supports the idea that people aren't very good authorities on how their own minds work. Decades of research on psychology and consciousness can attest to that.

If your approach to the subject is that it's the same as the "what if our 'reds' are different" debate then yeah it's going to be unfalsifiable, you've also just very generously assumed from the get go that I'm conflating ideas plus ignored the end of the prior comment.

My friend cannot create a mental voice at all, so not only does he not usually talk to himself mentally, he never does it. He also can't recall voices. If someone is describing a process in steps he has to stop them frequently to write down the parts. This doesn't apply to a process he's seen, he can recall imagery fine.

The end of the very last comment I made contained a possible method for comparing these different thought processes, giving someone with poor mental imagery a spatial task and comparing with someone who claims strong mental imagery, the idea being that intuition should be faster under one set of conditions than the other. Funnily enough there's also others in this thread who have mentioned using imagined images to navigate spatial tasks.

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