Not everyone has an internal monologue

I have an internal monologue sometimes, and sometimes I don't. It depends on what I'm doing.

If I'm trying to think of how to say something, then I have an internal monologue that I use to try out ways of saying it. Similarly, if I'm thinking about how to write dialog or exposition for a story or for technical writing, then I have an internal monologue in which I construct drafts of what to say.

Also, in any nontrivial conversation, I prefer to try out sentences or sentence fragments mentally before uttering them. This habit contributes to me being an insufferable interrupter because if I get one constructed that says what I want it to, I then want to utter it, quick!, before I forget it. I'm not laboring under the delusion that my utterances are so very important, but the impulse to say something once I've got it constructed more or less properly is strong.

If I'm thinking about how to walk or drive somewhere, my thoughts are nonverbal--mostly 3D images or "spatializations" (that is, mental constructions of spatial relationships without any particular color, texture, or other visual content).

If I'm thinking about composing music, I may hear passages performed on various favorite instruments, or, like the low-content visualizations I mentioned, I may imagine melodies and harmonies without any specific timbre.

I guess my thinking is multimodal, depending on what I'm trying to think about.

My sense is that, generally speaking, if there is an imagined voice uttering words, or an imagined instrument playing notes, or an image or landscape with colors, it's always a rendering or translation of something more fundamental that lies behind it. I don't know whether that's accurate, or how I could know for sure.

I’m still not sure if I have one. I prefer to read texts with voice (not mine usually, I simulate some recent narrator), probably because my memory works much better with speech.

When I think about routine, the voice is either too dim or it’s just shadows of words mixed with images and concepts. E.g. going to gym or a clinic doesn’t involve “I must take a shower, grab my belongings, plan a route, …”. It is a sequence of snapshots or highlights, which helps to quickly check if all goes well. Me in a shower, me looking at a bag, me riding a taxi, etc. Words only play as directives like “need to take ids/contract with me”, which I explicitly emphasize to remember better.

But when I think about my job (programming), words are the least effective instrument. I use them, but they are mostly syntactically equivalent to a program, it’s hard to say that it’s a coherent speech, instruction or description of some sort. As with routine, words help to anchor key points and write down todos. But there is no clear monologue in my head like “I install a new package and an import it in that source file, then I will use a function from it to convert my data into X”.

If you have an internal monologue, maybe we can share ~verbatim examples to compare?

Obviously this could not have existed before there was a useable language. So why would it be so prevalent? In my mind is something visual more often than language based. Visualisation is likely to have a longer history.

For some people the difference is that they're like people who have internal monologue, but they say everything out loud so it's not internal. Others have semi-internal dialogue, where only one 'voice' is spoken out loud, like listening to someone on a phone.

I would say that I have non-linguistic monologue, usually of the logical or conceptual varieties. Or rather it's merely in a different non-word-based language.

Their bicameral mind hasn't broken down.