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Comment by LoganDark | Hacker News Reader

> Since I have a rich interior dialogue with myselves "inside"

Interesting~! We are a DID system that contains around 8 people but we don't have a very rich internal dialogue between ourselves despite the fact that we're capable of trying if we focus. What is this like for you? How rich is 'rich'?

-Emily

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Not that rich. It's usually a two-person dialogue. But the quality here is that most people have some kind of interior dialogue with themselves. Most? Above 50%. I think well above, the web disagrees.

If it's couched by most people as an interior monologue rather than dialogue, I think it stands as a distinct state which argues at a minimum 2 participants (the one listening, unvoiced?)

Sometimes mine is in schoolboy french. About remarkably pedestrian everyday things. I have often wondered if children who grow up multilingual consciously use more than one interior monologue language.(I didn't. It just seems like my inside-voice likes trying to speak in french, sometimes. I doubt it's very grammatically correct)

> the quality here is that most people have some kind of interior dialogue with themselves

Oh, yeah we definitely do. We usually only get one interior monologue per physical body though, of which we only have one. Bit weird how that works, but I suppose that's what was intended as DID wasn't exactly designed to happen.

(Sometimes we'll have a dialogue towards members who are cofronting, the funniest ones are "who had that thought I just saw? knock it off", lol.)

> I have often wondered if children who grow up multilingual consciously use more than one interior monologue language

What's funny is that we often narrate to ourselves things that we're thinking about, but if we stop trying to understand what we are thinking, it can evolve quite quickly into thinking in terms of abstract concepts with no associated voice or words.

It's probably an autistic thing that helps us form very complex thoughts at speed, but it's still very interesting because people describe conceptual thinking as being an effect of psychedelics like LSD and not something that you can trigger just by not narrating things to yourself internally.

Considering we can have a monologue in either English or nothing at all, despite not even being bilingual, I'm sure people who are bilingual can have one in any language that they know. Despite how proficient they are or aren't at any given language, they will always understand their own thoughts basically the same.

-Emily

I've asked a close friend of mine something along those lines. His native language is Spanish but he's been speaking English was well since he was around 3, so I think he safely grew up bilingual.

Anyhow, he said his default voice in his head these days most of the time is English, unless he is around his family and is exclusively speaking Spanish out loud with them, in those cases he just naturally continues speaking Spanish in his head to himself as well without having to "think" about it.

But a lot of times when he's not kinda zoned out, or high/drunk/tired, his thoughts sometimes slip into being entirely in Spanish without him even realizing, and when he's reeeealllly drunk he won't even realize for a bit he's speaking Spanish out loud to me as well haha.

Can confirm. I speak 3 languages (A (English), B (my mother tongue) and C). For most of my life I monologued in some combination of A and B. When I was a NEET for a couple years it was mostly in A because I spent most of my time on the internet. When I got a job my coworkers spoke in C so (as much as I hated it) my mind quickly started to occasionally default to C.

Another thing I noticed very often is when I consume any piece of media (could be a book or a TV show) my mind very quickly picks up the peculiarities of the narrative/spoken language and stays like that for a couple days.

Native English speaker that learned Spanish at 25 - now in my 40s and speak it with my wife and family. Inner monologue changed pretty quickly depending on context - long before I was fully fluent. Now flips to Spanish when I’m reading or watching something in Spanish or been with people speaking it. The hilarious thing to me is my accent still has the same faults internally and is actually worse. I can’t roll my rs in my head though I can actually do it without effort physically.

Our kids are natively bilingual, they are little but I’ll ask them about it today. Very curious how they say they think.

Learned English from age 6. I use English more than my mother tongue these days, but mostly in written form. I use both languages in my internal monologue. Sometimes, when deliberating something for example, I may also have a wordless and languageless inner monologue. It's difficult to describe.

I don't know if I'm part of a minority, but I have no internal monologue or dialogue unless I explicitly decide to have one.

My default thinking mode is in abstract concepts, having to put it into words feels like a downgrade in the speed at which I can think.

It's difficult to tell if you're in a minority or not, because this is an area where one can say a lot of different things about themself and still be correct.

We also tend to think in abstract concepts but we also narrate things like text we're reading or sort of talk to ourselves in our mind when we're doing things. How do we know if we're explicitly deciding? No idea.

But we do know that our speed of thought is not limited by how fast we can mentally narrate, and translating things into words isn't an overhead on anything. Our thoughts aren't made of words, the words only describe thoughts that we have already derived.

Weirdness all around!

-Emily

I don't really know how to go about asking this, so I'll just ask it. No disrespect intended. What do you mean when you say around eight? Are there like hidden or incomplete/developing selves?

> Are there like hidden or incomplete/developing selves?

Yeah, pretty much. We know there's probably at least one entity that we're not sure counts as a full person or even a member, and past that we're just not sure.

A fun fact is that we're pretty sure that entity thinks in only words and doesn't have a mind's eye (or that mind's eye only visualizes text).

> No disrespect intended.

None taken~

-Emily

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