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Comment by Swizec | Hacker News Reader

> it's pretty difficult to have a thought without using language

You get to be today’s 10,000! (xkcd reference)

Not everyone has an internal monologue! 50% to 60% people experience their thoughts completely nonverbally. There isn’t a voice constantly narrating their lives. Some people don’t even process words as words but add pictures instead.

Best part: the two groups don’t realize the other group even exists. We all think everyone thinks in the same way as us.

Sauce: https://www.iflscience.com/people-with-no-internal-monologue...

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This claim has always been very odd to me. My own thinking is, rather obviously, both. I have an inner monologue but it's not entirely word-based. There are mental visual images, and I often gesture with my hands reorganizing imaginary collections of objects while arguing with myself. There's also words going on too.

There is also thinking through proprioception. The sense of awareness of the relative placement of the body in space. That, like the other ways of thinking, also overlaps quite a lot with both visual thinking (moving around imaginary objects) and lingual thinking (writing words in the air idly or sub-vocalization). It is probably not appreciated enough as a mode of thought.

Anyway, I suspect it's something of a false dichotomy, and it's not a binary/multi-way clean split, but that most people think like I do -- in a mix of modes, to varying degrees, using all their senses, all their models of the world, simultaneously. But the assumption that I'm relatively normal is the usual conceit here, isn't it? :)

Visual Thinking is a great book that goes more into this.

Yes it’s a spectrum and different modes of thinking are better for different tasks. The author of Visual Thinking describes 3 types: linear language thinking, abstract visualizer thinking (common to engineers, mathematicians etc), and object visualizer thinking (common to artists, machinists, etc). Most people can do all 3 with different levels of proficiency/comfort, but only 1 is usually the primary.

The dichotomy I mentioned is about having or not having that inner monologue/narrator.

To me, this section of the article deserves more attention:

> They confessed they had thought it was a fictional concept made up as a narrative device in the TV show Dexter

I imagine a person saying "I have an internal narrator", and other person thinking "shit, I don't hear stuff like TV shows, that person is different". A misunderstanding.

I can bet that if the expression "internal narrator" was changed to "an internal voice that you can feel but cannot hear", more people would say they have it, and those poll numbers would change.

But I _do_ hear it, accent, inflection, pauses, and all. Not through my ears of course but a very close simulation. I don’t relate to the inner monologue as pictures reference at all!

Ok then, let's rephrase to "an internal voice that you can feel, but it's not heard by your ears". It's not sensory.

The phrase doesn't matter. What I want to highlight, is that I can never describe my internal thoughts exactly. There's always a chance for misunderstanding (me not being able to put in words my thought process, or you not being able to translate my description to a meaningful experience to you).

If a better method for determining this appears (eg. scanning some brain areas), then I could be convinced. Otherwise, it's all anedoctal.

At this point of the discussion, it's time for p-zombies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie

This thought experiment expresses well the problem of asserting someone else's consciousness experience. It can't be done yet.

I don’t want to reject your experience because no one knows what anyone else experienced within their mind. But I know my experience is very much a conversation replete with proper grammar, inflection, etc to the point I could recite it out loud right after verbatim, so subjectively it’s very similar to hearing through my ears. Others experiences sounded more abstract so I wanted to share mine. But I suppose we may never really know :)

It's pretty close to hearing. Maybe 75% of the way there? Obviously it's a bit different than hearing with your ears but it's got almost all of the same information - except positional.

I think you're just emphasizing that you're a language thinker and can't imagine the other side... I can "sound out something" in my head but 1) that's a conscious effort that never happens out of the blue 2) I don't use/need it for things like emotional reactions, understanding the world, thinking what I should say next, or so on. It's a tool I only use if I'm for example having trouble coming up with e.g. prose that rhymes, or solving crossword or Wordle puzzles -- language problems!

> abstract visualizer thinking (common to engineers, mathematicians etc), and object visualizer thinking (common to artists, machinists, etc)

Thank you for mentioning this! This explains a lot of myself to me.

I can imagine an abstract space (like Einstein's gravity as a well thing), and then rotate it to look at it from different angles etc -- but I can't hold a realistic image of a vase in my head, only the shape.

I heard this many times, but I'm guarded about the conclusions. This whole thing depends on people stating how they think.

When I say "I have an internal voice", some people might misunderstand this phenomenon as something more than it is. For example, one might hear it and think I actually experience an audible narrator.

I have an internal monologue, but I don't experience an audible voice. It's not a sensory thing, but there is a clear "lookup word, form phrase" thing going on internally, in which language plays an essential role. If I wasn't curious about how that works, or interested in the subject, perhaps I wouldn't have noticed that it is there.

Similarly, I know I have some picture based thoughts as well. I can't avoid but have it. Maybe if I was more interested on that, I would have noticed it more proeminently than my language-based stuff.

In other words, I do believe we have varying degrees of mental models, but I just can't grasp how can an experiment could validate someone thinks "completely nonverbally". The brain doesn't even have a single "language area", it's spread all over the place and can be highly plastic depending on the individual. How can we even measure how a person thinks?

Being unable to debate with yourself in your head must really suck.

Being unable to comprehend complex spatial structures without trying to describe them in words must really suck.

This online survey from UWMadison came up the other day, which estimates where you sit on the bell curve in terms of internal verbalisation.

https://uwmadison.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_3NMm9yyFsNio...

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