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Comment by yetihehe | Hacker News Reader

I have inner voice, it's very hard for me to comprehend how can you think, but it's possible. How I understand it: you just write what you think, without rehearsing it before inside your mind. We all do it to some extent when writing, it's not like I actually need to replay everything before I write.

"I asked myself" by a person who has no inner voice sounds like a blind person saying "I see..." when he understands something. It's just a figure of speech, not used in some languages (like polish, we say "I see" ONLY when we actually see something).

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Thinking doesn't need words. Thinking for me is a process of ideas and concepts coming from different directions, colliding, merging, splitting, transforming, and then going into other directions to interact with other thoughts.

The translation between these concepts to words or sentences from my mouth or my fingers is effortless by the way. Which I myself find interesting. I think it should take some effort but it doesn't.

If you wonder how one can think without an inner voice then I wonder can you even think without your inner voice? And can your inner voice be faster than your vocal voice and if not, doesn't that slow down your thought process?

This is exactly how I would describe it, as someone without much of an inner eye or an inner voice.

I can have an inner voice. I use it to practice how things sound in my head, or if I want to be very specific about wording, or when trying to parse some complex text, or to work out a sum. That’s how I know that most of the time I don’t use an inner voice to think.

Most of the time it’s like I have thoughts without words, and turning it into words must be handled by some unconscious part of my brain, because it’s automatic and silent.

Same here, and the thought itself is basically instant, so why go through the long process of narrating the thought to myself? I just have the next one.

This is getting more confusing. Just because you can think in words doesn’t mean you enumerate everything in words. I think of myself as someone with an inner voice that I use often but not everything that happens in my mind is subvocalized. A lot of it is imagining or recalling images or movements, there’s spatial awareness when thinking about positioning things and manipulating objects, there are non verbal recollections like music or recalling a sound something made and there are thoughts that are more like pure concepts or feelings. Maybe there is some misunderstanding about how the inner voice is used or maybe I’m wrong and there are people who exclusively think in words?

There are people who have all their thoughts in words (most people, in fact). I don't think they actually have their thoughts in words, I think they just narrate them to themselves after they have them.

I used to do this, but I stopped at some point.

> doesn't that slow down your thought process?

probably yes.

also, when being asked questions I rehearse and rephrase the answer in my head often stumbling or pausing uncomfortably long to actually get it out for fear of it sounding weird or wrong or dumb.

This may be surprising, but I indeed can "ask myself" (aka. think about) things, without explicitely verbalizing the question in my head. "Thinking" is more abstract, but it can be faster that way.

I also don't always explicitly verbalize things. The whole problem seems to be more of disagreement about a definition of inner voice and what it means for different people.

Maybe not the whole problem, but yeah, I also wonder about what people mean with "inner voice" respectively.

I do think though that I verbalize less than other (maybe most) people.

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