What IS there then, if it's not quiet like the author describes?
Could it be a lack of introspection? Have you been examined by any kind of specialist or is it self diagnosed?
i have a math heavy degree so pretty sure im not disabled in any kind of way. sometimes I struggle to explain my thought process but not usually. it is equally perplexing to me that people seem to think that verbalization of thoughts is needed to think.
When you reflect on something embarrassing, how could it have gone differently? How do you imagine "I should have done this differently?"
Imagine arguing with a friend, now a clone of yourself, now hold two options in your mind (what to have for dinner) and assign a clone to argue for each. Is it possible?
You must get this all the time and I'm sorry, but it's so interesting! I'd buy all your beers for weeks just to chat about it.
When I write it’s almost always flow of consciousness style and I make a lot of mistakes. In online or chat kind of settings it makes me look a little dumber than I am, I mix words up on the spot a lot, it’s probably the closest thing to whatever would be my “internal” narrative, also because I am limited by the speed at which I can type. So when to type a paragraph if I am being serious it usually takes 70+ revisions (not changing what I am saying) for me to consider it perfect. I don’t usually bother and go 1/10th of that for professional writing and tend to be called a decent writer (again, I have to try).
So that’s probably the lack of narrative thing. writing my thoughts out helps. I have always kept extensive journals going back to when I was 5 or 6 or whenever I could write.
for your second scenario yea that’s a very easy thing for me. I often argue with myself anyway. I mutter out loud sometimes, probably makes me seem a little unhinged but with what I do it fits right in with other “types.”
I do visualize and play out scenarios a lot in my head, they are very vivid, and I am pretty proficient at going farther with this with lucid dreaming. Sights/sounds in my head are very easy for me. I just don’t really hear my own voice, or whatever.
I think it comes with some downsides with introspection sometimes but I’ve been well aware of this for a while - which is why I think the “argue with yourself with two conflicting arguments” thing is probably easy for me. I am constantly in “arguments” with my own assumptions. I think this last thing is why I’ve always been fairly proficient with abstract math.
> I am constantly in “arguments” with my own assumptions.
This is usually what best describes "having an internal monologue".
Do you ever imagine yourself or other people saying hypothetical things?
But the monologue is there, almost uninterrupted. It's just that very often I don't notice it. I have a hard time ignoring actual voices, unless there is some sea of other background noises or chatter.
I myself have an inner monologue like 80% of the time and the times that I don't thinking seems faster. The downside is being harder to translate into words if I need to explain the idea to others.
The neurons fire and piece together the dots. I can write quite well if I'm primed for it (big if). Speaking as well; but I have to be in the "headspace" for it.
It's like sports. You are in the "zone." Though I've been told many people still have an inner monologue even during sport (sounds terribly distracting).
We're the same, but I just skip the inner monologue. Now I'm typing and I have very little idea what comes next. I review it afterwards. I just have one level of this, you seem to have two and I don't know why you do it, but perhaps it's another level of control. Perhaps this bifurcation buys you something.
What I'm actually challenging, is that people exist that can e.g. write coherent paragraphs like these comments, with having absolutely no inner monologue, ever. I don't buy that there is "another inner language of thoughts", of the same or greater complexity than our known language, which has not been discovered or described at all.
(Warning: Bad Analogy incoming) You could rewrite all the software of a modern computer in assembly. And the computer actually runs machine code. However you could not have reached that mass of assembly code on your own, without replicating the complexity of the concepts of higher programming languages.
I don't doubt that there are people whose inner monologue is quieter, slower, less frequent, or whatever. I doubt that an adult can not have any inner monologue at all, and function "normally". Much like the author described.
I'm going to attempt a good faith interpretation here so we're clear. I want to understand your position, because I think it's, if nothing else, very interesting to contemplate these matters.
First of all, I have to clear the obvious debris out of the way.
I can read and I can cogitate lingual constructs. That includes creating monologues. Sometimes I "role-play" some professor or something and talk through my problem out loud - when alone. I tend to do this with philosophical problems, but it's unnatural and quite entertaining. The last time I did this must have been a few months ago when pondering Hume's problem of "necessary connection" or Kant's .. everything. I think this is the closest I get to "inner monologue" and it does have its uses, because language in and of itself has a computational character of sorts. By speaking the words out loud I sometimes trigger snippets of verbal knowledge that wouldn't be triggered otherwise.
If this qualifies me as "having inner monologue" already then we're done. By that definition I am in your club and I'm fine with that.
What would still remain however is that those role-playing sessions are deliberate and unnecessary. I can quite easily go without them. It's a trick I've picked up, but it's by no means the only way to make progress. Their nature is comparable to rubber duck debugging: by explaining your problem you work through it differently somehow than if you'd remain "stuck in your head". I can go without rubber ducking, but it's still a useful trick.
Another way of approaching this problem is through programming - assuming you code. You don't literally think "Ah, I see a linked list here and it gets initialized here.. [etc]"? Or maybe you do? I can tell you quite firmly that I don't. If you also don't then just assume I go through my life in the same abstract wordless mode.
> I don't buy that there is "another inner language of thoughts", of the same or greater complexity than our known language, which has not been discovered or described at all.
I find this quite interesting, because I don't understand it. Our language is made of rules and in and of itself has no content. It's literally made out of just rules. Any intelligence has to be brought into it. This was quite clear with GPT-2 era transformers spewing sentences like: "The bear and the snake are wearing stairs". You have to know quite a lot before you can explain why this is nonsense despite it being a valid sentence and it's not clear to me at all that this knowledge itself is purely lingual.
This "inner language" you speak of is just raw cogitation and surely you employ it just as much as me but we assign different words to things. This "inner language" is not to be put "besides" our natural languages, it's the core of it. Without it, there would be no "natural language". I view natural language as a communication convenience, built on top of and not besides raw wordless thought.
I'm not 100% sure how to handle your analogy because, as you've indicated, it's quite tricky, but I'll try something. Sorry for the mess again:
I agree that higher level abstractions enable cognitive moves that just won't be obvious from raw assembly.
Where we disagree, I think, is that these "higher level concepts" are somehow spontaneously lingual by nature. In my view of things these higher level concepts are still raw thought, but .. higher. More complex. Encoding these new more complex cogitations necessitates more complicated lingual structures.
Let's put it this way: do you first cogitate the "class concept" or does the "class syntax" enable the "class"-cogitation? Perhaps for a programmer it's the second, but for the one inventing the abstraction surely the cogitation must come first and, lacking existing lingual constructs, must be cogitated in a purer form.
My problem would thus be: how could you possibly cogitate something that doesn't yet exist in language if all you have is language? "class" does not "fall out of" assembly naturally - inside of it. You need to bring cogitation from outside and then realize it and be able to think of an encoding for that new concept to communicate the idea.
It does, but we're not done - we just got the "never" out of the way. I still don't think anybody that literally NEVER has any inner monologue/dialogue could pass as functioning adult in our society today, which I will try to explain here. We did not get that much out of the way though, as there is still vast room between "most of the time" and "once every few months".
I think these are key questions, from my armchair position, if you will excuse that. I don't doubt that some people have much less or more frequent inner monologues. For example, people with ADHD may have, among many other things, a too frequent (or fast, or fast-jumping) inner monologue. I'm not claiming this is the cause or anything, but it could be a factor, or some kind of feedback loop.
> Our language is made of rules and in and of itself has no content. It's literally made out of just rules. Any intelligence has to be brought into it. This was quite clear with GPT-2 era transformers spewing sentences like: "The bear and the snake are wearing stairs". You have to know quite a lot before you can explain why this is nonsense despite it being a valid sentence and it's not clear to me at all that this knowledge itself is purely lingual.
Language is just an extremely efficient encoding of reality. We are having this conversation right now, and the actual information encoded in it is orders of magnitudes higher than just the rules we are using. A word is just a sound or one combination of alphabet letters, yet it is attached to a million pathways of more words, each gaining or losing great amount of weight depending on the surrounding words. The rules are just there to make the pathfinding efficient.
To "know quite a lot" could be either, like I said, some hidden inner "encoding of thoughts" that has not yet been described or discovered, or actual language - perhaps mixed together with primitive "feelings" but impossible to use without language.
We know that the brain can produce this extremely dense and efficient encoding of information to communicate with each other. We know that most people also use this language internally, with a monologue or dialogues, to construct complex and simple scenarios. Now let's assume some people really don't have any inner monologue at all. A person would fall into either of these two categories:
1. Like the author describes, where she did not function like a "normal" person at all AND she was not aware of it, but others were well aware. 2. There is another "hidden" code, capable of the same complexity and efficiency, that has not been discovered or really described by anybody, that can be translated immediately to spoken or written language.
You can see that I find 2. very hard to believe, so either I'm making a strawman, or people that claim to have no inner monologue truly do have at least some degree of it.
> Let's put it this way: do you first cogitate the "class concept" or does the "class syntax" enable the "class"-cogitation?
So I started the bad computer analogy, and now I must own it. While technically possible to spontaneously conjure the class syntax and this making the concept, it's never really the case in general. The "class concept" existed first, described in a poorer way by existing syntax: a collection of functions that take a struct on which they mainly operate. The class-syntax, today, describes the class-concept much better than previous syntax, thus the programming language has evolved. Just like human language does, but human language is much more expressive and dynamic than computer language.
To get back to my doubting the general statement in the comments of "I have no inner monologue", could you answer some more questions?
When was the last time, or with what frequency if any, you imagine another person speaking in your head?
And yourself replying or making a statement or starting a conversation with someone else or even yourself?
It’s honestly quite a narcissistic view that someone could not possibly think differently than you, and dismiss it out of hand. The other people in this comment thread sharing similar things make perfect sense to me.
I am only engaging with commenters who are interested in the conversation, and I'm NOT trying to put anyone down. I just want to get to know more exact meanings and nuances of "I don't have an internal monologue".
All I can say is, as someone who also does not have an internal monologue, and can easily and happily go days without thinking in words (which is very, very different than not thinking at all), please just accept as a given that people like me exist, we're fine, do not feel like we have any deficits, and it's exceedingly frustrating to come across comments like yours whenever the subject comes up, because of the raw arrogance of it all. I can completely and honestly believe that you have a rich, engaging internal life, even if the quantity of words involved would drive me mad, because we're different people with different thinking styles. All I ask is for the same respect in return. If we can start there, then we can have a real conversation, which could be fun. I know that when I first learned that 'internal monologue' wasn't just a literary, poetically-descriptive term, but that people actually heard voices/words in their heads while thinking, it utterly floored me. That I'd made it to college without knowing this really threw me for a loop, and made me think about what other seemingly-core differences in cognition are out there. It really is a fascinating subject to think about.
While very interesting I'd have a hell of time debating those issues in this kind of medium. If you take that as your starting point then I do understand why you have a hard time grasping the "lack of monologue"-thing. If language is the source of all raw cogitation then how could anyone possibly lack monologue and still function? Am I getting it? I think I get it and I'd agree if I'd take your framework as true.
> impossible to use without language.
Now I understand those types of statements. I am totally not in a position to say you are wrong, but I'd be careful with this because you seem to be a holding a flashlight and saying there is light everywhere you look.
All I can say is I just don't think language plays that large a role in cognition. Why not? That's an excellent question, but I cannot possibly do justice to that here - besides being a complete amateur. I can leave some clues or things that count to me as clues, perhaps. We are surrounded with enormous quantities of beings that utterly and completely lack language yet show tremendous intellectual sophistication. Our own children are completely non-verbal for a very long time and sure, while they won't be winning Nobel prizes at that stage, you can't possibly claim they are incapable of the very same cognitive maneuvering you showed in the coding example (abstraction, generalization, etc). To me it's just a matter of scale. We gained function, we added something new and fancy to the preexisting Mammalian machinery with language, but I don't think it's fundamental to raw cogitation.
> 2. There is another "hidden" code, capable of the same complexity and efficiency, that has not been discovered or really described by anybody, that can be translated immediately to spoken or written language.
3. All people use the same raw cognitive substrate but some feel the need / are wired to overlay it with running commentary. A running commentary they themselves can inspect, I might add. That's an interesting bit. If it is so foundational, what's inspecting it? Language again? Like an LLM-reasoning type of agent or agents?
I notice the question "What happens before the inner monologue? A deeper level of monologue?" didn't get addressed and I'm quite interested in it. What process produces the monologue you perceive as necessary for cogitation? It surely can't be a monologue again? At some point you have to admit these dialogues just "pop into existence" pre-baked, right? Out of what? What produced that if not some raw, unobservable, non-verbal cogitation? That non-verbal cogitation has to be capable of some kind of computation to make that happen or am I making some kind of error?
Honestly, that last question is rhetorical. I'm making all types of errors, but I hope you see I'm kind of on the fence on the language thing. I'm fully open to the fact that I just might not be perceiving the monologue.
So yes, my framework is that the language articulation is the thought itself, and that is why we (most people) consistently have/hear an inner monologue, or dialogues with others.
> Our own children are completely non-verbal for a very long time and sure, while they won't be winning Nobel prizes at that stage, you can't possibly claim they are incapable of the very same cognitive maneuvering you showed in the coding example (abstraction, generalization, etc).
I don't think a child that cannot yet speak, so typically around 2 years old, can do much cognitive maneuvering, or at least not significantly more than an a great ape. Of course it could be pure correlation, and as we age we learn and simply also learn to use language efficiently. But we also cannot rule it out. Hellen Keller is a somewhat interesting case of someone missing the language learning stage and then also essentially not developing a "consciousness" as we understand it.
> the question "What happens before the inner monologue? A deeper level of monologue?"
I do not have an answer. I'm afraid that there isn't one, just like there is an answer to "How do LLMs work?", beyond some technicalities about the core operations, matrices, weightings and whatnot. I think there is no indication that this is recursive in any sense. I cannot find the words to describe it, ironically, but it might be like other systems in nature which seem chaotic in detail and only seem ordered when you look at the whole.
If you allow me to indulge: maybe we are too deep and lost in the simulation now, there are no more curtains to peel back. A mask cannot look at who is behind itself. Is there really another hidden "code" inside our brain that could express the last two sentences more efficiently? Perhaps there is, and our mostly "outer" language simply cannot express it, because the inner hidden language is just much better. Or perhaps it's the other way 'round.
Edit: BTW you also didn't answer "when was the last time you imagined yourself or someone else talking in your head", and I am genuinely interested in the answer - for armchair science!
For armchair science: I cannot remember for the life of me. I never imagine scenes like that. Is that strange for you? How is that for you? Do you often do that? Is it like an entire scene playing out like a movie?
Ah. Food for thought. Have a good weekend.
I almost constantly have fragments of scenes playing out, when I'm not doing something that requires concentration. Either myself telling something, ar asking, at someone or myself. Sometimes reversed. As I said, I think it's mostly fragments, or there is some kind of "fast forward" where the conclusion is articulated prematurely, and I suppose the exercise has reached its purpose.
You have good weekend and holidays too!
But if I’m just thinking about something myself, my thoughts just exist as abstract thoughts that aren’t tied to language. My brain is constantly thinking, but I’m not thinking in English!
I could express the same sort of disbelief you did - I can’t imagine how slow and inefficient it must be to have to do all your thinking in terms of words as opposed just operating on the underlying ideas directly.
To be clear, I'm not actually picturing a graph in my head; it's more that it feels similar in a lot of ways.
This probably sounds incredibly complicated, byzantine, and wasteful to word thinkers, but for me, constructing these "graphs" is so natural and rapid, that I can easily outthink my ability to convert my thoughts to words. It's intuition driven, and operates very quickly, in a sort of semi-conscious scatter/gather way.
I'm guessing other people may also do this subconsciously before they turn what they've gathered into words (maybe?), but for me, retrieving all this is often a more conscious activity.
All of this is as natural to me as breathing. I’m not planning out which things I’m going to scatter-gather, it just sort of happens, just like breathing or beating my heart just sort of happens, and just like those two things I can either be aware of it and control it, or unaware of it and just let it flow.
As an example, where someone else might literally think the words “my favorite flowers are roses”, I would grab concepts of flora, flower, plant reproduction, bees, nectar, pollen, etc. and facts like climbs trellises, susceptible to fungal infections, has thorns, and memories of many of the times I’ve seen roses or listened to someone talk about roses, and finally my emotions like happiness, fear (from the thorns), peacefulness, contentment, enjoyment, personal-ness, etc. Then link all of these together to give a graph that carries a lot of meaning that is extremely specific to me.
All this happens in a tiny fraction of a second. I'm aware of all the parts that go into this thought, even as I understand what the sum of those parts adds up to. There's a great deal of nuance in my new way of thinking that's hard to convert into words in a concise way. "My favorite flowers are roses" is a highly pruned version of what I was actually thinking. It's not a better way or a worse way of thinking. It's just different. Like everything, it has its strengths, and it has its weaknesses.
In this scenario, would the phrase "My favorite flowers are roses" have materialized in your mind?
Or if this scenario would be: you have been asked "What are your favorite flowers?", and you would just speak out those words to the other person without rehearsing in your head, would you be capable of recreating that scenario at another time, including the person asking you and you answering, in your head?
That depends on the situation. I thought I'd mentioned it in this thread, but apparently I'd mentioned it on the post about aphasia a few days ago. I don't think in words anymore except when I'm either conversing with or thinking about conversing with someone else.
If I was just thinking to myself about my favorite things, that phrase would never pop into my head at all. It wouldn't even occur to me to even try putting it into words in that situation.
> Or if this scenario would be: you have been asked "What are your favorite flowers?", and you would just speak out those words to the other person without rehearsing in your head, would you be capable of recreating that scenario at another time, including the person asking you and you answering, in your head?
Yes, I'm autistic (AuDHD), so I often replay social interactions in my head over and over and try to think of better responses than I was able to come up with on the spur of the moment, and this, necessarily, involves thinking in words.
So, while my natural mode of thinking post-stroke is now word-free, I am still capable of thinking in words and do so when I'm thinking about something I may need to communicate to someone else soon.
Immediately post-stroke, of course, I was incapable of thinking in words at all, but I rebuilt that capability over time. It definitely does not feel natural to me, still, to the point I sometimes stutter or pause for awkward seconds to find the right words if I'm suddenly asked to talk about a new topic I haven't rehearsed. I do have a safe subset of English that I try to stay within to avoid any potential stumbling.
I still think in my non-word way the vast, vast majority of the time, then translate to words, unless I'm saying something that's become an automatic response. If someone says to me, "How are you?" I immediately respond, "I'm doing well, thanks. How are you today?" all in words. But if I'm posed a novel question like yours, one that I've never considered before, I have to carefully find a way to translate my thoughts to words before I can answer.