Unfathomable to me. My mind is constantly racing, playing out different conversations, interviewing myself in a variety of roles to navigate my thoughts on things (one day I'm the president of the US talking about foreign policy, another day I'm a big tech CEO navigating the diversity questions). I constantly have something in my ears to tune myself out, podcasts or music. After being diagnosed w/ ADHD I realize I'm probably on the extreme end of those with internal dialogue but to see a complete lack of it in others is very surprising.
I used to be like that, and it was helpful in many ways as I seemed to always be ready for wherever a conversation might go. But I wasn't living in the moment. Now I actively stop myself from simulating the various branches of potential conversations. It feels good to live in the moment (shaking my head a little when I feel it starting helps). The downside is that I don't have as many prepared responses and am more easily caught unaware, so now I rely more on sentences or behaviors that are broadly applicable to buy me time to think about my actual response.
On the other hand, it is so satisfying when a conversation hits a branch you worked on for hours on end! Very useful for dating and job interviews. Especially for people with foot-in-mouth disease[1]
That sounds like hell to me. I don't have an internal monolog. I think in visuals. I am a quiet person. I am a better programmer for it I think. I visualize the structure of a program I am writing and pair programming would also be hell for me.
Why is it a bad thing for your brain to be running DFS all the time? Is it a wasteful use of time? Does it cause behavioral issues? Is it a personal choice? Or...?
Your mention about shaking your head is very interesting. How did you come up with that? Are you aware of Peter Levine's or David Berceli's work on shaking/trembling as a natural stress-releasing mammallian instinct that people are usually repressing?
In the last couple of years I started thinking about this and since then I'm trying to live in the moment because now I'm aware of how much time I spend in my head. It is very hard for me to train this though.
"interviewing myself in a variety of roles to navigate my thoughts on things"
I used to from time to time imagine my half of a conversation in which I was showing around someone notable who had traveled through time to get to the present day. Maybe someone from 1,000 years ago or maybe from 50. That is, for entertainment, not to cope with anything. I never felt like my imagination was quite good enough to turn it into fiction.
In general though, I don't have a monologue in a continuous sense. I frequently imagine saying things, imagine other people saying things, occasionally imagine saying something to myself, but I would never say that's how I think exclusively. When I am having trouble with a concept or problem though, I tend to return to verbal analysis - a narrative or verbal description helps me figure out things that I otherwise struggle with.
If I am writing, I might be hearing the words in my mind, or I might not. If not, I might reread what I wrote and then feel like editing it, probably because I wasn't conscious enough of how it sounded. So, really, I don't exactly relate to having or not having an "internal monologue". Thinking one type of thought all the time seems weird to me.
As far as this post goes, I didn't know what it would look like until I was done, so I'm not necessarily conscious of how I organize things at all.
> I used to from time to time imagine my half of a conversation in which I was showing around someone notable who had traveled through time to get to the present day. Maybe someone from 1,000 years ago or maybe from 50. That is, for entertainment, not to cope with anything. I never felt like my imagination was quite good enough to turn it into fiction.
I do this exact same thing.
I also have conversations with random people in my life, explaining what I’m doing and what I’m thinking to them. When I have an inner monologue, I don’t think of it as talking to “myself”, but rather the imagined presence of some friend or family member. I have no idea how normal this is.
> I used to from time to time imagine my half of a conversation in which I was showing around someone notable who had traveled through time to get to the present day. Maybe someone from 1,000 years ago or maybe from 50. That is, for entertainment, not to cope with anything. I never felt like my imagination was quite good enough to turn it into fiction.
I do this all the time. It's usually Ben Franklin, but sometimes it'll be someone else. Almost always a scientist who'd be curious and I think fun to hang out with. I don't know how long I've been doing this, but it's probably at least a couple times a year for the past decade or more. I imagine how I'd explain modern technology and how he might react.
Ha! When I need to take some idea apart and try to understand it, I often find myself explaining it to a highly perceptive Charles Babbage who has had his wish to see the future granted, albeit without having to sacrifice the rest of his lifespan.
There can be others, but Babbage is the most frequent visitor by far. I have no idea whatsoever why.
As for the rest of perl4ever's comment, there is not a single word or thought or sentence in it which I do not completely recognize and relate to.
And, as far as visual thoughts go, I don't think I'm a visual person, but I wouldn't say I don't think visually. Once in a while, I do. Waking from dreams, I often feel like they were very visual. I guess maybe my sense is that my visual imagination is latent or stunted. Usually it's difficult for me to picture anything, but I feel I know what it's like, that I can imagine waking up and being able to see the tiniest detail of something I'm thinking about.
Ketamine infusions can completely, instantly and seemingly permanently remove these racing thoughts, allowing you to only have them when you want them. Doesn't impact creativity either. Feels like the part of the brain responsible for running worrying scenarios quiets down and only brings them up to consciousness when necessary. There are several studies showing anxiolytic in addition to anti-depreesive effects. Doesn't work for everyone, though.
I found that about a year of serious mindfulness meditation with some CBT was able to give me the same lasting effect, even though I am not currently regularly meditating
Did you every try meditating? Most styles (that I know of) involve trying to quieten the mind, or train you not to grasp onto thoughts and run with them. Instead just let them arise and fade away. That's assuming you would be interested in changing this. (It's certainly beneficial when someone has annoyed you and you can't get it out of you head for the rest of the day).
With me it is often less words and more action movies: getting innocent people out of harms way, looking for cover, looking for anyone like minded who might be able to help block the doors and try to ambush an attacker together with me. Calling the police, whispering the address etc etc.
Not sure if it would work if anything happens, but this is one of the thing my mind keeps itself busy with as I walk through the city. And no, I'm formally a trained soldier, but I don't have much training in this so it is just my bored mind going crazy with ideas.
Pretty much describes The Last Psychiatrist's writings about Narcissism and The Matrix generation. "When the time comes the Universe will make it so I save everyone and know Kung-Fu, because I'm innately a hero so of course it will".
Me too. My mind is always going off on different tangents playing out various scenarios, even ones that almost certainly won’t happen. I haven’t been formally diagnosed but I suspect I have some level of ADHD as well.
On the other hand the random thoughts if I can stick with them long enough do help me form a coherent train of thought. It’s a bit hard to explain, but sometimes my mind is not “clear”. I’d be noodling on a problem (typically not a technical one, more like social or life problems) and feel like there should be a solution but it’s just out of my reach. If I keep focusing on that one issue it have a hard time coming to a conclusion. If however I follow the random tangents a bit then some how the various tangents converge on something useful.
Same, ADHD and everything, but overtime I've learned to control it. Now I typically use my internal monologue to work something out. Sometimes it still gets away from me though and I have to purposefully refocus my thoughts onto work or something constructive.
Honestly, I no longer view ADHD/ADD as a disorder, but different brain functionality. It doesn't typically fit in with our modern schooling systems so it's treated like a disorder. It certainly has some handicaps to be sure, but it's benefits, hyper-focus (when you get it working) and creativity are very helpful sometimes.
Without any insensitivity towards ADHD, another thing that I think contributes to a heightened sense of internal monologue and constant self-excruciation is the expectations and stresses of society.
I have found that in Southern Africa, if you take the time to understand many of the fusion and native cultures, you can learn a lot about stressing less. In my personal case, I do have an internal monologue, but it gets worse with stress.
My one Mozambican friend for example (notwithstanding his amusing "selfishness" with money) has made me realise that not all people handle progress (esp. technological) with underlying anxiety. Sometimes you really are allowed to suck in and enjoy life, appreciate the progress that has been made, and look to our challenges with grace.
I used to constantly think my mind wandered from subject to subject. I never thought of it much (ironic?) until I read an article about meditation. In meditation you make a conscious effort to not think.
As I got older I found I lost that fire as I call it. Now I find most of the time my mind doesn't wander and it feels wrong. I used to be incredibly creative just from the sheer volume of thoughts.
I do think I have mild ADHD I can't concentrate even the slightest noise ruins my thought process. A friend of mine who has been diagnosed as having ADHD has traits I see in myself. Headphones with brown noise, caffeine, night time (now) are the only ways I can concentrate.
Also ADHD and experience the world in a similar but slightly different way. All my narratives are about potential immediate futures and how they might tweak the longer term outcomes. It's interesting but insanely draining and often depressing. Since I've noticed this about my self I've been intentionally trying to take steps to slow my thoughts and be in the moment, but when I do I'm constituently thinking about how doing that will effect my future self, lol. Still, I think I've found that intentionally trying to take moments has been helpful and beneficial
Another thing that happens is that when someone else is talking a lot of the time I've already thought through what they are saying to the point that they don't even need to say it for our conversation to continue and keep track. This makes me extremely annoyed by people I deem long winded. I used to try and hurry the conversation along, but it turns out people don't like that and it definitely makes me look like an ass hole. Also, sometimes I'm wrong and I not only look like an ass hole I definitely feel like an ass hole. As I've matured I've gotten better at listening and not looking annoyed, but my mind wonders as soon as I know where the convo is going. Haven't quite figured that one out yet
1. Each time I review a concept or memory it lost information, so the most "honest" conception of something I could have was an unblemished impression lightly touched.
2. So can I just let feelings and thoughts flow around without letting it turn into words?
3. I found that while my comprehension didn't appreciably decrease, I still did fine in classes and homework, I had more trouble explaining concepts to other people.
So I conclude that for certain kinds of thinking it is important to recite it to fine tune your presentation. For others, for most, it is best to let them flow without much attachment.
I now tend to use writing for formal thought consolidation since it's less lossy and forces me to follow things from beginning to end. It required me practicing for half a year to stop myself from trying to formulate my opinions in words. Now I only do it if it's an opinion I want to express.
I don't know if it's possible to train in the other direction, though I've never heard voices other than my own internal voice so maybe I'm in the minority. Maybe a subset can hear only one voice, some hear nothing, most hear many?
I hear voices and see visuals of other people with extreme clarity in my head. I thought everyone had that given I couldn't comprehend how you would discuss and/or reason about things without conjuring up a representation of that thing.
I have this "condition". I didn't know it was unusual. I was on propecia (hairloss) medication for awhile, and it took the internal monologue away. I'm now off of it because life was dull and lonely without an active imagination. How curious that testosterone derivative hormones could alter brain activity.
It's good to know I'm not alone. Mine isn't that intense; I only do this several times a day, but when driving or in the shower, I am frequently giving speeches in front of thousands, or debating publicly on live television. I constantly call myself out on aspects where I'm weak, and correct myself. I don't schedule time or do this deliberately; it kind of just happens. But what I've found is that is has helped me so much in my face-to-face communication at work.
It also leads to overthinking. You could simulate several long conversations based on wrong assumptions, resulting in wrong conclusions and probably some anxiety.
It also makes it harder to deal with you because only you can react based on those long analyses, everybody else has to react based on your actions.
It's helpful for simulating different thoughts and feelings from different viewpoints in real or imagined scenarios. It doesn't grant super-empathic powers of comforting, or mirroring feelings in the moment. Moreso it hinders my ability to mirror emotions because I'm dont live "in the moment" as much.
I wish I knew how to switch on this power. As it stands, I seem to be pretty good at grasping the abstract “shape” of problems, in a way that short-circuits words, but I can’t flow forth with conversation or write believable dialogue to save my life. My thoughts are entirely fuzzy.
Sometimes when I’m very sleepy, I can simulate friends and relatives talking to an uncanny degree, but not at any other time.
I'm not sure if it's the same thing, but I can switch between the two modes, narrated and silent. Most of the time when reading I'll narrate in my head, otherwise I rarely narrate when performing more complex tasks (such as programming - I program much faster than I can speak).
I always find myself thinking out different scenarios, different responses, etc. I too listen to a lot of music and podcasts to drain out that voice - it often helps me work harder.
Also my internal voice is very different from my spoken voice. My internal voice is upper class English and my spoken voice is a rough, course English voice.
Another thing, possibly related, is that my ability to multitask is quite high. Right now for example I am watching a video whilst typing. I can often talk and type at the same time as well, whilst I find colleagues unable to do so.
I feel like this too. However, I've found I can instantly get into non-verbal focus while playing chess. You might want to give it a shot. FWIW I'm not a particularly good, or experienced player either, just someone that enjoys it.
I’ve hadn’t realized it until you just said it, but I am the same way. I’ve played roughly 10-20 games a day for years! That said, I feel I am simply trading one mode of thought for another. I tend to be _even less_ present when playing chess than nearly any other activity.
verbal focus helps my chess. when I think things like "he's trying to mount an attack on my queen's side", verbalized as words, it helps me to understand what I'm seeing in a new way
fwiw I also have ADHD, and certainly daydream a lot, and often imagine myself in situations or doing interesting things, but I would say that I don't have much of an 'internal monologue'. I imagine being in situations, but very rarely speaking is conciously involved. For example, I also sometimes imagine being the leader of my country, but I'm more thinking about issues that might arise and how I might decide to act to respond to them, and how people might react, what obstacles might be encountered etc, but in a more abstract way? Like on an emotional level rather than a linguistic level.
On a tangential note, I was amazed to find that there exist people who struggle to keep geometry in their head, in a sense have no visual "minds eye" at all. I was playing a game with somebody where you have to build a very simple tower while blindfolded, as somebody else reads the instructions, and they had a great amount of trouble imagining that a specific tetris-like shape might look like the letter 'T' even though they held it in their hands, until they removed the blindfold. They were still able to understand the shape of the object in some sense, but not 'see' it in some other sense until they removed their blindfold.
I wonder how well these kinds of simple differences in internal concious organisation map to personalities, or competency in certain areas.
Your first paragraph, I experience that frequently only mine is entirely verbal in nature.
I also have an extremely weak minds eye. I don't get visual thinking at all. If I have a blank page in front of me I simply cannot imagine a user interface. I would have to physically or digitally start drawing something in order to even be able to visualize further changes to the UI. I also have an extremely weak grasp on local geography. I suspect places form a network in most people's heads. For me they are mostly isolated locations which don't connect to anywhere else. I have an ok sense of direction. I can certainly go back the way I've come. But in regular conversations about locations in my city I have been stumped 1000x when certain place names are mentioned. I always ask where those places are. Everyone around me can tell me how to get there by what is close by or what describe the route. I usually don't know where the things the mention are either. Someone else usually chimes in to help me understand where something is by giving another example. Unless I pull up Google maps I almost always still end up not knowing where they are talking about even though I know the name of the place and roughly what type of place it is. I'm talking about the major suburbs anyone would know in their city. I worked out my ability in this area was sorely lacking when even my little brother who was 5 years younger than me would always be the 3rd person to attempt to explain where something was after my two older sisters had had a go.
But when it comes to peoples voices I can recall their accent, language patterns and mannerisms perfectly. So I wind up doing a lot of impersonations of people.
I spend a great deal of time worrying about what we'd do if a few hundred thousand exact clones of me appeared. Should we congregate, maybe seize an uninhabited island or form a town, or should we scatter to the four winds? How would we deal with our darkest secrets or quirks being public knowledge? Would we cooperate or conflict violently?
I think it's all my internal monologue voices feeling trapped living in one head. At least we're self-aware..
I have internal monologues, talking to myself as I write this, and when I was younger I'd play out stories in my head. Still do it sometimes when I'm bored or stressed, or particularly upset about something.
Example of a story: something very much like The Watchmen graphic novel, before I had read it (movie and show didn't exist, or were even talked about.
Interesting, that's what I'd typically think of as daydreaming, but it definitely doesn't feel like an always-on thing, as I definitely don't verbalize a lot of things internally. Which does pose the occasional problem when I'm asked to explain something :)
Thank you for this, I have been diagnosed as ADHD at 4/5. But nothing came of it since I maintained a good grade throughout school. My mind is exactly like that, I’ve always discarded that diagnoses as bogus but now it makes more sense.
Having conversations with yourself and re-playing conversations is different from narrating things like a voice over though. I do the former, and I believe that's quite normal, but not the later.
I also have ADHD, but my thoughts (multiple and distracted they are) are “flashes”, not a fully dubbed voiceovers. They would be much slower if they would need to be “pronounced” mentally.
This topic (comments here, the OP, and comments in threads elsewhere) exposes some conflicting definitions of what an "internal monologue" is or means.
- Some people describe hearing their internal monologue, which I take to mean something like: they have an internal monologue, and it manifests as a voice that only they hear. These people are analogous to those who see things they picture in their mind's eye.
- Some people describe not hearing their internal monologue, which I take to mean something like: they interpret "internal monologue" as a metaphor for their train of thought or stream of consciousness; they think of themselves as having an internal monologue (i.e., they are thinking in language), but don't experience it as a voice. These people are analogous to all of the aphantasics surprised that the mind's eye isn't just a metaphor.
- Some people describe not having an internal monologue. I suspect these people are a mix of those who think in language but interpret the term "internal monologue" as requiring hearing a voice, and people who'd describe their thought process as nonlingual in some way (visual, abstract, etc.)
Across these characterizations, different people describe their thought process(es) all over the place WRT to how compulsory/voluntary/consistent they are. Some of the people who "see" things do this consciously; others can't help but picture things they read or think or hear. Some people describe a conscious/conditional train of thought, while others describe one that is racing/intrusive/incessant.
For people who experience having an internal monologue: Suppose you see a bagel on the kitchen table in the morning and decide whether or not you're hungry enough to eat it. Does that process involve an internally experienced stream of words (whether "audible in your mind's ear" or not) like "I'm pretty hungry" or "I bet that bagel would taste good"? Is this what it would be mean to have an internal monologue? Because I certainly could decide to eat a bagel without experiences any words. Subjectively, it would involve me imagining the pleasant feeling of satiation and the annoyance of cleaning up and weighing them against each other, with no words involved.
I think it's more related with conflict situations. For example, imagine you are on a diet. Then after the first impulse of eating a bagel you think "but I started a diet a week ago" and then you justify yourself "a single bagel won't matter that much" which creates another thought "you said the same last time. You are going to regret it at the end of the month" and so on.
In fact, this internal monologue can be used in psychology when you are dealing with bad experiences by dividing your thoughts into an entity who suffers the pain and another one who is logical and supportive. For example, acting towards yourself the same way you would do for a friend.
For me it really depends. I have two ways of representing my speech.
1) experience the words as if I'm saying them out loud but don't vocalize them. This is similar to how a lot of people read, so I figure I'm technically subvocalizing them.
2) especially when doing math or programming I simply know what I was about to think using method 1) without any specific words springing up.
I can't figure out if method 1 is me having an auditory internal monologue or if it's non-auditory. But at least you have a second experience to contextualize with.
EDIT: I would also like to add that sometimes when programming my mind switches to a graph-like representation that I start to manipulate physically. That is, I'll actually move my fingers in the air and move around the idea of this graph to "view" it from different perspectives and at different levels "Minority Report"-stye. Yes, that is something I try not to do anywhere but at home.
> Does that process involve an internally experienced stream of words (whether "audible in your mind's ear" or not) like "I'm pretty hungry" or "I bet that bagel would taste good"?
Yes. I can also do this:
> decide to eat a bagel without experiences any words.
...but I prefer to think consciously about my actions. Doing too many things without internally verbalizing the decision-making process makes me feel like a beetle.
For me it's more a discussion or dialogue with one speaker. The same an old theater play would act it a convicted character - s/he will say one position/argument, then the other. There's no description of the bagel (so it's not as if images are replaced by a voice), but there might be (not always) a discussion what to do with it in my head, where I'm trying to formulate my want/choice. So it's the facets of the thinking procesd that might be played out. It's also not always a discussion, it could eg be a commentary or critique (both positive and negative) of what I'm doing. ("One more pushup, come on."; "I think I had too much tea already": "will she notice I've gone to the bathroom three times in the last hour?" ...) Other days or eg when I'm busy/in the flow there might be much less dialogue.
I don't think so (because this can be a short, impulsive decision), but it wouldn't surprise me if some experience it like this.
My personal experience (in the non-audible group) is that the "role" this voice is playing is a bit more supervisory/executive. It thinks about what I need to do tomorrow, or the next three steps on my current project, or that I really need to carve out time to go to the cleaners some morning.
This voice might think about getting food, but mostly when hunger is getting in the way of other priorities. Or when I need to game out how to fit food into a tight schedule.
Mostly what I hear is the internalized "No! Don't eat it! Too many calories!". If I don't hear that (or conjure up that voice) then I end up eating the bagel. It's like that for any bit of food I see laying around.
Additional complexity for me: the prefix "I'm hungry" or "should I have that?" is almost never in inner speech, but the answer upon making a decision always is.
This is why I'm sceptical if the whole thing. It's just way too subjective. I don't doubt that people experience the universe in different ways. But I highly doubt it's as simple as having an internal monologue or not.
I think it's possible that people experience the same things, but observe them differently, so it sounds like they're having a completely different experience. While I can absolutely have a conversation with myself inside my head, I don't "hear" the voice in my ears. Some people might take the "hearing" part very literally.
It reminds me of a conversation I had with my sister as a child. We were both falling asleep in a very dark room. I noticed that with my eyes open, staring into darkness, there was a kind of static noise pattern overlaying my vision. I asked her if she had the same thing. "No", she said. "I just see black". Thinking back, it's likely that we were both experiencing the same thing, but she just wasn't observing the same things that I was.
FWIW it does not seem like any of the above for me. It is more like I am rehearsing what I would say if I chose to do so. That does not come across as a voice to me.
Anecdata to add to this:
In the third grade I took the phrase "voices in your head mean you're crazy" so I actively suppressed my internal monologue (previously expressed in language) and now my thinking is mostly abstract and/or visual. There are two exceptions: imagining a hypothetical conversation or reviewing a previous conversation in my head. Those are the only cases of language in my head. When I read I experience a combination of the two.
I tend to use hypothetical conversations in my head to analyse my thoughts, but otherwise feel my thinking is more abstract than verbal. So I'm not sure I agree with the dichotomy this article is presenting.
IIRC, Chomsky's theory on this is that human language is first internal and is the basis for all human thought. He doesn't mean an internal 'voice', but some primordial, grammatical imperative to producing thought in a certain way. This resulted in all of the world's spoken languages and would explain rapid language learning rates in newborns.
For myself personally, it depends on what I'm thinking about. Thinking about writing this sentence, I hear each of the words I'm going to type in my head before I type them.
However, if I'm working out how to assemble a table, I'm not hearing "And now I screw the leg on" I just abstractly know that's what I'm going to do.
I have to imagine that's the case for at least most people. Thinking out complicated abstract concepts in internally verbalized words just seems like it would take forever.
Came to make the same comment. Normally, I avoid giving the "Me Too!" comments, but I think in this context it's appropriate. If I'm casually thinking about life, the universe, and everything then I typically have a monologue. I don't "hear" it, per say, but I am thinking in sentence structure. If I'm analyzing a problem, working on a project, or trying to digest a situation, then I do not think in such sentence like ways. If I'm performing a low-cognitive-load activity (like a long road-trip), then I've got an inner-monologue going on with words & sentences. If I'm really in need of my focus (driving in Manhattan), there's zero inner-monologue.
I think Ihave control over how I think. An internal monologue is great for remembering in order. But I rebuild as an image of keywords which is great for connecting but the words blur. I rebuild as a map to navigate with a mental car. I rebuild as a shape to trigger my eyes, a sound for my ears...
However the last week I've been stuck on naming "a complete thought", not just a vision which is just an image. But one that breaks through unconnected to any sense. A thought so full that it first needs to be unpacked in language, image, shapes and steps before it can be expressed. Thus like the article: does anyone else have this? Does anyone have a name for it?
> However, if I'm working out how to assemble a table, I'm not hearing "And now I screw the leg on" I just abstractly know that's what I'm going to do.
This is funny. I can't imagine anyone doing that. There is no end to that. Like imagine someone thinking while walking down a lane "I am walking down the lane, and now I am going to turn left ... " this is endless ...
This is what I don't understand when people claim things like "language is required for higher thought" or whatever (no link but I'm sure I've seen that claim numerous times across various articles). We necessarily do plenty of thinking without words. Certainly you can be someone who focuses more on the words or less on the words, and maybe word-based people are naturally better at talking because their thoughts are mostly in word-form to begin with, but you can't put all the thoughts in words.
This reminds me of an electrician I know. He spends a long time working by himself. Sometimes he explains to his tools what he is doing. "okay mr drill. Now we are going to make a whole here to get the cable through. Ready?". Occasionally his customers hear him.
> This is funny. I can't imagine anyone doing that. There is no end to that. Like imagine someone thinking while walking down a lane "I am walking down the lane, and now I am going to turn left ... " this is endless ...
Funny you say that. Growing up, I was almost exactly like that, though thankfully, the habit has shifted elsewhere.
By elsewhere, this amounts to active subvocalization of distinct physical attributes of the person in front of me: shape of head, type of eyes, (ir)regularity of teeth, cut of jib, unusual piercings, color of clothing, etc.
I don't do that with most thought but if (hypothetically) i dropped the screw and had to reach down and search for it, and that took some period of time, i might actually think "I have to put this screw in the hole i just drilled" to remind myself what i was doing.
I am also somewhere in between these two extremes, and I actually find that the process of taking an abstract thought and forcing myself to form it into words is a great way to find out how well-conceived the thought is.
In other words, I may find that I can't easily put it into words and that will indicate to me that I need to put more time into thinking about it and deciding what I really think.
I think almost entirely in images, usually moving and relating to each other in 3D space.
There are words mixed in, but when they come up they are usually just single words or a phrases which are attributes of something I'm thinking of, or an action I should take.
Sometimes I think more in words, but that's usually when something is really unclear to me or if I am obsessing over something.
I think that years of training myself not to obsess over things probably reduced my internal monologue almost to the point that it would be good to have a bit more of it sometimes.
I'm pretty much the same, but my internal monologue sometimes manifests itself as, I don't know how to describe it, but, as "feelings". This is somewhat usefull, but I need a more formal method sometimes to explain me to myself.
There are some theories that the brain may effectively contain more than one "proto-consciousness" (or perhaps some of them are actually "fully conscious"). Maybe 2 or 3, maybe a whole lot of them.
If this is true, then when you have an internal "dialogue", you may be literally conversing with different sapient "beings". If so, who's actually the "you" there? Are you one of them, or all of them, or just kind of observing them all from above? Are you able to switch between those modes, intentionally or otherwise? Are "you" a microservice architecture, a monolith, a monolith orchestrating microservices, or all, or none?
We intuitively feel like we're a single voice and "manager" of everything that's going on. That could still be true even if there are other consciousnesses at work in there. Or it could be an illusion, or sometimes you are and sometimes you aren't, or maybe consciousnesses can somehow merge into a true single whole.
Or maybe it's closer to what we think, perhaps with multiple "intelligent" subsystems exchanging information, but only one actually conscious, sentient system.
There are a myriad of puzzling possibilities. We still know very little about how the brain and mind truly work, so this is all blind speculation. But it's interesting to ponder.
I actually suspect we will someday have pretty definitive answers to questions like these, or at least answers which apply to 90%+ of humans. But those answers may not come in any of our lifetimes.
I don't necessarily think about all the words, they just appear at the keyboard (I touch type). A bit like if you're speed reading and skip the internal vocalisation, the word is before my mind, but not in a vocal sense. Like when you imagine a square, but don't imagine a picture of one -- or perhaps when you imagine a 5 dimensional hypercube and don't imagine a picture of one (much easier!).
I'm the spell it out type and I don't think it takes for ever. I more or less talk my self though abstractions and visualize the steps in my head. Usually in chunks if it's a complicated thing, but often as a whole. I think a cad model would be the closest parallel I can think of. My inner monologue is talking me through it as I visualize whatever I'm working on. So, it's not saying and.. now.. I.. put.. the.. next.. leg.. and so forth, it's this is how these 4 legs are going to fit
> Thinking out complicated abstract concepts in internally verbalized words just seems like it would take forever.
I do this but the internal monologue fits the time it takes me to do the thing or I go onto the next thing. It gives me a good sense of progression, what I have accomplished and the goal im focused on.
If the task is routine like buttering toast the monologue is about something else.
As with the ostensible Aphantasia I believe that this is a problem with people being able to describe their inner experiences accurately. It makes way more sense to me that >99% of people fall into the behavior category that you described, rather than that 10% of people don't have an internal monologue.
FWIW, my experience lines up very closely to yours.
I dream up movies and songs and all sorts of rich fantasies in my head, and I do this constantly. As a consequence of this, I never get bored as I've got an incredible imagination to lean on.
I think about movies I want to make, startups I want to create, the change I want to put into the world. New songs on my commute, goals I want to accomplish, what I could do with time travel. I'm always working on the structures of my different dream worlds, modifying the rules and the characters, exploring how they interact. The languages they speak, and the rules of the magic and science systems that form the bounds of their existence.
I have never once in my life been bored. Not once. I can sit in an empty room and just daydream.
If I play music or walk or run, this imaginative power is supercharged and becomes a transcendent experience. It's why I love running and headphones. I haven't taken drugs, but I imagine it's something like that. It's a pure, unfettered deluge of dopamine. I can also walk in circuits and circles around my house doing this and can waste hours in fantasy. Entire weekends can be "wasted" this way.
I think this is a source of my ADHD. I've got instant dopamine fixes from my raw imagination and it's incredibly hard to do anything else as I can always give myself something better to do by just daydreaming.
As an aside, the dreams that I have when I sleep are almost like movies. They have intricate (but often nonsensical) plots, and I'm seldom even involved.
The main thing I want to do with my life is to create tools so I can get this out of my head and out into the world.
I wonder how many other people daydream like this and have a vibrant inner creativity?
I used to have such an imagination when I was young: before going to sleep, I would always reimagine the movies I just watched or the books I just read, factoring myself into the story (often as a coprotagonist, not particularly OP but helpful in many ways), sometimes going a bit meta trying to explain my presence to the characters, tweaking their response, trying not to trigger the obvious self-doubting panic that would ensue if someone told you your reality isn't actually "real".
I even had a cross-universe canon for my character: I often had wings (watching Winx club as a kid helped), and sometimes took characters on a multi-dimensional ride in my magic hyper-technological flying car, big as a house on the inside, capable of traversing space and time.
I absolutely feel the same way about music, it manages to turn any world, even a simple concept into a fantastical and magical music video of sorts.
As I went on with my life I somewhat lost this ability, possibly due to the highly technical nature of my job and hobbies, however I still love reading and watching good fantasy stories, and sometimes, when I feel like it, I still fantasize by joining the story and aiding the main characters in saving the world (and music still can transport me away to another world, like before).
I have often considered the enormous power, and just as enormous limtations of modern creativity tools.
I honestly can't wait for neural interfaces: when everyone will be able to extract images and audio directly from their brains.
It will truly be a revolution for the media industry, a change as big as the introduction of computers.
It will also give way to haunting new aspects of copyright law: what happens if someone publishes a YouTube neural video that uses copyrighted characters, do we prohibit people from even thinking about copyrighted IP?
Do we beam films using widevine L0 DRM directly to people's brains, immediately removing all memories of them after they were seen to avoid copyright infringement?
Those will truly be interesting times, and I would really love to live to see them.
The first part of your comment reads like my own thoughts. I still find myself incorporate new fictions into my mental canon. Over time the framework has changed significantly, but its roots are still noticable. Some of my earliest memories are of me playing around with this fantastical dreamscape. Nowadays I generally dive into these sorts of day dreams whenever I'm walking/biking alone, or showering. Music or white noise can help me get into it more.
Neural interfaces will be a game changer. I'm so excited for them.
Have you read "The Continent of Lies" by James Morrow? I can't remember how I came across it, not quite my normal reading fare, but it delves into some of what you are talking about.
> I would always reimagine the movies I just watched or the books I just read
When I was a teenager, I went through this phase where I would dream of myself as the hero of a book I just read. And if I knew the hero would die at some point, I would always modify my dream so I didn't die :)
I believe I am similar. I have often thought that I would not consider locked-in-syndrome to be as bad as others express as a worse-than-death fate. I think I would just happily continue wandering within my meandering mind.
I think it is detrimental to achieving things though. Actually doing things takes far more discipline and that's time that could be used for coming up with more internal ideas.
As a side note to this, I also have aphantasia. So I don't get any images. Just concepts,dialog, connections etc.
While discussing lucid dreaming with my partner, we both learned that she has aphantasia. I think it blew my mind more than it did hers. Things like, "I pictured that character so much different when I read the book" after watching a movie-- she always thought people were just saying that because they had different ideas of the characters mannerisms, or the text conveyed something different to them... Not that they could actually play out a scene in their head.
It got me thinking about a lot of ways we go about teaching. Math for example - my partner struggled with calculus in uni when presented an equation she hadn't seen something similar to before. It never occurred to me that people couldn't attempt to "graph" something in their head.
I had the same thing. The more anchored it became to reality through supportive others and responsibility and commitment the quieter it became. Writing out my ideas and then really thoroughly and deeply exploring one that means something to gave a weight to bear on my psyche that quietened the others.
Ze Frank has a good video on this where he quotes Jung's work. https://youtu.be/u2cMjeSvZSs?t=184
Artists say life begins when you leave your comfort zone, in regards to making good art.
I find it still an important driver in life to follow that burst of ideas. The only way for me to raise up an idea structure or skill is to follow that buzz upwards. My capacity to imagine is jammed packed with meaningful content now and it grows a weight of it's own.
Same here. My “inner world” never stops unless I force it too (I like meditating occasionally for some mental-peace-and-quiet.)
Other than forcefully pausing it that way, it runs 24/7/365 and is incredibly vivid.
I can also have multiple “tracks” running at once internally, but I generally have one “in focus” and another 1 or 2 sort of there in the background dimly. I’m aware of what all tracks are currently up to though at any given point.
Generally it’s just brainstorming ideas, playing back memories, imagining fantastical worlds/stories for internal entertainment, or wondering about things.
It’s not always positive, and keeping it all under control can be difficult, but I definitely think the pros outweigh the cons.
It is not only healthy, but a great ability to be respected and cultivated. It is also good to learn to not do this. Saying it's unhealthy is like saying /dev/random is unhealty, but /dev/null is, or stars are bad but empty space is good. Both are quite useful. (let's please not have that talk about cryptographic qualities of /dev/random). My experience is that if you can easily tap into endless creativity and also experience the calmness of no-thought at will, you will have greater abilities than average in most situations. Meditation, among other things, can help you be more adept at either.
I can relate, as I do this all the time, being inside my head, a mashup of multi-verses, projecting myself in alternate realities, being able to time-travel in to the future and opening a conversational 1-on-1 portal to my present self, to answer the question like Dr. Banks from the movie Arrival or when Brand reaches out to her past self in Interstellar, all while taking bus home, or while taking a long shower.
I can watch an entire movie inside my head from another character's point of view or vantage point.
I'm also able to on the spot improv storytelling, something that I was able to do easily as a teen during summer camps and recently I got introduced to the world of DnD which got my mind racing and volunteered to become a DM.
Loneliness is a rarity for me as I feel content wandering off, writing and art is my way of projecting to this world, which I have plucked out from the sea of infinite realities through dreams and daydreaming.
When someone talks to me, asks me a question/opinion or solution, a whole mindmap/flowchart,timeline appears before me which I can navigate spatially in 3d.
When someone asks for direction or trying to find out where I am, I literally see a 3d flyover or bird's eyeview from where I'm standing.
When I dream, not only that I dream in colors but they have a feel to it like watching something nostalgic or when I travel. Sometimes dreams has visual filters as a part of it. Have you dreamed being inside a cartoon/comicbook, painting or noir movie?
I do have a hard time turning my brain off which sucks when trying to go to sleep.
I can do all the things you mention. I do also have a hard time "turning my brain off". Actually, I don't think I can do it. But I do have a way to sleep quickly.
It may not be the same for you but you probably can adapt it to whatever suits you. It's about coziness.
There are several cozy scenarios that are ideal for me to sleep. I just teleport myself there and I do stuff.
My favorite by far is the one in the wilderness. I read a book once about a guy from the neolithic who had to run away from his village with his dog. I imagine myself there. There's nothing around me. Only several small villages kilimeters away. I'm alone with my dog. The sun is almost set and it's getting chilly. There's a little cave nearby where I can take refuge for the night. I'll go gather some wood and make myself confortable inside. Then I'll sit by the fire eating some of that smoked meat I have left and I'll just rest my head down. At that point I'm already sleeping.
I have the same thing going on in my head. Sometimes I think that this has a negative effect on me, because it's very easy for me to procrastinate, because all I need for that is to daydream.
It helped me through school though. I cannot imagine going through classes without daydreaming. It sounds like torture.
I also do this quite a bit and recently I noticed it's been getting more intense. When this happens it's usually because someone's been talking to me for 10+ minutes straight without me saying a single word, and I get this physical feeling like they're getting further away or their head is getting smaller. Does anyone else experience this?
I do exactly the same. Started when I was 6, walking around in circles, just imagining things. Music makes it even easier. It also helps deal with frustrations and anxiety by imagining catarthic scenes.
I still spend an hour each day doing that during my commute.
I've found that improv theatre and writing books really helps with the "getting it out of my head" part.
I saw this viral tweet and I hoped that was more scientific information to read, because I'm a little confused. I don't see enough information here to even determine which type of person I am. Of course I've always heard of "internal monologue" and of course I think about things using language. But I also don't "hear" anything, and definitely not something that literally sounds like my voice speaking. But if I were to try to explain my thought process, I likely would describe it as myself expressing thoughts using language as if I were speaking.
Obviously this gets deep into the philosophy of qualia, but do we have evidence that there are two very different modes of thinking? Could this not just be different analogies people have adopted to describe their thinking?
An Instagram poll isn't a great tool to study this. I would like to see a psychological or neurological study about this idea. As of now, I'm pretty skeptical that the dichotomy exists. It sounds like the claim that "some people describe their brains like a computer, while some people describe their brains like a library." Computers and libraries are very different physical objects, yes, but the choice of analogy doesn't really tell me much about how people are experiencing their own thought processes.
Of course, if it's true that the majority of people do actually experience auditory hallucinations of their own voice speaking all of their thoughts, then my criticisms here are invalid, and I'm definitely in the other group of people.
For me it can be "auditory" in the same way that I can "see" pictures of things I'm thinking of inside my head. My understanding is when you're visualizing something in your head -- say, your partner's face -- the visual cortex is activated as if you are actually seeing it. The same goes for my thoughts.
Not every thought is actually.... auralized? auditorialized? ...though. There's some sort of default mode that I operate in most of the day. I don't have to "hear" every single thought I have, I'm able to take in information and perform common actions without hearing thoughts. But, as soon as I go into "conscious" mode, nearly everything becomes sounded out internally. For instance, when programming, I'm constantly having a real internal conversation along the lines of, "Okay, so if this value is Y here, but then this transformation happens, then..." And yes, this occurs in my voice, or at least how my voice sounds to me when I speak. (Sometimes, when I'm really in the flow of it, I'll even start unintentionally voicing it out loud.) I actually like this, because it forces my thoughts to slow down -- when I'm really thinking through a hard problem, I have no choice but to think at the speed of my monologue. It's like built-in rubber-duck debugging.
Having said all of this, we know that thoughts can be expressed differently in different people because deaf individuals (who were born deaf) certainly do not have an ongoing auditory inner monologue.
I mean, at the end of the day, a thought is just a pattern of firing neurons, so what precise neurons are involved is going to impact how you experience that thought.
"of course", no most of my thoughts are not expressible in any language. Why would they? Thoughts are so much richer than any language can possibly express. How to solve this physics problem? If I had to do it via a monologue it would take forever. Same with programming. Instead I just think the thoughts directly and just solve the problem without verbalizing anything.
Of course this makes it harder to tell others what you are doing, but I don't see how you could possibly solve any problems at all while being limited to thoughts you can verbalize.
> Thoughts are so much richer than any language can possibly express.
I'm not sure about that. Couldn't it just be that we sometimes don't understand our own thoughts? If you can't describe one of your thoughts with language, I would say that you must not understand that thought. And of course we sometimes have thoughts which we don't understand.
I think that understanding our own thoughts is something that needs to be worked on, both individually (we certainly should be better at is as adults than as children) and collectively (science and philosophy should allow us to keep improving our understanding of our own thoughts).
It is indeed an intriguing topic to consider. I hear something like my own voice both when I am thinking throughout the day and when I am writing, such as right now I hear my “imaginary voice” speaking what I’m typing out.
The idea of ones own voice is hard to describe. I perceive it as similar to what my voice sounds like, but from heard from within, almost like you’ve rolled off a bunch of the high-end. Imaginary voice is much more consistent in volume and tone for me too than speaking, much less emotional, almost no variety in pitch.
I wouldn’t say I think in full-sentence monologues all day, but I guess I think in fragments of sentences? It’s one of those things that is hard to look back and remember doing and explain how you did it, kind of like breathing. It’s just automatic.
I wonder if some of the “no monologue” people aren’t much different from the rest of us, but they just didn’t articulate their process the same way. I can kind of identify with the concept map thing, so I could probably answer differently depending on mood or how I felt when I read the survey.
I'm just sitting here overlooking a mountain and was feeling/thinking/interpreting one of the hills while reading this and realized it actually gets cumbersome if you try to describe it with words, first I thought "hilly", then thought "steep" was more of what I was feeling but after further analysis (of the past moment) the feeling/experience also encompased "rugged", "majestic"...
Super interesting topic overall. I wonder whether these people without inner dialogue are unable to recall music (with lyrics)?
I can easily "transform" my inner voice to be in the voice of Darth Vader (like someone here interestingly pointed out). I find it peculiar that there are people who cannot and their inner life must feel different than mine. I wonder how depression fits into this. I'd think you'd certainly be more prone to get depressed if you are able to tell yourself how stupid/worthless you are. I wonder how that manifests non-verbally.
Someone linked to an article by Feynman in this thread which demonstrated two different kinds of counting - using your voice and seeing the numbers visually. Quite interesting read: http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/607/2/Feynman.pdf
I would not say that it is auditory hallucinations as in you don't actually hear the voice in your ears. But you thoughts are in a voice in your head that is distinctly your voice or your identity. At least that is my experience and it sounds like what the author is describing to me.
I'm working on a PhD in cognitive science. Something that I think relates to this is the idea of Emboddied Cognition [0], and in particular off-line emboddied cognition, where you use sensorimotor mechanisms in your body while thinking, even if you're not actually interacting with the environment. In this case it would be your brain activating the same audio processing areas you use when sound enters your ear, even though you're generating the sounds inside your head while thinking.
I used to, but I intentionally stopped and cleared my mind every time I did it for half a year, and now I only think in language when I'm trying to compose a speech or write.
So that's a thing you could try if you want to see for yourself, in case I'm a P-zombie.
I would not say that my internal monologue is entirely auditory, but there's an auditory element to it. I sometimes sort of 'see' the words or concept I'm thinking about, and if i focus on it, I think I can switch from one to the other.
1. I do inner monologue. And I have to say, sometimes I get scared from what I "hear". I don't mean sometjing like "I hear voices telling me to kill everyone", but nasty, brutally cynical, sometimes outright violent thoughts. They feel alien to me, because on general level I consider myself "the good guy", but one the other hand they don't feel like someone else whispering me evil things.
2. Sometimes I feel like my mind has layers, where this monologue is the the most upper one with some lower, less verbalized layer which is only later formed into words. Doesn't happen often, but it feels like the lower layer is actually more capable because it's not constrained by language/words.
Sometimes I have a "how awful would it be to do XY" moments. Usually something brutal. But it always makes me pay even more attention to not doing that very thing even accidentally because I definitely do not want to break stuff or hurt someone. Yet it makes me a bit nervous. What if I actually decided to do that? Fortunately it never happens when I'm under influence. Do I need help?
As others have said, these sound like typical intrusive thoughts.
The most common intrusive thoughts are, I believe, the "call of the void" ones (also known as "high place phenomenon"). You might be driving down the freeway and think "What if I drove into oncoming traffic?" or standing on a cliff at the end of a hike and think "What if I just walked off the ledge?" There's also some common less-morbid ones, like "What if I kissed my boss right now?" or "I just want to scream in the middle of this board meeting for no reason." Your immediate reaction should usually be to dismiss the thought as disturbing and move on with your life. If you find this dismissal to be difficult... that's when it can be worth checking out with a psychologist.
One hypothesis [0] for this phenomenon is that it is actually a post-fact reconstruction your brain is doing. Really, it's that your subconscious was uncomfortable with some imminent danger and forced you to compensate without thinking, and then you start thinking about what just happened. "Why did I suddenly step back from the ledge? Huh, must've been thinking about jumping off."
Another hypothesis I've read (which I can't find a good link to at the moment) is that it's some self-test mechanism. Your brain kind of sends a false "What if?" signal, and you should dismiss it because of the discomfort. This dismissal causes heightened awareness of the danger imminent and causes you to be more alert and thus be safer.
Again, though, these are pretty normal. That link I shared estimates that 50% of people have experienced the "call of the void". It's really only an issue if they're extraordinarily frequent (like... all the time), or if you genuinely feel tempted to act on them. Intrusive thoughts are not always indicative of suicidal ideation, but have also been linked to OCD and similar anxiety disorders (because they're a weird coping mechanism, when you think about it).
I seem to remember Sartre saying interesting things about this idea. Something about exercising your absolute freedom or something. As far as I know, it's perfectly normal.
I remember reading these are called parasitic(?) thoughts, uncontrollable and random thoughts, sometimes leading to more complex reasoning but ultimately almost on autopilot ; like the mind is just suggesting many different things at once and you just happen to notice one of those random thinking when it reaches the surface of your consciousness. I belive it also has to do with an anxious mind but I have nothing to back that up.
I think I remember reading somewhere that thinking about jumping when you are near a staircase, balcony, cliff, or something like that is pretty common, even if you don't have the least desire to commit suicide otherwise.
I feel the same way on the 2nd layer you're talking about. I feel like I can plan out a big project in my head, and see it, and understand it. But when I try to verbalize it, I get really flustered. I just want to zap the idea into someone else's head so that I don't have to explain how it works, because I'll inevitably do a poor job until I start working on said project.
Trying to explain it is part of understanding it. Our brains do a really good job of lying to us. They tell us they understand the topic, while ignoring what we don't know because it's harder to conceptualize.
I think it was Feynman who said you don't understand something unless you can teach it.
As I understand it, this is correct. One's mind is made up of different, sometimes 'competing' parts, most of which we are not consciously aware of (most of the time).
It's widely believed that the 'thinking' part of our brain, the neo-cortex, is far less in control than the deeper, emotional parts, such as the limbic system.
In re: #1 The world is hell. Look at history: everything has been a psychotic nightmare for most people most of the time, except for a handful of people in the last few minutes. That's gonna leave a mark.
> Under the present brutal and primitive conditions on this planet, every person you meet should be regarded as one of the walking wounded. We have never seen a man or woman not slightly deranged by either anxiety or grief. We have never seen a totally sane human being.
~Robert Anton Wilson
So, yeah, don't pop off on the bus or anything and you're doing alright.
> "Oh, yeah, if I didn't have inner peace, I'd completely go psycho on all you guys all the time." ~Lenny, from "The Simpsons"
In re: #2 Of course your mind has layers. Who does your breathing when you're not watching it? Also, the nervous system in your gut is as large as your brain (just distributed, spread around, yeah?)
> 2. Sometimes I feel like my mind has layers, where this monologue is the the most upper one with some lower, less verbalized layer which is only later formed into words. Doesn't happen often, but it feels like the lower layer is actually more capable because it's not constrained by language/words.
I have something like that which is more akin to wandering formless thoughts to me. I don't think they are more capable though, I think it's an illusion given off by the deeper or soother sensation it instills into the mind.
I’m grateful someone put to words the layers thing. The sublayers seem to move much faster than the top most layer. I try to get my monologue out of its way, but it’s almost prohibitive against it. Like I have to have the same thought twice - once low level and again top. Only then may I move onward.
I do try to “step aside” sometimes though. I think meditation has helped me hone that technique.
Intrusive thoughts are normal. I get that too, stuff I'd never say out loud (and that I'd not agree with). I think it's just a natural way for our brain to bring up alternatives and test our assumptions.
On your second point I think that thinking in words actually slows down my thoughts too. I've read about it and try not to, but sometimes it doesn't feel right until I spell it out to myself like I'm explaining to a child.
One of my favourite series, Bojack Horseman, had an episode where you hear his internal monologue. It was scarily eye opening, because I've often found my inner monologue saying the exact same things, and I can't even remember how long this has been going on for.
I get really annoyed with people who twitter about crap old people say (example old Clint Eastwood). Have always believed they’re just losing control over their internal monologues, because you just -know- a lot of people think that way sometimes but aren’t bad people.
On layers, it’s like there is a second contrarian thread that pops up during controversial topics. Like some safety or auditing function.
Something I discovered within the past year is that if I know a song fairly well, I can "play it" silently in my head, and be entertained. The experience isn't quite as emotionally resonate as listening with headphones, but it's not so far off either. It's useful when I'm bored.
...can anyone else do this? I actually find it supremely weird.
No, I think that's pretty normal. I do it all the time.
I can even "compose" my own music (it can be any genre, with any type of instruments, and even include voices), but I have no ability to play instruments myself. I'd love to get into music, but just don't have the time.
My literature professor back in college said he "listened to" classical music in his head during his morning runs. I just assumed everyone did it based on sample size 2.
Man I can't even imagine. I realize a while back that I don't actually hear music in my head when I have an earworm, instead I hear a representation of it made entirely of what would be vocalized sounds. So if I'm hearing the guitar solo from November Rain, its kind of like someone (me, really) going 'bowwwww owww nah nahhhh nah nahahhhhhhh wan nah nah nah nah wah wah' rather than actual guitar noises, but then it's followed up by the singers legitimate voice.
My wife found this pretty weird. I suspect it's related to my also experiencing aphantasia. It could be some form of mental lossy compression, where the brain knows it can roughly replicate what it heard using the limited set of vocalizations it already knows instead of actual note/instrument combinations.
>No, I think that's pretty normal. I do it all the time.
[Edit: Currently I "listen" to a lot of Georgios Papadopoulos, heh!]
>I can even "compose" my own music
I can relate! Unfortunately, I'm totally untrained regarding music. I once tried to enter one of the melodies in my head (simplified) into a music program, and it took forever, because I had to find the correct notes by trial and error: "Not that one. Neither that one. Still wrong. Not quite. This one is it! Next note..."
I cannot 'play music in my head'. I can recall vaguely what it felt like to have been listening to a specific piece of music, but not much further than that.
Possibly related, I have a very poor ability to visualise anything internally. (I cannot, for example, "picture a beach in my head")
In fact, most things I try to hold in my head evince nothing more than a foggy recollection.
It has been this way for as long as I can remember.
I'm a drummer and my wife always gets mad at me for drumming on things. I have a song in my head and can hear all the parts really well even over whatever sounds my taps are making. So in my head I'm drumming along and it sounds super good, but to the rest of the world it's just monotone taps on a table or whatever.
I do the same, but unintentionally and the songs that seem to pop into my head are all songs I hate. It's incredibly rare that my favorites end up playing, but rather repetitive Pop crap. This isn't even a comment about Pop Music, as even though I don't really listen to Pop, I've heard plenty that I like. But not the songs that fly around in my head all day; Pure garbage.
Edit: As I was typing this, "La Macarena" popped into my head.
I specifically avoid viral earworm songs because I am very prone to getting them stuck in my head. I can have the same song playing "in the background" non-stop in my mind for days. I have songs in my dreams and I'll wake up with them still playing in my head. Sometimes it will just be a single bar of a song, or just a piece of it looping.
To this day, I have never once listened to "Chocolate Rain" or Rebecca Black's "Friday" because I fear never being able to turn them off. (I avoided Taylor Swift for, like a decade, but now just thinking about means I've got "Shake it Off" playing.)
Writing this out now makes me realize how weird this all sounds...
I've also had songs get stuck in my head for as long as I can remember. What surprised me was the realization that I could (A) consciously initiate and turn off a mind-song, and (B) actually be entertained by the mind-song.
My "mind's eye" is pretty strong as well, but I would never mentally look at a painting or watch a movie to pass the time. Yet it seems to work for music.
The way I solved this is by stopping completely to listen to pop songs. I will actively avoid the radio or web stations so I won't be "contaminated" by these cheap songs. I actively look for more complex music: jazz/classical style and similar.
I once read that to get the loop out of your head, you have to "finish" the song, i.e. play it to the end, either in your head, sing it or play it on the stereo.
Yup, have been able to do that as long as I remember. It's great for pub quizzes where they play the start of a song, I listen to the rest in my head until I've worked out the song's name.
Isn't this the experience of getting a song "stuck in your head?"
I have experienced something similar, namely hypnagogic hallucinations, usually when waking up, that sound exactly note for note the same as the recordings. Strawberry Fields Forever was the most memorable. To my mind experiences like this and particularly vivid dreams show that our mental capacity for self-stimulating is profoundly more extensive than most people believe. I can't think of any reason why you couldn't have a kind of state of lucid wakefulness effectively functioning as an overlay of what your sense organs are telling you. Imagine for example a race car driver who sees the line as clearly as in one of the simulation games that enables it.
Edit: I've also had vivid hypnagogic visual hallucinations intentionally. It's a kind of fun game to play, seeing my bedroom clearly with my eyes closed, or checking the time on my watch while same. Obviously I'm conscious and aware that I'm not really checking the actual time, but not particularly surprisingly I'm pretty close since I tend to wake about the same time every day.
In case you're interested: "hypnogogic" refers to experiences you have while falling asleep. The word for experiences you have while waking up is "hypnopompic".
My wife doesn't like listening to music in the car, but one of the local radio stations will show the title/artist on the center console. So I put the radio on with the volume at 0, I hear the song in my head, and she has silence :)
Yeah I can also do this (sometimes), the experience is the same as yours: I can't quite emotionally resonate with the song as I would if I were hearing it IRL, but if I know the song quite well I can get all the details right.
It is particularly intriguing to be able to "sing" using other people's voices, since the lyrics of the song "feel" the same way as my inner voice, passing through (I assume) the brain's phonological loop.
Once I had this really weird experience, where in certain conditions, certain muscles would resonate exactly with the song playing in my brain (and not just the rythm, even minor details were somewhat transferred, as if my brain was redirecting raw PCM audio from my brain directly to the nerves); I was really excited about this, as there was potential for a direct non-invasive neural interface to my brain, capable of extracting original songs directly from my brain without any instruments; unfortunately I could not replicate this weird behaviour reliably, and I also felt a bit weird in my brain when trying to do so, so I just dropped the matter.
I haven't done it for many years but you've reminded me that I could sometimes play songs in my head and actually hear it. Only very softly though, like old-fashioned headphones on a very low volume.
I still have music in my head very often - I play piano and I'm always getting ear worms, but it must be at least 20 years since I last physically heard my mental music playing. I wonder if I can get it back?
This is the norm for me. If I am awake, I almost always have music playing in my head, from pop songs to classical to little nondescript melodies. Sometimes this can be quite annoying.
When you say play do you mean like a musician or do you mean like hitting play on a music player, if the latter I can do that, I suppose what would stop people is not a good memory for music.
Absolutely. I work extremely long hours, so I've noticed that when I'm particularly tired, my "mental iPod shuffle", as I call it, will go into extreme mode. Sometimes reading a single word or sentence is enough to remind me of a song, and BOOM it's immediately playing in my head.
I now basically have actual music on nearly 24/7 to drown that out otherwise it can get pretty annoying – especially if the song that's stuck in my head isn't one I actually enjoy.
Yep, I do this. In fact, sometimes when I'm meditating and focusing on my breath, I start hearing a song. I often ask, "Is that still being mindful or is it cheating?" I usually settle on cheating and my brain tries to focus in on the breath again. Sometimes I just let it play.
You know what's really weird? If I don't know all the lyrics to a song, I can sometimes listen to it in my head and hear the parts of the song I don't consciously remember.
Yes, I think the inability to do this seems to be associated with aphantasia. Most people do not have aphantasia, therefore I'd expect most people are able to do this.
I think similarly that most people who do not have an internal dialogue experience aphantasia - the ability to replay or simulate sensory experiences mentally. Personally I do not often have thoughts "racing" through my head - maybe one main one, maybe zero - and I think this related to my aphantasia.
Most well-trained musicians can read a score and construct the sounds mentally. It's an essential skill for composers and conductors, and useful for others.
In the aphantasia discussions that are closely related to this, it was revealed that some graphical artists have it and actually can't visualize things in their head, yet they're able to draw things on command.
Which is completely mind-boggling to me.
So there's probably people who can compose music without being able to audiolize it in their heads first, as strange as that sounds.
I find that if I'm in a noisy environment, like a moving car, if I think hard about a song, it feels like I can faintly hear it. I guess it's a side effect of the brain trying to find a recognizable pattern in the noise. I used to especially appreciate this in the days before it was easy to actually hear any song on demand, when I would have had to either buy the album or record the song off the radio.
I can play a whole song in my head, and then realize that I don't know the words, and when I try to get the words out of the song in my head, I can't understand them, because my brain only committed the musical parts, not the lyrical parts.
I can even hear the vocals, they're just gibberish until I make a conscious effort to memorize them.
I can do this too. I also will sometimes unconsciously bop along to the music.
One time, a friend's Dad asked me why I was rocking back and forth. I think he thought I had a nervous tick. In reality, I was "listening to a song" and didn't even realize I was moving along to it. Seems to happen most often when I'm bored.
Yep, I can totally do this. It's normally not the whole song, just a section of it (but that doesn't bother me). It's a particularly common thing for me to do in bed, using the last song I heard that day.
I found that when some particular song is getting too much of my internal "air time", the best way to get rid of it is actually to find it (personal collection, youtube, google music, spotify - whatever you are using) and just to listen to it from beginning to the end. HTH.
He discovers that he can read while counting in his head at a steady rate, but he cannot talk while counting. When he tells his friends, one of them claims to be the opposite, and indeed proves that he can count while talking but not while reading. It turns out “he was visualizing a tape with numbers on it going by.”
That friend was John Tukey. You may have heard of him. He invented the Fast Fourier Transform.
This has gotten me into a lot of trouble in my life. I don't use internal monologue to read - that means that I can be reading and listening to someone at the same time, and comprehend both. But, even if I can prove I heard and understood everything someone said, they inevitably view it as rude if I am reading something while listening to them.
I used to get in so much trouble for this in primary/secondary school. Listening to someone talk was boring beyond belief. So I read sci-fi in class.
I could always respond correctly when called upon, and could recite virtually word-for-word the entire class lecture if need be, so I eventually got a pass to just do my thing.
At this great distance in time I can see how this was impolite to say the least. But, really, it was bordering on abuse to make me sit there and listen with nothing else to keep my mind occupied.
Is this a left/right brain split specific thing or is there another thing going on? ever explore it?
I can do neither of these things. One voice dominates, self speaking, reading, listening to another person talk to me - the rest of them get 'left behind'.
That makes a lot of sense. It's hard to think in speech while talking. And it's hard to think visually when reading. But conversely easy to think in speech while reading, and think visually while talking.
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[1] https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/foot-in-mouth_disease
I used to from time to time imagine my half of a conversation in which I was showing around someone notable who had traveled through time to get to the present day. Maybe someone from 1,000 years ago or maybe from 50. That is, for entertainment, not to cope with anything. I never felt like my imagination was quite good enough to turn it into fiction.
In general though, I don't have a monologue in a continuous sense. I frequently imagine saying things, imagine other people saying things, occasionally imagine saying something to myself, but I would never say that's how I think exclusively. When I am having trouble with a concept or problem though, I tend to return to verbal analysis - a narrative or verbal description helps me figure out things that I otherwise struggle with.
If I am writing, I might be hearing the words in my mind, or I might not. If not, I might reread what I wrote and then feel like editing it, probably because I wasn't conscious enough of how it sounded. So, really, I don't exactly relate to having or not having an "internal monologue". Thinking one type of thought all the time seems weird to me.
As far as this post goes, I didn't know what it would look like until I was done, so I'm not necessarily conscious of how I organize things at all.
I do this exact same thing.
I also have conversations with random people in my life, explaining what I’m doing and what I’m thinking to them. When I have an inner monologue, I don’t think of it as talking to “myself”, but rather the imagined presence of some friend or family member. I have no idea how normal this is.
I do this all the time. It's usually Ben Franklin, but sometimes it'll be someone else. Almost always a scientist who'd be curious and I think fun to hang out with. I don't know how long I've been doing this, but it's probably at least a couple times a year for the past decade or more. I imagine how I'd explain modern technology and how he might react.
As for the rest of perl4ever's comment, there is not a single word or thought or sentence in it which I do not completely recognize and relate to.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31339086
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Not sure if it would work if anything happens, but this is one of the thing my mind keeps itself busy with as I walk through the city. And no, I'm formally a trained soldier, but I don't have much training in this so it is just my bored mind going crazy with ideas.
https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2009/03/what_was_the_matrix....
On the other hand the random thoughts if I can stick with them long enough do help me form a coherent train of thought. It’s a bit hard to explain, but sometimes my mind is not “clear”. I’d be noodling on a problem (typically not a technical one, more like social or life problems) and feel like there should be a solution but it’s just out of my reach. If I keep focusing on that one issue it have a hard time coming to a conclusion. If however I follow the random tangents a bit then some how the various tangents converge on something useful.
Of maybe I’m just weird.
Honestly, I no longer view ADHD/ADD as a disorder, but different brain functionality. It doesn't typically fit in with our modern schooling systems so it's treated like a disorder. It certainly has some handicaps to be sure, but it's benefits, hyper-focus (when you get it working) and creativity are very helpful sometimes.
I have found that in Southern Africa, if you take the time to understand many of the fusion and native cultures, you can learn a lot about stressing less. In my personal case, I do have an internal monologue, but it gets worse with stress.
My one Mozambican friend for example (notwithstanding his amusing "selfishness" with money) has made me realise that not all people handle progress (esp. technological) with underlying anxiety. Sometimes you really are allowed to suck in and enjoy life, appreciate the progress that has been made, and look to our challenges with grace.
As I got older I found I lost that fire as I call it. Now I find most of the time my mind doesn't wander and it feels wrong. I used to be incredibly creative just from the sheer volume of thoughts.
I do think I have mild ADHD I can't concentrate even the slightest noise ruins my thought process. A friend of mine who has been diagnosed as having ADHD has traits I see in myself. Headphones with brown noise, caffeine, night time (now) are the only ways I can concentrate.
Careful with this, hearing damage or tinnitus (ringing in the ears) are both dangers. They often come along with each other.
*weird to get a downvote for warning about these dangers... I have both of these and want to help others avoid my mistakes.
1. Each time I review a concept or memory it lost information, so the most "honest" conception of something I could have was an unblemished impression lightly touched.
2. So can I just let feelings and thoughts flow around without letting it turn into words?
3. I found that while my comprehension didn't appreciably decrease, I still did fine in classes and homework, I had more trouble explaining concepts to other people.
So I conclude that for certain kinds of thinking it is important to recite it to fine tune your presentation. For others, for most, it is best to let them flow without much attachment.
I now tend to use writing for formal thought consolidation since it's less lossy and forces me to follow things from beginning to end. It required me practicing for half a year to stop myself from trying to formulate my opinions in words. Now I only do it if it's an opinion I want to express.
I don't know if it's possible to train in the other direction, though I've never heard voices other than my own internal voice so maybe I'm in the minority. Maybe a subset can hear only one voice, some hear nothing, most hear many?
It also makes it harder to deal with you because only you can react based on those long analyses, everybody else has to react based on your actions.
Sometimes when I’m very sleepy, I can simulate friends and relatives talking to an uncanny degree, but not at any other time.
I always find myself thinking out different scenarios, different responses, etc. I too listen to a lot of music and podcasts to drain out that voice - it often helps me work harder.
Also my internal voice is very different from my spoken voice. My internal voice is upper class English and my spoken voice is a rough, course English voice.
Another thing, possibly related, is that my ability to multitask is quite high. Right now for example I am watching a video whilst typing. I can often talk and type at the same time as well, whilst I find colleagues unable to do so.
On a tangential note, I was amazed to find that there exist people who struggle to keep geometry in their head, in a sense have no visual "minds eye" at all. I was playing a game with somebody where you have to build a very simple tower while blindfolded, as somebody else reads the instructions, and they had a great amount of trouble imagining that a specific tetris-like shape might look like the letter 'T' even though they held it in their hands, until they removed the blindfold. They were still able to understand the shape of the object in some sense, but not 'see' it in some other sense until they removed their blindfold.
I wonder how well these kinds of simple differences in internal concious organisation map to personalities, or competency in certain areas.
I also have an extremely weak minds eye. I don't get visual thinking at all. If I have a blank page in front of me I simply cannot imagine a user interface. I would have to physically or digitally start drawing something in order to even be able to visualize further changes to the UI. I also have an extremely weak grasp on local geography. I suspect places form a network in most people's heads. For me they are mostly isolated locations which don't connect to anywhere else. I have an ok sense of direction. I can certainly go back the way I've come. But in regular conversations about locations in my city I have been stumped 1000x when certain place names are mentioned. I always ask where those places are. Everyone around me can tell me how to get there by what is close by or what describe the route. I usually don't know where the things the mention are either. Someone else usually chimes in to help me understand where something is by giving another example. Unless I pull up Google maps I almost always still end up not knowing where they are talking about even though I know the name of the place and roughly what type of place it is. I'm talking about the major suburbs anyone would know in their city. I worked out my ability in this area was sorely lacking when even my little brother who was 5 years younger than me would always be the 3rd person to attempt to explain where something was after my two older sisters had had a go.
But when it comes to peoples voices I can recall their accent, language patterns and mannerisms perfectly. So I wind up doing a lot of impersonations of people.
I think it's all my internal monologue voices feeling trapped living in one head. At least we're self-aware..
I have internal monologues, talking to myself as I write this, and when I was younger I'd play out stories in my head. Still do it sometimes when I'm bored or stressed, or particularly upset about something.
Example of a story: something very much like The Watchmen graphic novel, before I had read it (movie and show didn't exist, or were even talked about.
- Some people describe hearing their internal monologue, which I take to mean something like: they have an internal monologue, and it manifests as a voice that only they hear. These people are analogous to those who see things they picture in their mind's eye.
- Some people describe not hearing their internal monologue, which I take to mean something like: they interpret "internal monologue" as a metaphor for their train of thought or stream of consciousness; they think of themselves as having an internal monologue (i.e., they are thinking in language), but don't experience it as a voice. These people are analogous to all of the aphantasics surprised that the mind's eye isn't just a metaphor.
- Some people describe not having an internal monologue. I suspect these people are a mix of those who think in language but interpret the term "internal monologue" as requiring hearing a voice, and people who'd describe their thought process as nonlingual in some way (visual, abstract, etc.)
Across these characterizations, different people describe their thought process(es) all over the place WRT to how compulsory/voluntary/consistent they are. Some of the people who "see" things do this consciously; others can't help but picture things they read or think or hear. Some people describe a conscious/conditional train of thought, while others describe one that is racing/intrusive/incessant.
In fact, this internal monologue can be used in psychology when you are dealing with bad experiences by dividing your thoughts into an entity who suffers the pain and another one who is logical and supportive. For example, acting towards yourself the same way you would do for a friend.
1) experience the words as if I'm saying them out loud but don't vocalize them. This is similar to how a lot of people read, so I figure I'm technically subvocalizing them.
2) especially when doing math or programming I simply know what I was about to think using method 1) without any specific words springing up.
I can't figure out if method 1 is me having an auditory internal monologue or if it's non-auditory. But at least you have a second experience to contextualize with.
EDIT: I would also like to add that sometimes when programming my mind switches to a graph-like representation that I start to manipulate physically. That is, I'll actually move my fingers in the air and move around the idea of this graph to "view" it from different perspectives and at different levels "Minority Report"-stye. Yes, that is something I try not to do anywhere but at home.
Yes. I can also do this:
> decide to eat a bagel without experiences any words.
...but I prefer to think consciously about my actions. Doing too many things without internally verbalizing the decision-making process makes me feel like a beetle.
My personal experience (in the non-audible group) is that the "role" this voice is playing is a bit more supervisory/executive. It thinks about what I need to do tomorrow, or the next three steps on my current project, or that I really need to carve out time to go to the cleaners some morning.
This voice might think about getting food, but mostly when hunger is getting in the way of other priorities. Or when I need to game out how to fit food into a tight schedule.
It reminds me of a conversation I had with my sister as a child. We were both falling asleep in a very dark room. I noticed that with my eyes open, staring into darkness, there was a kind of static noise pattern overlaying my vision. I asked her if she had the same thing. "No", she said. "I just see black". Thinking back, it's likely that we were both experiencing the same thing, but she just wasn't observing the same things that I was.
I wouldn't include thinking through upcoming conversations, texts, tweets, emails, posts, presentations, or phone calls.
Let's say you need to run three errands and eat dinner on the way home. How do you decide what to do when, and make sure you have what you need?
However, if I'm working out how to assemble a table, I'm not hearing "And now I screw the leg on" I just abstractly know that's what I'm going to do.
I have to imagine that's the case for at least most people. Thinking out complicated abstract concepts in internally verbalized words just seems like it would take forever.
However the last week I've been stuck on naming "a complete thought", not just a vision which is just an image. But one that breaks through unconnected to any sense. A thought so full that it first needs to be unpacked in language, image, shapes and steps before it can be expressed. Thus like the article: does anyone else have this? Does anyone have a name for it?
This is funny. I can't imagine anyone doing that. There is no end to that. Like imagine someone thinking while walking down a lane "I am walking down the lane, and now I am going to turn left ... " this is endless ...
Funny you say that. Growing up, I was almost exactly like that, though thankfully, the habit has shifted elsewhere.
By elsewhere, this amounts to active subvocalization of distinct physical attributes of the person in front of me: shape of head, type of eyes, (ir)regularity of teeth, cut of jib, unusual piercings, color of clothing, etc.
In other words, I may find that I can't easily put it into words and that will indicate to me that I need to put more time into thinking about it and deciding what I really think.
There are words mixed in, but when they come up they are usually just single words or a phrases which are attributes of something I'm thinking of, or an action I should take.
Sometimes I think more in words, but that's usually when something is really unclear to me or if I am obsessing over something.
I think that years of training myself not to obsess over things probably reduced my internal monologue almost to the point that it would be good to have a bit more of it sometimes.
It is much sexier though than irl. I wonder why is that?
On the other hand, I can speak much faster yay. Why?
Is your voice reading this comment too? Maybe.
Do you feel like you are conversing with an oddly being? Maybe.
I am alive. Where is my mind reading tech?
If this is true, then when you have an internal "dialogue", you may be literally conversing with different sapient "beings". If so, who's actually the "you" there? Are you one of them, or all of them, or just kind of observing them all from above? Are you able to switch between those modes, intentionally or otherwise? Are "you" a microservice architecture, a monolith, a monolith orchestrating microservices, or all, or none?
We intuitively feel like we're a single voice and "manager" of everything that's going on. That could still be true even if there are other consciousnesses at work in there. Or it could be an illusion, or sometimes you are and sometimes you aren't, or maybe consciousnesses can somehow merge into a true single whole.
Or maybe it's closer to what we think, perhaps with multiple "intelligent" subsystems exchanging information, but only one actually conscious, sentient system.
There are a myriad of puzzling possibilities. We still know very little about how the brain and mind truly work, so this is all blind speculation. But it's interesting to ponder.
I actually suspect we will someday have pretty definitive answers to questions like these, or at least answers which apply to 90%+ of humans. But those answers may not come in any of our lifetimes.
Well, now it is. Thank you (and me I guess for being so susceptible).
I do this but the internal monologue fits the time it takes me to do the thing or I go onto the next thing. It gives me a good sense of progression, what I have accomplished and the goal im focused on.
If the task is routine like buttering toast the monologue is about something else.
FWIW, my experience lines up very closely to yours.
I think about movies I want to make, startups I want to create, the change I want to put into the world. New songs on my commute, goals I want to accomplish, what I could do with time travel. I'm always working on the structures of my different dream worlds, modifying the rules and the characters, exploring how they interact. The languages they speak, and the rules of the magic and science systems that form the bounds of their existence.
I have never once in my life been bored. Not once. I can sit in an empty room and just daydream.
If I play music or walk or run, this imaginative power is supercharged and becomes a transcendent experience. It's why I love running and headphones. I haven't taken drugs, but I imagine it's something like that. It's a pure, unfettered deluge of dopamine. I can also walk in circuits and circles around my house doing this and can waste hours in fantasy. Entire weekends can be "wasted" this way.
I think this is a source of my ADHD. I've got instant dopamine fixes from my raw imagination and it's incredibly hard to do anything else as I can always give myself something better to do by just daydreaming.
As an aside, the dreams that I have when I sleep are almost like movies. They have intricate (but often nonsensical) plots, and I'm seldom even involved.
The main thing I want to do with my life is to create tools so I can get this out of my head and out into the world.
I wonder how many other people daydream like this and have a vibrant inner creativity?
I even had a cross-universe canon for my character: I often had wings (watching Winx club as a kid helped), and sometimes took characters on a multi-dimensional ride in my magic hyper-technological flying car, big as a house on the inside, capable of traversing space and time.
I absolutely feel the same way about music, it manages to turn any world, even a simple concept into a fantastical and magical music video of sorts.
As I went on with my life I somewhat lost this ability, possibly due to the highly technical nature of my job and hobbies, however I still love reading and watching good fantasy stories, and sometimes, when I feel like it, I still fantasize by joining the story and aiding the main characters in saving the world (and music still can transport me away to another world, like before).
I have often considered the enormous power, and just as enormous limtations of modern creativity tools.
I honestly can't wait for neural interfaces: when everyone will be able to extract images and audio directly from their brains. It will truly be a revolution for the media industry, a change as big as the introduction of computers.
It will also give way to haunting new aspects of copyright law: what happens if someone publishes a YouTube neural video that uses copyrighted characters, do we prohibit people from even thinking about copyrighted IP?
Do we beam films using widevine L0 DRM directly to people's brains, immediately removing all memories of them after they were seen to avoid copyright infringement?
Those will truly be interesting times, and I would really love to live to see them.
Neural interfaces will be a game changer. I'm so excited for them.
When I was a teenager, I went through this phase where I would dream of myself as the hero of a book I just read. And if I knew the hero would die at some point, I would always modify my dream so I didn't die :)
I think it is detrimental to achieving things though. Actually doing things takes far more discipline and that's time that could be used for coming up with more internal ideas.
As a side note to this, I also have aphantasia. So I don't get any images. Just concepts,dialog, connections etc.
It got me thinking about a lot of ways we go about teaching. Math for example - my partner struggled with calculus in uni when presented an equation she hadn't seen something similar to before. It never occurred to me that people couldn't attempt to "graph" something in their head.
Ze Frank has a good video on this where he quotes Jung's work. https://youtu.be/u2cMjeSvZSs?t=184 Artists say life begins when you leave your comfort zone, in regards to making good art.
I find it still an important driver in life to follow that burst of ideas. The only way for me to raise up an idea structure or skill is to follow that buzz upwards. My capacity to imagine is jammed packed with meaningful content now and it grows a weight of it's own.
Other than forcefully pausing it that way, it runs 24/7/365 and is incredibly vivid.
I can also have multiple “tracks” running at once internally, but I generally have one “in focus” and another 1 or 2 sort of there in the background dimly. I’m aware of what all tracks are currently up to though at any given point.
Generally it’s just brainstorming ideas, playing back memories, imagining fantastical worlds/stories for internal entertainment, or wondering about things.
It’s not always positive, and keeping it all under control can be difficult, but I definitely think the pros outweigh the cons.
I can watch an entire movie inside my head from another character's point of view or vantage point.
I'm also able to on the spot improv storytelling, something that I was able to do easily as a teen during summer camps and recently I got introduced to the world of DnD which got my mind racing and volunteered to become a DM.
Loneliness is a rarity for me as I feel content wandering off, writing and art is my way of projecting to this world, which I have plucked out from the sea of infinite realities through dreams and daydreaming.
When someone talks to me, asks me a question/opinion or solution, a whole mindmap/flowchart,timeline appears before me which I can navigate spatially in 3d.
When someone asks for direction or trying to find out where I am, I literally see a 3d flyover or bird's eyeview from where I'm standing.
When I dream, not only that I dream in colors but they have a feel to it like watching something nostalgic or when I travel. Sometimes dreams has visual filters as a part of it. Have you dreamed being inside a cartoon/comicbook, painting or noir movie?
I do have a hard time turning my brain off which sucks when trying to go to sleep.
It may not be the same for you but you probably can adapt it to whatever suits you. It's about coziness.
There are several cozy scenarios that are ideal for me to sleep. I just teleport myself there and I do stuff.
My favorite by far is the one in the wilderness. I read a book once about a guy from the neolithic who had to run away from his village with his dog. I imagine myself there. There's nothing around me. Only several small villages kilimeters away. I'm alone with my dog. The sun is almost set and it's getting chilly. There's a little cave nearby where I can take refuge for the night. I'll go gather some wood and make myself confortable inside. Then I'll sit by the fire eating some of that smoked meat I have left and I'll just rest my head down. At that point I'm already sleeping.
If you try this, report back.
It helped me through school though. I cannot imagine going through classes without daydreaming. It sounds like torture.
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I still spend an hour each day doing that during my commute.
I've found that improv theatre and writing books really helps with the "getting it out of my head" part.
Obviously this gets deep into the philosophy of qualia, but do we have evidence that there are two very different modes of thinking? Could this not just be different analogies people have adopted to describe their thinking?
An Instagram poll isn't a great tool to study this. I would like to see a psychological or neurological study about this idea. As of now, I'm pretty skeptical that the dichotomy exists. It sounds like the claim that "some people describe their brains like a computer, while some people describe their brains like a library." Computers and libraries are very different physical objects, yes, but the choice of analogy doesn't really tell me much about how people are experiencing their own thought processes.
Of course, if it's true that the majority of people do actually experience auditory hallucinations of their own voice speaking all of their thoughts, then my criticisms here are invalid, and I'm definitely in the other group of people.
Not every thought is actually.... auralized? auditorialized? ...though. There's some sort of default mode that I operate in most of the day. I don't have to "hear" every single thought I have, I'm able to take in information and perform common actions without hearing thoughts. But, as soon as I go into "conscious" mode, nearly everything becomes sounded out internally. For instance, when programming, I'm constantly having a real internal conversation along the lines of, "Okay, so if this value is Y here, but then this transformation happens, then..." And yes, this occurs in my voice, or at least how my voice sounds to me when I speak. (Sometimes, when I'm really in the flow of it, I'll even start unintentionally voicing it out loud.) I actually like this, because it forces my thoughts to slow down -- when I'm really thinking through a hard problem, I have no choice but to think at the speed of my monologue. It's like built-in rubber-duck debugging.
Having said all of this, we know that thoughts can be expressed differently in different people because deaf individuals (who were born deaf) certainly do not have an ongoing auditory inner monologue.
I mean, at the end of the day, a thought is just a pattern of firing neurons, so what precise neurons are involved is going to impact how you experience that thought.
"of course", no most of my thoughts are not expressible in any language. Why would they? Thoughts are so much richer than any language can possibly express. How to solve this physics problem? If I had to do it via a monologue it would take forever. Same with programming. Instead I just think the thoughts directly and just solve the problem without verbalizing anything.
Of course this makes it harder to tell others what you are doing, but I don't see how you could possibly solve any problems at all while being limited to thoughts you can verbalize.
I'm not sure about that. Couldn't it just be that we sometimes don't understand our own thoughts? If you can't describe one of your thoughts with language, I would say that you must not understand that thought. And of course we sometimes have thoughts which we don't understand.
I think that understanding our own thoughts is something that needs to be worked on, both individually (we certainly should be better at is as adults than as children) and collectively (science and philosophy should allow us to keep improving our understanding of our own thoughts).
It is indeed an intriguing topic to consider. I hear something like my own voice both when I am thinking throughout the day and when I am writing, such as right now I hear my “imaginary voice” speaking what I’m typing out.
The idea of ones own voice is hard to describe. I perceive it as similar to what my voice sounds like, but from heard from within, almost like you’ve rolled off a bunch of the high-end. Imaginary voice is much more consistent in volume and tone for me too than speaking, much less emotional, almost no variety in pitch.
I wouldn’t say I think in full-sentence monologues all day, but I guess I think in fragments of sentences? It’s one of those things that is hard to look back and remember doing and explain how you did it, kind of like breathing. It’s just automatic.
I wonder if some of the “no monologue” people aren’t much different from the rest of us, but they just didn’t articulate their process the same way. I can kind of identify with the concept map thing, so I could probably answer differently depending on mood or how I felt when I read the survey.
Super interesting topic overall. I wonder whether these people without inner dialogue are unable to recall music (with lyrics)?
I can easily "transform" my inner voice to be in the voice of Darth Vader (like someone here interestingly pointed out). I find it peculiar that there are people who cannot and their inner life must feel different than mine. I wonder how depression fits into this. I'd think you'd certainly be more prone to get depressed if you are able to tell yourself how stupid/worthless you are. I wonder how that manifests non-verbally.
Someone linked to an article by Feynman in this thread which demonstrated two different kinds of counting - using your voice and seeing the numbers visually. Quite interesting read: http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/607/2/Feynman.pdf
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embodied_cognition
I used to, but I intentionally stopped and cleared my mind every time I did it for half a year, and now I only think in language when I'm trying to compose a speech or write.
So that's a thing you could try if you want to see for yourself, in case I'm a P-zombie.
1. I do inner monologue. And I have to say, sometimes I get scared from what I "hear". I don't mean sometjing like "I hear voices telling me to kill everyone", but nasty, brutally cynical, sometimes outright violent thoughts. They feel alien to me, because on general level I consider myself "the good guy", but one the other hand they don't feel like someone else whispering me evil things.
2. Sometimes I feel like my mind has layers, where this monologue is the the most upper one with some lower, less verbalized layer which is only later formed into words. Doesn't happen often, but it feels like the lower layer is actually more capable because it's not constrained by language/words.
The most common intrusive thoughts are, I believe, the "call of the void" ones (also known as "high place phenomenon"). You might be driving down the freeway and think "What if I drove into oncoming traffic?" or standing on a cliff at the end of a hike and think "What if I just walked off the ledge?" There's also some common less-morbid ones, like "What if I kissed my boss right now?" or "I just want to scream in the middle of this board meeting for no reason." Your immediate reaction should usually be to dismiss the thought as disturbing and move on with your life. If you find this dismissal to be difficult... that's when it can be worth checking out with a psychologist.
One hypothesis [0] for this phenomenon is that it is actually a post-fact reconstruction your brain is doing. Really, it's that your subconscious was uncomfortable with some imminent danger and forced you to compensate without thinking, and then you start thinking about what just happened. "Why did I suddenly step back from the ledge? Huh, must've been thinking about jumping off."
Another hypothesis I've read (which I can't find a good link to at the moment) is that it's some self-test mechanism. Your brain kind of sends a false "What if?" signal, and you should dismiss it because of the discomfort. This dismissal causes heightened awareness of the danger imminent and causes you to be more alert and thus be safer.
Again, though, these are pretty normal. That link I shared estimates that 50% of people have experienced the "call of the void". It's really only an issue if they're extraordinarily frequent (like... all the time), or if you genuinely feel tempted to act on them. Intrusive thoughts are not always indicative of suicidal ideation, but have also been linked to OCD and similar anxiety disorders (because they're a weird coping mechanism, when you think about it).
[0] https://www.wbur.org/endlessthread/2018/06/29/the-call-of-th...
I seem to remember Sartre saying interesting things about this idea. Something about exercising your absolute freedom or something. As far as I know, it's perfectly normal.
Of course, if they're causing you anxiety, you find them intrusive, or you fear acting on them, you should discuss it with somebody.
I think it was Feynman who said you don't understand something unless you can teach it.
It's widely believed that the 'thinking' part of our brain, the neo-cortex, is far less in control than the deeper, emotional parts, such as the limbic system.
> Under the present brutal and primitive conditions on this planet, every person you meet should be regarded as one of the walking wounded. We have never seen a man or woman not slightly deranged by either anxiety or grief. We have never seen a totally sane human being.
~Robert Anton Wilson
So, yeah, don't pop off on the bus or anything and you're doing alright.
> "Oh, yeah, if I didn't have inner peace, I'd completely go psycho on all you guys all the time." ~Lenny, from "The Simpsons"
In re: #2 Of course your mind has layers. Who does your breathing when you're not watching it? Also, the nervous system in your gut is as large as your brain (just distributed, spread around, yeah?)
I have something like that which is more akin to wandering formless thoughts to me. I don't think they are more capable though, I think it's an illusion given off by the deeper or soother sensation it instills into the mind.
I do try to “step aside” sometimes though. I think meditation has helped me hone that technique.
On your second point I think that thinking in words actually slows down my thoughts too. I've read about it and try not to, but sometimes it doesn't feel right until I spell it out to myself like I'm explaining to a child.
Link to the scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3P4_E3GhUv8
On layers, it’s like there is a second contrarian thread that pops up during controversial topics. Like some safety or auditing function.
You shouldn't feel guilty for having a brain which gives you outrageous ideas. You should only worry if you can't filter them appropriately.
My understanding is that part of schizophrenia can be experiencing those ideas as an external voice.
...can anyone else do this? I actually find it supremely weird.
I can even "compose" my own music (it can be any genre, with any type of instruments, and even include voices), but I have no ability to play instruments myself. I'd love to get into music, but just don't have the time.
My literature professor back in college said he "listened to" classical music in his head during his morning runs. I just assumed everyone did it based on sample size 2.
My wife found this pretty weird. I suspect it's related to my also experiencing aphantasia. It could be some form of mental lossy compression, where the brain knows it can roughly replicate what it heard using the limited set of vocalizations it already knows instead of actual note/instrument combinations.
[Edit: Currently I "listen" to a lot of Georgios Papadopoulos, heh!]
>I can even "compose" my own music
I can relate! Unfortunately, I'm totally untrained regarding music. I once tried to enter one of the melodies in my head (simplified) into a music program, and it took forever, because I had to find the correct notes by trial and error: "Not that one. Neither that one. Still wrong. Not quite. This one is it! Next note..."
Possibly related, I have a very poor ability to visualise anything internally. (I cannot, for example, "picture a beach in my head")
In fact, most things I try to hold in my head evince nothing more than a foggy recollection.
It has been this way for as long as I can remember.
Edit: As I was typing this, "La Macarena" popped into my head.
To this day, I have never once listened to "Chocolate Rain" or Rebecca Black's "Friday" because I fear never being able to turn them off. (I avoided Taylor Swift for, like a decade, but now just thinking about means I've got "Shake it Off" playing.)
Writing this out now makes me realize how weird this all sounds...
My "mind's eye" is pretty strong as well, but I would never mentally look at a painting or watch a movie to pass the time. Yet it seems to work for music.
Works reasonably well for me.
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Isn't this the experience of getting a song "stuck in your head?"
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Edit: I've also had vivid hypnagogic visual hallucinations intentionally. It's a kind of fun game to play, seeing my bedroom clearly with my eyes closed, or checking the time on my watch while same. Obviously I'm conscious and aware that I'm not really checking the actual time, but not particularly surprisingly I'm pretty close since I tend to wake about the same time every day.
It is particularly intriguing to be able to "sing" using other people's voices, since the lyrics of the song "feel" the same way as my inner voice, passing through (I assume) the brain's phonological loop.
Once I had this really weird experience, where in certain conditions, certain muscles would resonate exactly with the song playing in my brain (and not just the rythm, even minor details were somewhat transferred, as if my brain was redirecting raw PCM audio from my brain directly to the nerves); I was really excited about this, as there was potential for a direct non-invasive neural interface to my brain, capable of extracting original songs directly from my brain without any instruments; unfortunately I could not replicate this weird behaviour reliably, and I also felt a bit weird in my brain when trying to do so, so I just dropped the matter.
I still have music in my head very often - I play piano and I'm always getting ear worms, but it must be at least 20 years since I last physically heard my mental music playing. I wonder if I can get it back?
But have you heard of Bob Milne? He can listen to four different symphonies in his head at the same time: https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/14867...
I now basically have actual music on nearly 24/7 to drown that out otherwise it can get pretty annoying – especially if the song that's stuck in my head isn't one I actually enjoy.
You know what's really weird? If I don't know all the lyrics to a song, I can sometimes listen to it in my head and hear the parts of the song I don't consciously remember.
I think similarly that most people who do not have an internal dialogue experience aphantasia - the ability to replay or simulate sensory experiences mentally. Personally I do not often have thoughts "racing" through my head - maybe one main one, maybe zero - and I think this related to my aphantasia.
Which is completely mind-boggling to me.
So there's probably people who can compose music without being able to audiolize it in their heads first, as strange as that sounds.
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/14867...
I can even hear the vocals, they're just gibberish until I make a conscious effort to memorize them.
One time, a friend's Dad asked me why I was rocking back and forth. I think he thought I had a nervous tick. In reality, I was "listening to a song" and didn't even realize I was moving along to it. Seems to happen most often when I'm bored.
I should add that I find myself with a song stuck in my head all the time as well.
I do it frequently. Sometimes I can't stop myself from doing it, which can be annoying.
http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/607/2/Feynman.pdf
He discovers that he can read while counting in his head at a steady rate, but he cannot talk while counting. When he tells his friends, one of them claims to be the opposite, and indeed proves that he can count while talking but not while reading. It turns out “he was visualizing a tape with numbers on it going by.”
That friend was John Tukey. You may have heard of him. He invented the Fast Fourier Transform.
I could always respond correctly when called upon, and could recite virtually word-for-word the entire class lecture if need be, so I eventually got a pass to just do my thing.
At this great distance in time I can see how this was impolite to say the least. But, really, it was bordering on abuse to make me sit there and listen with nothing else to keep my mind occupied.
I can do neither of these things. One voice dominates, self speaking, reading, listening to another person talk to me - the rest of them get 'left behind'.
- count
- count some physiological process within you (breathing or heartbeat)
- recognize that you can count it without thinking numbers
- recognize that same “emptiness” can continue for a while even after you stop following the physiological process
- rinse and repeat until you can drop into that “emptiness” and stay there at will