I had this realization in the last couple of weeks slowly, starting from a discussion about who thinks in which language in my friend group. I've tried to convince them how thoughts aren't in any language, but nobody agreed, which made me think. I found these threads later when trying to research it.

For me, thinking in words and sentences sounds like thoughs being weighed and slowed down. Seems very unnecessary. On the other hand, I did and always had the the issue of putting my thoughts into words properly. Like the translator is pretty bad and I always struggle and feel like most of the information is lost.

I think there might be some correlation between this and being introverted, socializing is exhausting for me because the translator is not well trained as I don't use it while thinking, and it has to run at 100%. I've talked with my better half about this and she said it's easy for her because the sentences are already there and it takes zero effort to say them, which aligns with my theory.

I do have a terrible "mind chatter" though, I'd rather describe it as white noise. Way too many thoughts going through at once, which makes it very hard to concentrate on anything. So even though not everyone is thinking in words and sentences, this issue can effect all of us.

Yeah, I remember being annoyed by comic books as a kid when I’d see a person thinking in full sentences. I’m still not convinced verbalization is the default mode: how slow would a person’s thought processes have to be if they had to spell everything out in internal monologues?

I've seen this "inner voice" thing on the internet a couple of times and I'm yet to find a source that convinces me there's a real difference between people in this respect.

I can definitely relate more to the way you described your mind than to the usual "inner voice". But I suspect it's the same for all people, they just subconsciously abstract it in another way.

I suspect a similar confusion happens when people talk about aphantasia. But I haven't really put in the work to discover how serious the research around these things is.

There's a voice for me, but it makes no sound. It directly activates the speech centres in my brain. Like my aphantasia, that I can imagine things without seeing them.

My thoughts work much like this. For example, if I'm discussing some kind of design or graph relationship, I actually see what I'm talking about vividly. The problem is it's really hard to make eye contact while doing this. It's not that I find eye contact uncomfortable in conversation. It's just that discussing many topics, especially technical ones, it's not possible to see my ideas while looking directly at someone.

I find this most frustrating in work that is interrupted and explanation is sought. So for example, if I'm thinking through the most efficient way to accomplish X, taking into accounty Y and Z, and someone walks into my office and asks me what I'm working on it's frustrating stating my thought process on the spot because none of that reasoning was assembled using language.

What are others experience with this?

>when I realized that some people really do have a "voice in their head" and it's not just a movie thing that they use for lazy storytelling.

For some of us it's quite literal, and goes by the term subvocalization.

I know that I, for one, when speaking to myself, sometimes am doing it through little breathy throat quasi-vocalizations, like I'm beginning to say a word that I'm mentally saying.

I wonder at my ability to carry on an internal mental monolog without it.

I have that too (minus colors, if you actually see colors in your mind, colors in my mind is only an conceptual attribute attached to a thing).

How do you articulate speech? With me, the concepts in my mind just turn into vocalized words. It's note even an effort, it just happens when I want to speak. Like my thoughts move the muscles in my arms. I don't know how and I am surprised that my line of thought rarely stumbles and doesn't produce the correct words. I think it should be some kind of effort to turn that wordless cloud of abstract thoughts and concepts into words but it just isn't.

I do have vocalization when I'm reading or when I'm preparing a text (like this one I'm just writing). But this is just to get the phrases and wordings the way I like them to be with the right effect.

Could you explain what happens when you read text?

I definitely have an issue where composing English sentences takes a little bit of working memory, and if I'm concentrating on a task that can't spare that one or two items of working memory, and someone insists on talking to me, I end up speaking a jumble of English words (and sometimes non-word English sounds) back to them and waving my hands to indicate I can't be distracted, and I'm aware that I'm not making sense. It's the only way I have come up with to try and convey that I'm not ignoring them to try and be rude, but composing a meaningful utterance will force me to throw away a lot of mental work.

In college, I was once concentrating on some Mechanical Engineering homework in the fraternity library late at night. One of my fraternity brothers asked me "What did you just say?". Me: "nothing. I'm working". Him: "No, you said 'Noun?' and you said it like a question.". I'd apparently had a language center missfire while co-opting some language working memory to work on a 3d spatial reasoning problem.

Haha really? Because a good friend of mine has spent a large amount of his life seeking an internal experience that he feels he so desperately needs in order to have lived a complete life.

It's called complete aphantasia* and it's not too incredibly rare. I've met at least two people who would sit down and have a conversation with me about it.

By the way, my aphantasic friend is a talented composer and an INCREDIBLY powerful writer. He's described composition as "sitting down at the piano and letting his hands do the work." He's never heard music in his mind because he's never had any internal experience whatsoever.

* No dreams * No internal chatter * No internal recollection at all

When asked to recall his life, he is able to tell a basic story, but it's not because he internally experiences remembering anything. Instead, he opens his mouth, and the story flows from him, as he has learned to say it.

He's sought out psychedelic experiences just to feel something that is not there, and even then on the most powerful psychedelics he sees nothing (though he does feel things from them).

The range of internal experience is far vaster than many of us ever thought possible. Sometimes I wonder if what is cartoon to me, is the lived experience of some other human being out there.

It certainly would explain somethings.

* https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia

Being able to summon a voice and having this voice as default (apparently some aren't even able to quiet this inner voice) are different things.

Would you also call bullshit if some people told you that they don't see colors the way you do or that they can hear colors?

In some cases it might be bs, and I think there could be a test for that. The idea is from Feynman, of all people, who once discovered that his colleague counts in "visual" numbers while he counted in "auditory", or maybe I mixed them up.

The idea is to simultaneously do two tasks that would interfere with each other if they were of the same kind, and would be performed successfully if they are different. So, give a person a text to read out loud and make them perform a cognitive task that requires, in your opinion, verbal reasoning. If they can read and still solve the task in the same time as "normal" people, they could probably reason in non-verbal terms.

Is an inner monologue supposed to be completely intelligible, or at the same speed as spoken conversation, or in complete sentences, or always on by default? Because I can, e.g. look at the painting on my wall and summon a voice and think "ok what do I think of this painting?", and then I start getting random ideas like "blue sky" and "leaf, leaf, leaf" and "that's a weird curve" and "I'm getting hungry". But it's not like a fully formatted paragraph with coherant thoughts, in fact the voices are almost always overlapping, like someone is speaking 3 or 4 things at once and I can sort of hone in on one or two of them at a time.

Then when I stop thinking about it, my mind fades back into whatever it was on before, usually some music that's stuck in my head (which interestingly is always in the correct key and tempo even if it repeats the catchy bit more than it should if I'm not paying attention). The weirdest part is that when I'm actually listening to or playing music the narrative DOES actually collapse into a single spoken-conversation-speed track.

>i dont know how you can formulate concrete thoughts using abstract or symbolic things. //

What are you saying here, thoughts are abstract, but to me seem purer and more varied than the (both abstract and symbolic) constraints of language. There are lots of things that come to mind that are almost impossible to describe fully and clearly -- thoughts would seem very constrained if you could only have them in a language you knew.

Children often described things they don't really have the language for. I think that constraining thought to use language is only an appearance and must necessarily arrive with language learning.

Side note: I suffer intrusive thoughts which are in the form of images and compulsions, they are never word based and I never choose to describe them to myself (perhaps I should?).

Some people can't picture images in their head, while I can, it's not so hard to imagine some people can do images but not voice.

Able to summon? Sure, but it feels unnatural. It sometimes happens when I gather all of my focus on a single task, eg. a debugging session. But then it's closer to talking to myself.

My mind defaults to such a jumbled mess of simultanelous trains of thought that attempting to linearize them into a single voice is impossible.

I don’t think it’s a conversation as in a dialogue, it’s rather a monologue. But since you “hear” the monologue, you think about what you hear, and that thinking doesn’t necessarily become part of the monologue (not immediately and directly), so the thinking and the monologue tend to bounce of each other to some degree.

This is interesting, I have the same experience as you and have never even heard of this inner voice people have before opening the Reddit link.

Can you emulate personalities? Can you, for example, ask Elon Musk for an opinion on something you're currently working on? If you can, a routine discussion with internal monologue is most likely more of a habit than a neurological feature.

As a person with Aphantasia, I never knew that picturing something in your mind was literal. I dream in interactive images/video/whatever you want to call it, but when asked to picture something (the common example is a green apple), I do not "see" it, but instead have a database of words that describe it from the shape to the color to the waxy sheen of the skin. I also have a very hard time with faces if anything changes too (like a haircut or glasses or even basic aging), I watch a LOT of movies, a LOT a LOT, and I cannot remember what I know actors or actresses from even if I literally watched a movie with them that SAME day (with some major exceptions like Robert Downy Jr. or Brad Pitt).

I didn't have one until I was 10 or so and tried to have one, just on a lark.

At some point it became permanent. IMO it's net-negative but not enough so to be a big deal.

Not the person you asked but here’s an attempt from a 48yo diagnosed with adult adhd about six years ago.

- imagine watching tv at a bar where everyone had a remote control. That’s the attention model in my head, i can start to form ideas and concepts then suddenly realize I’m thinking about something else

- add 3-4 more tvs. That’s the distraction model, external stimuli drag my attention

- the ‘hyperfocus’ you hear about would be similar to the bar handing you a pair of noise canceling headphones and dedicating the tv directly in front of you to binging on an amazing new series. It’s not just focus as much as it’s a temporary obsession.

Some ways it seems to manifest in my life:

- i never ever ever finish a discretionary project, 80% at best. i completely lose interest and have zero drive. Projects for work require me to procrastinate to the point where my attention is fueled by adrenaline.

- i can’t read anything that requires more than one sitting. I’ll read for three hours but the next time i have an opportunity to read i find i have no interest

- i constantly lose shit

- i constantly pack more and more activity into the period before i need to get ready for something, causing me to always be lateish and running in the airport

- i think of great gifts for people but always end up last-minute scrambling for garbage

- i can be a bit of an airhead at times

- at work I’m a generalist. I’ve been at this a long time but i don’t know anyone in my personal sphere that knows a bit about more domains than i do. On the other hand there isn’t a single domain that i don’t know someone that knows more than i do.

The first time i had a ‘quiet mind’ was probably a week after i was prescribed Adderall. It was like a flashing cursor in my head and I became so overpowered with emotion that i just started crying. Like those videos where someone with color blindness tries on those glasses. It was incredible.

I was in a deep dark pit of depression, mostly life long that got worse in the past few years. Sought help, found a therapist, and after 2 years she asked me if I ever considered I might have ADHD. I looked into it in December, every fucking thing made sense, got diagnosed in January and started my medication in March.

I'm still learning to live with it, but I've managed to understand how my brain ticks, why I'm in a constant search for pleasure, and now I have a theory why my life got so bad lately: I've quit my marijuana habit 8 years ago, I quit my smoking habit 2 years ago, and I've quit coffee because it doesn't play very nice with my anxiety and heart, and the more stimulants I've removed from my life, the less functional I've become, and even at my peak "drug" usage my motivation and focus was always outside my control, anyway. But at least I had the mental energy to do _things_. I was self medicating without knowing it.

I did suspect, when I started using Reddit 15 years ago the ADHD thing was a meme everybody said "yeah, I have that." It remained a meme for me, until, guess what, I actually have a problem and I shouldn't be struggling that much. The medication doesn't turn me into that Limitless movie, it gives me the chemicals needed to pick up trash off the floor, make boring phone calls and be a productive member of society. What's ordinary for most people, for me is absolutely mind blowing.

I got diagnosed with 20+. I had the suspicion and went to a specialist. He diagnosed based on my history (e.g. teacher reports from elementary school describing hyperactivity), my explanations and an EEG. When that lined up we started with medical treatment with a slowly increasing dose and just observed how it affected me. My understanding was if there were no apparent negative effects, but the meds helped against the unwanted symptoms it was seen as proving the diagnosis correct by successful treatment. Some subconscious things that I never thought of as symptoms like rapidly moving my foot when otherwise sitting still just to "do something" completely went away while medicated.

Personally I mostly do better without the drugs even though my mind is also in an always on state. But I do have them here and rarely (last time over a year ago) take them, if my very easily distracted mind collides with some very important and immovable deadline.

I also feel though that my brain sometimes kicks me in a hyperproductive mode (like being in the zone on steroids) and I just get a shitton of difficult work done and I felt the meds prevented that too.

Not the gp, but:

The book Delivered From Distraction has helped a few people I know understand that they are not neurotypical.

This podcast opened my eyes: https://www.theguardian.com/news/audio/2020/nov/13/adrian-ch...

A 4 year old cannot be diagnosed with ADHD. His personality hasnt finished developing yet (that comes at around the age of 6)

Having recently been diagnosed with ADHD too I must say that the book "ADHD doesn't exist" helped me as it provides great tools to understand what it is but also how to live with it and where to look for its source as it's almost always a symptom in itself and thus can be cured.

Thanks to everyone for the responses. I won’t be jumping to any conclusions without involving professionals, of course, but it’s certainly interesting for me to see such detailed first-hand anecdotes from people with similar backgrounds. Much appreciated.

I seem to understand it's not a constant occurrence for most people. Also, great nickname.

Oh man, have you heard of misophonia? I didn’t learn about it until my mid-30s but the knowledge helped me re-frame a lot of previously very puzzling bullshit.

I think it has reasonably high bandwidth, but it depends on the mode. A lot of the time I’m speaking to an acquaintance who is not present, and it’s a little like rubber duck debugging what I am going to say when I next meet them. Sometimes I sound completely over the top, or too fantastical, so it’s a good way for me to check my state of mind. The bandwidth starts to roll off once topics become circular, or there are too many repeats. Then I either just shut up or move onto another topic.

Man I’m making myself sound insane. I hope I don’t accidentally dox myself one day.

I liked your mention of rubber duck debugging, I think it’s the closest way to describe it :)

This seems common in children when learning to read. Most can initially only read out loud and have to later to learn to do so in their head.

Yeah I was using “phantasia” as an antonym for aphantasia, so just a placeholder term. I guess I mean I readily conjure images in my mind.

> It’s not common to be able to hear music in your head

I did not know this, do you have any sources for somewhere to read about it? Not that I don't believe you, I'm just curious about just how unlikely it is to be able to do that.

In music we call the above ability "audiation", and people who can't audiate are often not good at improvisation. It's more intuitive for people who can audiate, and more systematic for people who can't (ie instead of imagining new music, they are generating it from rules).

I can recall and recite full pieces that I've only heard one or two times. I really struggle with remembering lyrics, but I will remember the full suite of instruments and what they played. I can also synthesize/imagine new songs in my head with those same instruments and voices, with totally new melodies and chords, I can do that for voices to. I can make anyone say anything in my head.

I figured everyone could do some variant of that. Though remembering every note is probably a bit extra-curricular I wouldn't have expected it to be that unique.

It's also possible that I don't remember as perfectly as I think I do, but because I can synthesize so well and have a fairly large musical exposure, I fill in the background instruments closely enough that it's the same vibe.

thank you for your response

PROTIP: If you open a song in Audacity and tweak it slightly (I usually slow it down by 5%), you can trick your brain into processing it as a "new" song again. The returns are still diminishing, but I find I can eke a few more days out of a good song this way.

thanks for the suggestion, I will check them out

I have wondered if using different music to drown it out would work, like tinnitus sufferers do

it's slightly relieving to hear you experience similar and find it normal

yes to it getting in the way of sleep and yes to probably anxiety related

I used to listen to a lot of music and play a few instruments as a hobby, but have had no time to in recent years. I consider myself an incredibly musical person and wonder if recording the main offenders would expel them. I would love to find the time to turn this affliction into a creative process, both as a hobby and possible therapy

Oh man, i know how that is.

I’m getting back into mountain biking after my surgery, and after an hour or two into my latest ride, if found myself spacing out a lot and letting that chatter take over. Not paying attention during a slow, straight ride I caught my wheel on a root and fell forward over the bike, not fun. I found it much easier to slip into that state while I was exhausted though.

I feel exactly the same as you describe, unless im trying to stay focused, taking in something new every once in a while or making choices, I tend to space out completely.

i mountain bike, and the climb, i have an internal monologue as much as normal. i try to focus on the woods instead but doesn't work.

on the downhill though, silence. while skiing (downhill), silence. rock climbing same deal. those moments are bliss in many ways.

Maybe bike riding isn't really exhausting for you anymore?

I used to cycle to work in the pre-2020 era, but during the first few months I remember how everything in my mind was about the bicycle and the road and forcing myself not to stop. After this first period the body adapted and the usual train of thoughts returned. When I noticed I was thinking of mundane things during the ride was when I considered that my body had adapted

Motorcycling is also my go to activity to disconnect my brain from almost all "chatter". It's just the road, the bike and you. As soon as you are an somewhat experienced driver and you can drive "fairly" safe in sailing/flow/cruise mode it's pretty incredible. It's just engaging enough that it feeds the brain with mental work, but does not leave any more room for unimportant "garbage". Took me around three years (around 30.000km) to get to this point.