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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.
Similarly, not everyone can visualize things in their mind. Pixar's founder Ed Catmull did a survey of Pixar employees and, interestingly, there wasn't that big of a skew of artists who are able to mentally visualize. https://www.bbc.com/news/health-47830256 I wonder if there's an intersection of people who do not have an internal monologue nor a "mind's eye?"
Generally instead of visualizing something I would tend to have an internal monologue on how it should work. Even if I am drawing something programmatically I would describe the logic for getting what I want, rather than visualizing what it should look like.
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.
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.
There are also people who code-switch. I sometimes monologue and sometimes think abstractly.
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.
Edit: As I was typing this, "La Macarena" popped into my head.
There are also people who code-switch. I sometimes monologue and sometimes think abstractly.
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.
Isn't this the experience of getting a song "stuck in your head?"
I wonder if this is related to (forgive the term) grammar-nazi-ism. I'm pretty sure I don't have any inner-monologue, at least the concept of it sounds weird to me. I'm also super picky about grammar: if someone writes "its cold out today" I have to re-read the sentence to try to understand it. I don't "hear" "it's cold" in my head, I parse "its (posessive) cold" which doesn't make any sense, and I have to go back an…
But when I smoke weed, I have to actively think about the position of keys in the keyboard in order to type coherent things. I have to type "by software".
The point is: maybe for some people, their spoken language is "hardware accelerated" and for others, thinking in words is too computationally expensive, so they resort to less expensive methods.
Or maybe it's the opposite. Thinking abstractly is the computationally expensive method but the improvement in decision making isn't worth the effort.
Disclaimer: I know absolutely nothing about psychology or neuroscience. I just like to think about it.