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Not everyone has an internal monologue

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Re: Not everyone has an internal monologue

#61

Post by enobrev »

munificent wrote: post #55
enobrev wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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" pop…

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…

I have the exact same experience. It may even, unintentionally, be the _reason_ I don't listen to Pop music. It's generally not even a whole song - usually not even the chorus. I'll get a 2-4 second loop in my head of some insignificant section of a crappy song for 2 or 3 whole days.

Like you, it will sometimes start when I'm sleeping. I won't remember much of the dream, but the song is still there, echoing as it was in whatever setting my dream took place.

Re: Not everyone has an internal monologue

#62

Post by Gene_Parmesan »

baddox wrote: post #28

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 t…

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.

Re: Not everyone has an internal monologue

#63

Post by air7 »

Not only that but my inner voice can do impressions: I can have "it" do accents or imitate specific people whose voice I know well.

Also sometimes (albeit rarely) a thought might actually make me smile or even laugh out loud a little out of surprise with no external input so to speak.

Quite weird, come to think of it... do others do this too?

Re: Not everyone has an internal monologue

#64

Post by stallmanite »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #26

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.

I do this almost all day every day. With practice you can actually do edits pitch shifts rearrangements, etc.

Re: Not everyone has an internal monologue

#65

Post by echelon »

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?

Re: Not everyone has an internal monologue

#66

Post by errantspark »

jrauser wrote: post #25
gshdg wrote: post #3

There are also people who code-switch. I sometimes monologue and sometimes think abstractly.

I'm like this, but when I have too much caffeine I notice that it's harder to turn the monologue off. It becomes a little shouty in fact. Brains are weird.

Brains are so weird! When I get deep into thought sometimes my internal monologue doesn't turn off but it sort of spinlocks by repeating bits of songs that are tangentially related to whatever it is that I'm thinking of abstractly. I have a sense in general that there are two parts of my brain that are semi-independent.

I play time-attack puzzle games; and some of my best times have been while I'm listening to an audiobook, music or deep in thought about some emotional problem. It feels like I actually perform both tasks better if I'm doing them simultaneously because my "vague processing" isn't interrupted by my "sharp processing" and vice versa.

Re: Not everyone has an internal monologue

#67

Post by TheHideout »

baddox wrote: post #28

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 t…

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.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embodied_cognition

Re: Not everyone has an internal monologue

#68

Post by worik »

Very interesting. I am not sure that I am one or the other.

My thoughts form in a soup of cognition. Then if I pay attention become words, or smeeld, sounds, tastes....

Related: I play guitar in two rock bands. I have to reach a state in my mind between attention and inattention to do well. For example if I count beats I loose my rhythm. But if I stop paying attention I loose... So I need to be in a intermediate state.

Re: Not everyone has an internal monologue

#69

Post by Wowfunhappy »

enobrev wrote: post #45
Wowfunhappy wrote: post #26

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.

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" pop…

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.

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