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Not everyone has an internal monologue

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Re: Not everyone has an internal monologue

#81

Post by User23 »

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 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.

Re: Not everyone has an internal monologue

#82

Post by godshatter »

checkyoursudo wrote: post #24
1980phipsi wrote: post #12

This reminds me of some other recent articles about topics like aphantasia (no visual imagination) and severely deficient autobiographical memory (SDAM). People who have these conditions do not realize how different other people think.

I realized a few years ago that I have aphantasia, and it blew my mind that most people could conjure images of things when they closed their eyes (to some greater or lesser degree, but more than my zero degree). I didn't realize that, for example, "mental image" was not just, like, a metaphor for thinking. When I close my eyes, it's black. Just, black. Well, you know, depending on how bright the lights are, etc.

There's a part of me, deep down, that still believes the rest of the world is trying to have a joke on me at my expense.

Re: Not everyone has an internal monologue

#83

Post by username90 »

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…

> of course I think about things using language.

"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.

Re: Not everyone has an internal monologue

#84

Post by Zenbit_UX »

ramblerman wrote: post #29
coldpie wrote: post #20

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…

I'd say your grammar nazism comes from the fact that you are visually oriented. The mistake just looks wrong. And as a visually-oriented person you would also be less likely to have an inner monologue.

For me it's more about a and an, if someone were to write: "I installed a HDMI cable" my inner monologue will actually yell as it passes over the "a" to heavily emphasize the mistake.

Depending on how annoyed it is, it might even respond... "Really? Did you really install _A_ HDMI cable today? Really? Maybe you installed _AN_ HDMI cable?"

Acronyms are generally the worst for a/an situations as depending on if you personally pronounce the acronym as a whole word or spell it out in letters the rule might change.

Re: Not everyone has an internal monologue

#85

Post by asdasdasdasdwd »

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.

The Hamilton soundtrack has been playing in my head since I last heard it last week. Send help!

Re: Not everyone has an internal monologue

#86

Post by GistNoesis »

I guess that's probably related to the way people internally vocalize or not when they read. Teaching people to read probably scars many minds at a young age.

People who vocalize are working with the slow side of the mind. You are not vocalizing your thoughts when you need to drive fast.

Imagine for a second having the focus of your thoughts being forced into being single-threaded vocalized process. Having to serialize your thoughts so you can hear them. Horrible isn't it ?

It's like having to make SQL queries to get your memories back, instead of just letting them flow in, interact and transmute together.

Re: Not everyone has an internal monologue

#87

Post by godshatter »

marknadal wrote: post #76
godshatter wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm one of those that has aphantasia. No visual or auditory imagination for me, so no running monologue in my head, or view of sentences. Or, if it's happening, I can't hear it or see it. Thoughts come to me as concepts, and sort of just pop into my head. Had no idea until a year or two ago that this wasn't how it worked with everyone.

How many thoughts/ideas/things can you process simultaneously? I can probably do up to 8 different subjects/thesis, but I also can imagine in: audio, touch, sound, color, space, abstract, visual, time, taste, smell, linguistic, and hyperdimensional. Couple of these things I had to practice though.

That's a hard question for me to answer. I know it sounds weird but "I" am not the one doing the thinking. It happens elsewhere in my brain; I only get notified of the results. So my answer is either 1, 0, or "no idea", depending upon how you look at it. I can keep track of a lot of pieces of a large process or program all at once, but it's happening in the abstract, I guess. This might just be a communication problem, though.

In terms of the senses, I can walk into a busy scene and take everything in. The sounds, the sights, the smells, etc. I seem to be more situationally aware than a lot of other people I interact with. Just no record button. Notes I make to myself or overall impressions stay, but I would not be very helpful as a witness to a crime if I wasn't trying to memorize what I was seeing in the specific.

This is a difficult thing for me to "look at", in some ways I don't do much thinking at all, but am still successful and am thought of as that guy that can figure out the problem when others are stuck.

Re: Not everyone has an internal monologue

#88

Post by aidenn0 »

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.

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 :)

Re: Not everyone has an internal monologue

#89

Post by Agebor »

Hmm actually now i'm not certain which one of these I have.

I'm a software developer and I have kind of like two different "address spaces".

There is the normal visual + auditory address space. And there is the "intuition space" which is similar to the first one (e.g. I can imagine a 3D object and rotate my viewpoint around it, simulate conversations, etc), but it's with limited detail, more like black and white unless I concentrate more. I can "hear" there but it's separate from normal hearing.

It's super-useful in programming, as i can imagine code in some kind of 3D space, where I can move in and out of different functions calling each other (I still imagine them mostly as text though), so I can remember them pretty well.

Re: Not everyone has an internal monologue

#90

Post by victorNicollet »

echelon wrote: post #65

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…

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.

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