Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Not everyone has an internal monologue

ryanandrewlangdon.wordpress.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 904 posts

Re: Not everyone has an internal monologue

#191

Post by olyjohn »

n00b123 wrote: post #164

Interesting topic (and comments). 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 th…

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.

Re: Not everyone has an internal monologue

#192

Post by mayoff »

What Do You Care What Other People Think?, a book of Richard Feynman stories, has a chapter that ties into this. You can read the chapter here:

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.

Re: Not everyone has an internal monologue

#193

Post by johnchristopher »

burnte wrote: post #155
zelly wrote: post #128

The "inner dialogue" is called the default mode network in neuroscience. It doesn't have to be thinking in "words" necessarily; you could also skip the words and still be thinking in a resting state. It serves the purpose of ruminating, reflecting on memories, doing introspection. Paradoxically, your brain actually consumes more calories doing this type of resting thinking than you do in task-oriented thought, like w…

> I think it's maladaptive. You are better off having no default mode network activity. > Of course it's another thing entirely if you're too stupid to have an inner dialogue, verbal or not, but I feel like even non-human animals are capable of an inner dialogue. It doesn't add anything useful. With all due respect, I disagree completely . I think it's incredibly helpful to be able to talk to yourself and examine ide…

With all due respect, rumination is a well known symptom of depression and depressed people's internal dialogue tends to be warped in negative thinking patterns.

Re: Not everyone has an internal monologue

#194

Post by mikelevins »

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 have internal monologue sometimes, and I also have the characteristic you're describing here. It's sort of pleasing somehow to discover that someone else has similar parsing issues.

I tend to get stuck on failed parses, which sometimes makes conversation awkward. Some failed parses are funny, or they might prompt me to substitute homophones in a search for a parse that works. Sometimes the results make me laugh, and that can lead to occasional awkwardness.

Re: Not everyone has an internal monologue

#195

Post by arcade79 »

keiferski wrote: post #167
arcade79 wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And I'd posit that you're wrong. :-) The reason? I do neither. I do not have an internal monologue. I can construct one if I want to, but I do not have an "inner voice". When I type this, I do not prepare the sentences before I type them. They come to me as I type. I know exactly what I want to convey, but the sentence doesn't exist inside my head as a recognizable language or as any structure I can describe. The fun…

I was saying more that "language" is just one way of processing, along with "visual" and "spatial" and perhaps innumerable others. It sounds like you have a spatial method of processing the world. > I can spin things and know exactly how things will "look" from a different angle This is essentially the spatial equivalent to the inner monologue of the language-oriented processor.

Interesting. When I've seen other describe this kind of spatial skill, I've always imagined it being with imagery. Which I don't have. I wouldn't be able to draw an image of it, except xkcd-like 2-d stuff.

Re: Not everyone has an internal monologue

#196

Post by mikelevins »

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.

I have experiences like those of the previous poster, but I also experience when listening to speech, so it's not specifically visual, at least for me. And no, I don't experience speech visually (unless I'm reading a text transcript).

Re: Not everyone has an internal monologue

#197

Post by kordlessagain »

VLM wrote: post #148
kordlessagain wrote: post #121

Here's the imagery based version of this: https://www.facebook.com/notes/blake-ross/aphantasia-how-it-... From what I can tell, if you don't have imagery, you don't have audio. If you happen to be someone who can hear audio internally (audio hallucinations) yet don't form imagery internally (historic iconic memories, faces, shapes, creative viz, etc.) hit me up on email.

Talk to ham radio operators who know morse code, for them its fairly common. After awhile, especially in a competitive contest, you start to hear stuff in the static. Sometimes because there's an actual station there trying to reach you, sometimes not. Hams and hunters are the only people I can think of in modern life who listen very closely to silence, or noise anyway.

Good points!

The trick will be finding one with Aphantasia, given my "proof" requires looking for someone who doesn't visualize AT ALL, yet still hears regular audio hallucinations.

There's a somewhat controversial book called The Origins of Consciousness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind which seems to indicate audio hallucinations were quite common in earlier periods.

Re: Not everyone has an internal monologue

#198

Post by mikelevins »

wozer wrote: post #49
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 wonder: does not having an inner monologue imply that you never ruminate or worry excessively?

I can testify that both rumination and worry can occur without an inner monologue. I have a monologue sometimes, and none other times. I can ruminate or worry in either case.

Re: Not everyone has an internal monologue

#199

Post by friendlybus »

ghego1 wrote: post #165
friendlybus wrote: post #141

I had an internal monologue in my youth. Constantly searching for the next witticism in my mind before I said it and putting thought into structuring my words carefully for school. I later spent some time alone and developed a simulation of other people I could ask and have conversations with in my head. Then I went to therapy and they told me to stop doing that, so I did. I also worked with people who barely speak e…

Why did they tell you to stop doing that? What's wrong with it?

It was just said & implied to be negative. A lot of therapists will refuse to discuss their diagnosis with you and their methods beyond fairly simple questions. The best clue I got was the diagnosis as an identity crisis. Once you've been through enough psychotherapy you begin to see it's flaws.

It's primarily a relationship between two people and I know that for all the descriptive psychological terminology it was mostly her character that guided her advice giving. I think it's something she didn't do or didn't value and passed that on.

Re: Not everyone has an internal monologue

#200

Post by TOGoS »

robofanatic wrote: post #130
donatj wrote: post #107

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 co…

> 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.
Post reply on HN