Not everyone has an internal monologue

On the other hand the random thoughts if I can stick with them long enough do help me form a coherent train of thought. It’s a bit hard to explain, but sometimes my mind is not “clear”. I’d be noodling on a problem (typically not a technical one, more like social or life problems) and feel like there should be a solution but it’s just out of my reach. If I keep focusing on that one issue it have a hard time coming to a conclusion. If however I follow the random tangents a bit then some how the various tangents converge on something useful.

Of maybe I’m just weird.

There is this inner monologue orchestrating the actions occasionally listening to intuitions and random thoughts popping in your mind.

Whereas the mind in its natural form is highly non-linear, like a multitude of information processing filters, and independent processes. For example you can train your mind to set a mental clock. You can put some things in a corner of your mind to have it being sorted to make sense out of it. You can orchestrate it, but you can also let your mind orchestrate itself. You can let it fly.

Some kids have imaginary friends, some people see auras, others have Spyro the dragon roaming their room as they type. Every day now with neural networks we can have a glimpse of how machines thinks and visualize things, and with a little training and imagination, most of these techniques are.

Our languages today are bad! They are thought limiting! They are not there to express our thoughts but to communicate effectively between people, and that's the fundamental bottleneck.

Don't let a bad language ruin a good mind, have this monologue orchestrate in silence like a good conductor.

I expect someone will object that it's logically contradictory to propose that you have an inner monologue but don't experience it; I don't think it is, actually.

I get migraines. I've experienced them for about forty-five years. They're not just headaches. They're some kind of unusual neural and vascular activity in the brain that can cause a whole slew of weird effects.

One effect that I've experienced many times is called scotoma. It's a phenomenon where a region of the visual field is taken over by a vivid abstract pattern. Scotomas take various shapes, but they generally have a few things in common: they are more vivid than real seen objects; they often flicker rapidly and may move slowly; they often have high-contrast black-and-white-striped zigzag patterns; they may be surrounded by faint or vivid colorful auras that pulse or stream.

I've seen lots of scotomas over the years with all of these attributes.

One time just a few years ago I was reading a good book and I began to notice the mild visual distortions that alert me to an oncoming scotoma. There's nothing much I can do about them, and I was really interested in the book, so I sort of shrugged and figured I'd continue reading until I had to stop.

I never had to stop.

The scotoma came on full-force and took over the center of my visual field. I couldn't see anything except the scotoma directly in front of me.

Nevertheless, I was able to continue reading without any trouble. Well, the scotoma was distracting, but it didn't prevent me from reading.

As you can imagine, I found this really weird. If you don't believe me, I don't really blame you. I found it so surprising that I started reading the book aloud, as if that would somehow serve as a reasonable test that I wasn't simply making up the contents of the book without realizing it.

I continued reading. The scotoma eventually faded away, and I could confirm that, yes, the pages I had read while I couldn't see them were just as I had heard myself reading them aloud.

This experience suggests to me that seeing the book is one process, but consciously experiencing the seeing of it is another, completely separate, process. The migraine sabotaged my ability to consciously experience seeing the book, but it didn't interfere with the process of actually seeing or reading it.

If that's true, it suggests that the process of running an internal monologue, or of constructing internal images, could be separate from the process of being conscious of them. Perhaps you indeed have an internal monologue and you simply don't experience it?

Of course, if they're causing you anxiety, you find them intrusive, or you fear acting on them, you should discuss it with somebody.