Not everyone has an internal monologue

fwiw I also have ADHD, and certainly daydream a lot, and often imagine myself in situations or doing interesting things, but I would say that I don't have much of an 'internal monologue'. I imagine being in situations, but very rarely speaking is conciously involved. For example, I also sometimes imagine being the leader of my country, but I'm more thinking about issues that might arise and how I might decide to act to respond to them, and how people might react, what obstacles might be encountered etc, but in a more abstract way? Like on an emotional level rather than a linguistic level.

On a tangential note, I was amazed to find that there exist people who struggle to keep geometry in their head, in a sense have no visual "minds eye" at all. I was playing a game with somebody where you have to build a very simple tower while blindfolded, as somebody else reads the instructions, and they had a great amount of trouble imagining that a specific tetris-like shape might look like the letter 'T' even though they held it in their hands, until they removed the blindfold. They were still able to understand the shape of the object in some sense, but not 'see' it in some other sense until they removed their blindfold.

I wonder how well these kinds of simple differences in internal concious organisation map to personalities, or competency in certain areas.

For those who do inner monologue - I worry about telling you about this. It might make you wish you didn't ever realize it. So.. spoiler in the next sentence. When you start talking in your head, pay attention to your vocal cords and the area around them... Notice anything? They're probably moving like they would if you were actually talking out loud. Have you ever noticed how you tried to talk really fast in your head but seem to always get limited and it feels weirdly physical that you can't talk even faster? It's because you can't actually speak that fast in real life - thus you're limited because your mechanisms for talking are actually moving at the rate you're speaking - but if you can't speak fast then you can't think fast either really. It's usually something you'll casually notice but ignore... and then later you'll really notice it every time you think. Similar to floaters - always there but only when you're tired or looking at a blue sky do you really notice and get upset over it.

Sometimes I find myself speaking at an unreal speed in my head (but everything is clear and distinct - something that doesn't happen when people talk fast, things get slurred) but it's because I suppressed the vocal portion of my physical movements for just a moment. It's weirdly surreal. I think, "Is this how fast I would talk if I wasn't physically limited?" To think faster, I usually skip words in my inner monologue because the physical part always gets in the way. To someone listening in, it'd sound weird. And I always worry that people can tell what I'm thinking because I know my body is actually moving when I speak - it's sometimes like people pick up on it. I think I pick up on it too here and there... hard to say.

There are some theories that the brain may effectively contain more than one "proto-consciousness" (or perhaps some of them are actually "fully conscious"). Maybe 2 or 3, maybe a whole lot of them.

If this is true, then when you have an internal "dialogue", you may be literally conversing with different sapient "beings". If so, who's actually the "you" there? Are you one of them, or all of them, or just kind of observing them all from above? Are you able to switch between those modes, intentionally or otherwise? Are "you" a microservice architecture, a monolith, a monolith orchestrating microservices, or all, or none?

We intuitively feel like we're a single voice and "manager" of everything that's going on. That could still be true even if there are other consciousnesses at work in there. Or it could be an illusion, or sometimes you are and sometimes you aren't, or maybe consciousnesses can somehow merge into a true single whole.

Or maybe it's closer to what we think, perhaps with multiple "intelligent" subsystems exchanging information, but only one actually conscious, sentient system.

There are a myriad of puzzling possibilities. We still know very little about how the brain and mind truly work, so this is all blind speculation. But it's interesting to ponder.

I actually suspect we will someday have pretty definitive answers to questions like these, or at least answers which apply to 90%+ of humans. But those answers may not come in any of our lifetimes.

I am also somewhere in between these two extremes, and I actually find that the process of taking an abstract thought and forcing myself to form it into words is a great way to find out how well-conceived the thought is.

In other words, I may find that I can't easily put it into words and that will indicate to me that I need to put more time into thinking about it and deciding what I really think.

Mathematics can be expressed in a sort of language? (Or also often - geometrically.)