291–300 of 904 posts
I have no idea how healthy it is but it's only when I'm alone.
I think there are also two types of people when it comes to navigating. One type gives and understands directions along the lines of "go along this street until you pass the Red Lion pub, then turn right. After 50 metres, turn left". Most people seem to be in this category. Then there are those of us who have an internal map, and have no problem with "go north for half a mile, then turn east". I'm the latter - I alwa…
My mother is a step-by-step navigator. She wants detailed in-order instructions. I'm a spatial navigator. Give me enough information to locate the destination on my mental map, and a few local details I can use to double-check that I'm in the right place. My mother will follow the directions step-by-step. I will travel in the general direction of the location of the destination and start checking landmarks and addres…
Same with me. I've been learning to tune people out, and I tell the interviewer that I'll probably tune you out when I need to focus but you can interrupt me if you need to.
Getting better at it as I get older.
This isn't so hard to understand if you've ever meditated. It becomes clearer that the internal monologue is a process that just runs on its own almost endlessly, and the feeling that we control it is mostly just an illusion. You can test this for yourself by trying to find out what your next thought is going to be. You never know until you have it, which indicates that the process is spontaneous and involuntary. I h…
Without your thoughts you only your body, an animal. Language is what expands human sphere of influence beyond what we see, taste and feel. The "Noosphere", if you will [1]. I don't find internal monologue counterproductive, it's how I explore the possible and impossible without moving.
P.S An honest thanks, I wouldn't have discovered my own thoughts on this subject without an invitation to dialogue in the form of your comment. Language takes two :)
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…
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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…
Since I don't know the song it is of course just the chorus.
What about both..? For example, I have a concept in my head that's like a hashtag but would translate to "over-optimized 80s/90s technologies that have aged poorly". It's a categorization that overlaps with a sense of frustration (typically because I'm using one) and joy that I'm seeing fewer of them these days... I have a lot of similar "feelings" that are felt instantly, but would take dense English to express. It…
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I think it's a question of balance. I was too far on the side of not living in the moment, and spending lots of time on what-if scenarios. I think that I might have veered too far to the other extreme now, and my capacity for empathy is suffering a little.
Thanks for answering. Makes sense to me.
Everything in moderation I guess
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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.
You noted the possibility that you might have mental images or monologue but don't experience them. That's interesting. 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 va…
The reason I wonder about whether I am seeing things on a "screen" I can't access has to do with my ability to recognize things. When I see something I've seen before, I immediately recognize it, just like normal people do. So it's saved off somewhere, I just can't access it in the meantime. So it's possible that when I try to imagine a beach or whatever, it's appearing on a screen I can't see. I think of it as if my visual projector has a burnt out bulb. It could be showing it to me if I could somehow change the bulb, possibly.
I found the revelation that people don't do this fascinating. I guess I assumed it was part of the human experience. I had a conversation with a buddy of mine about what language he thinks in one time, due to English being a seconds language for him and it is funny because looking back on that conversation we both assumed that internal monologue was just a default. I did notice a pattern in the minority of people tha…
Prior to this I had made the assumption that everyone has an internal dialogue.
I'm 36.