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Not everyone has an internal monologue

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Re: Not everyone has an internal monologue

#361

Post by xvector »

ericmcer wrote: post #336

This doesn't make any sense to me, even his example: 'One person even mentioned that when they do voice overs in movies of people’s thoughts, they “wished that it was real.”' How can they form the thought 'I wish that was real' if they have no monologue? And to convey that thought they just open their mouth and spew forth a sentence with no knowledge of its shape?

> How can they form the thought 'I wish that was real' if they have no monologue? And to convey that thought they just open their mouth and spew forth a sentence with no knowledge of its shape?

For me, the thought exists in concepts/feelings/imagery until I perform a "reduction in dimensionality" by bringing it down to actual verbal speech.

Re: Not everyone has an internal monologue

#362

Post by laegooose »

DonaldPShimoda wrote: post #273
vojta_letal wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes I have a "how awful would it be to do XY" moments. Usually something brutal. But it always makes me pay even more attention to not doing that very thing even accidentally because I definitely do not want to break stuff or hurt someone. Yet it makes me a bit nervous. What if I actually decided to do that? Fortunately it never happens when I'm under influence. Do I need help?

As others have said, these sound like typical intrusive thoughts. The most common intrusive thoughts are, I believe, the "call of the void" ones (also known as "high place phenomenon"). You might be driving down the freeway and think "What if I drove into oncoming traffic?" or standing on a cliff at the end of a hike and think "What if I just walked off the ledge?" There's also some common less-morbid ones, like "Wha…

Thank you, I feel more normal now

Re: Not everyone has an internal monologue

#363

Post by saltyfamiliar »

On the topic of internal speech, I've recently developed a weird quirk, if you can call it that. Basically I'll hear fragments of speech in an internal voice distinctly different from my own, about random things that have nothing to do with anything I was thinking or doing. And sometimes, rarely, the fragments will contain information that I wasn't consciously aware of.

For a while I actually thought I was hearing other people's thoughts, but since then I've come to understand our conscious minds as being a collection of multiple subconscious entities that communicate with each other and from which our sense of integrated consciousness arises. And somehow, parts of my brain that don't normally handle verbalization got internal speech privileges. That's what it feels like at least.

Re: Not everyone has an internal monologue

#364

Post by xenomachina »

thinkingemote wrote: post #316
lqet wrote: post #314

I have a serious question to people here describing themselves (as I understand it) as thinking in words and whole sentences: How can you think about concepts which cannot be put into words or for which no words exist? Do you have to come up with elaborate verbal descriptions of abstract concepts in your head before you can think about them? If so, don't you think that any verbal description is essentially incomplete…

I would imagine the answer would be; the same way you would talk about the concepts out loud to someone else.

So how do you think about something that you can't describe to someone else? There are many things I can deeply understand, but turning that understanding into natural language takes considerable effort.

Are people with internal monologues incapable of understanding things they can't verbalize? Or is it that their brain just instantly verbalizes thoughts after the thoughts have already been formed? The latter seems a bit more likely to me, but I imagine it must be very lossy at times. (That is, the verbal monologue is merely a summary of the thought.) I often have thoughts that take only an instant, but would take many sentences to verbalize.

Re: Not everyone has an internal monologue

#365

Post by grawprog »

OGWhales wrote: post #283

I took mushrooms once and only about a month after the trip did I realize I hadn’t been using an internal dialogue since the trip. It started up again and hasn’t really stopped since. It was unnerving.

Yeah mushrooms will do this. It's not a bad thing to be able to quiet your mind. It's nice to have an internal monologue but once you've had that silence it's good to learn how to bring it back when you need it. Mushrooms helped show me what it was like quiet so I could do it myself without them.

Re: Not everyone has an internal monologue

#366

Post by pbhjpbhj »

rc_hadoken wrote: post #137
JoeAltmaier wrote: post #116

Had a writer say "We think in words. Without language, we could not form thoughts". Which is instantly nonsense. I can think of a blue elephant, then the Gettysburg Address. If I'm asked "What did you think of first?" I'd say "a blue elephant". So where was that blue elephant in the mean time? Still in my mind, still a thought. Just not at the surface, not words. I look at code projects by scrolling through all the s…

I'm confused -- are you saying the writer is wrong because of your anecdotal process for coding? As someone who writes I would have a very hard time imagining writing without the ability to have a mental monologue. I do know Alan Moore said in an interview that he would talk to himself in the mirror. Maybe he's an instance of a writer who doesn't think in words. I would not think of a blue elephant as the word 'blue…

The fifth natural language I learnt any conversation in was BSL (British Sign Language)[1]. Later, doing further language training, when I was trying to recall words (particularly in German) I would recall instead a sign. Not an image in my mind of making the sign, but a feeling that if I let them my arms/hands/fingers/face would make a sign.

Can you imagine writing through an interpreter without any audio/vocal use at all, as a BSL user could?

Without using a word, can you think what your favourite vegetable that isn't a carrot is? Like, can you call it to mind without using the word?

[1] Kinda, fwiw I just know smatterings of lots of languages.

Re: Not everyone has an internal monologue

#367

Post by rladd »

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…

I think almost entirely in images, usually moving and relating to each other in 3D space.

There are words mixed in, but when they come up they are usually just single words or a phrases which are attributes of something I'm thinking of, or an action I should take.

Sometimes I think more in words, but that's usually when something is really unclear to me or if I am obsessing over something.

I think that years of training myself not to obsess over things probably reduced my internal monologue almost to the point that it would be good to have a bit more of it sometimes.

Re: Not everyone has an internal monologue

#368

Post by gliese1337 »

ericmcer wrote: post #336

This doesn't make any sense to me, even his example: 'One person even mentioned that when they do voice overs in movies of people’s thoughts, they “wished that it was real.”' How can they form the thought 'I wish that was real' if they have no monologue? And to convey that thought they just open their mouth and spew forth a sentence with no knowledge of its shape?

Why would they need to be able to put it into words in an inner monologue in order to form the thought?

The fact that it is possible to translate sentences into different languages should make it clear that the information content is not the same as the manner in which it is linguistically encoded. One simply... forms the thought. And then encodes it into speech for the purposes of telling other people about it later, and separately.

Re: Not everyone has an internal monologue

#369

Post by archagon »

40acres wrote: post #105

Unfathomable to me. My mind is constantly racing, playing out different conversations, interviewing myself in a variety of roles to navigate my thoughts on things (one day I'm the president of the US talking about foreign policy, another day I'm a big tech CEO navigating the diversity questions). I constantly have something in my ears to tune myself out, podcasts or music. After being diagnosed w/ ADHD I realize I'm…

I wish I knew how to switch on this power. As it stands, I seem to be pretty good at grasping the abstract “shape” of problems, in a way that short-circuits words, but I can’t flow forth with conversation or write believable dialogue to save my life. My thoughts are entirely fuzzy.

Sometimes when I’m very sleepy, I can simulate friends and relatives talking to an uncanny degree, but not at any other time.

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