Not everyone has an internal monologue • Hacker News Board

Re: Not everyone has an internal monologue

#391

Post by phkahler » Thu, Jan 30, 2020, 11:48 PM UTC

babgev wrote: post #302

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.

Can you tell more about that month please. I just cant imagine how that could be possible

There was a blog linked here some time ago where the author turned off his internal dialog and was able to observe his more automatic behavior. I recall trying it on my way to work and was fascinated. It was not like meditation, but I was still suspicious of the safety. This piece just reminds me that I need to try it again, but I dont recall how.

Re: Not everyone has an internal monologue

#392

Post by minikites » Thu, Jan 30, 2020, 11:50 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #384

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…

What is a concept which cannot be put into words?

I'm not sure how you're expecting people to answer this with text.

Re: Not everyone has an internal monologue

#393

Post by aaroninsf » Thu, Jan 30, 2020, 11:50 PM UTC

xvector wrote: post #272

warent wrote: post #262

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…

I never knew that people actually thought verbally ! I always thought it was a figure of speech. I mean, I can "think verbally" if I try really hard... even then, it's more like me imagining myself saying something rather than actually thinking verbally. Wow. I don't know what to think.

I am having this reaction also.

I am literally speechless, thinking that it wasn't an idiom; and that the monologue as recorded in e.g. modern literature, was likely meant to be read and as is read as a transcription...

I have always at a deeply unexamined level assumed that that was just a convention of how literature functions through its medium, language; that the recording of thought through its semantic content was a (to me "obvious") necessary translation-layer thing.

I don't have a headache, but I might have to go sit somewhere and stare with my eyes unfocused for a while, to come to terms with this. I've been cross examining my coworker (who does "hear the voice") about what that even means.

The aphantasia thing was curious. This is somehow much more of a shock.

Re: Not everyone has an internal monologue

#394

Post by dominicl » Thu, Jan 30, 2020, 11:51 PM UTC

Wow! Is this a hidden science that we missed to research as a society? Understanding these elementary pieces of thinking seems to me to be a science probably hugely important for AI research and tons of socially relevant questions. Anyone know of scientific papers on this? A catalogue of human ways of thinking, experiments to prove them, analysis of their impact on daily life or career etc..?

Re: Not everyone has an internal monologue

#395

Post by JabavuAdams » Thu, Jan 30, 2020, 11:51 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #377

Yeah, this is crazy to me. (I'm hearing these words in my head as I'm typing them.) Like, what form do your shower thoughts take if you don't have an internal monologue?

Visual / tactile. Put head under shower, open eyes, facing down. Notice how streams of water look like the capital ships from Robotech firing full frontal barrage. Relieve some Robotech nostalgia. See patterns in the shower tiles. Words are too slow for thinking. But, words give solidity and can help develop a train of thought.

When I have verbal shower thoughts, they come out verbally and I sing or monologue.

Re: Not everyone has an internal monologue

#396

Post by smegger001 » Thu, Jan 30, 2020, 11:51 PM UTC

jryb wrote: post #80

I was always very confused as a child when characters on TV couldn't tell whether they were dreaming. I thought it was obvious! Things were 3-dimensional and they could taste and feel and hear and see, which no one does in dreams. While reading a great discussion similar to the link[1], a comment made me realize people actually do have realistic dreams that are comparable to waking life, which absolutely floored me.…

Yeah my first clue that I am dreaming is usually when people start to "talk" and they don actually say anything I just know what they are communicating to me. Then I start to notice other for lack of a better term rendering errors in the dream. The more problems I notice the faster the dream seems to deteriorate around me.

Re: Not everyone has an internal monologue

#397

Post by ivanhoe » Thu, Jan 30, 2020, 11:52 PM UTC

If someone who doesn't experience inner monologues is willing to answer, I would really like to know how does it feel for them when reading? Do you vocalize in your head the text that you read, or it's also just abstract non-verbal stream of words for you?

It might be a bit far fetched, but from observing & talking to my kid when he was learning to read, I strongly suspect that there's a connection, that it has something to do with the skill of reading without saying the words aloud. Kids can't do it at first, they have to say every word aloud in order to understand the text, and then with time they train themselves to read in silence. For me, I still say the text as I read it, but I just say it in my mind, not aloud - And it feels exactly the same as when I verbalize my thoughts. AFAIK a lot of people reads like this (all my friends at least). This seems like some sort of "hack" to help us understand the meaning easier, we run it through the same processing as a spoken language. Some of us obviously can learn to avoid this intermediary step of verbalization, and can focus the consciousness directly on their thoughts.

Re: Not everyone has an internal monologue

#398

Post by lincolnq » Thu, Jan 30, 2020, 11:52 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #384

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…

What is a concept which cannot be put into words?

For me, scents are rich sensory experiences. Yet I can’t describe cinnamon to you, other than that it smells like cinnamon. It’s like an opaque pointer, I can compare equality but not inspect it beyond that.

Re: Not everyone has an internal monologue

#399

Post by pier25 » Thu, Jan 30, 2020, 11:52 PM UTC

warent wrote: post #262

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…

> the process is spontaneous and involuntary

Do you consider that the parts of yourself that are not conscious are in fact not part of yourself?

Otherwise it cannot be involuntary. Some part of you has decided to have those thoughts.

Ex nihilo nihil fit.

Re: Not everyone has an internal monologue

#400

Post by qntmpkts » Thu, Jan 30, 2020, 11:53 PM UTC

As one of those without this monologue, I've always found it maddening when dealing with those who strictly do. It's also fairly straightforward to me what sort of mental landscape someone has after some cursory conversation with them.