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Not everyone has an internal monologue

ryanandrewlangdon.wordpress.com

401–410 of 904 posts

Re: Not everyone has an internal monologue

#401
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?

Concisely describe the space battle you see in your mind's eye in less than 0.5 seconds. It's not that it can't be described. It's that I'm looking at / living a shot from a movie in realtime or faster than realtime. If I tried to write that out ... it would be too slow and actually over-specified.

Re: Not everyone has an internal monologue

#402

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…

"interviewing myself in a variety of roles to navigate my thoughts on things" I used to from time to time imagine my half of a conversation in which I was showing around someone notable who had traveled through time to get to the present day. Maybe someone from 1,000 years ago or maybe from 50. That is, for entertainment, not to cope with anything. I never felt like my imagination was quite good enough to turn it int…

And, as far as visual thoughts go, I don't think I'm a visual person, but I wouldn't say I don't think visually. Once in a while, I do. Waking from dreams, I often feel like they were very visual. I guess maybe my sense is that my visual imagination is latent or stunted. Usually it's difficult for me to picture anything, but I feel I know what it's like, that I can imagine waking up and being able to see the tiniest detail of something I'm thinking about.

Re: Not everyone has an internal monologue

#404
post #357

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 obser…

Wow, as I'm aware of the idea, that our brains may indeed host several consciousnesses, I did not expect to be freaked out by any of this. But if my inner narrator is another consciousness, holy. Just at the realization struck me, my inner voice said knowingly "Heeeellloo there". Ahaha, I'm going to bed now.

Or maybe it's like a first-person novel (for example, ASOIAF), where the narrator is a different person at different times. Not to freak you out more...

If I were to purely guess, my gut feeling - which of course means little with complex, unintuitive things like this - is that your inner narrator / monologue-giver really is just one single consciousness the vast majority of the time.

That is, I think there's a pretty good chance it is just "you". Phew. But I think there's also some chance it communicates in some way with other conscious entities, and it can be influenced by them as well. Different states of mind (for all meanings of the word "state") may cause those systems to temporarily "corrupt", or perhaps even substitute for, your inner narrator. For example, these could be systems that evolved well before primates, like things involved with fear, anger, sex, etc., that can partly or fully hijack the narrator, but only for limited periods of time, and usually infrequently. Maybe some guys really do, literally, occasionally think with their dick. Maybe some people guilty of "crimes of passion" really were different people during those moments. Maybe certain psychoactive drugs can put the narrator in the shotgun seat while some other stuff takes the wheel. Maybe psychotic disorders mess up the communication channels, so people start hearing those other consciousnesses "talking" when normally the neocortex would suppress or ignore most or all of that chatter.

But I think most of the time, it's just the single inner narrator. This may be the highest layer of the neocortex, which is the most recently involved system. Maybe it can tell the other consciousnesses to shut up, or speak up, or ask them to compute something in parallel, and at other times maybe it's just completely overwhelmed by them (which may lead to anxiety, delusions, and other issues).

I suspect something sort of like this is likely true, even if those other systems aren't actually conscious in any way, but are more just like cold information processing systems.

Or if not that, the next thing I'd lean towards is that there are two full consciousnesses: one in each hemisphere of the brain, with similar but not exactly the same behavior, thoughts, decisions, etc. Some philosophers have concluded this after performing studies of split-brain patients (people with their hemispheres surgically disconnected to treat epilepsy). Redundancy can be beneficial.

If true, maybe these are the two full ones, and the others are only "kinda conscious", sort of like having a few different ant brains inside your own brain. Ants are conscious, but not in a very deep way. I believe they are likely aware and sentient, but they only have a limited understanding of what's going on, why they do what they do, etc. They have their own thoughts, but they are very simple, dumb thoughts. Maybe each hemisphere controls its own respective set of one or more ant- or squirrel-like brains/consciousnesses.

Going by evolution, it wouldn't be that shocking to have one or more lower-level, cruder consciousnesses inside our brain, which the neocortex builds on top of. Maybe those are like deep learning models, and the highest executive in the neocortex is like the data scientist feeding data, tuning hyperparameters, and interpreting the output. This could maybe (partly) explain why some people with brain trauma and genetic conditions turn out to be savants - the neocortex is disrupted or routed around, and some of the raw models become more exposed and closer to the highest layer of awareness and consciousness, and they can use their billions of years of evolutionary advancement to compute and memorize things when large datasets are inputted.

Octopus intelligence is an interesting case study. It evolved totally separately, so it doesn't necessarily create a path we can follow to our own intelligence, but it does suggest possible options. And given the commonality of convergent evolution, maybe it could be giving us some applicable options.

Octopi seem to have one central consciousness, and one crude consciousness in each arm. So, 9 total. The octopus can choose to intentionally move all of its arms in synchrony, but each arm can also think and act autonomously. The arms can act autonomously even for a period of time after the octopus has died, and even if the arms are totally removed (or both). If their arms can do that, it's certainly not impossible that lobes or regions of our brain do something similar. If there were some way to safely take some regions out of a person's brain and see how those parts behave on their own (and how the person behaves without them), maybe they'd be a little like the detached octopus arms - autonomous consciousnesses, but able to be directed and controlled by a central consciousness when they're connected to one.

Re: Not everyone has an internal monologue

#405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This "Living in the moment" stuff has depth such that many books have been written on it. It is one of the premises of mindfulness meditation, and Buddhism thoroughly explores this.

The summary is that you will be more satisfied if you are not continuously ruminating on the past, or anxiously anticipating future problems, but instead focus on your immediate happiness. e.g. Right now you are comfortable, not in any pain and surrounded by interesting things. Enjoy this, and don't worry about some conversation you might be having later.

Re: Not everyone has an internal monologue

#406
post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Can you try to dig that up and share it with us? It sounds a lot like some versions of meditation, but I'd be really interested to read it.

Re: Not everyone has an internal monologue

#407
post #367
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 train…

I'm pretty much the same, but my internal monologue sometimes manifests itself as, I don't know how to describe it, but, as "feelings". This is somewhat usefull, but I need a more formal method sometimes to explain me to myself.

Re: Not everyone has an internal monologue

#408
post #65

I dream up movies and songs and all sorts of rich fantasies in my head, and I do this constantly. As a consequence of this, I never get bored as I've got an incredible imagination to lean on. I think about movies I want to make, startups I want to create, the change I want to put into the world. New songs on my commute, goals I want to accomplish, what I could do with time travel. I'm always working on the structures…

I can relate, as I do this all the time, being inside my head, a mashup of multi-verses, projecting myself in alternate realities, being able to time-travel in to the future and opening a conversational 1-on-1 portal to my present self, to answer the question like Dr. Banks from the movie Arrival or when Brand reaches out to her past self in Interstellar, all while taking bus home, or while taking a long shower.

I can watch an entire movie inside my head from another character's point of view or vantage point.

I'm also able to on the spot improv storytelling, something that I was able to do easily as a teen during summer camps and recently I got introduced to the world of DnD which got my mind racing and volunteered to become a DM.

Loneliness is a rarity for me as I feel content wandering off, writing and art is my way of projecting to this world, which I have plucked out from the sea of infinite realities through dreams and daydreaming.

When someone talks to me, asks me a question/opinion or solution, a whole mindmap/flowchart,timeline appears before me which I can navigate spatially in 3d.

When someone asks for direction or trying to find out where I am, I literally see a 3d flyover or bird's eyeview from where I'm standing.

When I dream, not only that I dream in colors but they have a feel to it like watching something nostalgic or when I travel. Sometimes dreams has visual filters as a part of it. Have you dreamed being inside a cartoon/comicbook, painting or noir movie?

I do have a hard time turning my brain off which sucks when trying to go to sleep.

Re: Not everyone has an internal monologue

#409
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…

A great many abstract concepts can be put into words (which are, to generalize, abstract symbols) - that is one of the great powers of human language. I wanted to ask what ideas cannot be so expressed, but of course there is a problem...

There may be candidates in qualia, the subjective experiences that tend to tie the philosophy of mind in knots, and which, being subjective, cannot be communicated precisely in language (can you tell a blind person what it is like to see red, such that they can learn it from your words?) In these cases, however, our internal monologue could refer to them indexically ("seeing red is like that", where that picks out an aggregation of memories.)

Bizzarre as this may seem to you, I can assure you that it feels very natural, easy and straightforward, though it might be something of an illusion, merely the way we explain thinking to ourselves when we pay attention to doing it (see my other post.)

Re: Not everyone has an internal monologue

#410
post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's probably less of a difference than you might think. Dreams are generally less detailed than you might think from their portrayal on TV. What they are really good at are convincing the dreamers that they are a great deal more detailed than they really are, because they're on the "inside" of the cognition; you might "see" a vaguely round blotch of color like what you may see when you close your eyes, but you cogni…

It seems like part of what makes it _feel_ real is your brain's own ability to rationalize and explain what it's "seeing" under the assumption that it is real. For example, some say you should try to look at a complex object like a watch or a phone since your brain will often get the details glaringly incorrect. However, I find my brain can often "explain away" exactly _why_ I don't have my phone with me at the momen…

My dreams are always a mishmash of real and imagined places, scenarios and people. For example studying for exams but in a completely different city or country, stuff like that. My mind just accepts it, never seems to have any issues with it. I only realize the craziness after I wake up (if I remember the dream that is).
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