Probably every young boy has the inner voice.
"It's the final quarter, and the home team is down by a point. He's got the ball, he shoots and....."
Thinks the kid in the driveway with the basketball.
Not everyone has an internal monologue
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Re: Not everyone has an internal monologue
#532Wow! 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..?
> Is this a hidden science that we missed to research as a society?
Yeah, it's called Neurolinguistic Programming, and it's not quite a science yet. (E.g. the Wikipedia entry just straight-up calls it pseudo-science.)
In brief, it started with linguistic analysis of transcripts of videos of therapy session with some very talented and successful therapists. (The analysis was informed by the same Transformational Grammar of Chomsky that also informs formal language design.) It was noticed that some people tend to favor "preferred" sensory systems, and a model of subjective experience was developed that allowed for eliciting and encoding subjective processing "strategies". (E.g. most good spellers use visual memory to recall a picture of a word, and then check it kinesthetically for correctness ("it feels right"), and read it off from their minds' eye. Bad spellers typically do something else. Teach a bad speller the good "strategy" and they can suddenly spell well.)
That was nearly half a century ago.
"The future is here, it's just not evenly distributed." ~William Gibson
Re: Not everyone has an internal monologue
#533Interesting topic (and comments). 1. I do inner monologue. And I have to say, sometimes I get scared from what I "hear". I don't mean sometjing like "I hear voices telling me to kill everyone", but nasty, brutally cynical, sometimes outright violent thoughts. They feel alien to me, because on general level I consider myself "the good guy", but one the other hand they don't feel like someone else whispering me evil th…
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?
"Call of the void".
I seem to remember Sartre saying interesting things about this idea. Something about exercising your absolute freedom or something. As far as I know, it's perfectly normal.
Re: Not everyone has an internal monologue
#534Earlier quoted context omitted.
I used to be like that, and it was helpful in many ways as I seemed to always be ready for wherever a conversation might go. But I wasn't living in the moment. Now I actively stop myself from simulating the various branches of potential conversations. It feels good to live in the moment (shaking my head a little when I feel it starting helps). The downside is that I don't have as many prepared responses and am more e…
Why is it a bad thing for your brain to be running DFS all the time? Is it a wasteful use of time? Does it cause behavioral issues? Is it a personal choice? Or...?
Poster said BFS, which is good, because DFS is probably a massive waste of effort that mispredicts reality (but is a more immersive daydream).
Re: Not everyone has an internal monologue
#535Unfathomable 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…
Ketamine infusions can completely, instantly and seemingly permanently remove these racing thoughts, allowing you to only have them when you want them. Doesn't impact creativity either. Feels like the part of the brain responsible for running worrying scenarios quiets down and only brings them up to consciousness when necessary. There are several studies showing anxiolytic in addition to anti-depreesive effects. Does…
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Re: Not everyone has an internal monologue
#536If 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 somet…
It's hard to explain, it just feels like.. reading. All I can say is that my mental focus is on the text in front of me, and not on an aural narrator in my head or a movie-ish visualization. I would say it's non-verbal but not really abstract.
Re: Not everyone has an internal monologue
#537Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am surprised that you said others can suspect ulterior motives, because that started happening to me but I can't figure out what the connection is. Can you expand on that?
I have learned to be cautious with two very different types of people (this is not a scientific exercise, take with a grain of salt): - One is people who are constantly negative and cast stones everywhere, but offset that negativity with charm. They can accrue a network of Stockholm-esque followers that would say "he's not an asshole, he's actually a really sweet person." When they perceive a threat from you, or they…
Do you live on the set of Mean Girls? But me, most people are spending their energy trying to get by, with no time for junior high school drama conspiracies. Maybe I'm too useless to be socially manipulated.
Re: Not everyone has an internal monologue
#538Earlier 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…
I've always had an odd pleasure at standing at the edge of cliffs. Something meditative about trying to overcome the feeling of unbalance. Think about it, you can be perfectly balanced standing on a cubic foot of rock. But if it's suspended hundreds of feet in the air, you would feel unbalanced (wind notwithstanding).
It turns out that this actually is dangerous. The feeling of imbalance is a "real" reaction your body has.
Re: Not everyone has an internal monologue
#539Earlier quoted context omitted.
For 1 alot of info on "gaslighting" online. For 2, there needs to be reciprocity and honesty (even silent). We shouldn't regard ourselves as below/above, but may be ingrained and diminishing.
Has there been a deflation of the word "gaslighting" recently? I used to understand it as "making person X or others believe person X is crazy (in order to discredit them)" but I see it used much more widely nowadays and I don't really see what it has to do with the scenario in question.
"Gaslighting" now means having a different perspective and asserting it's the correct one or a valid one.
Re: Not everyone has an internal monologue
#540Unfathomable 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…
MDMA was great for that, but the weeklong comedown is a bitch