Not everyone has an internal monologue

A few links:

https://bookofbadarguments.com/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-informal/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetoric https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-rhetoric/

I also tend to remember a lot of facts after I watch documentaries, sometimes I can recall facts from a documentary many years later. It's similar to how my mind works so it's easy for me to digest.

I can visualize a very complex concept but I need my inner voice to dumb it down so that I can make an actionable decision. Sometimes I talk myself through the same visual concept in different ways to make sense of it from many angles.

I can imagine what it's like to visualize concepts with only abstract imagery, but I feel that in order to actually make decisions, a person needs some kind of mental mechanism to dumb it down. For me, the internal monologue is the best way to dumb down complex concepts and actually make decisions.

Decision-making for me is all about dumbing down very complex inputs and producing a single yes/no output.

I might visualize code in my head if I'm programming, but I don't see words. I know they're there, but they're not helpful to me in reasoning. I'm thinking through the steps of an algorithm which I wrote and how it changes the state of my mental model for the data on the computer -- but I don't literally have a picture of the variable states in my head or anything, nor can I see the code.

If I need to reason in a more intuitive way about why I think things or how I feel about things in the first place I think adding a dialog or visualization makes my reasoning worse. I'm rationalizing rather than feeling, leading to me reinforcing beliefs that aren't... quite... what I actually believe. I find this dangerous.

I want to understand why I feel something, but I also recognize that the feeling is what's true and any narrative I put together is imperfect because words pidgeonhole your much more flexible abstract concept into the constructions available in the language you think in.

I managed to get a PhD in an engineering field, so clearly I can still reason about things ;-) But I kind of... train my intuition and then make better guesses based on intuition, and then go back and use slower verbal/logical reasoning to find problems or do tactical changes. On the other hand, my method of "memorizing" fourier transforms was to do the proof a hundred times and then do the proof on my exams since it was not practical for me to actually memorize a formula. And why I'd make a terrible biologist or doctor or chemist where fluency and memorization play a much bigger role.

Or another way, I use no words for strategy, I rely on training my intuition with practice and then trusting my intuition with verification to improve my intuition later. When it gets to the tactics of how to connect A to B to C I use a rigorous approach but I still wouldn't say that at any point I've experienced something like a discussion in my head between multiple distinct voices. I do have a running monologue of me asking myself questions when I'm in rigorous mode, but it definitely never feels like a distinct entity questioning anything.

When you read a book, do characters have different voices? My partner has no voices since he claims he was taught to read by memorizing what words look like whereas I learned to read from sounding out words. I have exactly one voice, the same internal monologue as for anything else. But that's for books I'm enjoying reading, if I just want to get through something I'm not sure I actually have a coherent voice in my head at all anymore. But my reading comprehension is markedly lower.

Verbal creativity is the shallowest kind. Freeing yourself from words enables thought that cannot be represented in the words you have. Most potential ideas can't be, at their beginning.

To communicate new ideas, you might need to invent new language for the job. That is where all language comes from: idea first, then the word.