What my stroke taught me (2017)

It's hard to see how this works with such a complex question though. By its nature it's actually impossible to put into words. It's my theory that we all think like this, because it's literally impossible to think "in language", but some people need to have it as some type of security blanket and some don't.

Every time someone says they have some inner monologue I can ask where this comes from. Your inner monologue also needs a source and that can't be language again. You cannot source all thought you have about this question just from those words alone. Your mind is making all types of connections that might eventually be convertable into words, but are themselves absolutely not verbal.

For those of us without an inner monologue, perhaps it's similar, just with a different way of self-reflecting.

I'm in the weird position of having memories of me as a child with a detailed inner monologue, and memories of post-stroke me without an inner monologue. The old memories feel like someone else's memories. I even called them xenomemories for a few years after my stroke because they didn't feel like they belonged to me.

In those old memories, I thought of my inner monologue as "my thoughts" and "my consciousness," but I have no memory of what was going on beneath that level. The words just seemed to flow in a way that made sense to child me. It was like young me needed words to keep thoughts stepping forward in an endless chain of reflection and reasoning via language. Young me didn't value anything except the build artifacts (the words), so all the rest of my thinking process never made it into my memories.

It was the effects of losing those words that made me so hyperaware of everything else going on in my brain, and I had to build up a new understanding of who "I" even was.

All the recent talk about the potential for LLMs to "think" in latent space instead of words feels so very similar to my own experiences, going from words with well-defined meanings to something less sharp, but with more room for nuance. Your mention of thinking in semantic space feels right to me based on the way I think through complex problems today. Thinking in words is exceptionally slow and clumsy for me.

In a sense, it feels like I traded in a binary computer for an analog (or quantum) one, and just like computers, I would imagine each style of thought has its strengths and weaknesses.

It would certainly be nice if my word compiler wasn't so slow and buggy, though. It makes it a lot harder to leave permanent notes for myself or communicate with others.

In this scenario, would the phrase "My favorite flowers are roses" have materialized in your mind?

Or if this scenario would be: you have been asked "What are your favorite flowers?", and you would just speak out those words to the other person without rehearsing in your head, would you be capable of recreating that scenario at another time, including the person asking you and you answering, in your head?

This issue is very complex. One of the thorny bits is that what you remember and what is germane are very different things. As humans we operate under the laws of psychology which necessitate interesting but ultimately quite inexplicable things like an "I" to somehow "anchor" our thoughts. I believe investigations into the nature of this "I" are still ongoing (after a few millennia). Perhaps different personalities can use different types of hooks to anchor this "I". Perhaps some are inclined to use language for this and others not.

Sometimes I wonder if it's just lack of introspection: the ones with inner monologue having accepted too soon that that's all there is to their minds and neglected to look underneath this chatter. They can see that this chatter must have a source as well. Surely they'll see this can't be another level of chatter, because I'll ask the question again and again. Ultimately all human cogitation is without source[1] and can't be anything other than purely spontaneous.

Anyway, I'm rambling. Good luck to you!

[1] "without source" meaning: not able to be observed by the subject itself

I did! I also learnt to read at 3. Your observation was really impressive.

I've never thought about it being the cause of my weird quirks, I thought it was actually another consequence/symptom of being wired a bit different, but maybe you are right. Have you ever met anyone else who learnt to read early? Do they also behave like that?

I don't know if I'm in the spectrum (I suspect I do, but I don't want to know). In any case, if I do, then I'm also a functioning one.

> if you’re literally sounding out every word in your head you’d never be able to keep up with whatever it is I do

Another possibility is that they overestimate how much they use their inner monologue without realizing. For example, I really doubt they think "time to move the left leg, now the right leg, now the left..." whenever they walk. Maybe they just don't enter into that "mode" as often as us