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Not everyone has an internal monologue

ryanandrewlangdon.wordpress.com

341–350 of 904 posts

Re: Not everyone has an internal monologue

#341
So I'm gonna sound jaded but this isn't news to me. It was never in an "official" capacity (student at best) but this "result" turns out in interviews, discussions, in social sciences (cognitive psychology first of all, but certainly anthropology as well, philosophy too, it's a cross-domain topic). You just have to listen carefully and someday you hit this weird fact.

It's too long to explain here, but there's another realization that somehow helps describing such discrepancies between human beings. The question is that of 'normalcy', versus the 'abnormal', the notion of 'deviance', which leads to 'pathological', 'syndroms' and other supposedly 'undesirable' mutations.

Well, the history of evolution itself is that, among a population of "normal" beings, the next stage for any species always begins with 1 mutation, 1 "freak" who has a new thing, and will eventually spread to the whole species if that trait is worth it for survival and better adaptation.

There are enough accounts of historical psychology research to affirm that biologically, cognitively, psychologically speaking, there's virtually no difference between human beings 4,000 years ago and today; a baby from then raised now or vice versa would grow up just normal in context — we know this because every witness from the past said so, there's a recurring chain of normalcy if you will, and reading Ancient texts yields fairly "normal" psychological profiles. (Also think that 1,000 years is but 30 generations or so.)

And yet there are tests measuring dramatically changing cognitive abilities over just a century — take attention span in the last 40 years, it's appaling.

This means, IMHO, that minute change keeps occurring much more than we might suspect, continuously, but over long enough periods that human history is dwarfed by meaningful special (species) evolution. It also means that right now, a minority among us have evolved to what is the next stage for all of us, but it will only be obvious in hindsight.

The 18 over 91 quoted by OP has having no spoken dialectic (rather through other forms of encoding than language/speech) may be a dying breed, an artefact from the past (the animal in us who hasn't fully integrated speech maybe); they might as well be the future, how human brains would evolve as they adapt ("beyond-speech humans" in that case). Maybe the real path is people who have the ability for both, a switch.

A fair point was made in a previous to-level comment about the "speed limit" of speech, in terms of bandwidth or information density, and this is echoing how e.g. the math genius in us tends to think, when notation becomes object beyond than abstraction in and of itself and there are no words anymore but concepts, often impossible to visualize anyway (e.g. it's not a "function" or "f" anymore, in context it's become a "..." — no word but a feeling of what it is and what it does and how we could manipulate this specific thing).

I guess the take away is there are many discrepancies that we would never suspect had we never talked to others, and a lot of what we take for "granted" about human nature is typically a strong hint for something that's very subjective. At least in perception, if not in value. And that while we are entitled to our own hierarchy of values in the present, we simply cannot possibly judge the endgame, we can't tell today who's embodying the shape of things to come — just that some of us are, some of us must, if we are indeed evolving.

Re: Not everyone has an internal monologue

#342

This doesn't make any sense to me, even his example: 'One person even mentioned that when they do voice overs in movies of people’s thoughts, they “wished that it was real.”' How can they form the thought 'I wish that was real' if they have no monologue? And to convey that thought they just open their mouth and spew forth a sentence with no knowledge of its shape?

I think one can convey the feeling of "wishing something were real" into spoken words without actually thinking those exact words to themselves.

It's like when you are hungry, and decide to eat. You didn't have to tell yourself to do it to know that you should.

Speech is largely subconscious. Even people with a strong inner dialog are capable of expressing themselves in words without explicitly thinking out every word they say prior to open their mouths.

Re: Not everyone has an internal monologue

#343

My mind is also blown by this - although in a different direction. I knew some people have an internal monologue but thought it is reserved for the deepest moments. And I definitely did not think that they might be a majority, as author's own mini-research implies. I would presume that I would have to think at the speed I talk and that seems inefficient to me - I am usually not a fast talker.

+1

I never thought it was meant literally _at all_. I can "will" a rehearsal of what something would sound like, but it has nothing to do with my personal thought process or conscious experience...

Re: Not everyone has an internal monologue

#344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It took me until my mid-20s before I realized that not everyone thought this way.

It took me until my mid-20s to be able to drink enough to make this go away (at least for a short time).

This is among the many reasons why I almost never drink alcohol any more - easier to learn to manage the problem than to wake up hungover every morning.

Re: Not everyone has an internal monologue

#345
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 suspect that everyone has an inner dialog, but the defining difference could be on which side of your subconscious it's on.

It might not be that some people don't have an inner dialog, it could be that those people aren't capable of directly observing it.

Re: Not everyone has an internal monologue

#346
post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is much sexier though than irl. I wonder why is that? Well, now it is. Thank you (and me I guess for being so susceptible).

Now your read this sentence in Darth Vader voice. Not the first time though.

Seriously, it never occurred to me that you could choose an appealing voice for your inner monologue, mine has always been a neutral version of my real voice. Stranger since I subvocalize while reading, and as a kid, the voice would actually act and change for each character.

Now I wonder if your reading speed can improve by choosing a voice from here https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MotorMouth

Re: Not everyone has an internal monologue

#347
post #108
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.…

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 moment, or why the watch that I'm suddenly wearing isn't accurate. Sometimes the dream then shifts to be about solving that problem - e.g. trying to retrace my steps to find my phone.

Your example of a dream problem scenario was amazing, by the way.

Re: Not everyone has an internal monologue

#348

Something I discovered within the past year is that if I know a song fairly well, I can "play it" silently in my head, and be entertained. The experience isn't quite as emotionally resonate as listening with headphones, but it's not so far off either. It's useful when I'm bored. ...can anyone else do this? I actually find it supremely weird.

I can play a whole song in my head, and then realize that I don't know the words, and when I try to get the words out of the song in my head, I can't understand them, because my brain only committed the musical parts, not the lyrical parts.

I can even hear the vocals, they're just gibberish until I make a conscious effort to memorize them.

Re: Not everyone has an internal monologue

#349

Interesting 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?

I think I remember reading somewhere that thinking about jumping when you are near a staircase, balcony, cliff, or something like that is pretty common, even if you don't have the least desire to commit suicide otherwise.

Re: Not everyone has an internal monologue

#350
post #128

The "inner dialogue" is called the default mode network in neuroscience. It doesn't have to be thinking in "words" necessarily; you could also skip the words and still be thinking in a resting state. It serves the purpose of ruminating, reflecting on memories, doing introspection. Paradoxically, your brain actually consumes more calories doing this type of resting thinking than you do in task-oriented thought, like w…

If you think you are having no default mode activity, you are likely fooling yourself. It is externally observable when humans have a quieter default mode, through subtleties of behavior, one can notice a calming presence, like that of non-linguistic animals. Even without language, default processing loops can be quite complex, not even taking into account multiple diverse parallel processes. Inner dialog can be very useful. Not having inner dialog is not stupid. I agree though, that in many situations, or for some people, default mode inner dialog can have a debilitating effect. But in an evolutionary way, thinking "I can survive" in a perilous situation, likely outweighs thinking "wtf I am I doing w/ my life?" when sitting on the couch. But consider the evolutionary effects of the modern externalization of inner dialog through devices.
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