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Not everyone has an internal monologue

ryanandrewlangdon.wordpress.com

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Re: Not everyone has an internal monologue

#411

Post by JabavuAdams »

downtide wrote: post #263
40acres wrote: post #105

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…

Don't worry with age your brain will deaden. My mind raced, I learned somewhat how to chill it right out, and now it flat-lines far too much.

Almost 44 years, and the hurricane hasn't seemed to calm down. I just have fewer registers. :/

Re: Not everyone has an internal monologue

#412

Post by benibela »

lincolnq wrote: post #398
rayiner wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is a concept which cannot be put into words?

For me, scents are rich sensory experiences. Yet I can’t describe cinnamon to you, other than that it smells like cinnamon. It’s like an opaque pointer, I can compare equality but not inspect it beyond that.

That reminds me of the password used to enter the TARDIS control room in Doctor Who: "Crimson Eleven Delight Petrichor". But you could not say the password verbally, the words are irrelevant. You need to visualize the color, and the recall the petrichor smell in your mind, ...

Re: Not everyone has an internal monologue

#413

Post by adamcharnock »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #26

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.

Yep, I can totally do this. It's normally not the whole song, just a section of it (but that doesn't bother me). It's a particularly common thing for me to do in bed, using the last song I heard that day.

Re: Not everyone has an internal monologue

#414

Post by ninkendo »

perl4ever wrote: post #376
40acres wrote: post #105

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…

> 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 into fiction.

I do this exact same thing.

I also have conversations with random people in my life, explaining what I’m doing and what I’m thinking to them. When I have an inner monologue, I don’t think of it as talking to “myself”, but rather the imagined presence of some friend or family member. I have no idea how normal this is.

Re: Not everyone has an internal monologue

#416

Post by bemmu »

archagon wrote: post #369
40acres wrote: post #105

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…

I wish I knew how to switch on this power. As it stands, I seem to be pretty good at grasping the abstract “shape” of problems, in a way that short-circuits words, but I can’t flow forth with conversation or write believable dialogue to save my life. My thoughts are entirely fuzzy. Sometimes when I’m very sleepy, I can simulate friends and relatives talking to an uncanny degree, but not at any other time.

Interesting, one of the signs that I’m about to fall asleep soon is also that I accidentally feel my thoughts as if they were said by another person.

Re: Not everyone has an internal monologue

#417

Post by sadness2 »

n00b123 wrote: post #164

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…

It's our brain's job to give us lots of ideas. It's then our job to contextualize and filter those ideas, into "useful" and "discard".

You shouldn't feel guilty for having a brain which gives you outrageous ideas. You should only worry if you can't filter them appropriately.

My understanding is that part of schizophrenia can be experiencing those ideas as an external voice.

Re: Not everyone has an internal monologue

#418

Post by sstangl »

UseStrict wrote: post #375
xvector wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never knew that people actually thought verbally ! I always thought it was a figure of speech. I mean, I can "think verbally" if I try really hard... even then, it's more like me imagining myself saying something rather than actually thinking verbally. Wow. I don't know what to think.

Similarly until last year I never knew that people actually could visualize things when they closed their eyes. I thought it was more of a metaphor. But alas when I close my eyes it's darkness. Thankfully I have my internal monologue to describe things to me in that darkness.

I can't visualize every kind of object. The easiest things to visualize are simple geometric shapes with a strong color. By default, if I try to "visualize something" it will be a red triangle.

I cannot visualize faces whatsoever, even if the person is right in front of me and I close my eyes suddenly.

Re: Not everyone has an internal monologue

#419

Post by xvector »

aaroninsf wrote: post #393
xvector wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never knew that people actually thought verbally ! I always thought it was a figure of speech. I mean, I can "think verbally" if I try really hard... even then, it's more like me imagining myself saying something rather than actually thinking verbally. Wow. I don't know what to think.

I am having this reaction also. I am literally speechless, thinking that it wasn't an idiom; and that the monologue as recorded in e.g. modern literature, was likely meant to be read and as is read as a transcription... I have always at a deeply unexamined level assumed that that was just a convention of how literature functions through its medium, language; that the recording of thought through its semantic content…

Yes, I always thought that when a novelist describes the “voice in the head” of a character, or when a coworker does the same, they are trying to convey thought over a medium incapable of conveying true thought.

I never imagined that that was the actual thought!

Re: Not everyone has an internal monologue

#420

Post by qez »

lqet wrote: 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…

> Do you have to come up with elaborate verbal descriptions of abstract concepts in your head before you can think about them?

I am very unusual, but for me, yes.

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