cross-posted from: https://lemmit.online/post/2916897
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The original was posted on /r/science by /u/mvea on 2024-05-15 10:17:06+00:00.
I’m one of the 5-10%. I always sucked at verbal memory tasks. Didn’t know some people have an real, interpretable internal monologue until a few years ago. I thought thinking nonverbally was the default. I even specifically remember watching shows and movies where you listen to a character’s internal internal monologue and thinking “this is dumb, that’s not how thinking works”. Turns out it is, and I’m just in the minority! Now I make an effort to manually start an internal monologue when I’m doing anything that requires a lot of verbal processing, like listening to instructions at work. It helps, but I can still tell that I have a deficit compared to most people when it comes to those things.
Your anecdote seems to support that it’s a learned behavior/skill, which tracks for me. I have a very active internal dialogue that’s difficult to turn off. I say dialogue instead of monologue because I often make up “other voices” that bounce ideas off each other, and this generally happens without my conscious effort. I think I developed this because as I was growing up I was encouraged to pray regularly, and I was very fanatically religious as a kid so I did so as often as I could. I prayed silently so often in fact that my thoughts were basically a constant one-sided monologue directed to god. Whenever I would daydream or let my imagination wander I would imagine god responding, and eventually the constant monologue became a dialogue. I would work out problems or make decisions by having conversations with an imaginary god. When I stopped believing in god the second voice never went away, I just started recognizing it as my own.
Okay, now I have to know if religious individuals are more likely to have an inner voice. That just makes sense!!!
Perhaps! I also think internal monologues can develop just from learning to read and write silently. Having an inner voice makes it easier to absorb the information in a book or to plan out your writing in advance.
There’s actually a theory that back in ye olden times when inner monologues first started, people thought it was God talking to them because it was a new phenomenon and that didn’t have any way to understand that it was some kind of evolution of consciousness, not a god.
Yeah Jensen’s work. It is mostly considered pseudoscience today but there some who think it has value.
I am trying to wrap my head around this. So if you are just walking down the street alone, watching cars go by, not reading, there a voice? What would it even be saying?
Yes, multiple voices, probably debating what I’m going to cook for dinner later. At this point I might be going a bit too far anthropomorphizing the voices, it’s not like actual separate personalities, they’re all me. It’s more like perspective taking. I’m engaging in a conversation with myself and the different voices will take different stances. For example I might have a “lazy voice” that just wants to eat leftovers and a “craving voice” that wants to cook tacos. I decide what to do by having the voices hash it out.
As I’m describing this it all sounds very intentional and like I’m playing pretend, but it really is just automatic.
Whoaaaa that’s so interesting. I grew up silently praying in the daily as well, and also tend to have dialogues going on in my head. Also a stream of unsolicited advice, which is less pleasant… But I’d probably miss it if it went away.
Learning to get over religious shame and guilt took quite some time for me, and I still have to catch myself sometimes when an inner voice says things I no longer believe/agree with. Part of getting over that meant cultivating other voices. When one voice bites another bites back lol.
As a plus I’m very good in a debate.
TIL. I’m one of the 5-10% as well!! I have not noticed a deficit in verbal memory… I’m more interested reading the comments and learning today that people have inner voices?!?
Yes! You’ve seen TV shows where people are thinking words in their heads or whatever…based on reality!
Basically if I know you well I hear your voice in my head argue for a pov I know you hold. If you are say a safety-first kinda guy I will hear you lecture me when I am not being safe. I got a committee arguing all the time and I admit it sometimes becomes hard to remember if I mentioned X to my mental version of someone or the real someone.
Yes I am aware that the voices I hear are not real. It is just the way my brain is presenting information to itself. Like writing down notes in different colored inks. It is all the same letters and words but with an added change.
I’m with you. Your movie reference really helped solidify it. I assumed I was one of the lonely minds, but this made it clear.
Some things that seem associated with this are my constant cravings for social interaction and intellectual conversation. I can’t give it to myself. I have never understood how people can just do nothing. I never had an invisible friend as a kid. There are many things people say and do that could be explained by having personal voices. There are many struggles with communicating to others that have already had a conversation with themselves before I can share a full thought.
“It helps, but I can still tell that I have a deficit compared to most people when it comes to those things.”
I was totally gonna ask you about this until I got to the end! It seems like thinking without any kind of internal monologue would be incredibly abstract which might be good for some things but it would probably suck ass for trying to remember or understand extremely detailed instructions and things like that! I’m so curious what it’s like to think the way you do and I wish I could flip a switch for a little bit to experience it because it’s kind of hard to really imagine what I would be like.
It’s strange because while we can use words to describe our thought processes, understanding how someone else thinks isn’t really possible since we only have one frame of reference (our own minds) and words can only go so far in describing cognition. We can only observe differences in task performance and speculate as to the underlying causes on a cognitive level, maybe make some correlations here and there in the process. So weird!
I’ve seen this conversation come up so many times and I’m never not fascinated by it. I have a nonstop internal monologue, it can be exhausting really. But I can’t fully wrap my head around thinking without it
I have ADHD, it’s like having talk radio permanently on in my head. Often times I’ll have an internal monologue playing on top of internal background music.
I have ADHD too but in my case I don’t actually “hear” any of the thoughts. But they exist similar to how you describe. At any given time I can feel multiple different thoughts kind of floating around. When music gets stuck in my head I don’t so much hear it in there as I feel the presence of a song. So I have to talk out loud in order to keep from losing the thread of what I was thinking about.
I’m the same way, if I don’t talk out loud or write my ideas down I can’t think straight. Without an inner monologue my thoughts just feel like a jumbled abstract soup I have to manually untangle by speaking. I also get songs stuck in my head, but I’ve always explained it as feeling a particular part of the rhythm, or almost feeling the lyrics in my mouth like I’m speaking them.
Me too. People like you are fascinating to me. When I first found out that everyone thinks differently I went around interrogating everyone I knew about how they think.
I don’t have an interior monologue unless Im typing, but I sometimes use my internal “sound system” to play music.
i dont have one at all, i think, i don’t even have one when typing, which i think leads to a lot of weird mistakes, sometimes i’ll just interject a completely random word, or pickup halfway through a sentence with a completely different sentence, it’s weird sometimes.
I can see that could have that effect! I pretty much need it for typing, it’s like an act of translation. I have to write a lot for work or I probably wouldn’t have started doing it that way.
If someone is talking or the radio is on when I type I will accidentally include some of the words from those sources.
That’s really fascinating and similar to how I think, I think. Like, typing, reading, or thinking about things that are by nature verbal get internally verbalized but in an atonal “narrator voice”, though it’s still not “quiet” otherwise. I also have what I call my “internal walkman” for playing music in a recording/playback manner (sometimes with some “skips”), rather than any voice of my own.
What happens to your monologue when you’re not thinking about it though?
When your senses provide information about tastes or sounds, isn’t that a kind of thinking without the monologue?
I’ve battled insomnia for my whole life and not being able to shut off the monologue is the main reason
I wouldn’t describe it that way, no.
I’d like to preface this by saying that I’m not some kind of mindfulness / meditation guru and have no business trying to explain such things to anyone else given I have such a poor understanding myself.
I think really I’m just talking about feeling feelings. The monologue might be reporting on sensory inputs “that spoonful of peanut butter has a very sticky mouthfeel!” but there’s an underlying feeling. You can kind of feel the feeling and disregard the chatter.
For me, my inner voice is muted when I am focused on something, like working on a task or playing a video game.
The second I stop focusing, the inner voice starts.
If I do nothing, it’s usually a song that is stuck in my head.
As for other senses, for me, it is the same as focusing on a task. When my senses are activated, the inner voice stops.
If I am reading something and I know thr voice of the person that wrote that, I automatically read in their voice and it is extremely hard to read in my voice.
Does you inner monologue have a voice? Mine is just… Voiceless? Like, pure translation. I never think in “My Voice”.
It’s fascinating to me, too.
I have seen everything by now: People who think that only sociopaths have an inner monologue. People who think an inner monologue would be useful, but can’t quite lean in on the concept. People who are confused that some people don’t have an inner monologue. People getting angry at me for even “questioning” the inner monologue, as if it was holy.
It’s an interesting exercise in trying to understand the experience of others while removing our own biases. Doesn’t always go so well I guess! So how do you think?? I really can’t tell from your comment
Same, sometimes I even move my mouth when I talk to myself if I am too engaged in my internal dialogue. Freaks my wife out sometimes.
I think that’s pretty normal to some extent, I remember reading that you can kinda see people’s inner monologue on a head MRI based on tiny movements of speech organs. Take this with a massive grain of salt, no idea where I read that and too lazy to find it right now lol.
Personally I definitely notice every now and then that when I activate my inner voice I also slightly move my tongue etc. as if I was saying what it says.
This is a really interesting question. If I were a researcher, I’d try to go chase this topic, since it seems to be fairly quantifiable.
Like Mudskipper, I can replay music in my head but it has a few caveats: I don’t really process the instruments… I remember the pitch/volume/etc but primarily of vocals. I also replay with the original singer’s voice and not my own. Replaying a few songs in my head now and I can’t even focus on the instruments if there were vocals unless they are critical to how the song works, like a bass drop. If I try to replay music that is instrumental, I get verbal recreations, like someone performing the song acapella. If i focus hard, I can hear instruments instead, but that requires thinking about it. This matches how I ‘sing along’ with instrumental pieces in otherwise verbal songs. It might just be that the backing music isn’t retained, so I can remember the melody, but not, say, a bass line unless the bass is being highlighted.
Are there people who CAN’T replay music in their heads? Are they immune to ‘ear-worms’ or do they just perceive it differently?
I recently learned that some people do hear a voice in their head. Some see pictures too.
So, if you study a map of a building, noticing that it has a kitchen at a certain place, then in go inside the building (without the map), and someone says “go to the kitchen,” how do you know where the kitchen is? How do you imagine the paths, rooms, hallways to follow?
If I told you “a pink and brown dog,” you can’t “see” that dog in your mind at all?
The map would be tough. If someone showed me the map and said, go to the kitchen, I would try remember, turn left then right then its around to the left. I would remember it in words, not visually.
Brown and pink dog…in my mind I see a hazy face of a poodle with fluffy pink ears. I can’t see the full dog. I can’t walk around the image and explore it more. Its just a hazy partial visual that flashes in my mind for a moment.
Not op, but I have a very weak ability to visualise. The data is more abstracted. A map is a set of spacial connections that define an area. My brain has learnt to pull that from a map. What I can’t do is recall the map to figure out additional information. If my brain didn’t think it was relevant when I looked at it, the information is likely gone.
There are definitely pros and cons to it. I’m not limited to what I could visualise, when thinking. This lets me dig deeper into more complex ideas and patterns. It also makes other tasks a lot harder. I struggle a lot with faces and appearances.
As for the dogs, I have an abstracted “model” in my mind. The size and breed of the dogs is undefined. There are 2 dog entities in my mind. 1 brown, which is quite generic, the other has pink attached to it, that cross links it with poodles etc.
I can personally push it to a visualisation, but it takes significant mental effort, and the results are unstable.
So you basically visualize maps as graphs? You’re the human equivalent of the A* algorithm!
I’m not the OP either but my brain seems to work the same way that yours and theirs do. I’d say you did a good job of describing how it works for people like us.
One difference though is that you don’t seem to have the visual recall that I do. I don’t have a “photographic” memory but I could probably recall the hypothetical map as a visual object and examine it for additional information that I didn’t notice the first time.
I can personally push it to a visualisation, but it takes significant mental effort, and the results are unstable.
You may actually be better at this than I am. Describing my results as “unstable” would charitable. I also don’t get dog breeds, just amorphous and blurry blobs with rorsarch like colors slapped on them.
I definitely have both. I can even visualize things with my eyes open. I switch back and forth between modes depending on the content I’m working on in my head.
I can even visualize things with my eyes open.
Are you able to build complex visualizations while maintaining eye contact with someone? Once the concept becomes complex enough, I have to break eye contact with them (usually staring at nothing above their heads) and unfocus my eyes. Once I do that, the sky’s the limit on how complex the mental visual can get and be abstracted, but something about staring at a face (reading realtime facial reactions?) consumes the part of my brain I need for the very complex visuals.
So kind of like Werner Herzog then, who once stated that he never, ever dreams. But he keeps having visions with his eyes wide open, in broad daylight, all the time. He describes them in his terrific book “Of Walking in Ice.”
So, if you study a map of a building, noticing that it has a kitchen at a certain place, then in go inside the building (without the map), and someone says “go to the kitchen,” how do you know where the kitchen is? How do you imagine the paths, rooms, hallways to follow?
I know this isn’t true of everybody with alphantasia, but what I do in this situation is I get lost. I can’t visualize walking through the space while I study the map, and I can’t bring the map to mind when I’m actually there. Some people with aphantasia have no trouble finding their way around, so I think in my case it must be that I’m missing some innate sense of direction as well that visualization might have helped me to compensate for, if only I could.
If I told you “a pink and brown dog,” you can’t “see” that dog in your mind at all?
Correct. I’m not 100% on the aphantasia spectrum, so if I think about it then I might get the briefest flash of some dog, like an afterimage at best, and I can’t hold it in my mind, or manipulate it, or see any details or color. It’s not even really a complete outline or anything either that flashes for that quarter-second.
When I read a book, I don’t know what the characters or places look like. But I have always been able to draw really well. So it’s really a mystery how this all works.
For me it’s even weirder than that. Those pictures exist in my mind and I can “feel” them there but the conscious part of me that’s supposed to see them can’t see shit. I can describe to you the things that are in them or even draw them out as they exist in my mind, but I can’t see them. The part of me that’s giving directions? It can “see” the map of the building and my position in it just fine like it’s staring straight at a live minimap, but the conscious part of me that should be able to visualize that stuff? Nothing. I close my eyes and try to visualize that dog and I see nothing but black. But I can feel the presence of the image that the part of me that does the mental conjuring of images is making.
It’s like turning the monitor off on a computer. Everything is still running even though you can’t see it.
There’s a kitchen off the hallway just past the bathroom on the left. No magic path to follow. I hate those video games where you just wander around! I can’t see a dog - i don’t know what kind of dog, size/shape of its parts, what parts are brown, what parts are pink, … If you said poodle or German shepherd, and i focused hard i could get sort of a loose wire frame outline.
If I told you “a pink and brown dog,” you can’t “see” that dog in your mind at all?
Jim Pickens’s cat popped into my head. Sigh.
For the longest time I assumed it was just a literary device, not an actual thing anyone really does.
So, if I tell you “I’ll give you $10,000 for you to spend in 24 hours. Spend 20 seconds to think about it,” what goes through your head? Don’t you hear anything like “shit, that’s a lot of money?! Where to start, where to start…”?
Don’t you “have words” in your head to form thoughts?
No words here at all. I generally don’t use words for thinking unless I’m trying to think of a sentence or something like that.
It’s like I “know” all the options (pros and cons and obstacles and things to think about) all at once, any time I have is then spent on the emotional consequences of them. But more time doesn’t usually mean discovering more options.
Don’t hear anything like “shit, that’s a lot of money?! Where to start, where to start…”
No and it’s amazing to me that you’d even be able to think of it in 20 seconds with all that chatter in your brain.
As I was reading your comment I could sort of hear parts of that, because it’s you “speaking” to me, but as soon as I saw it the $10,000 imediately became a sort of conceptual bundle located in front of me, the 24h was like a moving spatial cycle thing and my brain was plotting possibilities based on how far I would have to travel (the ones falling inside the cycle are the do-able ones) and locating a whole lot of stuff branching out from my computer with short action times.
Also my brain had immediately reached to the right hand middle distance which is where it “keeps” investment advice. It had a quick dart to the far away centre-left and I had a flash/photorealistic image of home furnishings out there but rejected instantly as the tangled sense of moving parts between me and it meant the process toward them is complex and would take up too much of the 20 second processing time to even see if they would fit in the 24h cycle.
Not op, but I’m curious if anyone will help me understand my own reality. I immediately close my eyes to make the experience authentic.
“I have to spend 10 grand in 24 hours” as a imaginary verbal statement. (internal monologue?). Then I “lookup” spending money memories and create an object in my head without any attributes. I can tell it has emotional attachment from the memories, best described as a label. (I determine to go online shopping without much thought).
“most likely buy raw materials like gold”. [Pause]. But what’s unique about this situation that I can take advantage of? 24 hours [trail off]. Bonds would be easy and just postpone payment. Is laundering an option? Why is this person giving away 10k? What damage can it do?"
As the passenger, it feels like large derivitive stuff is silent. The inner dialogue is mostly probing. But here is a significant amount of silence betweens questions. I don’t have a visual canvas.
Are others answering these questions? Frequently, I have a silent mind but pondering takes probing.
Only 1-3% of people lack the ability to visualize images in their head.
Somewhat related, I recently realized I can’t really remember the taste of food at all. I can remember the texture of the food, and whether I liked it or not, but not how it actually tastes. For example, I know I like chocolate but I have no desire to eat it most of the time because I can’t remember anything about the taste except for the texture. But once I start eating chocolate and have the taste lingering in my mouth, I find myself craving more of it until the taste fades and I forget what it tasted like again.
Oh man! That is a perfect example! I have not able to understand the voice or the picture… Like you actually hear a voice or you see an image??.. But I totally understand the taste - almost like the shadow of a taste in your mouth for something that sounds good. I guess that’s why what people say, “what do you have a taste for”?)
I have some very loud voices in my head. One is intentional, like when I read or write things out I hear my own voice in my head. At least one of them just talks shit to me all the time. It’s not like schizophrenia “I hear voices”, it’s just a thought that I’m not actively having. When my depression gets bad it’s gets really loud so I drown it out with music and books.
I can’t see pictures in my head.
On another note, I’m pretty sure religious nutjobs really hear their own inner monologue and think it’s a god talking to them. That’s why their god always agrees with them.
“Weirdos. I don’t have an inner voice”, most people thought, using their inner voice.
Some inner voice talking to me all time sounds fucking awful haha
Eh, it isn’t all the time for most people, and it isn’t hard to shut down for most people either.
The key is that it isn’t a separate entity, it’s just your own mind using words to ideate. Like, you can see the sky and just enjoy the blue, or you can think about the blue in words, if you have that inner voice. People without that voice still have a way of processing and thinking, it just isn’t in words, it’s more abstract.
The few people I’ve met that don’t think in words do seem to have difficulty in expressing the experience to others though.
As someone with an inner voice, I can’t even imagine how I’d think about abstract concepts without words. Like, how does “I love freedom” or “I wish all people could be free” happen without words? Maybe this is a learning disability of mine, and explains why interpretive dance doesn’t make any sense to me.
Yeah I can’t imagine functioning without an inner voice. Mines constant. I can’t really make any decisions without internal debate and I have to sorta constantly keep track of things I need to this. after work im going to do x this weekend I need to get y and z done. W needs to get done before the end of the month.
I didn’t think this “not using inner voice” thing applied to me, but the way I read the article maybe it does. If the inner voice is truly a voice using grammatical spoken language it sounds crazy limiting.
As someone with an inner voice, I can’t even imagine how I’d think about abstract concepts without words. Like, how does “I love freedom” or “I wish all people could be free” happen without words?
None of this is in words when I’m thinking about it. I’m putting words here to describe the concepts , thoughts and feelings, of each step but none of it is words when I’m thinking it.
Freedom
- limitless choice
- peace and comfort
- patriotism (to the extreme, ironic terms freedom being used as a method of control)
- anti-freedom = slavery or being controlled
- personal experience with making free choices
- historical learning about situations where they didn’t have freedom
- personal luck in being born in a (mostly) free country
- imagining being born and living in a place without freedom
- fictional examples of lack of freedom, like sci-fi dystopia
- empathy about those that don’t have the same things I do
- sense of justice about equality
- memory of muscles used to make my mouth and larynx say the word “freedom” FREEEEEE — DUUMMM
All of the above only takes a second or two of actual elapsed time.
Words that come out:
“I love freedom. I wish all people could be free”.
Interpretive dance is about expressing feelings without words. Mimes convey a ton of meaning without words. Both use motion and body language in ways that not everyone is familiar with, kind of like speaking a language. Other things people do physically, like shaking hands, bowing, and hand gestures have regional meanings like verbal language does.
Non-verbal communication can be hard, but then again speaking different verbal languages is a barrier too.
It’s not “some voice” talking “to you”, it really just feels like your thoughts are words, if they’re “word adjacent thoughts”.
Like, thinking about how to phrase that first part, it felt like I was reciting the words I was thinking of typing, not like someone else was saying them to me.
