found this interesting
I'm a little lost in all this.
I have an internal monologue at times when reasoning something out or going through something slowly, but I also do not have an internal monologue at other times, replaced instead by thoughts instead being more like shapes and feelings. My ability to think is considerably faster WITHOUT a monologue than with one.
Is this not how it is for most people? Dipping in and out?
I'm the same way as you, but wasn't always. I'm autistic, and before my diagnosis and medication, my mind was racing 24/7, and it was all in words. It was exhausting, and complicated communication.
A way I've described it to therapists is to imagine 5 train tracks on which at any given time, 3 trains drive. I was always aware of all 3, but I could focus on one in specific. (I probably thought of the train metaphor because of the "train of thought" idiom.) It was just... from the moment I woke up, till the moment I fell asleep. No respite.
This sounds pretty damn close to me, but I was thinking that stuff would be ADHD which I haven't being diagnosed with yet (but I'm already diagnosed autistic). I've been looking into getting an ADHD diagnosis to get medicine because I know it would help, but what medicine did they give you for an autism diagnosis?
Ritalin. They didn't give it to me for my diagnosis per se, they gave it to me because I was chronically fatigued due to overstimulation. This (coupled with various types of therapy, mainly psychosomatic) helped act as a sort of stimuli filter, the filter that neurotypical people have which prevents them from being overstimulated.
I can't understand monologuing all the time because like... I have lots of thoughts all happening at the same time? I have that process running in the back of my brain about that theory I read yesterday that I'm pretty sure is gonna come to some sort of revelation in a day or two that interrupts whatever I'm doing. Then I have whatever I'm currently doing, what I'm planning to do, what I feel like eating/drinking soon, and a number of others going on about various things including that thing that upset me this morning.
I can't possibly monologue this all at once. It is all running in tandem, like multithreading. Multiple tracks is an interesting way to put it but they're not really tracks, it's more like a sorting algorithm with many things happening in many places all at once. It's not linear for me at all.
I can drop in and out of monologue, but it's not always there, and it's much faster for it to not be there so I can process many different things at any one time.
it’s much faster for it to not be there
Yes, this was quite annoying, and I just realised I don't have the following experience anymore: I used to be thinking about something, already have finished the thought, but I'd have to think it all the way through verbally before I could move on.
Any who, don't have this anymore.
I got way better single-threaded performanceI never need to verbalise thoughts (verbalise in my head, I mean) anymore. My entire way of thinking has been rewritten after meds and various kinds of therapy. I only have 2 tracks now, and there's one train that goes on schedule. And I can make another train come and go whenever I wish. It's peaceful, compared to before.Hmmm mine is never really peaceful lmao I can only switch off with meditative content or hypnosis trance stuff that I definitely don't do often enough given how relaxing it is.
i dip in and out like you said, but I have a monologue much more often than I want to, and I think it slows me down sometimes.
Hmm now that you mention it I think being "in the zone" is a state of extreme lack of monologuing, relying almost entirely on unconscious instinctive thoughts due to extremely high levels of concentration.
My mind is just an ever-shifting ocean of physical sensations, past memories, raw emotions, general concepts, and imagination. It's rarely ever a singular thing. And it's not always active either as my mind can be still at times.
I guess I'm just perplexed about people who can't mentally do a certain thing or who can only do a certain thing.
I randomly poled the students in my class one morning, and students whom I've always considered to be quiet intelligent, empathetic, and well read said they have no internal monologue. Also normal kids (less well read and kind) said this. This has always shocked me.
I'm a fan of the theory that one's inner monologue starts from childhood and a lot of the voices a young kid hears at a young age. Dunno what your childhood was like.
That sounds awful. Ya I wonder if those voices got transplanted into your thinking.
Ya, most of me pulling myself out of depression was me telling my internal monologue to be nice.
bullied by my two siblings so I spent most of my time alone
This is also my story. I ended up creating these huge mental novels to calm the massive loneliness inside. The one benefit is that, with covid, I'm self reliant as fuck.
I bet my entire life savings that you're more interesting than most of the miserable adults I need to meet.
wild. a stream of thoughts, seems so constitutive of, if not nearly identical to, who I *am", that it's hard to imagine being conscious in any other manner.
Psychology professor Russell Hurlburt estimates 30 to 50 percent of people have an inner monologue narrating their thoughts throughout the day.
absolutely wild lmao. ya'll are legit bots ngl.
"Stream of thoughts" is not exactly the same as "internal monologue".
The idea that the most usual form of human thoughts is "single-channel data stream bearing a very close stylistic/structural resemblance to spoken language" doesn't strike me as trivial, although it's not exactly surprising either.
When this was a hot topic I thought "people with no internal monologue" meant people who didn't think like that automatically but could if they wanted to. I'm like that. Thoughts don't have to be language for me but I can also hold a dialogue with myself.
I do not have an internal monologue or the ability to clearly visualize images/audiolize sounds in my head. I don't think in words or images or sounds. The part here where they're talking about reading is very much like my experience, except I love reading. But otherwise she seems to visualize stuff internally in a way I don't.
Thoughts are just thoughts! They have no real world analogue for me. There's no internal framing device. Just thoughts!
I had no idea it was unusual until 2 or 3 years ago, and even still I'm skeptical how much of this actual cognitive differences vs. differences of description/semantics.
It's definitely not a difference in semantics, for example, as I am typing this post, I can hear a voice in my head (my voice, though it can change if I want it to) dictating the words as I type them, speaking at the exact same pace that I am typing, and when I read your post, the same thing happened. There are serious differences between how different people process information.
Ok, two questions:
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Is that inherently how you always engage with text? How similar is that sensation to actually hearing speech? Is there something sensory? (This is only one question btw)
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Does all your thinking operate with an internal monologue? Every thought is linguistic?
(This is only one question btw)
i'm going to answer it like it's 3 lol
Is that inherently how you always engage with text?
Usually, yes. if I'm looking a table of data it's a bit different. But anything that's mostly text I engage with like that.
How similar is that sensation to actually hearing speech?
It's much more similar to talking. Because It's "my" voice and I can mostly control when I start and stop it. unless I'm having trouble sleeping or feeling really emotional or something. then I might "argue" with my self inside my own head or "rant" inside my own head and I have a little less control over that.
Is there something sensory?
My brain "hears" while my ears don't. So the volume of the voice in my head is never overwhelming. I'd say there's something quasi-sensory to it but it's not really "sensed" overtly the way external phenomena are.
Does all your thinking operate with an internal monologue?
No. A lot of it does though.
Every thought is linguistic?
No. Sometimes I just "feel" things. But I think I verbally process a lot of emotions so my brain "talks it out." a lot.
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It was only a year or two ago that I learned that "internal monologue" is a literal, non-metaphorical description of what most people have in their heads. NGL, seems a little corny.
Tbf, that game did help me a lot when it came to understanding how my own internal monologue worked.
On the other side it took me a while to learn that "picturing" something is an actual thing people can do.
woah you have aphantasia? May I ask if you've ever taken psychedelic drugs like lsd or psilocybin?
I haven't, but I have been interested in psilocybin (for depression mainly, but aphantasia too). But from what I've read it seems like I shouldn't do it alone or in a bad state of mind, so I don't have many opportunities.
for your first time it's probably best to have a sitter. I think it's okay to trip while depressed, but I'd reschedule if I woke up feeling super unstable or angry
Yeah that's the problem, I don't really have anyone I'd be comfortable enough with to have them be my sitter.
Say you have a song stuck in your head or can play your favorite song you know real well inside your head.
You can hear it entirely within your own head. I'd say that might be the same exact thing as the way my internal monologue is 'voiced'.
If you say you have no internal monologue, do you know what it means to have a song in your head?
Firm yes. Happens to me multiple times a week. Involuntary sound-like thoughts are possible (as are voluntary sound-like thoughts), they just aren't my default mode of thinking.
E.g. I have ABBA's "Does Your Mother Know" stuck in my head right now. I can't 'hear' it in perfect detail because I do not remember it in perfect detail, but it's 60-70% of the way there. (Actually, the more effort I put into analyzing what details I remember and what details I don't, the worse it sounds.) I can skip or repeat sections, translate it into bad Spanish, and, with some effort, transpose it from G to G#. (I guess this is the auditory equivalent of "rotating the cow".)
that would've been a great question for the video. I definitely have a strong internal monologue (sometimes even cumbersome) and I can play back entire songs I've heard in my head at will, with the correct tempo, notes, instrumentation, vocal range, etc. High fidelity. But I don't know if someone without an internal monologue could do this. They probably need to play it back. I think in some ways it might be better to not have one. What you lose out on in imagination you seem to gain in speed. Like the way the woman in the video described her ability to read quickly surprised me, as I've always been a slower reader, and can't read much faster than I can speak, since my internal monologue reads for me.
These types of discussions are always difficult. I think when some people hear "oh I can hear my internal voice and picture things" they think the person means "I can become schizophrenic at will and create visual hallucinations at will" but most people don't mean that. They mean it abstractly. Of course all 3 types of people exist, but it's mostly in the middle.
i have to wonder how much of this discussion is just disagreement over the words being used. I have a feeling some people might realize they're actually more on the internal monologue side if they had the concept explained to them differently.
there's also the separate issue of aphantasia. I asked some co workers to imagine a coffee cup in their "mind's eye." They all did so, except one guy. Then I asked them what color the coffee cup was. They all had different answers. One of my coworkers said he wasn't able to visualize things in his mind like that and found it bizarre not only that we were able to close our eyes and "see" a coffee cup, but also give it a color, and so on. So not only do some people lack an internal monologue, some aren't able to visualize either. I think there's much more to it than the words being used, and I don't see it as a disability necessarily, since there are drawbacks to having a vivid imagination, such as being distracted by your own thoughts easily when you're trying to work or listen to someone else.
oh no I believe it's a real thing, I simply think internal thoughts might sometimes be very idiosyncratic and not easily explained from one person to another. I'm not a doctor or anything though.
found it bizarre not only that we were able to close our eyes and “see” a coffee cup, but also give it a color, and so on
It is weird that you can do that though, it's just that the majority of people are like you.
There definitely are advantages to aphantasia (not being free from distraction though sadly), some STEM fields and especially coding have aphants very overrepresented. I guess some kinds of abstract reasoning must be less natural when your thinking is anchored in visuals.
some STEM fields and especially coding have aphants very overrepresented.
interesting! I wouldn't have guessed that! The one guy at our job with aphantasia was a comp science major.
I guess some kinds of abstract reasoning must be less natural when your thinking is anchored in visuals.
I can see why that would be useful for coding, yeah. Thanks for sharing.
I mean I can literally see and hear things if I want to, I just understand they're imaginary. Like, if I've listened to a song enough times in my life, and I know all the lyrics, and instrumentation by heart, I can play it back in my head perfectly without having any kind of playback device. Not being able to visualize things in your mind is called aphantasia, which is a separate issue entirely from whether you have an internal monologue or not. What distinguishes both of these things from hallucination is being able to control them somewhat, and understanding that they're coming from inside and are not external. So "hallucinating at will" is kind of a contradiction since a hallucination usually comes with the ambiguity that you aren't entirely sure if it's real or not and/or you can't control it. Like, when tripping on mushrooms, I knew my hallucinations weren't real, but I wasn't able to control them. A schizophrenic isn't always sure whether or not their hallucinations are real, and on top of that, they need medication to control them.
By hallucinate at will, I just mean conjure false images that literally show up in your own field of view, at will. I think when one neurotypical person says to another, "I can see things in my imagination - I can picture them", that other totally neurotypical person might understand that statement as "I can create literal visual images that float around and look real", and assume that either they or the other person is neuroatypical.
I just mean conjure false images that literally show up in your own field of view, at will
i can kinda do that, but it's easier if i close my eyes. Like I can easily imagine an ant crawling on my desk right now, and if I focus hard enough on imagining such a thing, I can literally "see it" while understanding that it's not real. It just goes away if I stop focusing on imagining it. I hope that makes sense.
It's not really a hallucination though, just a somewhat vague visualization like a dream is. Aren't most humans also capable of hallucinating by actually seeing things in the world that aren't there? But it usually has to be induced somehow by drugs.
I can imagine a desk that looks like mine with ants crawling around on it, but it's clearly in my head and not my eyes perceiving the desk. Also, it's muffled.
I do have some N2O on the desk right now...
