I saw on a reddit thread that only 30-50% of people have inner monologues- i.e. don’t think in words. That seemed utterly ridiculous and fantastic, but lo and behold, it’s true.
How in the heck does that work? How do you function in normal society? How do you grasp more complicated concepts and engage in more critical and involved thought?
I mean, not having inner monologues is something I tend to think of how animals exist, and to find out that between a third and half of people are that way is astounding. I mean, it would seem to be a huge brake on a lot of things.
I agree, though I’ve heard before that some people do not have an inner monologue, I find it really difficult to wrap my head around the concept, and even more so that the percentage of those without one may be so high.
I know! I’ve long thought that our ability to think in abstract terms, which I don’t see how would be possible without an inner monologue, is one of the big things that make us uniquely human.
My inner monologue is, if anything, too talkative. I sometimes have to use methods to try to get my inner monologue to shut the heck up for awhile.
That first article in the OP, about the woman without an IM who describes it, is interesting. One thing that struck me about it was that she said it does not protect against anxiety and depression. I thought that was one of the positives to quieting one’s IM-- as with meditation quieting the mind, making the mind like a mirror: slowing the intrusive thoughts that cause anxiety and depression. But apparently not, at least not for her.
Also that it affects her ability to visualize-- when she reads a book, she doesn’t picture in her mind scenarios of what’s happening. She only sees the words. I’m a very visual thinker (as well as being a verbal thinker). When I read a book, the visual scenarios that my mind creates are so vivid that months or years later, if I’ve only read a book that has had a movie made of it, but not seen the movie, I’m sometimes not sure whether I did see the movie or not, since my visual imagination of the book was so strong. I’d hate to not have that ability.
This really explains so much about the way things are in the world.
In one of his novels, Breakfast of Champions, IIRC, Kurt Vonnegut has a character who has come to believe that everyone else in the world is a robot, so he’s justified in killing them. (I may not have this precisely right; it’s been decades.)
That guy may not have been quite so crazy, after all.
I think that’s a slight bit different. At least the way I conceive it, there’s a difference between an “inner voice” that talks to you, and an inner monologue in the sense that your thoughts are composed in language.
I mean, not everything I do is exhaustively narrated- I may take a sip of coffee and experience the pleasure, warmth, etc… in a non-verbal sort of way. But then invariably the words “Mmmm… that’s good” or something like that are mentally articulated to myself. It’s why the term “thinking out loud” is so self-evident to that proportion of us who have that inner monologue- it’s literally how you’re thinking, but the words are coming out of your mouth while you’re doing it.
What I’m stumbling on is how you organize your thoughts without this. I mean, if I can’t find something, it goes something like this:
Where did I put my pocketknife? It’s not in my pocket… where did I have it last? Hmm… let’s think back through the last times I remember having it. Had it at the gas station when I took out my keys. Had it at when I took out my keys again to open the front door. Did I have it when I changed into shorts? Don’t remember. I should go look in the bedroom… Why is it on the bookshelf? I don’t recall putting it there. Maybe K put it there?
I’m not sure how you even do that without an inner monologue. How would one conceive and understand something like the divine right of kings, or of dialectic materialism, or the tyranny of the majority, without being able to think about it using language?
The whole idea of not having an inner monologue seems almost like language is grafted onto something deeper in these people, or maybe there’s some kind of short circuit that causes them to have to translate language into this sort of non-verbal thinking.
I find it completely unsurprising. It explains why many people seem to lack any introspection, and why others exhibit a stream of verbal diarrhea instead of filtering their thought through some kind of process where they ask themselves, “Is this a good thing to say in this situation?”
If you are able to leap successfully to the end of a complex bit of reasoning without having to consciously organize each step, that sounds like an advanced mental faculty. But you should be able to apply dialectic and logic and not mere post facto rationalization… so it is more complicated than being or not being a robot.
When I was about 7, I imagined my whole life as a book, with three chapters each day. Over the several years that followed, I’d occasionally name the chapters. When I eventually learned a second language and lived abroad, it occurred to me that there’d be pages and pages of italic text.
Yes, this makes sense. Maybe it really is that common to not have an internal monologue, explaining the commonality of people with a lack of mental filters and inability to be introspective, as you say. I had thought people like that did not have a fully functional or fully developed frontal lobe, but maybe the two go together. The frontal lobe is the center of reason, so maybe a lack of inner monologue is directly due to a frontal lobe that’s not firing on all cylinders.
This sounds to me like intuition. I believe it’s been said that this is what set Einstein apart from the lesser minds of his day-- he was able to intuitively leap to the solution of a problem, going directly from step A to step Z without having to work through steps B, C, etc. But this isn’t mutually exclusive from having an inner monologue, and Einstein would go back and confirm steps B, C, etc. to make sure his intuitive leap was correct. I imagine that Einstein had a very strong inner monologue.
I think the misconception here is that in order to think you (1) you have to think in language, and (2) you need to imagine talking in your head.
I for one do not have an inner monologue, and do not think in language*, but I can think about pretty abstract and involved things, e.g. in engineering, business, and legal matters.
With concrete subjects I imagine things and events,
e.g. I do not think the words “I will order the canneloni” but I imagine the dish to be placed before me, the smell, texture and taste.
Another example: I do not think the words “It is very slippery with ice, better do the penguin walk”, but a mental video clip plays before my eye, of a foot slipping, a rush of adrenaline while reflexively trying to stay upright, falling on my back, hurting my elbow when impacting the sidewalk.
I do not exactly understand how I think about abstract things e.g. legal concepts, but I have often experienced knowing an engineering fact without recollecting if I learned it from a German language or an English language text.
*) of course when I compose an oral or written utterance or analyse some else’s utterance, I think about language. That is a very small proportion of my thought processes, though.
How does your mind work when you are preparing for a confrontation, say tomorrow, with a difficult person.
In my mind I usually think “I’ll say X and he’ll maybe say Y”
then “Maybe he’ll say Q, then I’ll say Z”
and I end up wasting way too much time playing out the scenarios, with my own bias making the worst of things in most cases, and the problem is usually a non-event.
I think back to the last time I used it - at the gas station
I consider if I had occasion to lay it aside at that time
I try to remember which pants I wore at the time
I look in these pants
I look around where it might be fallen down or laid aside
I happen to see the pocketknife on a bookshelf
I question myself if there was anything I did in the vicinity of the bookshelf - drawing a blank
I try for theories how it might have arrived here.
At no point in that train of thought the words ‘pocketknife’, ‘gas station’, ‘bookshelf’ etc. come up in my mind. When I give up on searching and ask my wife I sometimes am stumped at first for what the object I was looking for was called.
Not to turn the thread into a “I do not have an inner monologue, AMA” directed solely at you, but though I can understand how many, quite complicated, processes could be thought out pictorally, or procedurally, the way you describe, I can’t imagine how more abstract thoughts, such as legal matters, can be reasoned out in one’s mind without a verbal thought process. I’m not saying I don’t believe it, or in any way am denigrating a thought process different than one that employs an IM, just that I can’t wrap my head around it. My inner monologue is failing me in that regard
This may not be relevant, but I remember reading in the last few years that children who don’t learn any language, even if they learn one in their teens+, have a demonstrably lower capacity for…thought? I don’t remember the metric they used, maybe problem solving. The gist was that having a language helped one think through problems or issues.
A confounding factor here that a child that has not learned any language would either (1) have been brought up in circumstances of grave deprivation (e.g. locked away from others), or (2) have a very serious cognitive or sensory disability. Both possibilities obviously are very detrimental to mental development.
