I think that people without inner monologues are also capable of not using it when not necessary. Your description of the steps of looking for a pocket knife are totally and completely relatable. In a similar situation, I would look for the knife in the same manner without having to internally verbalize each of those steps. I think that that would slow me down.
When I’m in that mode, I reason that I’m letting my unconscious take over. I’m there as an observer, but the pocket knife search is entirely on autopilot.
This makes me wonder if the Vonnegut-robot thing isn’t far off. I mean, are you even conscious? Or do I just assume that you are? How can we test it? How do we know you really have phenomenal experiences vs. just reporting information?
I cannot imagine doing mathematics any other way. I wish I could turn it off when I want to sleep. I can understand counting sheep, although what I count is breaths to try to shut it down.
Here’s something I learned, and maybe this is oversharing, maybe not.
I make up weird stories in my head, like movies, and play them in my head before I go to sleep. It gives my brain something to focus on rather than whatever stray thoughts it decides to obsess over.
I had severe insomnia when I was in elementary school. I’d stay up for hours thinking about stuff, sometimes pretty much all night. It wasn’t until I developed this “mind movie” technique that I could get my brain to slow down and let me sleep.
I have never been diagnosed with ADHD but my wife’s pretty sure I have it. (My daughter has it too, and most of the traits she has that identified it in her are traits I have so she’s probably right.)
I don’t think I’ve ever told anyone about the “mind movie” thing, but I’ve been doing it every night of my life for almost 40 years and it works. And yes, my brain is really freaking weird.
When studying as a teacher, I worked with one teacher who automatically tried to represent abstract concepts as dance moves. “Modes of learning” theory is less popular now than it was then, but he certainly represented a different mode of thinking.
When studying as an engineer, I envied Tesla (who famously could not only visualize engineering problems, he could also run the visualization as a sub-conscious task). I struggled to visualize anything, even though "everybody knows* that men, and engineering students, are better at visualization. Subsequently, qualitative tests for “visualization ability” have been developed, and I’ve realized that the reason I struggle with visualization is because I’m really bad at it.
On the other hand, I immediately disliked medicine with amphetamine side effects because I found myself talking before I had time to think. I like to review what I’m going to say before I say it (or write it), and when I was speeding that didn’t happen.
I note that there is also split-brain research with people who can only communicate between the two sides of their brain by talking out loud. My wife seems to be partly that way – she talks, because until she talks, she doesn’t know what she is going to say.
But that suggests that I may have partly the same problem – maybe I have an inner monologue only because until I form the words, I don’t know what I’m going to say? In which case, maybe some of the people with no inner monologue are dumber than me – they lack internal communication – and some are smarter than me – they can handle internal communication as a background task.
I wonder if that’s why I sometimes have to verbalize a problem to resolve it.
I also do that when planning. Just today, when I was in the office and trying to make sure I got through everything I wanted to accomplish before leaving, I spoke out loud everything I wanted to do in order. And it was like hearing it out loud let me verify as on a check list. I’ve done this my whole life. It’s not that I didn’t already know these things, I’d already thought them ahead of time, but actually hearing them out loud let me confirm, as if it was one person hearing another say it.
I’ve always been very good at memorizing things I read and hear. In relationships I’ve made a wife or girlfriend angry when there was an argument and I could recite exactly everything that was discussed before, line-by-line, as if it was a recording. I don’t memorize my internal thoughts as well though, and it’s very common that I think of something important and then completely forget it later unless I verbalize it or write it down or do something else to “etch” it into my brain.
Coincidentally, in another current thread I learned about the case below. Fascinating.
Toward the end, there’s this quote:
In particular, the disparity between Genie’s linguistic abilities and her competence in other aspects of human development strongly suggested there was a separation of cognition and language acquisition, a new concept at the time.[8][221][3]
I can have as many inner voices as I want. I don’t need to give written text a voice, but sometimes I do, just so I can have a dialogue with it. I can also have a dialogue between, I guess, my subconscious mind (which doesn’t have a voice) and my conscious mind (which does). There are also degrees of “hearing” the voice. I can play realistic renditions of real-life voices in my head, or they can be totally generic. Depends on the circumstances.
I find the whole concept of not having an inner monologue hard to believe. Like somebody is pulling our leg.
I do this a lot with my job (programmer). It’s mostly cursing though. My wife sometimes does it while playing chess. It can be quite destructive to her strategies. She telegraphs her moves/plans.
I don’t have an inner monologue while playing chess, I don’t think. But I think… spatially, which, if I say so myself, is perfect for chess.
I do this when I have trouble falling asleep as well. I have a couple short stories and maybe 20% of a novel stuck in my brain that I’ve ‘written’ and reworked many times while lying in bed. I also visualize what I’m ‘writing’ in my head while I do it. So it’s kind of a ‘movie’ too. OCD does run strongly in my family, so maybe it is an OCD thing, who knows?
Why don’t I actually write down these stories in my head, you may wonder, but probably didn’t because you don’t really care enough wonder about it? Well, even as fully formed as these stories feel in my head, when I’ve tried to write it down it is a struggle. I did write down a first chapter of my ‘novel’ once and gave it to my wife to read. She laughed out loud while reading it. It was not a comedy.
The funny thing for me is that if I’m actively thinking in a sort of “intellectual” way- trying to solve a problem or figure something out, it’s always in language.
But there are times when it’s not necessarily language based. Driving for example, is more of a muscle-memory and non-language thing most of the time, and I can think about stuff in language while I do it. And sometimes I’m just sort of “in the moment” and not thinking about anything in particular while I’m driving, and that’s probably the closest thing I can think of to complete non-verbal thought that I do.
Reading is almost as weird, but in reverse; I can read the words on the page, and at the same time form a sort of mental-movie that plays simultaneously. It’s actually kind of jarring to run into a word I don’t know, or a particularly badly written passage that I have to re-read to understand, because it makes me concentrate on the words on the page specifically, and pause the movie.
Heheh, you are not alone. Mine is normally space opera. I’m not sure when I realized it helped me go to sleep.
Sometimes my inner monologue gets control of my vocal chords, and it gets to blurt out whatever I’m thinking. I am apparently not aware of it when this happens. So far, I have not been in an actual fight because of this.
I’m still not sure exactly what counts as an inner monologue. Certainly there are times when I consciously put my thoughts into coherent words and sentences inside my head—I did that just now, while deciding what I was going to write. But I don’t think it’s something I do all the time, automatically without trying.
I don’t think I ever have this experience:
I don’t, and maybe can’t, “think out loud.” Maybe my brain and mouth are wired in serial while other people’s are wired in parallel? To be able to talk (as with writing), I first have to mentally think about what to say and how to say it.
For me, unless I’m roleplaying a convo in my head to prepare myself for that conversation with someone, or roleplaying some kind of make-believe speech adressed to an imaginary or real someone, that is half rant and half organizing my thoughts on a topic, I usually do not have an inner monologue.
The thought that some people truly have some kind of rolling monologue in their head is as baffling to me as is my lack of it for the same people I guess.
The “where are my keys” is a good exemple. When looking for a lost item, I mostly have no conscious words coming up, it’s a series of feelings/impressions/images.
Or, like, I’m on my couch and wants to eat something, I do not think “gee, I’m hungry! What could I eat?.. Do we still have bread? Ha yes, good, I’m gonna get some cheese” etc etc
I feel a pang of hunger, I vaguely look up toward the kitchen and then the image/feeling of bread and cheese comes up in my mind voicelessly. And it’s gonna be the same while preparing food, unless I’m reading from a recipe.
I have Deaf friends who were language-deprived because they were undiagnosed, misdiagnosed, or put into an oral program initially. Thinking about people I know, there are people who did not have language until anywhere from 3 years old to 7 years old.
They have clear memories of specific things, events, routines, acquired knowledge, and so forth, that they thought about without language; and now, even with language, they still don’t always use it to think.
Personally, I have an inner monologue, and there are times it won’t shut up, even though I wish to heck it would. But there are also times when I think in other ways, because I’m thinking too fast for English.
People have asked me to describe how I think when I’m on high speed, and I have tried, but it never makes sense to anyone. Sometimes it’s metaphorically-- I see pictures, but they are meaningful only if you get the metaphor, which is sometimes based on some specific experience I had, so only I get it. Sometimes I hear words, but they are not grammatical. They make sense to me, though. And they are not always English words. I think in lots of languages, albeit, when I’m having a slower, “inner monologue,” that is in correct English.
This bit from one of those articles sounds like me: “In fact, some people don’t always hear their thoughts like songs stuck in their heads. They tend to hear them occasionally.”
My experience of inner speech is almost never about hearing. There isn’t really a “voice” to it. It feels a lot more like speaking, or whispering, but so softly that there’s no sound and barely any movement.
It comes and goes. Usually it doesn’t come in complete sentences, just a few words at a time, and then once the thought forms, it’ll continue as images, sometimes diagrams (especially when I’m writing code), or a more abstract sense of something happening.
If I need to reason through something, or if I’m writing and trying to phrase something, I may slow down and “talk it over” internally. Or externally.
I can imagine sounds, recall voices I’ve heard, etc., but that’s a different experience that feels more like hearing. And having a song stuck in my head is like both at once: internally hearing it and internally singing along with it.
Oh god, if people could see how often I do that when I’m alone, they’d lock me up.
In those situations I don’t usually have a meta-commentary like “maybe he’ll say…”, I just imagine having the conversation, or rehearse my end of it out loud.
