Do you hold an ongoing internal monologue?

background material:

Fun fact: some people have an internal narrative and some don't

As in, some people's thoughts are like sentences they "hear", and some people just have abstract non-verbal thoughts, and have to consciously verbalize them

And most people aren't aware of the other type of person

— Kyle🌱 (@KylePlantEmoji) January 27, 2020

a lot of the discussion above seems to break it down into "Yes" or No", but my answer would be a "Yes and.." related to what my someone's colleague Victoria Song describes here:

Gizmodo’s science editor Rose Pastore described her thoughts similarly, though she noted that she experiences non-language thought organization as well. But a number of our colleagues noted that they experience thoughts in a non-worded way, or as my colleague Victoria Song put it, more like an “associative web.” And as appeared to be the case with the blog’s author, many of us were absolutely astonished to discover that not everyone regularly hears their own thoughts.

“I’d describe my thoughts as a cloud of abstract noise, linked together by associations. Sort of like a web of images, memories, emotions, and ideas—not unlike falling into a Wikipedia hole where you just click link after link and wind up somewhere totally random from where you began,” she told me. “I can definitely ‘think in words’ if I put effort into it, and honestly, that’s why I started writing to begin with because it can get too noisy in my noggin. When I’m thinking or in conversations, it’s like rapid-fire associations.”

She added: “Maybe you say ‘communism’ and I simultaneously see images of Marx, Lenin, the hammer and sickle, Republicans yelling, the whole entirety of McCarthyism. That entire time, I’m also feeling a snapshot of every emotion I’ve ever had about those images at once. If I’m trying to make a decision, it’s like seeing all the steps play out at once as multiple, wordless movies and then I just go with the scenario I like best. I guess you could say forming words slows down the whole process and gives order to the chaos.”

As I read this, I am hearing words in my head telling me that this is unbelievable! A mind without words knocking around inside on a near-constant basis!

i dispute the author's characterization of that as "a mind without words", to me, Victoria's mind seems to be more like a running internal monologue PLUS all the "associate web" connections. my mind is always in conversation, and in addition all the things Victoria talks about area also a constant. it's a "monologue" or dialogue or conversation that is interwoven with other shifting elements and sensations.

but still, according to some of the people cited in the amateur/blogger accounts above, some people really don't have any sort of spoken "words" going on in the head. i do find that very interesting - i just kind of assumed that monologue was a prerequisite to speech, but now that seems wrong. it's not like i rehearse every sentence "out loud" in my head before speaking it into the real world.

what do you think? (no pun intended)

Being highly verbal, I frequently have a verbal monologue running in my conscious mind. It is a filter I habitually apply to my experience. However, over time I have learned to discount its reliability and view it as a distraction more often than a wealth of significance or 'truth' about anything at all, including as a clear window on my present state of mind. It's just there, ever-replenished, like the spit in my mouth.

60/60/24/7/365 til I die, my mind is always, basically, racing. I'd say I'm 50/50 worded/abstract. Usually, it's situations/conversations/encounters that I'd like to have or experience.

Is this "monkey mind", though? Are these thoughts helpful, or do they distract me from the present moment, keeping me in a daydream and steal my time? I think that's probably a 50/50 thing as well. These thoughts help me prepare for such encounters, should they manifest irl. Alternately, they probably do distract me from what I really should be focusing on right now, the little quotidian stuff you need to take care of to lay the foundation for these aspirations to actually materialize.

Sometimes I get manic and these running thoughts speed up and take 100% of my attention, and I recognize that they are becoming grandiose and ridiculous. So I do my best to turn them off. And sometimes I'm just cussing the fuck out of somebody in my head, and I am aware that this is probably toxic for me, and I try to stop that train.

I have so many THOUGHTS about this, but enough for now

Yes, but rarely listen to it

Hi, M. White. Nice to see your textual manifestation upon my screen once more.

I saw something about this several months ago and found out in conversation that my spouse doesn't have this nor does he auto visualize unless prompted. This made so much more sense why he's so forgetful about things (because he doesn't have running commentary constantly reminding him of things and reiterating information) and why he gets startled by seemingly sudden changes in direction of conversation.

i dont have words happening, i need to verbalise in other for the language to manifest

Only as much as writing in a journal counts

So if you’re headed toward the grocery store and you’re thinking about what you need to get, how does that go? For me it would at some level involve by inner voice saying “I need oranges. And limes.”

i dont visualise well in my head as a rule, thoughts are ime streams i plunge into rather than items i can construct or call up at will

xp i ... make a note, real or mental, that i refer back to and tick off, i guess

I don't think so...? But I will take the slightest opportunity to think out loud to the pets.

Yes to internal reminding while shopping, but I don't think that's a bad internal monologue.

Constantly. Usually it's reminding me of times I acted like a dickhead. Presumably I could mitigate this by not acting like a dickhead but even then it just reminds me of times I acted like a dickhead 25 years ago so it's just something I have to live with tbh

oh my abstract thoughts do that

All of my thoughts are presented in interpretive dance.

I type every thought i have immediately on ilx

So no

sometimes i have so many streams of conversation and tenses and outcomes in my head it becomes hard to verbalize in a coherent, linear way. I even notice I change tenses a lot in mid conversation/typing. And when I drink, I nonstop say every single thing in my head. I have been trying to take more time or else stay quiet because I start to bore and exhaust myself.
My spouse used to think I had a photographic and then later eiditic memory (which I definitely do not have) because I could remember magnitudes more than he could but it's usually just because I visualize memories really well (what people were wearing, sequence of events) and his mind is swiss cheese.

I have some kind of an internal monologue or an internal commentary for sure, but it's a hard thing to describe. Is it there all the time? I'm not sure, but I think it is. There are different inner voices depending on mood, situation etc., for instance, with literally different accents for one! I could say that I do some to entertain myself - except I don't think I consciously do it, it just happens and it amuses me. So, for instance, the Bobby Gillespie skits I do on ILM have really got nothing to do with Bobby Gillespie and are just me, this time, consciously utilizing a particular inner voice I've had for as long as I can remember. One of the reasons I can do the skits so quickly is that I can very easily 'think' using that inner voice. It could be that I'm just crazy though.

Probably 50/50, like rvw. I definitely have a running 'story' (or at least disparate snippets thereof) spinning out in my head during most of my waking hours but there is also a coherentist web being perpetually woven. And also a lot of interchange between the two. If one can really view them as two discrete processes. Which, honestly, I don't and wouldn't. My brain just does whatever weird shit it does, I dunno.

Most of my takeaway here is that, because it's so inextricably part of my mental makeup, it's odd to consider that there are people whose brains don't engage in autonarration. But then subjectivity is just a weird (but cool!) thing, generally speaking.

i definitely have this

That’s interesting. I am like that too i think—very non-linear in my thinking, and i often see multiple sides of an issue, and when i talk about the issue end up explaining these sides and not coming down on any one perspective, just sort of outlining the problem space. And everyone loves it.

my internal monologue is EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE because I have tinnitus

Also this may be tangential but since others have broached it: I have a tremendous facility wrt visualization (and whatever the equivalent would be for other senses...audiozation?) and can conjure intricately detailed worlds in my imagination, but my observational skills wrt real-world phenomena is often severely lacking (the most illustrative example being that thing I used to do in art classes where I would be well into a still-life drawing or painting before I realized that there were entire elements of the composition that I'd failed to notice or include).

One of my close friends developed tinnitus a couple of years back and it sounds insane. I’m sorry that is your experience f.hazel.

I have recently been imagining this as Saussure’s syntagmatic vs associative language, of which I am squarely the latter. For myself I imagine it is due to difficulties encountered pre-verbally that I think in disconnected and non-linear strands. I tend to associate syntagmatic language with a more typical language development but idk. I speak aloud often to bring order to disorder.

By ‘I am’ I mean, I am most frequently operating within

100% internal monologue.

. I speak aloud often to bring order to disorder.

― tangenttangent, Saturday, 1 February 2020 23:05 (six minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

yes, v well put

sometimes it's just Joy Division's "Disorder" on infinite repeat

oh ive a jukebox on constant, def. movie quotes and comedy sketches are in the underlying babble too

Film/TV quotes are a big one and I fear a lot of spontaneous speech is just reconstituted Dawson’s Creek dialogue.

my fear swings between ppl either recognising or failing to recognise similar in varying contexts

When I’m reading, I hear my thoughts. When I’m calculating something, like remembering directions or whatever, that to me feels more like a process and less sensory. Same goes for making judgments.

I certainly have language running in my head most of the time, and if it's not words it's music or occasionally just a frozen panic. And it is really weird to me to think that other people don't have words running pretty much all of the time. I admire Aimless's ability to tune out his voices (shades of ephemerol in Scanners).

Overall I don't remember much beyond some images and anecdotes from before the age of ten, which is also when I seemed to start finding my "voice"—writing stories, drawing comics, making recordings, material ways of putting together my own imaginative world, and really chiefly out of language. I think I probably need to write, in one form or another, to deal with the clutter. Over time it has come to seem to me that a wide range of human expression, in people's faces and bodies, is hard for me to fully process. This may be one reason I am perpetually single.

I used to always narrate my life in the third person, but at some point that shifted and now I'm more likely to have a monologue going on in my head about whatever I'm interested in at the moment. But it's not really a monologue, it's more like one-half of a conversation, like I've got an audience and I'm trying to figure out how best to explain my thoughts to them. Or like I'm constantly writing thinkpieces in my head.

But - I'm not sure about this, it just occurred to me as a possibility - I think looking at screens really damps it down, in a way that engaging with other media doesn't. Unless I'm typing, my brain just sort of goes into empty trance state when I'm looking at a screen.

Third person is interesting

I’ve realized I’ve started talking to myself sometimes in public when I’m “rehearsing” something I want to say—usually when I’m having a conflict with someone. Would love to stop doing this.

Yeah, I think I've always got words of some kind floating around my head, but my brain doesn't arrange them into sentences coherent enough for me to notice and remember unless it's for an audience. So the words just kind of adapt themselves to whatever audience-directed format is uppermost in my brain. When I was a kid and reading fiction nonstop, it was imitation fiction for an imaginary reader. I've still got that imagined audience, it's just that now I spend more time with other people and the internet and podcasts and so on than I do with fiction, so the form has changed.

I used to do the talking to myself thing when I lived in France - I would rehearse how to say things in French, or how I should have said things that I'd flubbed in the moment. I didn't realize I did this out loud until my housemates told me they'd heard me talking to myself in the shower, which was fairly embarrassing.

Also embarrassing: I routinely have really mundane imaginary conversations with celebrities. When my brain's tired of inventing an imaginary readership or podcast audience, it sometimes subs in whatever famous person I'm interested in at the moment. (Which is why my recent internal narration, if I tracked it, would probably be at least 15% me telling Bruce Springsteen the plots of classic novels.) I think it's key to the whole thing that my audience can't be someone I actually know or might ever talk to.

my internal monologue is mostly vulgar or violent outbursts like a person with tourettes

More a ceaseless barbed self-denigration, but yes.

I like these posts

I'm not a good writer or good at expressing myself, but i feel like I've always got an intense internal verbal monologue, everything from grocery lists to romantic/sexual fantasies to assimilated parental criticism and worries about past shames

Oh god, I have such a noisy brain. Internal monologue of self-loathing and chastisement to the point where it often feels like an Other telling me shit rather than a thing I could call "myself". But I also have the more abstract web too, it feels a bit weird to suggest that those things would be mutually exclusive.

Yeah, same! I almost wonder if the people who say they don’t have a “voice” are just defining it differently? If not, I am jealous because there are many times when I would love to shut myself up

talked about this with a coworker and came into it being very, very certain that i was a 100% verbal thinker, and then came out of it not being sure of anything really

the difficulty for me is figuring out what the line is between thinking to myself and daydreaming. because i'm almost always having some sort of imagined conversation, maybe sometimes with myself but usually with an imagined other. these conversations usually don't have a strong visual component like you might expect with daydreaming but sometimes they can. and because i probably have a solid chunk of very undiagnosed ADD in my brain, it's a crapshoot whether or not those imagined conversations are relevant in the present.

i can try to pay attention to my thoughts as they're happening but it's impossible for me to do that without getting into an imagined conversation about my thoughts and thinking. so maybe that's just how i think, or maybe that's only how i think i think when i think about thinking, and i normally think abstractly when my brain relaxes a little. i don't know, i can't remember.

daydreaming is big for me and thinking about it it is always verbal, words are key to my fantasies

i will just answer simply that yes i have a running internal monologue, always have, apparently always will

I speak aloud often to bring order to disorder.

― tangenttangent, Saturday, February 1, 2020 5:05 PM (five hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

Yes, see also: writing. I sometimes think of those methods of externalization as the empty space in a tile puzzle, a necessary condition for sorting my mental tiles into something resembling a coherent image.

I have to wonder what happens to these ‘no monologue people’ when they’re mentally ill. Voices I hear when I’m not well are actual words, sentences - my own thoughts ‘tagged’ as someone else’s, perhaps. It might be instructive to look to Wittgenstein when thinking about this: a ‘picture’ of the world is linguistic, in some way.

Yes, and much of it is a pre-verbal, almost shapeless aggregate of timbres and rhythms that seem almost musical, yet primitively so (there is no noble melody to be heard here). I assume this is partly due to the trilingual situation I was coerced into as a child and which I find tremendously alienating on most days: when tongues come in and out of focus, either at random or in direct response to an ever-changing environment, you cannot help but take refuge in the fiction of an 'Ursprache' or, better yet, in the ridiculous desire to reforge language altogether, in your own image. Part of me absolutely loathes words, even as I am continually drawn to them, and sometimes I feel like the sole viable solution would be to allow myself to be assimilated into pure monolingualism until my thoughts and my language(s) become one (again? I can't quite recall what it was like, or if it ever was at all).

This is all very silly, of course, but I think it helps explain why I am so obsessed with music, and so apathetic towards lyrics (for the most part): music brings unity and serenity to my mind in a way that, say, works of literary prose and/or poetry do not. If anything, I view the latter as necessary crucibles: I can't imagine a path around them but if one was to arise, I would take it immediately and without hesitation. As it stands, no experience is furthest from my own than that of the monolingual subject for whom language isn't a battleground, who doesn't feel like they could be reduced to silence at any moment, who views the business of articulation with spontaneous enthusiasm, and whose language (emphasis on the possessive) stands for co-belonging and community.

Point blank: inarticulate acousmatic sounds, for the most part, painfully yet inevitably translated into words of a given language whenever the need arises (every day). More prosaically: if I am thinking about a specific person, I will virtually converse with them in 'their' language.

I think I have two or sometimes more internal voices, one of self-loathing, embarrassment the usual classic catholic bullshit. And a more practical one that I didn't seem to have when I was younger. Like a lot of people have professed in this thread I suffer from too much internal noise - the order of the permanently frenzied space-cadets!

Interesting topic, and booming post, Pom. Several things ring true from that, but mostly the bi/trilingual situation adding another dimension to this internal voice. Having been brought up trilingual (one big, majority nation-wide language, one minority language, and one absolutely tiny minority language - where the latter was the most important one), it's not just a question of having an internal monologue, but also that this voice differs depending on which language I'm thinking in, or have been engaging in for a while. (if I am thinking of a specific person I too converse, in my head, with that person in 'their' or rather, our shared, language).

The going to and fro all the time makes for changing voices, and it being different languages, different content/context said voice has to say. Every language brings a different filter to the table; which is why I tend to process emotions with the voice of one of my native tongues, but when I'm creatively writing or working the voice is in one of the other languages. (and this is not taking the voice of insecurity into account, for one, which is a whole other voice)

It's quite cacophonous up in 'ere, though I don't for most of the time regret this. I don't long for assimilation into pure monolingualism, multilingualism has given me more than it takes out of me (so far). But it is noisy, and busy, and requires a lot of to-and-fro'ing, something that can be exhausting, definitely.

multilingualism has given me more than it takes out of me (so far)

This is ultimately true, of course. I guess there's a monolingual ideation, for lack of a better word, that always hovers at the back of my mind, but in the end I can't conceive of existence other than through a plurality of tongues.

Out of curiosity (and if it's not indiscreet), which one is the 'tiny minority language'?

i have an internal monologue, but i talk out loud to myself a lot. my mother does this too so I probably got it from her

Good thread, good posts. Short answer: yes.

I need to verify this but every decision point seems to be predicated upon me forming up a very definite “Question Presented”-style verbal construct, and then several iterations of “what u forgetting?” edits. But it feels pretty verbal.

Less significant decisions and proceedings might just be like two hazy word clouds clustering around “better” and “worse.”

Comment above about “bringing order to disorder” captures how my monologues feel in process.

Great thread and a fascinating topic.

My internal monologue is ceaseless. Quite often I'm arguing with someone, which I assume is a way of organising my thoughts, or, since I started teaching, I'm often composing mini lectures - particularly when I'm walking. If I pay close attention to it, there's an urge towards spatial metaphors, with thoughts rising or emerging from the murk. I'll have days when I'm 'on' and whole phrases will rise up; these tend toward the poetic and usually signal or presage some heightened state of emotion.

I'd totally welcome an experiment where we could be rendered pre-linguistic - just to see what it's like in there without the commentary. And to have a rest from my bullshit.

All of this makes me think of Ken Campbell's phrase 'me is just one of the things my brain does'.

I work with a guy who has aphantasia. We've talked about it quite a lot as a) I'm nosey/fascinated and ii) he's totally happy with describing it. He only realised relatively recently when hearing on telly someone else describing it. He has basically no internal life at ALL. No inner analogue of the sensual world whatsoever: no data bank of images or smells or sounds or whatever. He literally doesn't know what his daughter looks like. She is at the school and he'll walk right past her. Similarly, he can't conjure her voice or her smell of whatever. Even what you might consider relatively simple thought experiments like detailing the furniture in your lounge or constructing a visual image of a bowl of fruit or whatever are completely beyond him. It blows my mind.

Out of curiosity (and if it's not indiscreet), which one is the 'tiny minority language'?

I experienced a similar curiosity and echo this request.

Think he told us once somewhere else, but maybe was self-conscious about being too specific about it.

Klingon?

I would completely understand if you didn't feel like disclosing it, LBI!

dutch

Something else just occurred to me regarding the point upthread about reading on screens seeming to quieten the internal voice. Paul Virilio called that state - the senses are 'on' but no information seems to pass through, induced by extended screen time (be it gaming, pornography or whatever) - picnolepsy. It's a kind of suspended animation, I suppose.

It feels like I've got a constant flow of dream-logic babble which I don't notice when I'm having real thoughts or activities. When I'm in front of my computer at work, sleep-deprived and drifting focus, that's when it surfaces. Sometimes there's a visual, usually not, but I think it is literally a waking dream--I come out of this little spell and I remember the last few words or half a sentence of the stream that's always flowing. Like a dream, wait a second or two and it's gone.

I keep a document open at all times, and if I flip to it quickly enough, I type what I can remember. I capture at least 2 or 3 each day at work, but some days I can catch a dozen or more. I've been writing them down since 2011 and I've got over 6,000 of them now.

Here's a random chunk:

President Menthol Enough
Cindy column in the news
Chances are, a fire extinguisher
How about the polar bear?
Am I a house of magic pixie dust yet?
Look! My internal clock is swimming!
Dogs can say
Chatting a cherry
Sneaky rejoice across the country
I was rushing had a green room
Molly Spoonbeam will write in with her accountant
3-D horses
What I need, dot dot dot, the sea
Houring days
They don't see except his gritty envelope
But Ms. Memory, don't we have to go to Stars or something?
Goat like Butlin's furnace
Bang printability
Tar-making girl
An infinity of judgment
Journey tower from a pharmaceutical company
Why is Ellie Kemper in the silvery bushes?
Shark dog on the toy
Cupid ballbag
Porcelain bob-bender

Much of the time the grammar is correct, sometimes non-existent ("Got as many mean a chimp" or "Worthless, clam post, willing to hold")

Some of them I just know are titles that must be capitalized ("Tunnel Describer Millionaire" or "The Elevator of Thank You for Hanging Around")

I've invented a lot of new compound words (branmother, creepyfriars, London-wiggy, slumberhorn)

Occasionally the dream logic produces a kind of wordplay ("Do you want a glass of cow lining?" or "Black-on-trampoline crime")

And you can put together a pretty good Tom Waits song:

I got paid in Chihuahuas
in Angela's arcade
The curtain goes up to reveal shade,

A bottle of water and a banana snake
There's a midnight steering lesson at stake
Lie down on my lunch and dream
Nothing comes between my face and self esteem

Can I get the rose at Diamond Jubilee Day?
Is there a band in a bog in a bay?
Fettucini, I sold your hat!
Here, bury the exploding cat

Cheat out the frame
Anger and flames
I'll try to write a portrait of your brains

Say you mamma-jamma and remind you not be here
You can't make me come alive or disappear
The finishing war--I call it complete
Leave the diplomatic officer in a coffin on the street

Walk away, put it on your wheeze
Sift through your fine philosophies
swirling out his wishing well
If the Irish were more Scottish, this place wouldn't smell

that's so cool.

Yeah, it's hard to know if I have a verbal internal monologue, but unless I'm replaying a spoken scenario in my head most likely it's not.

When I'm on my own (or when I don't think anyone is watching), I have a tendency to spout glossolalia out loud - absolute gibberish, just rolling sounds and syllables around. I wonder if that's what my internal monologue is actually like?

Being somewhat bilingual (spoke mostly French till I ws ready to go to school), people sometimes ask me if I 'start thinking in French' after being exposed to it for enough time. The answer is that I don't really think in English most of the time, so it's hard to say.

I wonder if people who do 'think in language' also find it easier to concentrate on books, or find writing more fluid? Have to say, when I'm writing (especially online in places like ILX), I write a lot like I speak. That includes a lot of interjections and dialectic expressions.

I wonder if people who do 'think in language' also find it easier to concentrate on books, or find writing more fluid?

This is my envious assumption.

i totally don't have words or sentences running through my brain at all, pretty much ever! it never occurred to me that other people would! i do remember one time reading that george orwell, from a very early age, would 'write' in his brain to pass the time, like if he saw a shaft of sunlight falling through a doorway he'd idly construct a sentence describing it and i did think to myself 'that sounds like awfully good practice - how will i ever write well without the tens of thousands of hours of THAT at my fingertips?'

man, Hideous Lump, you need to write some songs. I wish I did this.

This is the case for me, when I can be bothered to write. I have always been able to write anything I want to relatively easily, obviously quality not being a factor here.

I am definitely one of those people who has very poor visualisation and that BBC article everyone cites was really shocking for me. I had gone my whole life hearing people talking about visualising stuff and picturing things in the mind’s eye and thinking that was metaphorical. My normal thoughts are a sort of soup of words and abstract thoughts and concepts but if I am thinking consciously about something it’s in words.

man, Hideous Lump, you need to write some songs.

He already has, being Karl Hyde and all.

I can play long scenes from movies in my head and near enough anything else I want, HD quality or is that ADHD quality idk?

Hmm maybe that’s part of why I like rewatching stuff so much? I don’t have any other way of recalling it.

I think in words maybe a third of the time. There’s no pattern to the occurance of word-based thought, except it USUALLY happens when I’m talking or writing. And seldom when I’m tired. The words in my aren’t “fixed” in an organized stream, but almost like in a main-path with endless clauses and tributaries to follow. Until I “think the thought” or speak the thought out loud, there’s no way of knowing where it’ll go. I end up misspeaking a lot.

You know that trope of Looney Tunes following green wafting scent-trails, strong enough to lift them off the ground and (frequently) bring them to danger just around the corner? That’s what my internal word-stream is like.

*The words in my head aren’t “fixed” in an organized stream,

@Pom, I shot you an e-mail

Got it, thanks! I'll shoot you a proper reply as soon as I can (work beckons).

Hideous Lump, I do the same thing. I have a written list (for things that bubble up from my conscious brain and barely-recalled scraps of dreams) and also a handheld recorder for snippets of whatever batshit song my brain whips up in a given moment. I've done this on and off for like twenty years now.

All I can think of today is Vyvyan bellowing at Rick 'can you tell your conscience to keep its voice down!'

See I don't even remember that specific scene but I have enough data to conjure a vivid reconstruction in my mind. I can see the little forehead stars and everything.

I wonder if people who do 'think in language' also find it easier to concentrate on books, or find writing more fluid?

Haha, no. I'll be reading a book and my internal voice will start yammering on about how everybody hates me and the world is so terrifying - it's pretty difficult to concentrate on anything. I'm not sure about writing, it's certainly something I feel I have in my skillset, but I'm also extremely perfectionist about it so I certainly don't find it easy or fluid to do. Plus an internal monologue doesn't mean I am good at communicating with other humans, I find the Other largely an unknowable monolith and that is reflected in e.g. my crapness at writing dialogue.

Yeah, if anything the presence of a persistent internal monologue, left unchecked, has historically made reading a real chore at times (writing less so because I can just use my hand(s) to barf out whatever my brain is churning up atm). And so I thank you yet again for your beneficence, o Ritalin.

an irishman iirc

tbh I have a voice in my head that does one of two things: iterate over a line of conversation before I say something aloud, or repeatedly narrate past events that is argumentative

the latter is very close to obsessive-compulsive, and prone to re-litigating past events to the extent it can cause anxiety or depression. the thing that's helped me most in life is that while being able to remember snippets and facts is useful, my own memory -- especially emotional memory -- is prone to exaggerating importance of trivial events and skewing things negatively against my own point of view

my natural anxiety, at times, is bad enough that I'd wake up with absolutely nothing to worry about and the voice in my head would start inquiring about a minor car accident from a decade prior

About writing: I used to kick myself for procrastinating about writing anything of length. But I would do almost all the brainstorming and composition in my head in the weeks prior so when I actually sat down to write at the very last minute it was 75% just quickly transcribing everything I had been thinking.

Do people who don't have inner ongoing monologues or don't visualize easily, dream infrequently?

This question has been vexing me, it's very weird to think about thinking like this.

I want to say yes, because I love reading and have always thought of myself as a 'word person', whatever that means. But I don't think it's really true...if I'm reading and become too conscious of hearing the words (like someone is reading aloud in my head), it kind of ruins the experience. Ideally I can take in the words as an unconscious act, almost.

And with my own thoughts, it's more like I'm so familiar with my brain (duh) that actual words aren't really needed.

one of the most amazing things to happen to me in recent years is the ability to selectively turn off the internal monologue

My dreams are intermittent but they’re always highly visual.

On a related note, if I have a music performance coming up where it's a big deal or I have to learn a bunch of material, I'll do some pretty intense visualization beforehand. I'll picture the venue, the sound, what I might play in certain moments, the whole thing. I don't set aside time for this, it's just what I've always done. And it helps me memorize long arrangements (being terrible at reading music and memorizing in order to fake it/compensate also helps).

What surprised me is learning that not everyone does this. Talking to my bandmates, including some extremely talented players, they were like "no, that doesn't sound familiar." Which is insane to me, and I don't know what it means.

But in general I've never considered myself a very visual person (I'm not very observant when it comes to changes in my environment, I'm r/g colorblind, not especially into visual art, etc), so idk.

xpost, I remember watching a 60 minutes thing on people who remember every day of their lives like it just happened and all the emotions of constantly feeling like, your boyfriend just broke up with you yesterday.

imo there's a crossover between visual and spacial memory but they're each a unique aspect of mental imagery

Dr Manhattan-style

xp

I'm at the KFC. I'm at the Taco Bell. I'm at the combination KFC and Taco Bell.

this was the 60 minutes thing on it. https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-gift-of-endless-memory/

My spacial sense is quite acute for anything I can see directly. For example, I can look at the leftover soup in the bottom of a large stock pot and imagine very precisely how well it will fit in a much differently dimensioned container. After I'd driven my school bus for several years I could tell within inches whether I could drive it through the width of any opening I could see ahead. But my visual memory is very vague and opaque.

how are you at walking around your home in complete darkness?

if it weren't for my tendency for pesky clutter I'd be able to make it though the majority of the space without touching a single doorway or piece of furniture

bus driver club! xpost

Complete darkness is not a normal condition in my house. Too much ambient light to qualify.

Some of this stuff is probably an artifact of genetic predisposition but I feel like a lot of it is developmental, potentially even learnable to the extent that one has the wherewithal to change one's brain. I'm just thinking about the different ways my own brain has responded according to wildly disparate circumstances and, I dunno, it seems like we probably adapt a lot according to what's required of us over the long term and then just come to think of that as the way our brains are.

We, in a glance, perceive three wine glasses on the table;
Funes saw all the shoots, clusters, and grapes of the vine.
He remembered the shapes of the clouds in the south at
dawn on the 30th of April of 1882, and he could compare
them in his recollection with the marbled grain in the design
of a leather-bound book which he had seen only once, and
with the lines in the spray which an oar raised in the Rio
Negro on the eve of the battle of the Quebracho. These
recollections were not simple; each visual image was linked
to muscular sensations, thermal sensations, etc. He could
reconstruct all his dreams, all his fancies. Two or three
times he had reconstructed an entire day. He told me: I
have more memories in myself alone than all men have had
since the world was a world. And again: My dreams are like
your vigils. And again, toward dawn: My memory, sir, is
like a garbage disposal.

1. the hideous lump phrase post is wonderful fun
2. i'm trying to re-eval my own post-- i'd say the more "orderly" i'm trying to be, the more likely my thought train is to exist as an internal monologue.
3. i've got a somewhat bland mid-american/newscast sound accent, a slightly obnoxious, performative speech style, and have been told that i "mirror" a lot, by which i guess i mimic speech styles, words and even accents. i've been listening lately to 1870ish publication stuff narrated by...some guy in England, and it's amazing how much of internal monologue sounds like english 1870 narration/construction.

if I'm reading and become too conscious of hearing the words (like someone is reading aloud in my head), it kind of ruins the experience.

Jordan, it me!!

so when I actually sat down to write at the very last minute it was 75% just quickly transcribing everything I had been thinking.

I do this, but then I come to gaps where I thought there were words but actually no, it's all still vague. So there must have been moments when I was thinking out my argument and then my brain, coming to a weak point, didn't stop and work it out but just flung itself over the gap like the bus in Speed and continued on to a more easily verbalized bit of thought. Which is making me think that my brain does a lot more of its thinking without words than I had realized. There are always words there, swirling around, ready to take shape, but there are also a lot of moments when my brain gets from point A to point B to point C without using actual sentences as a bridge.

I guess I still think of myself as verbal, but I'm increasingly aware that a large percentage of whatever's going on in there exists at some level that is not verbal. It can take verbal form, and often does, but that's like some amorphous Ray Bradbury alien being momentarily coalescing into human shape.

I have some amount of visual thoughts, but much more verbal. Similar to a few others in this thread, I feel like I'm often having an imaginary dialogue or argument with someone that is my way of organizing my thoughts or constructing a point in my head. However, it does not feel like a rush of thoughts or thoughts speaking to me. It's much more deliberate and analytic, and doesn't feel at all like an intrusion. I think one reason I don't like writing is that my thoughts end up being almost overly deliberate, where I would labor over each and every word as I put them down. I don't feel like I have this mass of words I just need to get out.

Also, regarding the point about not wanting to hear the words in your head when you read: I'm the exact opposite. I need to focus on the words that I'm reading at least a little, otherwise I get distracted by my inner dialogue, only to find myself having read a couple pages without having processed them at all, which leads to a bunch of backtracking.

I brought this up at work today and asked a bunch of people about their own experience. No one had ever really given it close attention before and/or took it for granted in their own way; each went away to think about it (I basically set them homework). One person said that the main reason they leave work early each day (I teach - this was to plan lessons) was that she has to talk aloud to herself to get things straight and didn't want to annoy people/seem mad.

Regarding the reading thing, I'm closer to needing to subconsciously absorb the words as I read them - rather than internally vocalise them. If I do start to internally speak them aloud, I start to lose the sense, as if this were triggering a different part of my brain. The former is more like eating if anything.

I sometimes read about study techniques of things I am interested in. One that I saw recently was if you could teach someone a type of synesthesia so that if they were trying to analyze a wine they could learn to associate certain notes with colors and learn to visualize the shape of that wine in their head. It was also surprising to learn that some tasters didn't automatically do this.

have been told that i "mirror" a lot, by which i guess i mimic speech styles, words and even accents

I gave a talk at work the day after a 2016 Trump/Clinton debate and, between my own weariness and an hour of watching the word salad on television, I'm not sure which to blame for my own incoherence

ha you too me too, i'm actually only as dumb as my environment, theoretically only as smart as well. (*considers fave threads*)

xpost I do the mirroring thing sometimes. I remember in high school, showing up to a rehearsal, and the stage manager had laryngitis, so the first thing she asked me, I weirdly mimicked her raspy sound, to myself was like "uhh, what was that?". so she asked if my brother was with me and I instinctively again mimicked her raspy, hoarse voice, and she told me to fuck off.

i deserved it but I wasn't actually intentionally making fun of her, I just instinctively did it cos that's the way she was talking.

speech styles, yeah, lord forbid if there's a fast talker around me cos I'll become one fast.

i hate my brain.

i totally don't have words or sentences running through my brain at all, pretty much ever! it never occurred to me that other people would! i do remember one time reading that george orwell, from a very early age, would 'write' in his brain to pass the time, like if he saw a shaft of sunlight falling through a doorway he'd idly construct a sentence describing it and i did think to myself 'that sounds like awfully good practice - how will i ever write well without the tens of thousands of hours of THAT at my fingertips?'

― Li'l Brexit (Tracer Hand), Monday, February 3, 2020 5:48 AM (fourteen hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

as someone who at least used to do a lot of writing i have no idea how someone is supposed to write intentionally without first.... thinking the sentence

i had to look away from my computer screen several times to think of how to word the sentences i'm writing right now, which probably sounds pretty pathetic if you're not a word thinker

otoh today i had a lot of stressful and fast paced work where i had to take extremely confusing and badly presented information from a coworker and turn it into something understandable to the whole team, and from what i remember of that process i don't think i was internally monologuing at all. i didn't really have time between looking at the information i was looking at and translating it/trying to figure it out to lay anything out mentally, i was just going and going. i could be wrong though, i wasn't thinking about this at the time.

But enough about all of you--let's talk about me again.

Undoubtedly related to the babble below my waking thoughts, I noticed long ago that, if I'm reading something in a dream, the words always change as I'm reading them. It's become a trigger to lucid dreaming--if, say, there's a billboard in my dream, I immediately focus on reading it, get partway through the first sentence, realize I didn't understand something and try to reread it, but the text keeps changing so I can never get any sense out of it.

not surprising, lucid dreaming guides tell you to practice looking at digital clocks over and over because your sleeping brain can't keep hold of the numbers.

I want to say yes, because I love reading and have always thought of myself as a 'word person', whatever that means. But I don't think it's really true...if I'm reading and become too conscious of hearing the words (like someone is reading aloud in my head), it kind of ruins the experience. Ideally I can take in the words as an unconscious act, almost.

People talk about auditory, visual and tactile learning styles. I've always found it hard to take in information when it's spoken aloud without some sort of visual aid. Wonder if there's a correlation between narrative and abstract thinker in this respect?

shame the idea of 'learning styles' is bogus

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/04/the-myth-of-learning-styles/557687/

Fwiw, the learning style stuff has been largely debunked in the last five years or so.

Hah xp.

fair enough

Now I'm trying to understand exactly what people mean by an 'internal monologue'.

Is it a bit like having a commentator chattering away like 'Now he's put the teabag in the water, brilliant. Just a drop of milk. Textbook... OH! And he's fumbled it at last minute. Dog Latin, spilling hot tea all over the place like a plonker as usual...'?

I was trying to 'listen' to my own thoughts just now and while I don't think I have a neatly laid out running internal narrative spoken in my own voice, I might well get short 'strings' of sentences running through my head, often spoken in the voice of other people: colleagues, radio DJs, friends or whoever I've just been speaking to... But they're not necessarily about what's going on right there and then. It's more fragmented - a 'babble' of voices flowing in and out of each other. There are always 'words' but they don't really have much meaning beyond themselves.

Often, as with many people, I have music running through my head, so there's not really any room for a spoken monologue?

I'm just trying to work out what this 'internal monologue' thing is I suppose?

https://i.pinimg.com/736x/cb/82/7c/cb827ced8f8179128ed15c1e7e74c187--james-joyce-james-darcy.jpg

I would define my own inner monologue as a contemporaneous means of sorting thought and experience and memory into a loose narrative (however rambling and unbeholden to narrative convention it may be) that helps me to make sense of the world and my place in it. And then part of that narrative is the metanarrative that recognizes the inherent artificiality and ultimate futility of attempting to weave life into a coherent story, which I find adds a lot of fun tension for the protagonist to struggle with on a minute-by-minute basis.

as someone who at least used to do a lot of writing i have no idea how someone is supposed to write intentionally without first.... thinking the sentence

i had to look away from my computer screen several times to think of how to word the sentences i'm writing right now, which probably sounds pretty pathetic if you're not a word thinker

― ℺ ☽ ⋠ ⏎ (✖), Monday, February 3, 2020 7:48 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

This is interesting to me inasmuch as this is not how I write at all. Not first drafts, anyway. I do often wonder at the process of people who post here. Like (as should maybe come to no surprise) I pretty much just type out the words as they leave my brain and then I hit 'Submit Post'. If I find myself dithering and editing my word choice and what have you, I usually just delete the post and move on under the assumption that I haven't quite figured out what I'm trying to say.

But then also if I tried to verbalize these same sentiments you would probably be forgiven, at times, for thinking I'm some kind of half-shaved cro magnon who is in the beginning stages of learning to construct sentences. Don't know what that's about.

If I find myself dithering and editing my word choice and what have you, I usually just delete the post and move on

A big reason why I don't post more or enjoy writing in general. And perhaps not surprisingly, I'm much more loquacious IRL. Like the "type out words as they leave my brain" is pretty much what I'm like in actual conversation.

This is largely irrelevant but for a writer who I tend to consider wary of emotion and imitative writing, two of the passages likely to reduce me to tears are the end of The Dead and Molly's soliloquy.

related, also seen on reddit

Try this: Visualise (picture, imagine, whatever you want to call it) a ball on a table. Now imagine someone walks up to the table, and gives the ball a push. What happens to the ball?

.

.

.

.

.

.

.

Now, answer these questions:

What color was the ball?

What gender was the person that pushed the ball?

What did they look like?

What size is the ball? Like a marble, or a baseball, or a basketball, or something else?

What about the table, what shape was it? What is it made of?

And now the important question: Did you already know, or did you have to choose a color/gender/size, etc. after being asked these questions?

For me, when asked this, I really just sort of conceptualize a ball on a table. Like, I know what that would look like, and I know that if a person pushed it, it would probably roll and fall off the edge of the table. But I'm not visualizing it. I'm not building this scene in my mind. So before being asked the follow up questions, I haven't really even considered that the ball has a color, or the person a gender, or that the table is made of wood or metal or whatever.

This is contrasted when I ask other people this same thing, and they immediately have answers to all of the follow up questions, and will provide extra details that I didn't ask for. IE, It was a blue rubber ball about the size of a baseball, and it is on a wooden, oval shaped table that's got some scratches on top, etc. That's how I know that the way they're picturing this scene is different and WAY more visual than how I am.

I like to think of it as "visualizing" vs "conceptualizing". I don't think of it as a disability or something to be freaked out about, though it is definitely strange to think about. It isn't a hindrance for me at all, I have excellent spatial reasoning and a really good memory, and I'm good at abstract thought, I just think about things differently than most other people."

261 comments
2.3k upvotes
100% upvoted

CraftyMerr
195 points

I really appreciate this post. I’ve known for years I’d lacked a minds eye but I absolutely can conceptualize something. The idea of a ball rolling on a table is rock solid to me. But there’s no color, no actual table, no person rolling it. It’s also not a list of words in my head I don’t think either. It’s a CONCEPT not an image. Thank you for putting language to this idea.

ladyeva613
24 points

i couldnt get the ball to move ffs

I have a hangover and I've just been outside to retrieve the trampoline which had been picked up by storm Ciara and fucked into next door's fence so I'm not at my best but I think I'm somewhere in between. I have a few details but mostly it's conceptual with the odd bit of colour.

Saw a supposed aphantasia test (close your eyes and visualize an apple, some people - me - can't see anything) the other day after this went around.

Pity the poor souls with no internal monologue AND no ability to internally visualize.

I tried it and found that what I came up with was a bit like a drawing that's detailed at the center and just sketched out around the edges. I could see the position of the hand - a woman's right hand - and that the ball was a basketball, but everything else was vague. I think that's because I was taking my cues from the language but not filling in any extra details. I saw the word "push" and so I could clearly visualize the kind of hand movement that would suggest (not a nudge or a flick or a tap or a shove, but an open-palmed push), which meant the ball had to be something fairly big and heavy (you wouldn't push a baseball) but still small enough to fit on a table. I hadn't been given any cues about the type of table, so I saw it very vaguely; it was square, I think, and at about hip or waist height (you wouldn't open-palmed push something on a low table), but that's all I got.

my family even my mom have voted me off the kitchen island since my tbi because i now have an ongoing external monologue and now i can share it and derail shit here too.

snooker ball. red. middle aged woman no taller than 5'2. lots of rings on chubby fingers. dark red curtain. table is my dining table. push with three fingers of the right hand. ball rolled from centre of table and landed with only a small bounce on the green carpet.

there are two kinds of people: those who interview themselves, and those who won't admit it

I suspect a better litmus test for mental visualization is if you can rotate this word upside down in your head: sdᴉnb

when I think of the word 'man' I visualise a man, but not any man I know or could imagine seeing IRL. without context or adjectives it's a sort of vari-form humanoid shape. but also there are strange details. he is middle aged, greying, wearing some sort of peaked flat cap, which is quite specific really.
this is quite interesting in the context of the ball and table exercise.
When I think of the word 'ball' I think of a deep orange sphere, probably rubber. Once it's on a table though it becomes a small red pool ball, and the table a mix of a pool table and the table nearest me (my kitchen table). When someone comes and pushes the ball, it's the aforementioned default 'man' but of course the word 'push' suggests a movement bigger than a nudge and so the ball becomes bigger, heavier, and the table changes in turn

there's a james mcavoy snl sketch where the audience proxy goes, "your accent is very thick; can you not have it?"

and this got me thinking -- continuous internal narrators -- have you ever successfully silenced your inner chatterbox by accident or intention?

supposedly having perfect pitch was something you couldn't acquire past a critical period, but that was a myth, so i'm wondering if this supposed fundamental aspect of your mental life isn't also something that can be trained for or against.

also, in the opposite direction, have you ever been able to train up two simultaneous voices for stereo?

Monkey mind gonna monkey mind

Longer answer: feel like people have an implicit ongoing internal monologue. For me it’s helps to be more aware of it with meditation.

And yes, it can become more of a dialogue.

That does bring up the idea that maybe age-old meditation approaches are operating on the model that everyone has it, and are fitting a lot of circles into square-shaped holes. Have there been any newer techniques that de-emphasize any verbal assumptions?

thought the question in the revive was gonna be "does your internal monologue share your accent/voice?"

mine sounds a lot more like harrison ford than me tbh

Can you train it to do grudging commercial endorsements?

Plenty of non-verbal stuff in meditation too.

Feel like people who think they don't have an inner monologue DO have an inner voice which is prompting them to have to bug other people who admit to having inner monologues.

thought the question in the revive was gonna be "does your internal monologue share your accent/voice?"

mine sounds a lot more like harrison ford than me tbh

― Ár an broc a mhic (darraghmac), Tuesday, June 27, 2023 12:16 PM bookmarkflaglink

mine sounds like teenage me

Does teen you speak faster than normal? Do you think you could train it so you can "think" twice as fast? I don't know how you'd go about doing that. Get a stopwatch and mentally recite lyrics?

don't think mine sounds like anything in particular, just words

Just read about a Scottish woman who had a haemorrhagic stroke in 1996 and lost her ability to read, write, and speak

She also lost her inner voice - but also no interest in her past or future, just always in the present.. she said the 'constant hamster wheel of anxiety was gone, replaced by infinite calm.' "Anauraliac individuals" ( those without that inner voice) still get up and make breakfast, but without the inner voice telling them to

(Her book is called A Stitch in Time by Lauren Marks if anyone is interested)

was she able to type still or...

oh, she recovered

I was really lost for a second thinking "ok, if she couldn't write or speak, did she dictate the book telepathically?"

I definitely have an ongoing interior monologue. The voice really depends on what I'm thinking about. I often hear my friends' voices if I'm thinking about them.

How many of us will talk to ourselves out loud in an effort to "talk over" a painful or embarrassing memory?

xp yeah, she recovered... she described that period as "the Great Quiet" which sounds kind of appealing in a way

Vladimir Nabokov was allegedly taught English and French from birth, and learned Russian only as an afterthought.

In an interview he was asked which language he thought in, and he replied that he didn't think in words but rather in images, and that Joyce's mistake was giving too much verbal body to thoughts.

This doesn't align with my own experience; I constantly narrate and debate and construct a strongly verbal interior monologue. Further, after a day that has a lot of speaking in it (like a professional meeting or a party), I will spend the next couple of days going over everything I said and revising it for more concision and wittiness.

My long-suffering wife can attest. When we come home from a dinner party, I will spend the next ten hours obsessively going over the conversations I had, and looking for ways I could have improved what I said.

I knew I was becoming fluent in another language when I began to dream in that language.

Joyce's mistake was giving too much verbal body to thoughts.

I am not sure that thought is possible without language. At any rate, Joyce's mistake (if we can call it that) is trying to capture thought in a way that I don't think anyone actually thinks. Chalk it up to the near impossibility of translating thoughts into written form.

near impossibility of translating thoughts into written form

Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano was pretty successful

More successful than Ulysses, I agree.

jimbeaux, I am told that I talk in my sleep. Mostly I suspect I am rehashing and/or revising painful and/or embarrassing conversations.

In answer to your subsequent post, I suspect that babies and nonverbal people and nonhuman animals surely have lots of thoughts and dreams and an entire imaginative world that is not language-bound, but that is nevertheless real to them - hard to say, though.

My son can't talk, but I know he has a very rich inner life, with fantasies and delusions and jokes and deceptions. He'll pretend to be evil, he'll pretend to be a superhero, he'll pretend to be a cat, and he'll crack himself up by pretending to have been grievously injured by a chance contact with an elbow.

There's definitely a privileging of language as a requisite and qualifier for conscious thought that I suspect colors the self-diagnoses of "internal monologue" or even one's own ability to modulate it.

I did for years, but somewhere in the last 10-15 years or so it fell away.

Did something happen at around the same time? Did you notice any other changes?

This article seems interesting.

https://healthmatch.io/blog/the-science-behind-the-voice-in-the-back-of-your-head

have you ever successfully silenced your inner chatterbox by accident or intention?

No. I cannot meditate. The only thing that sort of works a tiny bit is crowding it out with other noise or trying to direct it into a different flow (like the trick of getting yourself to sing 'Popcorn' to override an unwanted earworm - NB this trick requires that you, like me, love 'Popcorn').

Can you do the opposite -- attempt to maintain dual verbal threads going simultaneously? I don't think popcorn has lyrics, unless it's that "let the bodies hit the floor" thing.

My brain never shuts up. It just doesn't. I used to pour vodka on it. That turned out to be bad for my liver. Pouring pinot grigio on it was also suboptimal. Nowadays it just runs, on its own, and I mostly try to ignore it.

otm

yes, alcohol! i spent a good 30 years dousing the constant yammering in my head with booze. worked pretty good. i'm a goddamn simpleton right about now. #missionaccomplished

That does bring up the idea that maybe age-old meditation approaches are operating on the model that everyone has it, and are fitting a lot of circles into square-shaped holes. Have there been any newer techniques that de-emphasize any verbal assumptions?

― Philip Nunez, Tuesday, June 27, 2023 10:50 AM (five hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

this was what i was thinking too. maybe an app? preferably something i can pay for.

i've temporarily replaced booze with THC and the main difference is my attention span is now too short to remember how my inner monologue began its sentence

Does teen you speak faster than normal? Do you think you could train it so you can "think" twice as fast? I don't know how you'd go about doing that. Get a stopwatch and mentally recite lyrics?

― Philip Nunez, Tuesday, June 27, 2023 1:04 PM bookmarkflaglink

teen me speaks about the same but just sounds scared and naive, which is funny because every time I have a memory of myself fucking up something or being embarrassing, my memory also contains that voice vs how I actually sound now

My interior space shifts in colour and intensity. Often, particularly in the mornings, it's like a purple sponge squatting over the top of my head, heavy and dense. It becomes more vocal as I move through the day. I dampen it with all sorts of things (booze, music, podcasts) but there are times when I'm *on* or in tune with it. I can't control it, or more precisely, if I try to control it, it becomes fuzzy and blocked. It's often when I'm on a long walk and seem to wear through a layer of consciousness; then, it's poetic and singing, with fully-formed phrases rising out of the murk - unbidden at first, then it can be willed. Depending on whatever medium I'm working in - blogs then, lessons or lectures now - I'll write entire tranches of text of varying quality, that I'll rarely if ever use.

I'll definitely say that meditation has given me a new space and lexicon from which to observe and discuss 'it', if (not yet) any tools to enhance or master it. (I'm fully aware that meditation techniques precisely work *against* the notion of enhancing or mastering, but part of me is still hoping for a *bit* of a power-up.)

I've been pondering more and more how exactly I should feel about it, I don't really know if it is a good, bad, or neutral thing. I don't necessarily feel like I'm subject to overwhelmingly negative thoughts, but it's just constant chatter and a bit exhausting. I think it's the repetition and the fact that it distracts me and makes it hard for me to "get outside my head" that weighs on me.

Neanderthal raises a good point. I had something to add but I forget what it was.

Maybe your internal interlocutor will remember.

I cannot meditate. The only thing that sort of works a tiny bit is crowding it out with other noise

relate to this. i can only fall asleep to the sound of multiple quiet voices talking over each other (so it's impossible to concentrate on what is being said) + a lot of white noise ("rain")

My internal monologue has a loud, unceasing soundtrack. I am constantly triggered by a word, phrase, smell, image to hear an associated song, and often that will embed itself enough that simply moving into certain rooms or seeing certain things will always trigger the same song/snippet of music. Drives me bonkers sometimes, but does mean I have really clear recall of music if I need to work it out/play it.

OTOH my internal visuals are vague. I tried that "ball on table" thing from upthread, and I saw a square, pine Ikea table, but the ball was vaguely soccer-ball size and rubber, no idea what colour, and the person pushing it had no head/face. I dont seem to be able to see faces well when I "think" of things.

Maybe that explains why I'm a bit faceblind? I dunno.

Oh and as for actual internal monologue, yeah I have that too but mine's pushed its way out to being a frequenly external monologue and I think people I work with etc must think I am a bit touched because I talk to myself a LOT. I can't help it and I don't like that I do it but, eh.

i do not! i don't think? you guys are my internal monologue.

ILX is my ILXternal monologue.

I have some crazy 3am inner dialogues.. tossing & turning, and hyper-focusing on things that aren't really that pressing (work shit, etc.). And I try so many things to quiet and focus on my breath, hopefully getting some sleep... but 3am Andy is a complete nutter

My internal monologue is not constant and since I spend most of my day writing (articles, emails, a book) it often takes the form of me talking through something I'm about to write or say to someone else. A lot of the time I just have music playing in my head — one or two lines of a Big Daddy Kane song over and over, or something like that, especially when I first get up in the morning. The whole self-critical voice thing, not so much, and at some point the remembering-something-from-high-school-with-horror thing just kind of...stopped. No idea why, but obviously I'm happy about it.

One thing to point out with meditation is that it doesn't necessarily imply sitting totally still and being totally devoid of thoughts. There are a variety of ways to approach it and some are more active than others.

Being devoid of thoughts is impossible. It recognizes that “the mind is wild” and instead is about “quieting the mind” and having thoughts but not being consumed by them.

right, and it often achieves this by replacing the less controlled thoughts with something else, words/mantras, breath, movement, which on some level still requires you to be "active"

Something else to focus on, although you can eventually let go of that too.

I talk to myself in a low voice whenever I'm taking a walk, and this is something I need to do every day if possible, and the reason I mind if anyone is in my vicinity when I walk. They're repetitive thoughts that I verbalize and that I take up where I left them. I started doing this as a child of 9-10, at first it was fantasies and games, then as a teenager arguments with myself or grown-ups (rationalizing my conduct), and in the last ten years they have become a stream-of-consciousness, regular and mundane stuff that have no importance whatsoever but that have a soothing effect on me. There might still be some rationalizing if I'm angry at something, but that's rare.

Otherwise I also occasionally think out loud, especially if I'm focused and need to work something out. Most people would describe me as distracted.

Yet the rest of the time I don't verbalize. That would be too tiring I think. The rest of the time my thoughts are like an undercurrent activity that I can feel buzzing at the back of my head. As in, I'm conscious that I'm thinking, I can orient my thoughts at will, and I could capture some of it in words but it's also a mix of sentiments and wishes. I think they're still in a language, which could be French or English. Probably if someone can't speak they still think, but if you speak then thinking and speaking have the same form I would say.

One more (obvious) thing. Paying attention to my thoughts is only possible in a leisurely pace, when I'm at peace. When I have to think quick and reach a conclusion fast, it's lightning-fast and language is lagging behind. But there's real pleasure in artificially slowing things down, and I think that's what I am doing. That's also the pleasure of writing on a message board for that matter.

I talk to myself in a low voice whenever I'm taking a walk, and this is something I need to do every day if possible, and the reason I mind if anyone is in my vicinity when I walk. They're repetitive thoughts that I verbalize and that I take up where I left them.

Oh yes 100%. One of the best things about demi-urban bike-trail walking in the last decade or two has been the profusion of wireless earbuds.

First, if you are talking out loud to yourself, people will assume you have a wireless headset in, and that you are not in fact a raving lunatic.

Second, they themselves probably have earbuds in, so they don't hear what you are saying anyway.

Which is great news because I am probably rehashing a conversation I had twelve years ago, only this time my ripostes are more apropos and my anecdotes are more scintillating.

The other use of these walks is to practice for a conversation I know I will be having soon, and try to anticipate all the ways it could go disastrously wrong.

My mind is largely verbal, with some associated imaging, but it’s nowhere near coherent - just babble. I can direct it to rehearse conversations I need to have if I try hard, but unless I’m really grinding at it, it spins off into unresolved nonsense. ADHD probably has something to do with this. Often (thankfully) the words are drowned out by music, and I can take comfort in a musical phrase or groove just playing over and over all day and night in there, a kind of relief from monkey mind. OTOH, when I’m very stressed, both music and words are drowned out by noises I can sometimes literally hear as though with my ears, kind of a screeching groaning scraping sound, like someone slowly dragging a sea container over a concrete floor in a cavernous warehouse. This has only occurred a few times in my life but it’s dreadful.

jimbeaux, I am told that I talk in my sleep. Mostly I suspect I am rehashing and/or revising painful and/or embarrassing conversations.

In answer to your subsequent post, I suspect that babies and nonverbal people and nonhuman animals surely have lots of thoughts and dreams and an entire imaginative world that is not language-bound, but that is nevertheless real to them - hard to say, though.

― pomplamoose and circumstance (Ye Mad Puffin)

i used to chew in my sleep. apparently these days i'm very upset and agitated in my sleep and i yell "NO!" a lot. although maybe it's been better since i started the prazosin.

autistic people all have different experiences but for me, as an autistic person who sometimes goes nonverbal, i do in fact have an _extraordinarily_ rich inner life. not to be all "silent snow, secret snow" about it. being nonverbal is pretty frustrating to me because i really do want to communicate with other people, it's just extremely difficult.

regarding the question of inner voice, i do think this is somewhat related to my dream self. one of the... ok fuck it i'll just say it, it's taken a long time but my default inner voice is a woman now. i found i have a certain persistence of memory wherein i think of myself as being my past self, i'm blind to all of the small ways in which i've gradually changed over time, small changes that have over time added up to big changes. and i feel like maybe that's true of a lot of people.

teen me speaks about the same but just sounds scared and naive, which is funny because every time I have a memory of myself fucking up something or being embarrassing, my memory also contains that voice vs how I actually sound now

― sad Mings of dynasty (Neanderthal)

one of the things i deal with a lot is trauma... i've had a lot of, sort of, past traumagenic "voices" sort of frozen in amber in my head, and those trauma things also contain the emotional responses and all of the somatic sensations that were there when the original trauma was created.

i do have multiple "voices" in my head. they're not literal voices most of the time, they're just... like the way of thinking I grew up with is that we're logical people who have completely consistent thoughts and desires, there's this saying "you can't have your cake and eat it too" but in my experience a lot of times i want two contradictory things at once, to carry on from that relatively benign metaphor i do want to have my cake and eat it too, not in a "greedy" sense but in the sense of having conflicting desires. and for me a lot of "plurality" or "internal family systems" is trying to resolve those conflicting desires. i was raised by lawyers and i have always been extremely verbal... i mean i think there's probably if anything a bias on this board towards people who frame their internal experience verbally.

anyway so labelling different internal narratives as different "selves" helps me to resolve those internal contradictions. but not in a dialectical sense or a trial sense, the bias in western thought is to need to make a judgement, that the mediator is supposed to be solomon or some shit, but i find the best approach is to let each desire express itself and just be like, ok. not judging any one thought as "right" or "wrong" even if the desire is fucking awful. that's really antithetical to cultural norms, and _particularly_ the legalistic norms i was raised with.

the other thing i do with certain narratives is to identify their source, that's really helpful. a lot of... like there's an idea of "internalized" whatever that's pretty common in certain circles, i've internalized a lot of self-hatred due to the abuse i went through. so when i have negative thoughts or judgements about myself, it helps me to recognize where they came from, i hear them in the "voice" of my abuser. i don't think i _have_ an "essential self" but that "voice"... the way i deal with it is to say "ok, do you really believe that, or is that just what you were told over and over and over again?"

and that's important because i do tend to go on ruminative spirals, and those spirals are like thought patterns that generate really negative emotions and behaviors, so it's important to me to interrupt those spirals. it took a long time for me to do mindfulness, and for me it's not about silencing the narrative (which drugs and alcohol tend to do for me) but letting it pass on, whether they're verbal thoughts or bodily sensations or images or sounds or feelings, acknowledge, validate, and let go. idk, it's practice, it took a lot of practice to be able to "sit with it" as they say.

and yeah a lot of my... extraordinarily large referential network, everything reminds me of a song. my friends joke about it, they say i know a song about everything. it's not literally true but a lot of things do remind me of songs. i unfortunately have reached a point where... my ability to store things in my memory is finite, and there are songs i love that i don't have room to remember. a lot of times i'll listen to a song and it will be like hearing it for the first time, because i already have so many songs in my memory.

my girlfriend does externalize her internal monologue and it drives me crazy sometimes, simply because it interrupts my internal monologue. i go on... well, i mean, you can see it from my writing style, i get pretty in-depth and contemplative about things and that contemplative state is a lot of work to maintain - and it's not... i tend to spend a lot of time in that state to the point where i have difficulty functioning in other ways, which is a problem.

anyway that was kind of a ramble, thanks for reading!

Respectfully, can we refine our definition of "nonverbal"?

When I talk about my nonverbal child, I am referring to a person who literally cannot talk. He's in seventh grade. When he enters a school building he cannot tell you what his name is, or who his teacher is, or what room he's supposed to go to. There is assistive tech out there but it's not the same as being able to talk.

Maybe there's a different term for folks who have a strong track record of putting together words, sentences, paragraphs, etc.

maybe "literary-obligate" vs "literary-invocational"? I do think the literary homunculus bias leads people to discount any cognition that's inchoate and/or non-linguistic by comparison.

That sentence is breaking my brain.

No wonder you don't have an internal monologue.

by breaking your brain do you mean successfully pausing your internal monologue?

"Internal monologue" is an imperfect term to begin with. It doesn't really pause, just may not be as obvious at the surface due to various things.

I agree it's a poor term to ascribe to the totality of conscious thought, but the fact that so many people seem to identify with it means that effectively when the words stop forming, it's record-skip or zone out time.

xp I believe the accepted term for this now is non-speaking, since many non-speaking people verbalize in their own way.

Thanks!

You keep saying this stuff, trying to guess what’s happening as if you want in but can’t get in so it’s sour grapes time.
(xp)

Clearly there is some kind of continuity between non-verbal and verbal thought.

There’s not some kind of weird Flintstones needle drop followed by blackout or whiteout or wipeout.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qU-5IuNWqw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hXwGX5Es9vM

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0hLeQCnTGq8

Thoughts don’t run over some cartoon cliff and plunge into the abyss like Wild E. Coyote.

Or do they?

I'd agree on one level, but people who identify as "continuous monologuists" seem to want that needle drop, or "the big quiet" as mentioned upthread.

I didn’t identify as such. That is a different order of magnitude.

monologue is just someone speaking into the void

I have a dialogue in my mind.. "Should I have another beer?" "Yes, yes of course you should" is a pretty common exchange

This gets into the whole duality thing - when you talk to yourself, who is the listener?

Respectfully, can we refine our definition of "nonverbal"?

When I talk about my nonverbal child, I am referring to a person who literally cannot talk. He's in seventh grade. When he enters a school building he cannot tell you what his name is, or who his teacher is, or what room he's supposed to go to. There is assistive tech out there but it's not the same as being able to talk.

Maybe there's a different term for folks who have a strong track record of putting together words, sentences, paragraphs, etc.

― pomplamoose and circumstance (Ye Mad Puffin)

"non-speaking" would be fine, the language i'm familiar with _is_ still nonverbal but it does change all the time, there are always new understandings coming out! i do respect that you see me as being qualitatively different from your child but my understanding is that it's more of a quantitative difference! i do have a strong record of speech but i _do_ sometimes get into states where i _literally can't talk_. it's just not 100% of the time like with your child. that said i'm not making a _direct comparison_, i don't know your child and like i say everyone's experiences are different.

are these "can't talk" states stress-induced, precipitated by something, or random?

What are you, some kind of homework g00gler?

The entire thread revive was out of a curiosity on people's experiences prompted by an SNL sketch. I've never been assigned homework that interesting. At least two people here describe the monologue going away by itself (!)

The entire thread revive was out of a curiosity on people's experiences prompted by an SNL sketch. I've never been assigned homework that interesting.

― Philip Nunez

i want to assign you some homework! except i don't know what homework to assign you. apparently my going non-verbal or non-speaking or whatever the correct word is, that's something to do with autism. and there are some good sites for learning about that stuff, except i don't know what they are. all i know is that "autism speaks" is bad. i don't know why, that's just what all my autistic friends tell me, and i believe them.

for me "what precipitates these states" is... rightly or wrongly, i rephrase that in my head is "why do you stop being able to talk sometimes? and why do you start being able to talk again?". which are questions that do make me bristle a little bit, i've been under quite a bit of pressure to explain myself or justify myself, and a lot of times the questions are based in incorrect assumptions, so to answer those questions i have to completely deconstruct the interlocutor's frame of reference regarding my lived experience, and it's kind of a lot of work is what i'm saying. i'm an a posteriori kind of gal which i think is latin for "i like it in the butt". _why_ i stop being able to talk sometimes is secondary to just acknowledging the fact _that_ sometimes i'm just not able to communicate verbally. this is something i have gotten a lot of push-back on historically, people think i'm faking it or putting on an act or something. and a lot of times the "why" questions, not necessarily on purpose, place an implicit expectation that i have to convince that person that i really can't talk. not only is that a pretty big burden, sometimes it's an impossible burden, sometimes people have already made up their mind on that, and trying to convince them otherwise is a waste of time and energy.

anyway - i hope you continue learning about this stuff! i wish i could be of more help to you.

^Excellent post.

I don't think I have an internal monologue

no, you do, you've just tuned it out, if you get high you can hear it very clearly

oh right, thanks

the disparity in weed quieting/amplifying differently for people seems to map similarly on the OCD thread

re: bouts of being non-verbal, as someone who gets total linguistic freeze-up in stress situations like public speaking, that's the only frame of reference I have. (I wonder if deliberate open-mic & bailing could become a thing.)

my tinnitus gets worse when i use thc. and then i can't hear my inner monologue. okay, that last part was made up. but the first sentence is true. i'm so glad that i no longer think constantly all the time and so quickly. it means i'm dumber probably but i'll take it.