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.

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.