6 ms·

This topic (comments here, the OP, and comments in threads elsewhere) exposes some conflicting definitions of what an "internal monologue" is or means. - Some

This topic (comments here, the OP, and comments in threads elsewhere) exposes some conflicting definitions of what an "internal monologue" is or means. - Some people describe hearing their internal monologue, which I take to mean something like: they have an internal monologue, and it manifests as a voice that only they hear. These people are analogous to those who see things they picture in their mind's eye. - Some people describe not hearing their internal monologue, which I take to mean something like: they interpret "internal monologue" as a metaphor for their train of thought or stream of consciousness; they think of themselves as having an internal monologue (i.e., they are thinking in language), but don't experience it as a voice. These people are analogous to all of the aphantasics surprised that the mind's eye isn't just a metaphor. - Some people describe not having an internal monologue. I suspect these people are a mix of those who think in language but interpret the term "internal monologue" as requiring hearing a voice, and people who'd describe their thought process as nonlingual in some way (visual, abstract, etc.) Across these characterizations, different people describe their thought process(es) all over the place WRT to how compulsory/voluntary/consistent they are. Some of the people who "see" things do this consciously; others can't help but picture things they read or think or hear. Some people describe a conscious/conditional train of thought, while others describe one that is racing/intrusive/incessant.

pbhjpbhj 7y ago
There have been a few threads on these subjects recently on HN, aphantasia was a pretty hot topic.
mannykannot 7y ago
FWIW it does not seem like any of the above for me. It is more like I am rehearsing what I would say if I chose to do so. That does not come across as a voice to me.
- abathur 7y ago
  Say to who, when, why? I wouldn't include thinking through upcoming conversations, texts, tweets, emails, posts, presentations, or phone calls. Let's say you need to run three errands and eat dinner on the way home. How do you decide what to do when, and make sure you have what you need?
  - mannykannot 7y ago
    To no-one in particular. It is as if I were going to speak my thoughts on whatever the topic of the moment is. To me, that seems very different to listening to a voice. Thre's no homunculus, virtual or otherwise, telling me what to think. I wrote elsewhere that this might just be an illusion - how it seems to me when, and only when, I am paying attention to what it is like to think.
    - abathur 7y ago
      Ah, that clarifies somewhat. The framing feels odd to me. If I'm rehearsing as if I were going to speak my thoughts, I'm concerned with trying to communicate. I'm trying different turns of phrase, levels of detail, and organizational strategies. The descriptions I've seen so far make me think people who "hear" the voice loosely subdivide into groups who feel like they're talking to themselves and hear the voice, people who feel like they are listening to their own voice speak, and people who feel like they're listening to third-party narrator(s). When I'm thinking through something lingually, I'm phrasing out the initial problem, phrasing through what I know about it and testing its rigor with counter-points and what-ifs and does-it-help-tos. Language isn't the focus, just the medium. It's like working something out in a notebook or text document, minus the pen/paper or keyboard/screen. It's also like talking to myself, without the judgmental glances. It isn't as effective--it doesn't scale up to thorny/sprawling problems as well--as vocalizing or taking notes (or both).
      - mannykannot 7y ago
        It is not really rehearsing, at least not as you set out in your last two paragraphs. It is more like the first draft of that process, and if it were spoken, it would probably seem incoherent. When I am doing something specific, such as composing this reply, then go on to rehearsing it explicitly as you describe. There is also visual imagination, but that seems to be secondary unless I am thinking through a physical process. This might explain some of the incoherence, as my monologue does not to explicitly identify the entities in my mind's eye - I can pick them out indexically. These issues may have some relevance to the philosophy of the mind, as philosophers often seem to assume they can gain insight into general principles through introspection, but with there apparently being several significantly different ways that people experience thinking, any one person's experience will not be the whole picture.
jessriedel 7y ago
For people who experience having an internal monologue: Suppose you see a bagel on the kitchen table in the morning and decide whether or not you're hungry enough to eat it. Does that process involve an internally experienced stream of words (whether "audible in your mind's ear" or not) like "I'm pretty hungry" or "I bet that bagel would taste good"? Is this what it would be mean to have an internal monologue? Because I certainly could decide to eat a bagel without experiences any words. Subjectively, it would involve me imagining the pleasant feeling of satiation and the annoyance of cleaning up and weighing them against each other, with no words involved.
- herbstein 7y ago
  For me it really depends. I have two ways of representing my speech. 1) experience the words as if I'm saying them out loud but don't vocalize them. This is similar to how a lot of people read, so I figure I'm technically subvocalizing them. 2) especially when doing math or programming I simply know what I was about to think using method 1) without any specific words springing up. I can't figure out if method 1 is me having an auditory internal monologue or if it's non-auditory. But at least you have a second experience to contextualize with. EDIT: I would also like to add that sometimes when programming my mind switches to a graph-like representation that I start to manipulate physically. That is, I'll actually move my fingers in the air and move around the idea of this graph to "view" it from different perspectives and at different levels "Minority Report"-stye. Yes, that is something I try not to do anywhere but at home.
  - tempestn 7y ago
    You just made me realize that internal speech is, I think, a better way to understand the internal monolog (at least in my case) than internal hearing. I guess I can hear my internal monolog, but it's more about 'saying' the words in my head than 'hearing' them.
- abathur 7y ago
  I don't think so (because this can be a short, impulsive decision), but it wouldn't surprise me if some experience it like this. My personal experience (in the non-audible group) is that the "role" this voice is playing is a bit more supervisory/executive. It thinks about what I need to do tomorrow, or the next three steps on my current project, or that I really need to carve out time to go to the cleaners some morning. This voice might think about getting food, but mostly when hunger is getting in the way of other priorities. Or when I need to game out how to fit food into a tight schedule.
wilbo 7y ago
Anecdata to add to this: In the third grade I took the phrase "voices in your head mean you're crazy" so I actively suppressed my internal monologue (previously expressed in language) and now my thinking is mostly abstract and/or visual. There are two exceptions: imagining a hypothetical conversation or reviewing a previous conversation in my head. Those are the only cases of language in my head. When I read I experience a combination of the two.
- rebuilder 7y ago
  I tend to use hypothetical conversations in my head to analyse my thoughts, but otherwise feel my thinking is more abstract than verbal. So I'm not sure I agree with the dichotomy this article is presenting.
globular-toast 7y ago
This is why I'm sceptical if the whole thing. It's just way too subjective. I don't doubt that people experience the universe in different ways. But I highly doubt it's as simple as having an internal monologue or not.
xf00 7y ago
IIRC, Chomsky's theory on this is that human language is first internal and is the basis for all human thought. He doesn't mean an internal 'voice', but some primordial, grammatical imperative to producing thought in a certain way. This resulted in all of the world's spoken languages and would explain rapid language learning rates in newborns.
dorkwood 7y ago
I think it's possible that people experience the same things, but observe them differently, so it sounds like they're having a completely different experience. While I can absolutely have a conversation with myself inside my head, I don't "hear" the voice in my ears. Some people might take the "hearing" part very literally. It reminds me of a conversation I had with my sister as a child. We were both falling asleep in a very dark room. I noticed that with my eyes open, staring into darkness, there was a kind of static noise pattern overlaying my vision. I asked her if she had the same thing. "No", she said. "I just see black". Thinking back, it's likely that we were both experiencing the same thing, but she just wasn't observing the same things that I was.

pbhjpbhj 7y ago

There have been a few threads on these subjects recently on HN, aphantasia was a pretty hot topic.

mannykannot 7y ago

FWIW it does not seem like any of the above for me. It is more like I am rehearsing what I would say if I chose to do so. That does not come across as a voice to me.

abathur 7y ago
Say to who, when, why? I wouldn't include thinking through upcoming conversations, texts, tweets, emails, posts, presentations, or phone calls. Let's say you need to run three errands and eat dinner on the way home. How do you decide what to do when, and make sure you have what you need?
- mannykannot 7y ago
  To no-one in particular. It is as if I were going to speak my thoughts on whatever the topic of the moment is. To me, that seems very different to listening to a voice. Thre's no homunculus, virtual or otherwise, telling me what to think. I wrote elsewhere that this might just be an illusion - how it seems to me when, and only when, I am paying attention to what it is like to think.
  - abathur 7y ago
    Ah, that clarifies somewhat. The framing feels odd to me. If I'm rehearsing as if I were going to speak my thoughts, I'm concerned with trying to communicate. I'm trying different turns of phrase, levels of detail, and organizational strategies. The descriptions I've seen so far make me think people who "hear" the voice loosely subdivide into groups who feel like they're talking to themselves and hear the voice, people who feel like they are listening to their own voice speak, and people who feel like they're listening to third-party narrator(s). When I'm thinking through something lingually, I'm phrasing out the initial problem, phrasing through what I know about it and testing its rigor with counter-points and what-ifs and does-it-help-tos. Language isn't the focus, just the medium. It's like working something out in a notebook or text document, minus the pen/paper or keyboard/screen. It's also like talking to myself, without the judgmental glances. It isn't as effective--it doesn't scale up to thorny/sprawling problems as well--as vocalizing or taking notes (or both).
    - mannykannot 7y ago
      It is not really rehearsing, at least not as you set out in your last two paragraphs. It is more like the first draft of that process, and if it were spoken, it would probably seem incoherent. When I am doing something specific, such as composing this reply, then go on to rehearsing it explicitly as you describe. There is also visual imagination, but that seems to be secondary unless I am thinking through a physical process. This might explain some of the incoherence, as my monologue does not to explicitly identify the entities in my mind's eye - I can pick them out indexically. These issues may have some relevance to the philosophy of the mind, as philosophers often seem to assume they can gain insight into general principles through introspection, but with there apparently being several significantly different ways that people experience thinking, any one person's experience will not be the whole picture.

jessriedel 7y ago

For people who experience having an internal monologue: Suppose you see a bagel on the kitchen table in the morning and decide whether or not you're hungry enough to eat it. Does that process involve an internally experienced stream of words (whether "audible in your mind's ear" or not) like "I'm pretty hungry" or "I bet that bagel would taste good"? Is this what it would be mean to have an internal monologue? Because I certainly could decide to eat a bagel without experiences any words. Subjectively, it would involve me imagining the pleasant feeling of satiation and the annoyance of cleaning up and weighing them against each other, with no words involved.

herbstein 7y ago
For me it really depends. I have two ways of representing my speech. 1) experience the words as if I'm saying them out loud but don't vocalize them. This is similar to how a lot of people read, so I figure I'm technically subvocalizing them. 2) especially when doing math or programming I simply know what I was about to think using method 1) without any specific words springing up. I can't figure out if method 1 is me having an auditory internal monologue or if it's non-auditory. But at least you have a second experience to contextualize with. EDIT: I would also like to add that sometimes when programming my mind switches to a graph-like representation that I start to manipulate physically. That is, I'll actually move my fingers in the air and move around the idea of this graph to "view" it from different perspectives and at different levels "Minority Report"-stye. Yes, that is something I try not to do anywhere but at home.
- tempestn 7y ago
  You just made me realize that internal speech is, I think, a better way to understand the internal monolog (at least in my case) than internal hearing. I guess I can hear my internal monolog, but it's more about 'saying' the words in my head than 'hearing' them.
abathur 7y ago
I don't think so (because this can be a short, impulsive decision), but it wouldn't surprise me if some experience it like this. My personal experience (in the non-audible group) is that the "role" this voice is playing is a bit more supervisory/executive. It thinks about what I need to do tomorrow, or the next three steps on my current project, or that I really need to carve out time to go to the cleaners some morning. This voice might think about getting food, but mostly when hunger is getting in the way of other priorities. Or when I need to game out how to fit food into a tight schedule.

wilbo 7y ago

Anecdata to add to this: In the third grade I took the phrase "voices in your head mean you're crazy" so I actively suppressed my internal monologue (previously expressed in language) and now my thinking is mostly abstract and/or visual. There are two exceptions: imagining a hypothetical conversation or reviewing a previous conversation in my head. Those are the only cases of language in my head. When I read I experience a combination of the two.

rebuilder 7y ago
I tend to use hypothetical conversations in my head to analyse my thoughts, but otherwise feel my thinking is more abstract than verbal. So I'm not sure I agree with the dichotomy this article is presenting.

globular-toast 7y ago

This is why I'm sceptical if the whole thing. It's just way too subjective. I don't doubt that people experience the universe in different ways. But I highly doubt it's as simple as having an internal monologue or not.

xf00 7y ago

IIRC, Chomsky's theory on this is that human language is first internal and is the basis for all human thought. He doesn't mean an internal 'voice', but some primordial, grammatical imperative to producing thought in a certain way. This resulted in all of the world's spoken languages and would explain rapid language learning rates in newborns.

dorkwood 7y ago

I think it's possible that people experience the same things, but observe them differently, so it sounds like they're having a completely different experience. While I can absolutely have a conversation with myself inside my head, I don't "hear" the voice in my ears. Some people might take the "hearing" part very literally. It reminds me of a conversation I had with my sister as a child. We were both falling asleep in a very dark room. I noticed that with my eyes open, staring into darkness, there was a kind of static noise pattern overlaying my vision. I asked her if she had the same thing. "No", she said. "I just see black". Thinking back, it's likely that we were both experiencing the same thing, but she just wasn't observing the same things that I was.