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It absolutely melts my mind every time I come across the two facts that: - People experience their thoughts very differently - We all secretly believe that de

It absolutely melts my mind every time I come across the two facts that: - People experience their thoughts very differently - We all secretly believe that deep down, everyone experiences thought like we do. I've never really had a strong internal monologue when thinking, so my assumption would always be that of course, thinking isn't very linguistic (even if we can use it as a tool while thinking). It seems like there's a large number of people who experience their thought exclusively as language. That sounds absolutely nuts to me, but I've heard people say the exact same in reverse. Even more fringe is that there's a sizable number of people who when thinking about words (i.e. remembering names) visualize their words as text. What!? I can't imagine that anymore than I can imagine how a jellyfish feels? The University of Wisconsin did a cool study that comes with a fun quiz you can do to see just how much of a wierdo you truly are: https://uwmadison.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_3NMm9yyFsNioVhz https://uwmadison.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_3NMm9yyFsNio...

_bramses 2y ago
Makes you wonder as well if the expressed genetic traits we can’t see are more are less different than the ones we can. For example, does evolution have any pressure to produce those who think linguistically, vs healthy hair and skin?
raincole 2y ago
Are humans just a thin common interface covering our messy implementations underneath?
- beacon294 2y ago
  Or "is language just a thin common interface covering a variety of internal implementations?"
leto_ii 2y ago
> I've never really had a strong internal monologue when thinking I'm curious, what is it like when you read something? Is it just not meditated by a monologue at all?
- benrutter 2y ago
  I definitely have an inner monologue im some situations, reading is a good example. I can speed read in which case I don't really have a perception of the sounds, but if I'm closely reasing something then I do have a sense of the sounds if words as I'm reading. The idea of thinking independtly like that though seems unbearably slow to me (although lots of very clever people report doing it, so obviously it isn't for them!)
  - mewpmewp2 2y ago
    That is thinking slow for you?? How do you reach conclusions or how do you know the reasons why you reached the conclusion?
    - TeMPOraL 2y ago
      Linguistic thinker: I reach conclusions by feel, pretty much jumping to them, and then sniffing out the "warp trail" from that jump and putting that into words. It doesn't feel like inventing post facto rationalizations, but rather retracing the reasoning that happened in the background. And I do need to do that step - the conclusion doesn't seem "stable" unless I trace it back like this.
      - grugagag 2y ago
        >I reach conclusions by feel That sounds like intuition to me
        Jensson 2y ago
        Words are also based on the same intuition, you just verbalize it and restrict yourself to what you have words for instead of all concepts and thoughts. For example I do math entirely without any words in my process, and I easily got a master in math that way, barely had to study. No problem, you just translate it at the end. Limiting myself to words just makes it harder to think freely.
passwordle 2y ago
> People experience their thoughts very differently what does this mean?
- LoganDark 2y ago
  > what does this mean? The experience of thought differs from brain to brain. For example, autistics generally experience thought differently from neurotypicals. This happens, in part, because autistics have a different distribution of synaptic connections, which are shorter on average than is neurotypical. This typically results in an experience of disorganized thought, where multiple different parts of the brain contain independent thought, because there aren't enough connections directly between them to enforce synchronization. There are enough localized connections to allow general thoughts to happen and be operated on, but they are exactly that; localized. Detail-oriented thinking is another well-known side effect of this, because each individual detail can easily be fit somewhere without being lost in the "big picture". Autistics are usually who you'll find sweating details that most people wouldn't necessarily care about, but they're also who you'll find sometimes getting lost in those details rather than sticking to a single clear vision. Neurotypicals, on the other paw, can miss those details if the picture as a whole looks okay to them, but they also usually won't get stuck on them in the process of executing their vision. Note that every person is different, whether autistic or non-autistic, so there are autistics who are good at thinking in terms of the big picture and neurotypicals who are good at considering every detail. The fact that the physical mode of thinking differs doesn't necessarily mean that another can't be emulated - it just means that even if two people appear to be doing or thinking the same thing, the way it's actually implemented "in hardware" (meatware?) can differ greatly depending on neurotype, even from autistic to autistic and neurotypical to neurotypical, as the brain has no single switch between fully autistic and fully neurotypical. Some of the statements in this comment are based on my personal experience as an autistic, some are based on anecdotes from others, and some are based on this article: https://embrace-autism.com/autism-and-disorganized-thoughts/ https://embrace-autism.com/autism-and-disorganized-thoughts/ I've been informed that the author of the article doesn't generally do good work, but I've personally reviewed the article and believe it to still be sufficiently accurate. Additionally, this particular description of autistic disorganized thought is what originally tipped me off to the fact that the way I think is different from others. If you're not autistic and/or it doesn't describe you, please know that it perfectly describes me, which should be enough to understand how exactly the experience of thought can differ from brain to brain. Also, psychedelics can significantly change one's mode of thinking. I use them recreationally from time to time. Somehow, they give me better executive function than my ADHD meds do.
madaxe_again 2y ago
> We all secretly believe that deep down, everyone experiences thought like we do. Not a universal law. I don’t think I work in the same way as other people at all, as I cannot see what is obvious to others, and they cannot see what is obvious to me. I don’t think, per se, the information and the integrated results of information are just there. People call it “intuition” but it isn’t some magical sixth sense, it’s just not using one’s language centre for compute, which is what many seem to do. The moment I start consciously considering something, it all usually goes to hell - so a large part of how I operate is preventing myself from lapsing into “conscious thought”, and instead to keep whatever it is just below the surface until it’s cooked. I infuriated teachers throughout my childhood by apparently paying zero attention but then inexplicably having the correct answer to whatever was posed to me, and have never quite related to other people, as it usually feels like I’m trying to bridge an immense gap of comprehension - not, to be clear, that I think other people are stupid - just more like I am running fundamentally different software, and everything has to go through an extensive translation and abstraction layer to make sense to others. If I speak my thoughts directly, then they often emerge as allegory, as it’s the only way I can try to encapsulate the otherwise rather inchoate froth of connection which leads to a result. Sometimes others understand the allegory, but more often than not, they do not, as the symbols mean something else to them. So yeah. I don’t think my mind works like most other people I encounter. The only other person I know who I think operates in the same way is my sibling, and people who have observed our conversations find them downright bizarre. They sound like beat poetry half the time, as with five well chosen words presenting the correct allegory we can transmit deep meaning to one another.
- medstrom 2y ago
  I don't automatically do what you describe, but I've had good experiences with it: "preventing myself from lapsing into conscious thought". Especially in how I experience ADHD, if I just wait for my subconscious to cook up something for me, it's a good trick for seeing past the weeds to what is actually relevant today, here and now.
- licebmi__at__ 2y ago
  I can totally relate. In my case I feel deeply connected to Poincare writings about unconscious processing. It’s not that I have sudden eureka moments, but I observed that if I try to consciously search for an answer, I just won’t find it, like I need to soak on information and do something else to actually get the result after a while.
meehai 2y ago
I'm in the 'visualising the words as text' category, and I've always thought I have a bad memory compared to other friends, though I can recall every little detail of large software projects that I've been in. During exams, where I had to cram lots of theory in a small amount of time, I recall trying to 'access' the slides via how they looked like in my mind and trying to somehow read the stored image, because that's for me easier to remember than the actual text when I'm not doing any deep understanding, but just memorization :/ I hated these kinds of exams, what's the point of repeating 500+ slides out of 14 weeks of courses word by word ? Open book exams + internet + tricky questions were the best.
endofreach 2y ago
Often times i can actively feel how laggy my brain is in wrapping the thoughts in language. Before i even have the words ready, my thinking is already way ahead at the next thought. Not sure if that's just ADHD. I like to think secretly it's because i am not too dumb and actually a quick thinker. On the other hand, my analytical thinking is not that good. While i enjoy the process of thinking about things alone for hours, when presented with problems like in school or sometimes even today when someone gives me a riddle, i can also very strongly feel that i am not "thinking" actively. I am just thinking that i should think and often seem to make myself appear as if i was thinking – and that's it. It feels a lot like "fake it till you make it". Often times i have ideas other people call "brilliant" as well, or i seem to have s lot of refreshing takes on things according to others (stated to hide my weirdly self-conscious arrogance), it's not that i actively pursue it. I sometimes feel like i am standing on the piazza, waiting for this beautiful thought to walk past me. Too scared to talk to it, because she would realize i am too dumb to understand her and a con-artist anyway... but then, every once in a while this beautiful thought turns around and takes over my brain. But maybe, i am truly just mad.
- orwin 2y ago
  I'm clearly not in your exact case, but having idea before the words to express it happen to me too (less the more i grow old tbh, when i was in my early twenties it was almost everytime, nowadays it is a bit more limited to subjects i know deeply). It usually end up with my tongue tied and having to take a deep breath and reformulate everything since the beginning with a better exposition plan. One thing that help is improv theater and pen and paper role play game, because you don't only have to thin about your idea, but how you are going to deliver it, and this is true in professional settings too. Doing that slow down my thought just enough to be clear. Hopefully this advice works for you too [edit] You aren't mad
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- ulkis 2y ago
  I recognize this "thinking the thoughts twice", and sometimes feel that the "fast" thoughts have to wait for the slow ones (language wrapping) to catch up. Then I try to skip the second phase and let the fast ones roam at full speed, expecting brilliancy. Never succeeded yet, but not giving up.
adrian_b 2y ago
I am an example of the opposite. For me, language is primarily a tool for thought and only secondarily a tool for communication.
advael 2y ago
Interesting test. I apparently am about as high as you can likely get a percentile score to go for the number of questions here on inner voice and representational manipulation, and as low as possible on mind's eye and orthographic representation The inner voice and mind's eye don't surprise me, I'm among the more hyperlexic people I know and seem to have total aphantasia, but I didn't realize (though I guess it seems like an obvious possibility in retrospect) that there were people who processed words as text in their head - I guess the survey itself said that surprised them too. I also didn't consider that there could be a large degree of variability in representational manipulation, and assume that this kind of inevitably leads to some pretty hard to bridge inferential gaps when speaking across that divide. Honestly maybe I'm misunderstanding what's meant by that, because the other extreme sounds to me like there are some people who just can't do metacognition which sounds insane. I'm guessing however that this is similar to an experience I had with a (now ex-)lover who was shocked when I mentioned I don't have visualization, and asked "So you're telling me you have no imagination at all?", which like, I wouldn't say is true? My imagination can be prosaic, narrative, auditory, abstract, olfactory, emotional, or kinematic, just not visual. I kind of assume that's similar to what I'm doing here, like whatever "manipulating representations" means here is a useful capability by which to do metacognition but not the thing itself... but it seemed like their questions pertained to a lot of different kinds of manipulation of abstractions or mental models, so I can't really figure out how you'd examine your thoughts per se without that ability. Maybe there's someone more knowledgeable about this field here that could help me understand the distinction?
- wruza 2y ago
  How does one even get high inner voice score there? I dialogue in my head all the time and answered “sa” to most of the inner voice questions, but fell on the far left side on that graph. Feels like other questions subtract from it silently. Instead I got high score in object rotation which I can do easily but it isn’t my main mode of thinking. I usually think abstractions and/or speak myself into convincing they are good enough. I probably failed due to this agree/disagree test laziness. You never know what they meant by things like “I often enjoy X”. What does strongly disagree mean here? Never? I don’t enjoy? What if I don’t enjoy it, but do often? Why not ask it directly like “I X: never sometimes often” or “I relate to X: hare it … love it”. Even then it’s unclear what “sometimes” means. Once in a year, in a month, in a day? This indirection and vagueness adds so much noise to the result. I guess all this tells how I think more than the test itself.
gvurrdon 2y ago
That test was indeed interesting. But, one thing it didn't mention was audiation. Various people I know (including me) can hear music in their heads, almost like a recording. This is very useful when performing as I can pretty much play along to this internal track. Some people appear not to be able to do this at all.
- lloeki 2y ago
  > Various people I know (including me) can hear music in their heads, almost like a recording Same, happening to me right now, happens automatically almost every morning when I wake up, which kind of gives me my own "soundtrack of the day" and enjoy the ride. Sometimes the song is stuck in repeat though and the only way to kick it out of loop is to actually listen to it. An interesting bit is that this internal jukebox is actually playing faster than real time, even though it sounds absolutely correct and natural in my mind and definitely not as if it was a 1.2~1.5x play rate that would give this funny "Benny Hill effect"; so when I perform the song at the time scale that I hear it it is clearly too fast (higher BPM) to outside observers or when compared to an original recording. It's as if my experience of mind-time is skewed vs real time so I've developed a bunch of coping strategies like padding (e.g making every beat having a "late by ~x" feeling), forceful downclocking (some sort of detached zen mode where I let go of the internal clock, which gives a very surreal feeling of perceiving the world), or active continuous ratio compensating (sort of like the world is going at 0.8x compared to my reference clock so remapping makes it sort of bullet-timesque) Socially it's all very disconnecting and exhausting.
- _0ffh 2y ago
  Curiously, I have this but I lack the musical education/experience/talent(?) to really use it. I can make up and "hear" music with multiple instruments and stuff, but I'm utterly useless at writing it down. Even just reproducing part of a melody on a keyboard is a frustratingly time consuming chore. :-(
  - gvurrdon 2y ago
    I know what you mean. What I found very helpful in getting music out of my head via an instrument was a lot of very tedious scale practice, and similar exercises. This appears to get my fingers habituated such that I may often hear a (simple) line on the radio then immediately pick up an instrument and play it.
concordDance 2y ago
Anecdote: I once tried to suppress my internal monologue. I found thinking elaborate thoughts and checking them for soundness was a lot harder. Might just be not being used to it. These days I mostly use words but there are many concepts that don't have a short number of words corresponding to them, which makes recalling them much harder for me.
bongodongobob 2y ago
Can you clap your hands to the syllables of the Happy Birthday song without singing it? That's all an "internal monologue" is.
082349872349872 2y ago
> just how much of a wierdo I was surprised to learn the other day from HN that not only some people, but some commenters here, consider the notion of "not opening one's mouth to start a sentence before knowing how it's going to end" an impracticable ideal.
- _0ffh 2y ago
  Hmmm, I don't think I know exactly what words I want so say when opening my mouth, but I usually do know exactly what point I want to express. Also, after having expressed my point I stop making noises. Some people seem to really need to say something, but then just go on meandering without giving any indication that they actually have any point to make.
arnorhs 2y ago
I score low in all categories. I wonder if that means I'm just not very aware of how I think while I'm not doing it. I think a lot though. A little bit too much I wonder if the quiz is missing questions / scoring around thought awareness.
xaphod 2y ago
This reminds me of this old Feynman video where he talks about how people use different methods in their heads when counting, seems relevant: https://youtu.be/Cj4y0EUlU-Y?t=135 https://youtu.be/Cj4y0EUlU-Y?t=135
- kebsup 2y ago
  Love it! I use something similar to remember long numbers. If a code or a pin has let's say 8 digits, I'm unable to remember it the normal way. So I remember the first digit in the inner voice, and the other 4 digits as a picture of the digits.
- leobg 2y ago
  + Rudolph Flesh, The Art Of Clear Thinking (1951). He has visualizations in there how people concepualize the months in a year as an ellipsis, and so on.
- veunes 2y ago
  It's so cool! cognitive processes can differ greatly among individuals
nikster 2y ago
Same here. I had a conversation with friends who said, language influences thinking. I said, no, I have thoughts, and I communicate them with language but the thoughts are not language. Later we spoke about being able to have no thoughts - still mind. I said I can do this any time, I can stop the thoughts and be still. At the time I had no training but I could do it for 10, 20, 30 seconds easily. And I knew with training I'd be able to extend that time, it was effortless. To them, that was crazy - they couldn't stop thinking at all! So yes, we learn how our minds can work completely differently from one another. The study of Human Design takes this to the next level - this strange science states that humans can be classified in 5 different general types which operate totally different from one another - it has taught me a lot about other people. My base assumption that everyone is more or less like me - turned out to be completely off.
- LoganDark 2y ago
  > Later we spoke about being able to have no thoughts - still mind. I said I can do this any time, I can stop the thoughts and be still. At the time I had no training but I could do it for 10, 20, 30 seconds easily. And I knew with training I'd be able to extend that time, it was effortless. > To them, that was crazy - they couldn't stop thinking at all! I have the same experience of being "unable to stop thinking". Are you by any chance neurotypical, or close to neurotypicality? My impression is that neurotypical brains have a higher degree of synchronization than autistic brains, which would make suppressing thought easier. I'm autistic, and I don't just have thoughts; they have themselves. Thoughts just spontaneously come into existence, and just think on their own. I can think about them myself, but only by picking up existing thoughts. Thoughts come into existence whether I intend them to or not, so it is not possible for me to suppress them. On one paw, the fact that thoughts seemingly think about themselves allows me to fit a lot of logic in my head at once without getting overwhelmed. But on the other, being unable to control which thoughts are in my head can be really infuriating.
  - anon373839 2y ago
    > I have the same experience of being "unable to stop thinking". I am doubtful that anyone can truly stop thinking. But people can have more or less awareness of their thoughts, and they can be having thoughts that they don’t consider to be thoughts. For example, if you notice that your shirt is wet, that is a thought even if you don’t “think” anything about it. I haven’t personally tried one, but I believe the purpose of a sensory deprivation tank is to create an environment where your thoughts are unavoidable.
LoganDark 2y ago
> - We all secretly believe that deep down, everyone experiences thought like we do. I wouldn't say that. What I would rather say is that everyone starts with the expectation that they share thought with others. There is overwhelming empirical evidence that people can tell when others think like them. Not everybody treats this indicator the same way. Some are fascinated when others think differently. Some get uncomfortable when they can't tell what another is thinking or feeling. I'm sure not everyone understands why there can be others that don't think like them. To a simple mind, it might just seem like there's something wrong with them or that they have unaligned goals/interests; you actually can see that assumption from certain neurotypicals. (I don't know if it's truly specific to neurotypicals.) However, it is possible not to believe, even secretly, that everyone experiences thought the same; I certainly don't. I try my best to understand exactly how thought can differ between each person, of course, but in the process of doing that research, it does become abundantly clear just how much I don't know, and just how differently others think than how I do.
darby_nine 2y ago
I'm not convinced it's a fact we all think as differently as implied. Try and get a room full of people to even agree what "internal dialogue" means or whether you actually hear a voice when you recall it.
- Jensson 2y ago
  Can you express your internal monologue in words? If not then it is clearly not an internal monologue. I can't express mine in words, hence I am certain it isn't an internal monologue. Similarly I doubt others would say they have an internal monologue if they couldn't express it in words. Hence I am fairly certain that they think in a different way, or at least they think they do.
ecjhdnc2025 2y ago
The question about visualising three dimensional objects is fascinating to me. Because my answer has changed radically in the last five or so years, and I'm not a young person! I used to consider myself 3D-impaired -- unable to maintain and rotate a 3D image in my head, which also made 3D software frustrating. (I also have, it turns out, some binocular vision issues and some other mild cognition weirdness). But a few years back I started on a hobby project, and I started to assemble my own DIY kit (because the commercial stuff is too expensive). To do that I had a lot of mental puzzles to try to solve. Then I decided the best way forward was a 3D printer so I tried to find 3D tools that would work for me on even a basic level -- OpenSCAD, CadQuery, FreeCAD etc.; as many different ways to approach the problem as would shed light on ways to think about it. I'm no longer really an OpenSCAD person but once my first successful models came out of my printer, my brain was changed forever, and now I visualise mechanisms in my head. (One of the most powerful things I have learned about how to imagine any man-made, real world object, is to imagine the tools making it.)
- haswell 2y ago
  As someone with Aphantasia, this is fascinating to me. There have been other aphantasics who report gaining the ability to visualize after mental exercises, and what you’re describing sounds somewhat similar. No luck for me yet, but I’m really interested in the idea that I could actually learn these skills…
  - dinkleberg 2y ago
    This is such an interesting topic. I believe I also have aphantasia and I find that communicating about the topic is rather challenging as the right vocabulary doesn't seem to exist (or I'm ignorant of it). I have no "mind's eye" and can't produce an image in my head. But confusingly, I am quite good at the mental 3D manipulation. I can spin the cow in my head and describe its orientation, but I don't actually see the cow, I just know it. I suppose my brain just has a different way of approaching this problem than visually. This is where the language is tough. I'm not visualizing or imagining as those words describe the act of using a mental image. I'm perceiving the cow? It is hard to communicate.
mannykannot 2y ago
I am, apparently, someone well on the linguistic side of the spectrum, yet I too was somewhat taken aback by this statement from the abstract: "Here we bring recent evidence from neuroscience and allied disciplines to argue that in modern humans, language is a tool for communication, contrary to a prominent view that we use language for thinking" [my emphasis]. My own thinking on this has been to consider the origins of language. In a community of hominins on the verge of developing a language, would they not need, as a prerequisite, some non-linguistic ability to consciously grasp that at least some of the vocalizations of their peers represented feelings that they recognized in themselves? But that, by itself, would not be enough for them to develop a language; in addition, I feel, it would take both a desire to communicate their thoughts and feelings to others (motivated in part, I would guess, by recognizing that it would be useful to do so) and the recognition that this might be accomplished through artificial sounds and/or gestures with arbitrarily-allocated yet specific meanings. I feel that there's a bootstrap problem in regarding language as primarily a means of thinking that was found to be useful in communicating. Like you (and, apparently, the survey compilers) I am surprised to learn that a sizable minority of people report frequently visualizing words as text. On reflection, however, that sounds somewhat like a form of synesthesia, and I occasionally get enough of a hint of that to put it just barely in range of my personal experience - but then, I don't regard people whose experiences differ markedly from mine as wierdos.
- deleted 2y ago
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Guthur 2y ago
This somewhat related to universals and how they are view from Platonic idealism and Aristotelian realism. With language we capture a symbolic representation of the ideal form, the red apple, or do we just imagine the last particular apple we saw. Or maybe if you're really modern you imagine the molecular structure and photonic reflective spectrum. I suppose chose your own adventure.
coldtea 2y ago
>It absolutely melts my mind every time I come across the two facts that: - People experience their thoughts very differently - We all secretly believe that deep down, everyone experiences thought like we do. Well, the first is not exactly right. People might experience thoughts differently, but not that widely so. It's not like "anything goes", more like there are a few cases, and people fall into one or the other (e.g. some can have aphantasia). And the second, while right, is hardly "mind melting". Why would people assume otherwise, since the only immediate empirically seen thinking they have access to is their own? (Especially since different modes of thinking is not exactly "anything goes" as we said, so the second-hand examples of thinking they have, e.g. people describing or mimicking thinking and inner monologues in movies and books, match how the majority thinks)
fnord77 2y ago
> People experience their thoughts very differently I don't see how we could possibly know this.
deleted 2y ago
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ainiriand 2y ago
For me it was mindblowing the fact that before my brain tumor surgery I had something like a conscience voice and a richer internal dialogue. After that the voice dissapeared and my train of thought is more logic focused instead of instrospection focused, not sure why.
jodrellblank 2y ago
I just did that quiz and the question about the sound of a trumpet getting louder made me notice that my imaginings of talking and instruments actually activate my vocal chords and neck muscles a bit; and imagining a trumpet is more like imagining someone make an imitation trumpet sound. Also was hoping that quiz would ask about other senses; how easily people can choose to imagine tastes and smells, e.g. on their agree/disagree scales: 1. You can easily imagine the smell of freshly baked bread. 2. You can easily call to mind the taste of peanut butter. 3. You are melting chocolate and somebody suggests adding basil, you can vividly imagine how that would taste before trying it. 4. When remembering an event that happened to you, there is a strong smell memory included. 5. You can imagine feeling the weight and texture of a brick in your hands.
api 2y ago
Look at how different we are from each other. Then consider that humans actually have less genetic variance than most mammal species. Now imagine meeting actual aliens whether from space or from our own AI efforts.
lumb63 2y ago
This test really threw me for a loop because it didn’t cover my main mode of thought. For me, I can consciously use my internal voice or visualize things, but if I am not actively trying to, they never happen. Typically, the results of my thoughts simply enter my conscious mind, and what brought them about is opaque to me.
roncesvalles 2y ago
I think to a large extent this is because people define "internal monologue" differently, so let me just clarify: a. There is a voice inside your head, and your consciousness is not the one talking: schizophrenia. b. There is a voice inside your head, it's you doing the talking i.e. you're doing everything but moving your lips and producing sound - the words are literally being narrated in your mind: internal monologue. c. No language is being "spoken" inside your head. If you're not talking, you're not forming sentences at all: apparently some people have this experience. My experience is b, but it is possible for me to also think without having to narrate everything (a bit of c). If anyone has a different internal experience, please reply.
kazinator 2y ago
> It seems like there's a large number of people who experience their thought exclusively as language. They must listen to a large amount of verbose drivel telling them how to weave their way through a crowd, or how to rotate a suitcase to fit it into a trunk.
FeepingCreature 2y ago
This is a big part of why I think LLMs can lead to AGI: humans clearly exist who can think equally well despite having some major gears in their brain going in different directions from each other. If you told me that there was a human who could only think by speaking and who experienced their entire reality and cognition in a textual form, occasionally augmented by flashes of visual or auditory data, I would not be willing to comfortably put an upper limit on their IQ despite all that. I'd just say "yeah, I guess? Weirder things have happened."
immibis 2y ago
It's difficult to say what thought is, but LLMs also solve more problems more correctly if you allow them to feed back through themselves multiple times (ask them to show their working) apparently for the obvious reason that it allows more computation to happen. I hypothesize that different people build different recurrence circuits, by chance. Some go through the audio cortex, some through the visual. Helen Keller described herself as driven solely by emotions, like a beast, before she had any kind of language: https://www.reddit.com/r/woahdude/comments/1jyo53/hellen_keller_describes_what_it_was_like_before/ https://www.reddit.com/r/woahdude/comments/1jyo53/hellen_kel...
zzo38computer 2y ago
> I've never really had a strong internal monologue when thinking, so my assumption would always be that of course, thinking isn't very linguistic (even if we can use it as a tool while thinking). I always had thought this is the case too. Thinking isn't linguistic but it can be helpful as a tool while thinking, especially while thinking about communication. It also seems obvious to me that language is a tool for communication rather than thought, although sometimes it also includes communication to yourself (in future). In some cases, I can visualize words as text too, especially if thinking about written communication. The quiz does not work.

_bramses 2y ago

Makes you wonder as well if the expressed genetic traits we can’t see are more are less different than the ones we can. For example, does evolution have any pressure to produce those who think linguistically, vs healthy hair and skin?

raincole 2y ago

Are humans just a thin common interface covering our messy implementations underneath?

beacon294 2y ago
Or "is language just a thin common interface covering a variety of internal implementations?"

leto_ii 2y ago

> I've never really had a strong internal monologue when thinking I'm curious, what is it like when you read something? Is it just not meditated by a monologue at all?

benrutter 2y ago
I definitely have an inner monologue im some situations, reading is a good example. I can speed read in which case I don't really have a perception of the sounds, but if I'm closely reasing something then I do have a sense of the sounds if words as I'm reading. The idea of thinking independtly like that though seems unbearably slow to me (although lots of very clever people report doing it, so obviously it isn't for them!)
- mewpmewp2 2y ago
  That is thinking slow for you?? How do you reach conclusions or how do you know the reasons why you reached the conclusion?
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    Linguistic thinker: I reach conclusions by feel, pretty much jumping to them, and then sniffing out the "warp trail" from that jump and putting that into words. It doesn't feel like inventing post facto rationalizations, but rather retracing the reasoning that happened in the background. And I do need to do that step - the conclusion doesn't seem "stable" unless I trace it back like this.
    - grugagag 2y ago
      >I reach conclusions by feel That sounds like intuition to me
      - Jensson 2y ago
        Words are also based on the same intuition, you just verbalize it and restrict yourself to what you have words for instead of all concepts and thoughts. For example I do math entirely without any words in my process, and I easily got a master in math that way, barely had to study. No problem, you just translate it at the end. Limiting myself to words just makes it harder to think freely.

passwordle 2y ago

> People experience their thoughts very differently what does this mean?

LoganDark 2y ago
> what does this mean? The experience of thought differs from brain to brain. For example, autistics generally experience thought differently from neurotypicals. This happens, in part, because autistics have a different distribution of synaptic connections, which are shorter on average than is neurotypical. This typically results in an experience of disorganized thought, where multiple different parts of the brain contain independent thought, because there aren't enough connections directly between them to enforce synchronization. There are enough localized connections to allow general thoughts to happen and be operated on, but they are exactly that; localized. Detail-oriented thinking is another well-known side effect of this, because each individual detail can easily be fit somewhere without being lost in the "big picture". Autistics are usually who you'll find sweating details that most people wouldn't necessarily care about, but they're also who you'll find sometimes getting lost in those details rather than sticking to a single clear vision. Neurotypicals, on the other paw, can miss those details if the picture as a whole looks okay to them, but they also usually won't get stuck on them in the process of executing their vision. Note that every person is different, whether autistic or non-autistic, so there are autistics who are good at thinking in terms of the big picture and neurotypicals who are good at considering every detail. The fact that the physical mode of thinking differs doesn't necessarily mean that another can't be emulated - it just means that even if two people appear to be doing or thinking the same thing, the way it's actually implemented "in hardware" (meatware?) can differ greatly depending on neurotype, even from autistic to autistic and neurotypical to neurotypical, as the brain has no single switch between fully autistic and fully neurotypical. Some of the statements in this comment are based on my personal experience as an autistic, some are based on anecdotes from others, and some are based on this article: https://embrace-autism.com/autism-and-disorganized-thoughts/ https://embrace-autism.com/autism-and-disorganized-thoughts/ I've been informed that the author of the article doesn't generally do good work, but I've personally reviewed the article and believe it to still be sufficiently accurate. Additionally, this particular description of autistic disorganized thought is what originally tipped me off to the fact that the way I think is different from others. If you're not autistic and/or it doesn't describe you, please know that it perfectly describes me, which should be enough to understand how exactly the experience of thought can differ from brain to brain. Also, psychedelics can significantly change one's mode of thinking. I use them recreationally from time to time. Somehow, they give me better executive function than my ADHD meds do.

madaxe_again 2y ago

> We all secretly believe that deep down, everyone experiences thought like we do. Not a universal law. I don’t think I work in the same way as other people at all, as I cannot see what is obvious to others, and they cannot see what is obvious to me. I don’t think, per se, the information and the integrated results of information are just there. People call it “intuition” but it isn’t some magical sixth sense, it’s just not using one’s language centre for compute, which is what many seem to do. The moment I start consciously considering something, it all usually goes to hell - so a large part of how I operate is preventing myself from lapsing into “conscious thought”, and instead to keep whatever it is just below the surface until it’s cooked. I infuriated teachers throughout my childhood by apparently paying zero attention but then inexplicably having the correct answer to whatever was posed to me, and have never quite related to other people, as it usually feels like I’m trying to bridge an immense gap of comprehension - not, to be clear, that I think other people are stupid - just more like I am running fundamentally different software, and everything has to go through an extensive translation and abstraction layer to make sense to others. If I speak my thoughts directly, then they often emerge as allegory, as it’s the only way I can try to encapsulate the otherwise rather inchoate froth of connection which leads to a result. Sometimes others understand the allegory, but more often than not, they do not, as the symbols mean something else to them. So yeah. I don’t think my mind works like most other people I encounter. The only other person I know who I think operates in the same way is my sibling, and people who have observed our conversations find them downright bizarre. They sound like beat poetry half the time, as with five well chosen words presenting the correct allegory we can transmit deep meaning to one another.

medstrom 2y ago
I don't automatically do what you describe, but I've had good experiences with it: "preventing myself from lapsing into conscious thought". Especially in how I experience ADHD, if I just wait for my subconscious to cook up something for me, it's a good trick for seeing past the weeds to what is actually relevant today, here and now.
licebmi__at__ 2y ago
I can totally relate. In my case I feel deeply connected to Poincare writings about unconscious processing. It’s not that I have sudden eureka moments, but I observed that if I try to consciously search for an answer, I just won’t find it, like I need to soak on information and do something else to actually get the result after a while.

meehai 2y ago

I'm in the 'visualising the words as text' category, and I've always thought I have a bad memory compared to other friends, though I can recall every little detail of large software projects that I've been in. During exams, where I had to cram lots of theory in a small amount of time, I recall trying to 'access' the slides via how they looked like in my mind and trying to somehow read the stored image, because that's for me easier to remember than the actual text when I'm not doing any deep understanding, but just memorization :/ I hated these kinds of exams, what's the point of repeating 500+ slides out of 14 weeks of courses word by word ? Open book exams + internet + tricky questions were the best.

endofreach 2y ago

Often times i can actively feel how laggy my brain is in wrapping the thoughts in language. Before i even have the words ready, my thinking is already way ahead at the next thought. Not sure if that's just ADHD. I like to think secretly it's because i am not too dumb and actually a quick thinker. On the other hand, my analytical thinking is not that good. While i enjoy the process of thinking about things alone for hours, when presented with problems like in school or sometimes even today when someone gives me a riddle, i can also very strongly feel that i am not "thinking" actively. I am just thinking that i should think and often seem to make myself appear as if i was thinking – and that's it. It feels a lot like "fake it till you make it". Often times i have ideas other people call "brilliant" as well, or i seem to have s lot of refreshing takes on things according to others (stated to hide my weirdly self-conscious arrogance), it's not that i actively pursue it. I sometimes feel like i am standing on the piazza, waiting for this beautiful thought to walk past me. Too scared to talk to it, because she would realize i am too dumb to understand her and a con-artist anyway... but then, every once in a while this beautiful thought turns around and takes over my brain. But maybe, i am truly just mad.

orwin 2y ago
I'm clearly not in your exact case, but having idea before the words to express it happen to me too (less the more i grow old tbh, when i was in my early twenties it was almost everytime, nowadays it is a bit more limited to subjects i know deeply). It usually end up with my tongue tied and having to take a deep breath and reformulate everything since the beginning with a better exposition plan. One thing that help is improv theater and pen and paper role play game, because you don't only have to thin about your idea, but how you are going to deliver it, and this is true in professional settings too. Doing that slow down my thought just enough to be clear. Hopefully this advice works for you too [edit] You aren't mad
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ulkis 2y ago
I recognize this "thinking the thoughts twice", and sometimes feel that the "fast" thoughts have to wait for the slow ones (language wrapping) to catch up. Then I try to skip the second phase and let the fast ones roam at full speed, expecting brilliancy. Never succeeded yet, but not giving up.

adrian_b 2y ago

I am an example of the opposite. For me, language is primarily a tool for thought and only secondarily a tool for communication.

advael 2y ago

Interesting test. I apparently am about as high as you can likely get a percentile score to go for the number of questions here on inner voice and representational manipulation, and as low as possible on mind's eye and orthographic representation The inner voice and mind's eye don't surprise me, I'm among the more hyperlexic people I know and seem to have total aphantasia, but I didn't realize (though I guess it seems like an obvious possibility in retrospect) that there were people who processed words as text in their head - I guess the survey itself said that surprised them too. I also didn't consider that there could be a large degree of variability in representational manipulation, and assume that this kind of inevitably leads to some pretty hard to bridge inferential gaps when speaking across that divide. Honestly maybe I'm misunderstanding what's meant by that, because the other extreme sounds to me like there are some people who just can't do metacognition which sounds insane. I'm guessing however that this is similar to an experience I had with a (now ex-)lover who was shocked when I mentioned I don't have visualization, and asked "So you're telling me you have no imagination at all?", which like, I wouldn't say is true? My imagination can be prosaic, narrative, auditory, abstract, olfactory, emotional, or kinematic, just not visual. I kind of assume that's similar to what I'm doing here, like whatever "manipulating representations" means here is a useful capability by which to do metacognition but not the thing itself... but it seemed like their questions pertained to a lot of different kinds of manipulation of abstractions or mental models, so I can't really figure out how you'd examine your thoughts per se without that ability. Maybe there's someone more knowledgeable about this field here that could help me understand the distinction?

wruza 2y ago
How does one even get high inner voice score there? I dialogue in my head all the time and answered “sa” to most of the inner voice questions, but fell on the far left side on that graph. Feels like other questions subtract from it silently. Instead I got high score in object rotation which I can do easily but it isn’t my main mode of thinking. I usually think abstractions and/or speak myself into convincing they are good enough. I probably failed due to this agree/disagree test laziness. You never know what they meant by things like “I often enjoy X”. What does strongly disagree mean here? Never? I don’t enjoy? What if I don’t enjoy it, but do often? Why not ask it directly like “I X: never sometimes often” or “I relate to X: hare it … love it”. Even then it’s unclear what “sometimes” means. Once in a year, in a month, in a day? This indirection and vagueness adds so much noise to the result. I guess all this tells how I think more than the test itself.

gvurrdon 2y ago

That test was indeed interesting. But, one thing it didn't mention was audiation. Various people I know (including me) can hear music in their heads, almost like a recording. This is very useful when performing as I can pretty much play along to this internal track. Some people appear not to be able to do this at all.

lloeki 2y ago
> Various people I know (including me) can hear music in their heads, almost like a recording Same, happening to me right now, happens automatically almost every morning when I wake up, which kind of gives me my own "soundtrack of the day" and enjoy the ride. Sometimes the song is stuck in repeat though and the only way to kick it out of loop is to actually listen to it. An interesting bit is that this internal jukebox is actually playing faster than real time, even though it sounds absolutely correct and natural in my mind and definitely not as if it was a 1.2~1.5x play rate that would give this funny "Benny Hill effect"; so when I perform the song at the time scale that I hear it it is clearly too fast (higher BPM) to outside observers or when compared to an original recording. It's as if my experience of mind-time is skewed vs real time so I've developed a bunch of coping strategies like padding (e.g making every beat having a "late by ~x" feeling), forceful downclocking (some sort of detached zen mode where I let go of the internal clock, which gives a very surreal feeling of perceiving the world), or active continuous ratio compensating (sort of like the world is going at 0.8x compared to my reference clock so remapping makes it sort of bullet-timesque) Socially it's all very disconnecting and exhausting.
_0ffh 2y ago
Curiously, I have this but I lack the musical education/experience/talent(?) to really use it. I can make up and "hear" music with multiple instruments and stuff, but I'm utterly useless at writing it down. Even just reproducing part of a melody on a keyboard is a frustratingly time consuming chore. :-(
- gvurrdon 2y ago
  I know what you mean. What I found very helpful in getting music out of my head via an instrument was a lot of very tedious scale practice, and similar exercises. This appears to get my fingers habituated such that I may often hear a (simple) line on the radio then immediately pick up an instrument and play it.

concordDance 2y ago

Anecdote: I once tried to suppress my internal monologue. I found thinking elaborate thoughts and checking them for soundness was a lot harder. Might just be not being used to it. These days I mostly use words but there are many concepts that don't have a short number of words corresponding to them, which makes recalling them much harder for me.

bongodongobob 2y ago

Can you clap your hands to the syllables of the Happy Birthday song without singing it? That's all an "internal monologue" is.

082349872349872 2y ago

> just how much of a wierdo I was surprised to learn the other day from HN that not only some people, but some commenters here, consider the notion of "not opening one's mouth to start a sentence before knowing how it's going to end" an impracticable ideal.

_0ffh 2y ago
Hmmm, I don't think I know exactly what words I want so say when opening my mouth, but I usually do know exactly what point I want to express. Also, after having expressed my point I stop making noises. Some people seem to really need to say something, but then just go on meandering without giving any indication that they actually have any point to make.

arnorhs 2y ago

I score low in all categories. I wonder if that means I'm just not very aware of how I think while I'm not doing it. I think a lot though. A little bit too much I wonder if the quiz is missing questions / scoring around thought awareness.

xaphod 2y ago

This reminds me of this old Feynman video where he talks about how people use different methods in their heads when counting, seems relevant: https://youtu.be/Cj4y0EUlU-Y?t=135 https://youtu.be/Cj4y0EUlU-Y?t=135

kebsup 2y ago
Love it! I use something similar to remember long numbers. If a code or a pin has let's say 8 digits, I'm unable to remember it the normal way. So I remember the first digit in the inner voice, and the other 4 digits as a picture of the digits.
leobg 2y ago
+ Rudolph Flesh, The Art Of Clear Thinking (1951). He has visualizations in there how people concepualize the months in a year as an ellipsis, and so on.
veunes 2y ago
It's so cool! cognitive processes can differ greatly among individuals

nikster 2y ago

Same here. I had a conversation with friends who said, language influences thinking. I said, no, I have thoughts, and I communicate them with language but the thoughts are not language. Later we spoke about being able to have no thoughts - still mind. I said I can do this any time, I can stop the thoughts and be still. At the time I had no training but I could do it for 10, 20, 30 seconds easily. And I knew with training I'd be able to extend that time, it was effortless. To them, that was crazy - they couldn't stop thinking at all! So yes, we learn how our minds can work completely differently from one another. The study of Human Design takes this to the next level - this strange science states that humans can be classified in 5 different general types which operate totally different from one another - it has taught me a lot about other people. My base assumption that everyone is more or less like me - turned out to be completely off.

LoganDark 2y ago
> Later we spoke about being able to have no thoughts - still mind. I said I can do this any time, I can stop the thoughts and be still. At the time I had no training but I could do it for 10, 20, 30 seconds easily. And I knew with training I'd be able to extend that time, it was effortless. > To them, that was crazy - they couldn't stop thinking at all! I have the same experience of being "unable to stop thinking". Are you by any chance neurotypical, or close to neurotypicality? My impression is that neurotypical brains have a higher degree of synchronization than autistic brains, which would make suppressing thought easier. I'm autistic, and I don't just have thoughts; they have themselves. Thoughts just spontaneously come into existence, and just think on their own. I can think about them myself, but only by picking up existing thoughts. Thoughts come into existence whether I intend them to or not, so it is not possible for me to suppress them. On one paw, the fact that thoughts seemingly think about themselves allows me to fit a lot of logic in my head at once without getting overwhelmed. But on the other, being unable to control which thoughts are in my head can be really infuriating.
- anon373839 2y ago
  > I have the same experience of being "unable to stop thinking". I am doubtful that anyone can truly stop thinking. But people can have more or less awareness of their thoughts, and they can be having thoughts that they don’t consider to be thoughts. For example, if you notice that your shirt is wet, that is a thought even if you don’t “think” anything about it. I haven’t personally tried one, but I believe the purpose of a sensory deprivation tank is to create an environment where your thoughts are unavoidable.

LoganDark 2y ago

> - We all secretly believe that deep down, everyone experiences thought like we do. I wouldn't say that. What I would rather say is that everyone starts with the expectation that they share thought with others. There is overwhelming empirical evidence that people can tell when others think like them. Not everybody treats this indicator the same way. Some are fascinated when others think differently. Some get uncomfortable when they can't tell what another is thinking or feeling. I'm sure not everyone understands why there can be others that don't think like them. To a simple mind, it might just seem like there's something wrong with them or that they have unaligned goals/interests; you actually can see that assumption from certain neurotypicals. (I don't know if it's truly specific to neurotypicals.) However, it is possible not to believe, even secretly, that everyone experiences thought the same; I certainly don't. I try my best to understand exactly how thought can differ between each person, of course, but in the process of doing that research, it does become abundantly clear just how much I don't know, and just how differently others think than how I do.

darby_nine 2y ago

I'm not convinced it's a fact we all think as differently as implied. Try and get a room full of people to even agree what "internal dialogue" means or whether you actually hear a voice when you recall it.

Jensson 2y ago
Can you express your internal monologue in words? If not then it is clearly not an internal monologue. I can't express mine in words, hence I am certain it isn't an internal monologue. Similarly I doubt others would say they have an internal monologue if they couldn't express it in words. Hence I am fairly certain that they think in a different way, or at least they think they do.

ecjhdnc2025 2y ago

The question about visualising three dimensional objects is fascinating to me. Because my answer has changed radically in the last five or so years, and I'm not a young person! I used to consider myself 3D-impaired -- unable to maintain and rotate a 3D image in my head, which also made 3D software frustrating. (I also have, it turns out, some binocular vision issues and some other mild cognition weirdness). But a few years back I started on a hobby project, and I started to assemble my own DIY kit (because the commercial stuff is too expensive). To do that I had a lot of mental puzzles to try to solve. Then I decided the best way forward was a 3D printer so I tried to find 3D tools that would work for me on even a basic level -- OpenSCAD, CadQuery, FreeCAD etc.; as many different ways to approach the problem as would shed light on ways to think about it. I'm no longer really an OpenSCAD person but once my first successful models came out of my printer, my brain was changed forever, and now I visualise mechanisms in my head. (One of the most powerful things I have learned about how to imagine any man-made, real world object, is to imagine the tools making it.)

haswell 2y ago
As someone with Aphantasia, this is fascinating to me. There have been other aphantasics who report gaining the ability to visualize after mental exercises, and what you’re describing sounds somewhat similar. No luck for me yet, but I’m really interested in the idea that I could actually learn these skills…
- dinkleberg 2y ago
  This is such an interesting topic. I believe I also have aphantasia and I find that communicating about the topic is rather challenging as the right vocabulary doesn't seem to exist (or I'm ignorant of it). I have no "mind's eye" and can't produce an image in my head. But confusingly, I am quite good at the mental 3D manipulation. I can spin the cow in my head and describe its orientation, but I don't actually see the cow, I just know it. I suppose my brain just has a different way of approaching this problem than visually. This is where the language is tough. I'm not visualizing or imagining as those words describe the act of using a mental image. I'm perceiving the cow? It is hard to communicate.

mannykannot 2y ago

I am, apparently, someone well on the linguistic side of the spectrum, yet I too was somewhat taken aback by this statement from the abstract: "Here we bring recent evidence from neuroscience and allied disciplines to argue that in modern humans, language is a tool for communication, contrary to a prominent view that we use language for thinking" [my emphasis]. My own thinking on this has been to consider the origins of language. In a community of hominins on the verge of developing a language, would they not need, as a prerequisite, some non-linguistic ability to consciously grasp that at least some of the vocalizations of their peers represented feelings that they recognized in themselves? But that, by itself, would not be enough for them to develop a language; in addition, I feel, it would take both a desire to communicate their thoughts and feelings to others (motivated in part, I would guess, by recognizing that it would be useful to do so) and the recognition that this might be accomplished through artificial sounds and/or gestures with arbitrarily-allocated yet specific meanings. I feel that there's a bootstrap problem in regarding language as primarily a means of thinking that was found to be useful in communicating. Like you (and, apparently, the survey compilers) I am surprised to learn that a sizable minority of people report frequently visualizing words as text. On reflection, however, that sounds somewhat like a form of synesthesia, and I occasionally get enough of a hint of that to put it just barely in range of my personal experience - but then, I don't regard people whose experiences differ markedly from mine as wierdos.

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Guthur 2y ago

This somewhat related to universals and how they are view from Platonic idealism and Aristotelian realism. With language we capture a symbolic representation of the ideal form, the red apple, or do we just imagine the last particular apple we saw. Or maybe if you're really modern you imagine the molecular structure and photonic reflective spectrum. I suppose chose your own adventure.

coldtea 2y ago

>It absolutely melts my mind every time I come across the two facts that: - People experience their thoughts very differently - We all secretly believe that deep down, everyone experiences thought like we do. Well, the first is not exactly right. People might experience thoughts differently, but not that widely so. It's not like "anything goes", more like there are a few cases, and people fall into one or the other (e.g. some can have aphantasia). And the second, while right, is hardly "mind melting". Why would people assume otherwise, since the only immediate empirically seen thinking they have access to is their own? (Especially since different modes of thinking is not exactly "anything goes" as we said, so the second-hand examples of thinking they have, e.g. people describing or mimicking thinking and inner monologues in movies and books, match how the majority thinks)

fnord77 2y ago

> People experience their thoughts very differently I don't see how we could possibly know this.

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ainiriand 2y ago

For me it was mindblowing the fact that before my brain tumor surgery I had something like a conscience voice and a richer internal dialogue. After that the voice dissapeared and my train of thought is more logic focused instead of instrospection focused, not sure why.

jodrellblank 2y ago

I just did that quiz and the question about the sound of a trumpet getting louder made me notice that my imaginings of talking and instruments actually activate my vocal chords and neck muscles a bit; and imagining a trumpet is more like imagining someone make an imitation trumpet sound. Also was hoping that quiz would ask about other senses; how easily people can choose to imagine tastes and smells, e.g. on their agree/disagree scales: 1. You can easily imagine the smell of freshly baked bread. 2. You can easily call to mind the taste of peanut butter. 3. You are melting chocolate and somebody suggests adding basil, you can vividly imagine how that would taste before trying it. 4. When remembering an event that happened to you, there is a strong smell memory included. 5. You can imagine feeling the weight and texture of a brick in your hands.

api 2y ago

Look at how different we are from each other. Then consider that humans actually have less genetic variance than most mammal species. Now imagine meeting actual aliens whether from space or from our own AI efforts.

lumb63 2y ago

This test really threw me for a loop because it didn’t cover my main mode of thought. For me, I can consciously use my internal voice or visualize things, but if I am not actively trying to, they never happen. Typically, the results of my thoughts simply enter my conscious mind, and what brought them about is opaque to me.

roncesvalles 2y ago

I think to a large extent this is because people define "internal monologue" differently, so let me just clarify: a. There is a voice inside your head, and your consciousness is not the one talking: schizophrenia. b. There is a voice inside your head, it's you doing the talking i.e. you're doing everything but moving your lips and producing sound - the words are literally being narrated in your mind: internal monologue. c. No language is being "spoken" inside your head. If you're not talking, you're not forming sentences at all: apparently some people have this experience. My experience is b, but it is possible for me to also think without having to narrate everything (a bit of c). If anyone has a different internal experience, please reply.

kazinator 2y ago

> It seems like there's a large number of people who experience their thought exclusively as language. They must listen to a large amount of verbose drivel telling them how to weave their way through a crowd, or how to rotate a suitcase to fit it into a trunk.

FeepingCreature 2y ago

This is a big part of why I think LLMs can lead to AGI: humans clearly exist who can think equally well despite having some major gears in their brain going in different directions from each other. If you told me that there was a human who could only think by speaking and who experienced their entire reality and cognition in a textual form, occasionally augmented by flashes of visual or auditory data, I would not be willing to comfortably put an upper limit on their IQ despite all that. I'd just say "yeah, I guess? Weirder things have happened."

immibis 2y ago

It's difficult to say what thought is, but LLMs also solve more problems more correctly if you allow them to feed back through themselves multiple times (ask them to show their working) apparently for the obvious reason that it allows more computation to happen. I hypothesize that different people build different recurrence circuits, by chance. Some go through the audio cortex, some through the visual. Helen Keller described herself as driven solely by emotions, like a beast, before she had any kind of language: https://www.reddit.com/r/woahdude/comments/1jyo53/hellen_keller_describes_what_it_was_like_before/ https://www.reddit.com/r/woahdude/comments/1jyo53/hellen_kel...

zzo38computer 2y ago

> I've never really had a strong internal monologue when thinking, so my assumption would always be that of course, thinking isn't very linguistic (even if we can use it as a tool while thinking). I always had thought this is the case too. Thinking isn't linguistic but it can be helpful as a tool while thinking, especially while thinking about communication. It also seems obvious to me that language is a tool for communication rather than thought, although sometimes it also includes communication to yourself (in future). In some cases, I can visualize words as text too, especially if thinking about written communication. The quiz does not work.