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I know it's bad to say this - lile telling someone who is ill that they are not - but I cannot believe that someone truly has no inner monologue and at the same

I know it's bad to say this - lile telling someone who is ill that they are not - but I cannot believe that someone truly has no inner monologue and at the same is capable of expressing complex ideas in writing or speech. What IS there then, if it's not quiet like the author describes? Could it be a lack of introspection? Have you been examined by any kind of specialist or is it self diagnosed?

JohnMakin 2y ago
People have asked me this. I don’t know what to say other than I just make the connections I need to in my head. sometimes it’s visual but it’s usually pretty abstract and I’m not really very conscious of it. From the outside it probably looks like intuition. I write a lot of things out and sketch things. i have a math heavy degree so pretty sure im not disabled in any kind of way. sometimes I struggle to explain my thought process but not usually. it is equally perplexing to me that people seem to think that verbalization of thoughts is needed to think.
- jvanderbot 2y ago
  When you consider a paragraph, perhaps to write, how do you plan it before writing? When you reflect on something embarrassing, how could it have gone differently? How do you imagine "I should have done this differently?" Imagine arguing with a friend, now a clone of yourself, now hold two options in your mind (what to have for dinner) and assign a clone to argue for each. Is it possible? You must get this all the time and I'm sorry, but it's so interesting! I'd buy all your beers for weeks just to chat about it.
  - JohnMakin 2y ago
    I don’t get this all the time or get into it because most people don’t understand or dismiss it. I just hope I can explain well enough. When I write it’s almost always flow of consciousness style and I make a lot of mistakes. In online or chat kind of settings it makes me look a little dumber than I am, I mix words up on the spot a lot, it’s probably the closest thing to whatever would be my “internal” narrative, also because I am limited by the speed at which I can type. So when to type a paragraph if I am being serious it usually takes 70+ revisions (not changing what I am saying) for me to consider it perfect. I don’t usually bother and go 1/10th of that for professional writing and tend to be called a decent writer (again, I have to try). So that’s probably the lack of narrative thing. writing my thoughts out helps. I have always kept extensive journals going back to when I was 5 or 6 or whenever I could write. for your second scenario yea that’s a very easy thing for me. I often argue with myself anyway. I mutter out loud sometimes, probably makes me seem a little unhinged but with what I do it fits right in with other “types.” I do visualize and play out scenarios a lot in my head, they are very vivid, and I am pretty proficient at going farther with this with lucid dreaming. Sights/sounds in my head are very easy for me. I just don’t really hear my own voice, or whatever. I think it comes with some downsides with introspection sometimes but I’ve been well aware of this for a while - which is why I think the “argue with yourself with two conflicting arguments” thing is probably easy for me. I am constantly in “arguments” with my own assumptions. I think this last thing is why I’ve always been fairly proficient with abstract math.
    - jvanderbot 2y ago
      Thanks for sharing. I find it impossible to differentiate what I consider my inner monologue from any of the above. So, maybe we are more similar than different.
    - the_gipsy 2y ago
      > I often argue with myself anyway. > I am constantly in “arguments” with my own assumptions. This is usually what best describes "having an internal monologue". Do you ever imagine yourself or other people saying hypothetical things?
      - JohnMakin 2y ago
        people describe it as some constant flow with an actual voice. I do not have that, and I don’t feel a need to conjure visions of arguing with myself to do so - that sounds weird to me. I don’t really know how else to describe it.
        jvanderbot 2y ago
        I don't hear a voice either. Or imagine one. I can just talk to myself. Maybe we're all weird.
        the_gipsy 2y ago
        To give some insight into what "monologue people" perceive: I don't exactly hear an actual voice, that would drive me crazy. I cannot do good multitasking with anything verbal going on. If someone is talking to me, I cannot do anything else that also requires my inner monologue well. I can drive a car, which doesn't require my inner monologue, and have a conversation with the passenger, but I cannot program or plan something while someone is talking into my ear all the time. But the monologue is there, almost uninterrupted. It's just that very often I don't notice it. I have a hard time ignoring actual voices, unless there is some sea of other background noises or chatter.
financltravsty 2y ago
Intuition. The neurons fire and piece together the dots. I can write quite well if I'm primed for it (big if). Speaking as well; but I have to be in the "headspace" for it. It's like sports. You are in the "zone." Though I've been told many people still have an inner monologue even during sport (sounds terribly distracting).
unaindz 2y ago
That is not something you diagnose and I doubt it's very important at all, just a different way of thinking. Words are just a way to communicate ideas but having the complete context of your own mind you don't need them, you can just think of the ideas directly instead of translating to words. I myself have an inner monologue like 80% of the time and the times that I don't thinking seems faster. The downside is being harder to translate into words if I need to explain the idea to others.
shippage 2y ago
The two sibling comments have great answers. For me, it feels like a very intuitive process. I've described it to others in the past as feeling like I'm constructing a sort of cognitive atom graph, where memories, emotions, facts, and concepts are the nodes, and the strengths of connection between these are the edges. To be clear, I'm not actually picturing a graph in my head; it's more that it feels similar in a lot of ways. This probably sounds incredibly complicated, byzantine, and wasteful to word thinkers, but for me, constructing these "graphs" is so natural and rapid, that I can easily outthink my ability to convert my thoughts to words. It's intuition driven, and operates very quickly, in a sort of semi-conscious scatter/gather way. I'm guessing other people may also do this subconsciously before they turn what they've gathered into words (maybe?), but for me, retrieving all this is often a more conscious activity. All of this is as natural to me as breathing. I’m not planning out which things I’m going to scatter-gather, it just sort of happens, just like breathing or beating my heart just sort of happens, and just like those two things I can either be aware of it and control it, or unaware of it and just let it flow. As an example, where someone else might literally think the words “my favorite flowers are roses”, I would grab concepts of flora, flower, plant reproduction, bees, nectar, pollen, etc. and facts like climbs trellises, susceptible to fungal infections, has thorns, and memories of many of the times I’ve seen roses or listened to someone talk about roses, and finally my emotions like happiness, fear (from the thorns), peacefulness, contentment, enjoyment, personal-ness, etc. Then link all of these together to give a graph that carries a lot of meaning that is extremely specific to me. All this happens in a tiny fraction of a second. I'm aware of all the parts that go into this thought, even as I understand what the sum of those parts adds up to. There's a great deal of nuance in my new way of thinking that's hard to convert into words in a concise way. "My favorite flowers are roses" is a highly pruned version of what I was actually thinking. It's not a better way or a worse way of thinking. It's just different. Like everything, it has its strengths, and it has its weaknesses.
- deleted 2y ago
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- the_gipsy 2y ago
  > "My favorite flowers are roses" is a highly pruned version of what I was actually thinking. In this scenario, would the phrase "My favorite flowers are roses" have materialized in your mind? Or if this scenario would be: you have been asked "What are your favorite flowers?", and you would just speak out those words to the other person without rehearsing in your head, would you be capable of recreating that scenario at another time, including the person asking you and you answering, in your head?
avalys 2y ago
If I am thinking about how to express a complex idea in writing or speech, I’ll certainly have an “internal monologue.” But if I’m just thinking about something myself, my thoughts just exist as abstract thoughts that aren’t tied to language. My brain is constantly thinking, but I’m not thinking in English! I could express the same sort of disbelief you did - I can’t imagine how slow and inefficient it must be to have to do all your thinking in terms of words as opposed just operating on the underlying ideas directly.
whatnow37373 2y ago
This is kicking the can down the road. I can ask you: what happens before you have "inner monologue"? Nothing? Words just pop into your head? How do you decide what to "inner monologue"? How can you have "complex inner monologue" without inner monologue discussing the coming inner monologue? We're the same, but I just skip the inner monologue. Now I'm typing and I have very little idea what comes next. I review it afterwards. I just have one level of this, you seem to have two and I don't know why you do it, but perhaps it's another level of control. Perhaps this bifurcation buys you something.
- the_gipsy 2y ago
  Do you ever "imagine", however vague that is, another person asking you a question or saying a statement? Or yourself making a statement or question to someone else? What I'm actually challenging, is that people exist that can e.g. write coherent paragraphs like these comments, with having absolutely no inner monologue, ever. I don't buy that there is "another inner language of thoughts", of the same or greater complexity than our known language, which has not been discovered or described at all. (Warning: Bad Analogy incoming) You could rewrite all the software of a modern computer in assembly. And the computer actually runs machine code. However you could not have reached that mass of assembly code on your own, without replicating the complexity of the concepts of higher programming languages. I don't doubt that there are people whose inner monologue is quieter, slower, less frequent, or whatever. I doubt that an adult can not have any inner monologue at all, and function "normally". Much like the author described.
  - whatnow37373 2y ago
    This is quite a swampy bit of territory you're joining me in here so please excuse the mess. I'm going to attempt a good faith interpretation here so we're clear. I want to understand your position, because I think it's, if nothing else, very interesting to contemplate these matters. First of all, I have to clear the obvious debris out of the way. I can read and I can cogitate lingual constructs. That includes creating monologues. Sometimes I "role-play" some professor or something and talk through my problem out loud - when alone. I tend to do this with philosophical problems, but it's unnatural and quite entertaining. The last time I did this must have been a few months ago when pondering Hume's problem of "necessary connection" or Kant's .. everything. I think this is the closest I get to "inner monologue" and it does have its uses, because language in and of itself has a computational character of sorts. By speaking the words out loud I sometimes trigger snippets of verbal knowledge that wouldn't be triggered otherwise. If this qualifies me as "having inner monologue" already then we're done. By that definition I am in your club and I'm fine with that. What would still remain however is that those role-playing sessions are deliberate and unnecessary. I can quite easily go without them. It's a trick I've picked up, but it's by no means the only way to make progress. Their nature is comparable to rubber duck debugging: by explaining your problem you work through it differently somehow than if you'd remain "stuck in your head". I can go without rubber ducking, but it's still a useful trick. Another way of approaching this problem is through programming - assuming you code. You don't literally think "Ah, I see a linked list here and it gets initialized here.. [etc]"? Or maybe you do? I can tell you quite firmly that I don't. If you also don't then just assume I go through my life in the same abstract wordless mode. > I don't buy that there is "another inner language of thoughts", of the same or greater complexity than our known language, which has not been discovered or described at all. I find this quite interesting, because I don't understand it. Our language is made of rules and in and of itself has no content. It's literally made out of just rules. Any intelligence has to be brought into it. This was quite clear with GPT-2 era transformers spewing sentences like: "The bear and the snake are wearing stairs". You have to know quite a lot before you can explain why this is nonsense despite it being a valid sentence and it's not clear to me at all that this knowledge itself is purely lingual. This "inner language" you speak of is just raw cogitation and surely you employ it just as much as me but we assign different words to things. This "inner language" is not to be put "besides" our natural languages, it's the core of it. Without it, there would be no "natural language". I view natural language as a communication convenience, built on top of and not besides raw wordless thought. I'm not 100% sure how to handle your analogy because, as you've indicated, it's quite tricky, but I'll try something. Sorry for the mess again: I agree that higher level abstractions enable cognitive moves that just won't be obvious from raw assembly. Where we disagree, I think, is that these "higher level concepts" are somehow spontaneously lingual by nature. In my view of things these higher level concepts are still raw thought, but .. higher. More complex. Encoding these new more complex cogitations necessitates more complicated lingual structures. Let's put it this way: do you first cogitate the "class concept" or does the "class syntax" enable the "class"-cogitation? Perhaps for a programmer it's the second, but for the one inventing the abstraction surely the cogitation must come first and, lacking existing lingual constructs, must be cogitated in a purer form. My problem would thus be: how could you possibly cogitate something that doesn't yet exist in language if all you have is language? "class" does not "fall out of" assembly naturally - inside of it. You need to bring cogitation from outside and then realize it and be able to think of an encoding for that new concept to communicate the idea.

JohnMakin 2y ago

People have asked me this. I don’t know what to say other than I just make the connections I need to in my head. sometimes it’s visual but it’s usually pretty abstract and I’m not really very conscious of it. From the outside it probably looks like intuition. I write a lot of things out and sketch things. i have a math heavy degree so pretty sure im not disabled in any kind of way. sometimes I struggle to explain my thought process but not usually. it is equally perplexing to me that people seem to think that verbalization of thoughts is needed to think.

jvanderbot 2y ago
When you consider a paragraph, perhaps to write, how do you plan it before writing? When you reflect on something embarrassing, how could it have gone differently? How do you imagine "I should have done this differently?" Imagine arguing with a friend, now a clone of yourself, now hold two options in your mind (what to have for dinner) and assign a clone to argue for each. Is it possible? You must get this all the time and I'm sorry, but it's so interesting! I'd buy all your beers for weeks just to chat about it.
- JohnMakin 2y ago
  I don’t get this all the time or get into it because most people don’t understand or dismiss it. I just hope I can explain well enough. When I write it’s almost always flow of consciousness style and I make a lot of mistakes. In online or chat kind of settings it makes me look a little dumber than I am, I mix words up on the spot a lot, it’s probably the closest thing to whatever would be my “internal” narrative, also because I am limited by the speed at which I can type. So when to type a paragraph if I am being serious it usually takes 70+ revisions (not changing what I am saying) for me to consider it perfect. I don’t usually bother and go 1/10th of that for professional writing and tend to be called a decent writer (again, I have to try). So that’s probably the lack of narrative thing. writing my thoughts out helps. I have always kept extensive journals going back to when I was 5 or 6 or whenever I could write. for your second scenario yea that’s a very easy thing for me. I often argue with myself anyway. I mutter out loud sometimes, probably makes me seem a little unhinged but with what I do it fits right in with other “types.” I do visualize and play out scenarios a lot in my head, they are very vivid, and I am pretty proficient at going farther with this with lucid dreaming. Sights/sounds in my head are very easy for me. I just don’t really hear my own voice, or whatever. I think it comes with some downsides with introspection sometimes but I’ve been well aware of this for a while - which is why I think the “argue with yourself with two conflicting arguments” thing is probably easy for me. I am constantly in “arguments” with my own assumptions. I think this last thing is why I’ve always been fairly proficient with abstract math.
  - jvanderbot 2y ago
    Thanks for sharing. I find it impossible to differentiate what I consider my inner monologue from any of the above. So, maybe we are more similar than different.
  - the_gipsy 2y ago
    > I often argue with myself anyway. > I am constantly in “arguments” with my own assumptions. This is usually what best describes "having an internal monologue". Do you ever imagine yourself or other people saying hypothetical things?
    - JohnMakin 2y ago
      people describe it as some constant flow with an actual voice. I do not have that, and I don’t feel a need to conjure visions of arguing with myself to do so - that sounds weird to me. I don’t really know how else to describe it.
      - jvanderbot 2y ago
        I don't hear a voice either. Or imagine one. I can just talk to myself. Maybe we're all weird.
      - the_gipsy 2y ago
        To give some insight into what "monologue people" perceive: I don't exactly hear an actual voice, that would drive me crazy. I cannot do good multitasking with anything verbal going on. If someone is talking to me, I cannot do anything else that also requires my inner monologue well. I can drive a car, which doesn't require my inner monologue, and have a conversation with the passenger, but I cannot program or plan something while someone is talking into my ear all the time. But the monologue is there, almost uninterrupted. It's just that very often I don't notice it. I have a hard time ignoring actual voices, unless there is some sea of other background noises or chatter.

financltravsty 2y ago

Intuition. The neurons fire and piece together the dots. I can write quite well if I'm primed for it (big if). Speaking as well; but I have to be in the "headspace" for it. It's like sports. You are in the "zone." Though I've been told many people still have an inner monologue even during sport (sounds terribly distracting).

unaindz 2y ago

That is not something you diagnose and I doubt it's very important at all, just a different way of thinking. Words are just a way to communicate ideas but having the complete context of your own mind you don't need them, you can just think of the ideas directly instead of translating to words. I myself have an inner monologue like 80% of the time and the times that I don't thinking seems faster. The downside is being harder to translate into words if I need to explain the idea to others.

shippage 2y ago

The two sibling comments have great answers. For me, it feels like a very intuitive process. I've described it to others in the past as feeling like I'm constructing a sort of cognitive atom graph, where memories, emotions, facts, and concepts are the nodes, and the strengths of connection between these are the edges. To be clear, I'm not actually picturing a graph in my head; it's more that it feels similar in a lot of ways. This probably sounds incredibly complicated, byzantine, and wasteful to word thinkers, but for me, constructing these "graphs" is so natural and rapid, that I can easily outthink my ability to convert my thoughts to words. It's intuition driven, and operates very quickly, in a sort of semi-conscious scatter/gather way. I'm guessing other people may also do this subconsciously before they turn what they've gathered into words (maybe?), but for me, retrieving all this is often a more conscious activity. All of this is as natural to me as breathing. I’m not planning out which things I’m going to scatter-gather, it just sort of happens, just like breathing or beating my heart just sort of happens, and just like those two things I can either be aware of it and control it, or unaware of it and just let it flow. As an example, where someone else might literally think the words “my favorite flowers are roses”, I would grab concepts of flora, flower, plant reproduction, bees, nectar, pollen, etc. and facts like climbs trellises, susceptible to fungal infections, has thorns, and memories of many of the times I’ve seen roses or listened to someone talk about roses, and finally my emotions like happiness, fear (from the thorns), peacefulness, contentment, enjoyment, personal-ness, etc. Then link all of these together to give a graph that carries a lot of meaning that is extremely specific to me. All this happens in a tiny fraction of a second. I'm aware of all the parts that go into this thought, even as I understand what the sum of those parts adds up to. There's a great deal of nuance in my new way of thinking that's hard to convert into words in a concise way. "My favorite flowers are roses" is a highly pruned version of what I was actually thinking. It's not a better way or a worse way of thinking. It's just different. Like everything, it has its strengths, and it has its weaknesses.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
the_gipsy 2y ago
> "My favorite flowers are roses" is a highly pruned version of what I was actually thinking. In this scenario, would the phrase "My favorite flowers are roses" have materialized in your mind? Or if this scenario would be: you have been asked "What are your favorite flowers?", and you would just speak out those words to the other person without rehearsing in your head, would you be capable of recreating that scenario at another time, including the person asking you and you answering, in your head?

avalys 2y ago

If I am thinking about how to express a complex idea in writing or speech, I’ll certainly have an “internal monologue.” But if I’m just thinking about something myself, my thoughts just exist as abstract thoughts that aren’t tied to language. My brain is constantly thinking, but I’m not thinking in English! I could express the same sort of disbelief you did - I can’t imagine how slow and inefficient it must be to have to do all your thinking in terms of words as opposed just operating on the underlying ideas directly.

whatnow37373 2y ago

This is kicking the can down the road. I can ask you: what happens before you have "inner monologue"? Nothing? Words just pop into your head? How do you decide what to "inner monologue"? How can you have "complex inner monologue" without inner monologue discussing the coming inner monologue? We're the same, but I just skip the inner monologue. Now I'm typing and I have very little idea what comes next. I review it afterwards. I just have one level of this, you seem to have two and I don't know why you do it, but perhaps it's another level of control. Perhaps this bifurcation buys you something.

the_gipsy 2y ago
Do you ever "imagine", however vague that is, another person asking you a question or saying a statement? Or yourself making a statement or question to someone else? What I'm actually challenging, is that people exist that can e.g. write coherent paragraphs like these comments, with having absolutely no inner monologue, ever. I don't buy that there is "another inner language of thoughts", of the same or greater complexity than our known language, which has not been discovered or described at all. (Warning: Bad Analogy incoming) You could rewrite all the software of a modern computer in assembly. And the computer actually runs machine code. However you could not have reached that mass of assembly code on your own, without replicating the complexity of the concepts of higher programming languages. I don't doubt that there are people whose inner monologue is quieter, slower, less frequent, or whatever. I doubt that an adult can not have any inner monologue at all, and function "normally". Much like the author described.
- whatnow37373 2y ago
  This is quite a swampy bit of territory you're joining me in here so please excuse the mess. I'm going to attempt a good faith interpretation here so we're clear. I want to understand your position, because I think it's, if nothing else, very interesting to contemplate these matters. First of all, I have to clear the obvious debris out of the way. I can read and I can cogitate lingual constructs. That includes creating monologues. Sometimes I "role-play" some professor or something and talk through my problem out loud - when alone. I tend to do this with philosophical problems, but it's unnatural and quite entertaining. The last time I did this must have been a few months ago when pondering Hume's problem of "necessary connection" or Kant's .. everything. I think this is the closest I get to "inner monologue" and it does have its uses, because language in and of itself has a computational character of sorts. By speaking the words out loud I sometimes trigger snippets of verbal knowledge that wouldn't be triggered otherwise. If this qualifies me as "having inner monologue" already then we're done. By that definition I am in your club and I'm fine with that. What would still remain however is that those role-playing sessions are deliberate and unnecessary. I can quite easily go without them. It's a trick I've picked up, but it's by no means the only way to make progress. Their nature is comparable to rubber duck debugging: by explaining your problem you work through it differently somehow than if you'd remain "stuck in your head". I can go without rubber ducking, but it's still a useful trick. Another way of approaching this problem is through programming - assuming you code. You don't literally think "Ah, I see a linked list here and it gets initialized here.. [etc]"? Or maybe you do? I can tell you quite firmly that I don't. If you also don't then just assume I go through my life in the same abstract wordless mode. > I don't buy that there is "another inner language of thoughts", of the same or greater complexity than our known language, which has not been discovered or described at all. I find this quite interesting, because I don't understand it. Our language is made of rules and in and of itself has no content. It's literally made out of just rules. Any intelligence has to be brought into it. This was quite clear with GPT-2 era transformers spewing sentences like: "The bear and the snake are wearing stairs". You have to know quite a lot before you can explain why this is nonsense despite it being a valid sentence and it's not clear to me at all that this knowledge itself is purely lingual. This "inner language" you speak of is just raw cogitation and surely you employ it just as much as me but we assign different words to things. This "inner language" is not to be put "besides" our natural languages, it's the core of it. Without it, there would be no "natural language". I view natural language as a communication convenience, built on top of and not besides raw wordless thought. I'm not 100% sure how to handle your analogy because, as you've indicated, it's quite tricky, but I'll try something. Sorry for the mess again: I agree that higher level abstractions enable cognitive moves that just won't be obvious from raw assembly. Where we disagree, I think, is that these "higher level concepts" are somehow spontaneously lingual by nature. In my view of things these higher level concepts are still raw thought, but .. higher. More complex. Encoding these new more complex cogitations necessitates more complicated lingual structures. Let's put it this way: do you first cogitate the "class concept" or does the "class syntax" enable the "class"-cogitation? Perhaps for a programmer it's the second, but for the one inventing the abstraction surely the cogitation must come first and, lacking existing lingual constructs, must be cogitated in a purer form. My problem would thus be: how could you possibly cogitate something that doesn't yet exist in language if all you have is language? "class" does not "fall out of" assembly naturally - inside of it. You need to bring cogitation from outside and then realize it and be able to think of an encoding for that new concept to communicate the idea.