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And yet anendophasia is a thing. Some people think without an inner monologue, without words[^0]. And they seem to do so quite well and quite successfully. [0]

• kubb 1mo ago
  I’m pretty sure I can do both. Can’t everyone?
  • polytely 1mo ago
    Yeah me too, and it feels like a lot of people who are exclusively 'stuck' in language seem to think the pre-language part is somehow inferior (which imo is very misguided)
    • Jtarii 1mo ago
      Thinking without language makes sense for problems that don't require language like visual art, but how do you solve complex logic problems or write a book without thinking in sentences.
      • bonoboTP 1mo ago
        You can think abstractly about geometry problems, or graph tgeory but even about linear algebra. Feynman describes how he felt while holding and analyzing problems in his mind. I'm less eloquent. Also you can think about the narrative and the valence of a scene for a book, without blabbering to yourself while planning the story. I can narrate it like as if I imagine a friend being there and translating my thought into language but it's an extra step. It also exhausts me more. Which makes coding with LLMs more tiring for me. Before it, I could code without language use exhausting my brain, but talking to LLMs requires putting all of it into English, while before I could just imagine a certain refactor as one coherent thought in my mind without turning it into sentences. Of course above a certain level of difficulty, putting thoughts down helps for problem solving, but a lot of that can be various types of sketch drawings and formulas too. It's likely a verbal and spatial heavy thought difference, the lawyer / engineer type of thinking difference.
      • NoMoreNicksLeft 1mo ago
        >but how do you solve complex logic problems If a species were (human level) intelligent, how would they have language first, if there is no need for an unintelligent species to have language (you know, other than bee booty-shaking tier language)? It becomes chicken and egg. They don't need the language without intelligence, and can't become intelligent without the language (all so they can boot up the internal monologue that is apparently sitting there waiting on a 12,000 word vocabulary). This is clear to me, because I don't rely on an internal monologue to think about such things. It is unimaginable to you, because you rely on an internal monologue. Human (and animal minds to a lesser extent) do not think in a spoken language, but in an internal symbolic "language of thought". It is beneath the perception of an "internal monologue", but also tends to atrophy quite severely for people who rely on an internal monologue. Even in your brain though, there are so many different mental processes that you are unaware of for this reason. You can't even reliably sense cause-and-effect in your own mind... the internal monologue just makes up whatever plausible best guesses it can about why you made this decision or that decision, about why you did X or didn't do Y. The internal monologue doesn't have access to that other part of your brain.
    • kelseyfrog 1mo ago
      I triggered a period of no internal monologue while driving once, just using basic meditative practices. What surprised me was that everything still worked. Without loss of ability or function, I could still navigate the world, follow rules, maintain safety. The experience made me appreciate how vast and competent the non-verbal part of the mind is. The verbal component is loud, takes up space, and generally acts as if it's the whole thing. It isn't. It's a symbolic veneer over something much more profound and mysterious than we generally have direct access to in our day to day lives.
  • NoMoreNicksLeft 1mo ago
    No. There are people who cannot exist without the internal monologue, and if unusual circumstances interrupt that internal monologue they experience anxiety, dysfunction, and a rapidly intensifying irritation that they can't even articulate (because there's no monologue to allow them to describe it). They're generally very stupid, but the internal monologue tells them that they should have a high opinion of their own intelligence. It's unclear to me if they can even pretend to understand the concept of metacognition. There is also a growing group of redditoids who believe that if you don't have an internal monologue you "have no soul".
    • bonoboTP 1mo ago
      If you spend your time reading reviews of books about other books that talk about the words of other writers who wrote about what others wrote, you start to believe that anything complex must be language-related. Try to do a mechanical or electrical engineering degree coasting only on internally narrated words. It won't work. It can work in soft fields where all criteria are about what words other humans like to hear and there is no other complex external arbiter.
  • ElFitz 1mo ago
    No, not everyone. A few simply don’t have an inner monologue. Many only know that way of thinking, and can’t begin to imagine what it would be like to think, or be, without one. Plus all the people somewhere between those two, whether or not they are themselves aware of it.
    • kubb 1mo ago
      But they can stil, you know, speak? So all they need for the inner monologue is to move their lips.