Do you have an inner monologue

[Huntn]

Woah! That would be both miraculous and terrifying to think of having that internal silence.

How do they function?

Isn't this essentially like not having a conscious? Or a diminished one?

As one who has an inner monologue, it’s not there all the time, but... I think without one (inner monologue), there are all the things the brain does, are still happening, but without words. In some cases there are visuals, feelings, and you know there is a lot you do instinctively without a inner word spoken.

Some interesting articles. The most in-depth is the last one about Pristine Inner Experience:

People Are Shocked to Discover That Not Everyone Has an Inner Monologue

People Have Discovered That Not Everyone Has an Inner Monologue and It Has Sparked a Dialogue Online

Do you have an internal monologue?

mymodernmet.com

Interestingly, researchers at Harvard University have found that visual and verbal thinking are highly linked. While people often think of themselves as being either more verbal or visual, this isn’t necessarily the case. In fact, people with a clear inner monologue typically have stronger mental visuals to accompany their verbal thoughts.

Whether you have a constant narration present in your head or hear nothing at all, the debate raises interesting questions about how we think and process information. Certainly, the next time you see someone lost in thought, you might just wonder what the conversation is inside their head.

APPARENTLY, SOME PEOPLE DO NOT HAVE AN INNER VOICE—HERE’S HOW THAT HAPPENS

Apparently, some people do not have an inner voice—here's how that happens

But here's how to befriend yours, if you have one.

www.wellandgood.com

So how does inner speech come to be, and is it always running in our minds?
“Inner speech is the product of the default mode network or DMN of the brain,” says Dr. Brenner. “It’s a network of different areas of the brain that become very active, all together, when we’re not engaged in doing anything task-oriented—when we’re just thinking or daydreaming. It turns out that it never fully stops either—it just gets suppressed the busier and more actively engaged we get.”

Whether you have a mental narrator or not, none of us really think in words when we’re completely engaged, skiing fast down a mountain, or scaling a cliff. Likewise, our thoughts lose words when we’re fully listening to music, the incessant drilling of construction at work (just me?), or someone else’s words.


“The default mode network is what produces that whole running narrative in your head—all the things you think about, connecting your past to your present and thinking about the future, all of your opinions and self-comparisons,” Dr. Brenner says. “It’s the seat of creativity and imagination, but it’s also the seat of neurosis, depression and anxiety.”

The bottom line is, if you don’t have an inner monologue, must be nice and you might not magically manifest one. If an inner monologue is your reality, though, how do we train and tame our inner voice? How do we make it our friend and guide instead of your enemy and tormentor?

——————
The following is an interesting article because this author mentions 5 types of the pristine inner experience, but only describes 3 examples of how they are described, leaving the other 2 for a future post.

• inner speech
• inner seeing
• feeling
• ?
• ?

Not Everyone Conducts Inner Speech

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/pristine-inner-experience/201110/not-everyone-conducts-inner-speech

Five main characteristics emerged, each occurring in about a quarter of all samples (many samples had more than one characteristic). Three of those five characteristics may not surprise you: inner speech occurred in about a quarter of all samples, inner seeing occurred in about a quarter of all samples, and feelings occurred in about a quarter of all samples. The other two phenomena occurred just as frequently but are not so well known.

Consider inner speech. Subjects experienced themselves as inwardly talking to themselves in 26 percent of all samples, but there were large individual differences: some subjects never experienced inner speech; other subjects experienced inner speech in as many as 75 percent of their samples. The median percentage across subjects was 20 percent.

———————————
And it's not that the remaining phenomena are minor, in fourth and fifth place after inner speech, inner seeing, and feeling. All five are in basically a five-way tie for first place. I'll describe features four and five in subsequent post.

Pristine Inner Experience and Descriptive Experience Sampling: Implications for Psychology

Frontiers | Pristine Inner Experience and Descriptive Experience Sampling: Implications for Psychology

Pristine inner experience is that which is directly present in awareness before it is distorted by attempts at observation or interpretation. Many psychologi...

www.frontiersin.org

Pristine inner experience is that which is directly present in awareness before it is distorted by attempts at observation or interpretation. Many psychological methods, including most introspective methods, attempt to measure some aspect of pristine inner experience (thoughts, feelings, mental imagery, sensations, etc.). We believe, however, that these methods produce unspecifiable combinations of pristine inner experience, beliefs about the self, beliefs about what inner experience should be like, inaccurate recollections, miscommunications, and other confounding influences.

 

[LizKat]

A lot of this stuff ends up confounded by some form of "the observer effect", no?

I mean if I feel a twinge in my knee as I start walking across a room, first I just feel it and may adjust the way I'm walking, perhaps without consciously making that adjustment.

So in a way there's an inner monologue going on that I don't participate in. I may even find it difficult to get involved in it, should a doctor later tell me hey ya know you're not helping when you walk like that if your knee hurts, so "do this instead" when adjusting gait...

But take that situation: once I've adjusted my gait and since I'm not falling down and apparently not about to croak, my brain has the option of offering any other related info that it happens to have stashed away at some point. And some of that may be visual or also verbalized.

Maybe I've read about how excess body weight puts undue stress on the knees.

Maybe I've recently learned "the hard way" that how I handle pivoting as I navigate small-space stairwells with angled landings isn't the best way to do that. Maybe I almost tell myself out loud "watch it now" when I'm rounding one of those steps on the way up to walking north when I started out walking south.

None of those things starts out as verbalization in response to a physical sensation: I may just have been leafing through a magazine while seated in a beauty salon when I bump into the piece about losing weight and maybe staving off knee surgery for awhile!

However, those are still parts of some kind of inner monologue. My brain has somehow managed to relate things once seen or read or wondered about at different times, to that twinge in my knee, and in almost real time. It apparently offers them back to me only if it figures I have time to process consciously some more info about my physical situation. I mean if my knee buckles suddenly, or I trip and start to fall, my brain is going to be busy telling me to drop that cuppa tea and put out a hand to keep my head from hitting the floor. I'm not going to be thinking anything past "oh noes..."

That stuff fascinates me, but I do think trying to observe an inner monologue while experiencing it at the same time almost certainly leaves out some important steps we're not able to be aware of in that same "real time". Stuff at the neurological, biochemical level. Stuff like those ephemeral towers and ladders our brains apparently build and then deconstruct after solving problems. I think I once before posted bits from a layman's discussion of how algebraic topology is now used to analyze how our brains process stimuli using creation of multi-dimensional (as many as 11 dimensions) "sandcastle-like" structures that disappear once a particular issue has been addressed

Weird how the more complex the challenge, the more dimensions are involved in the neural network. I mean "so it's not rocket science" may be pretty much on the money, in that some problems can be addressed with neural sandcastles in two or three dimensions But if we start down the road away from an Occam's razor approach to something, then our brain obligingly adds extra dimensions to handle the additional load on the neural network. I guess it's finally rocket science when we max out at 11 dimensions and still can't figure out if the butler did it?

Anyway seems to me that we all likely have some interior monologues going on that we're not aware of, even if we may complicate (or multiply them!) just by wondering about the ones we can actually observe in real time when we try to do that.

 

[Huntn]

A lot of this stuff ends up confounded by some form of "the observer effect", no?

I mean if I feel a twinge in my knee as I start walking across a room, first I just feel it and may adjust the way I'm walking, perhaps without consciously making that adjustment.

So in a way there's an inner monologue going on that I don't participate in. I may even find it difficult to get involved in it, should a doctor later tell me hey ya know you're not helping when you walk like that if your knee hurts, so "do this instead" when adjusting gait...

But take that situation: once I've adjusted my gait and since I'm not falling down and apparently not about to croak, my brain has the option of offering any other related info that it happens to have stashed away at some point. And some of that may be visual or also verbalized.

Maybe I've read about how excess body weight puts undue stress on the knees.

Maybe I've recently learned "the hard way" that how I handle pivoting as I navigate small-space stairwells with angled landings isn't the best way to do that. Maybe I almost tell myself out loud "watch it now" when I'm rounding one of those steps on the way up to walking north when I started out walking south.

None of those things starts out as verbalization in response to a physical sensation: I may just have been leafing through a magazine while seated in a beauty salon when I bump into the piece about losing weight and maybe staving off knee surgery for awhile!

However, those are still parts of some kind of inner monologue. My brain has somehow managed to relate things once seen or read or wondered about at different times, to that twinge in my knee, and in almost real time. It apparently offers them back to me only if it figures I have time to process consciously some more info about my physical situation. I mean if my knee buckles suddenly, or I trip and start to fall, my brain is going to be busy telling me to drop that cuppa tea and put out a hand to keep my head from hitting the floor. I'm not going to be thinking anything past "oh noes..."

That stuff fascinates me, but I do think trying to observe an inner monologue while experiencing it at the same time almost certainly leaves out some important steps we're not able to be aware of in that same "real time". Stuff at the neurological, biochemical level. Stuff like those ephemeral towers and ladders our brains apparently build and then deconstruct after solving problems. I think I once before posted bits from a layman's discussion of how algebraic topology is now used to analyze how our brains process stimuli using creation of multi-dimensional (as many as 11 dimensions) "sandcastle-like" structures that disappear once a particular issue has been addressed

Weird how the more complex the challenge, the more dimensions are involved in the neural network. I mean "so it's not rocket science" may be pretty much on the money, in that some problems can be addressed with neural sandcastles in two or three dimensions But if we start down the road away from an Occam's razor approach to something, then our brain obligingly adds extra dimensions to handle the additional load on the neural network. I guess it's finally rocket science when we max out at 11 dimensions and still can't figure out if the butler did it?

Anyway seems to me that we all likely have some interior monologues going on that we're not aware of, even if we may complicate (or multiply them!) just by wondering about the ones we can actually observe in real time when we try to do that.

My impression is the brain and body is humming along, and the part that you are conscious of, that you have conscious choice about, thinking at the conscious level may involve putting some of those thoughts into words or images. Speaking of walking you would never think about it unless you had been advised there was a certain way you needed to walk, that you normally would not do. When the conscious planning comes into it, there might be words or images produced as a reminder.

As one of the articles said when you are intensely involved in some activity like sking down a mountain side, there maybe thoughts about choices like go left at the fork, but all of you muscle efforts and reaction don’t surface as a monologue as it’s happening. The other example is landing an airplane and judging when to pull the power and start the flare. Those actions maybe spoken out loud if you are teaching but if you are doing it yourself, there is no monologue, at least I have never heard one.

What I am trying to imagine is going shopping with a list in my head, it would be the words, like meat, butter, milk thought of, maybe, most likely not the words as visual text, unless it was a long hard to remember list, nor the images of things like a carton of milk.

 

[LizKat]

What I am trying to imagine is going shopping with a list in my head, it would be the words, like meat, butter, milk thought of, maybe, most likely not the words as visual text, unless it was a long hard to remember list, nor the images of things like a carton of milk.

I see some words as text strings when I've been unsure how to pronounce them in the past and so mentally see their phonetic spellings if I did ever look them up, e.g., the last name of writer J.M.Coetzee I still always see in my head as Coetzee (Afrikaans: [kut 'sɪə]) and can hear myself saying it too..

And if I never looked up such words, then weirdly when I see them yet again in print, I see them in my mind also as text images in a big, bold font. My brain is nudging me: Look It Up. Get It Right. Then it's not an interior monologue any more but dialogue and I'm sometimes offering up "Get Off My Case."

political sidebar: I actually like that infamous Zara raincoat I really don't care do u?​

I also see as text in my head any words I've ever found hard to type correctly because of the occurrence in a word of the same letter as a singleton AND as a repeated letter. There's some sort of mental-physical hesitation as I type when it's a word like "Cincinnati" or "narcissism".

Is that interior monologue? Sure, I guess. Or a struggle between physical dexterity and a visual memory.

I'm better off slowing down to type a remembered word's tricky spelling so I can "see it" in my mind, but when it comes to something like playing the piano, I'm much better off letting motor memory have the upper hand if it's about playing a tricky couple of measures in a memorized keyboard piece.​

I can sometimes see parts of the score for a memorized composition in my head while I'm playing it. Images of it emerge unbidden, and may have to do with my having been my own page turner: I often see those particular bars flash up when I play without a score, can even see any hand-penciled fingering notes! So my brain when I was learning the piece must have figured "ok she needs help here!" and emphasizes memory of those page-turn places. But later on at some random point when playing, if I realize I'm losing track of the piece, I can't usually fish up a visual memory in real time, so best shut all images out and just hope motor memory still has a grip on the thing.​

Back to lists: when I write "tofu" on a list, I see an image of the exact kind of tofu in the brand packaging that I mean to buy, colors and all detail.

When I put "Cheerios" on a list though, I don't even flash up an image of the yellow box.

Not sure how that works.

I mean I know why I don't write on a list what to my mind is the generic name of Cheerios:

"little cardboard tasting processed oats in the shape of a circular doughnut".​

is exactly why I write "Cheerios".

Just not sure why I don't see in my mind the image of the Cheerios box.

By same token I do understand why I don't write "Nasoya organic extra firm tofu" when an image of a packaging with that on it is exactly what I see in my mind when writing "tofu" on my list. I am just not sure why brain later says "is this it?" and shows me my mental image of Nasoya box when I look at the word "tofu" on the list.

So I think interior monologue observed may look/feel like laziness or just not there, but it's actually insistence of the brain on executing its own idea of efficient use of energy: "I got it... leave it to me."


I guess it's none of my biz why my brain is sure about what's a box of Cheerios in a store, without comparing the word I write on a list to an image it has stored somewhere up there in "our attic". I've never come home with the wrong cereal even when there are competitor store brands in boxes that are very similar. But I'll close with this: I've been seeing a box of Cheerios in the house since I was maybe ten or so. But tofu only since I was 35? So I'm a slow learner: my brain is sure what's Cheerios now. As for tofu it's still willing to ask "is this it?" and show me a picture.

 

[ghboard2010]

Yeah, that inner dialog. I verbalize my thoughts when I am working through technical somethings like troubleshooting, writing code, etc. When I do this at home, drives my wife bonkers, tells me to keep it myself, doesn't want to hear it. Over the years I have worked with quite a number of engineers and technicians doing this when working in a lab environment. It gets pretty interesting with a group of us the same lab room "muttering under our breath" about some technical issue such as mixer harmonics bleeding into an IF strip.

 

[LizKat]

Yeah, that inner dialog. I verbalize my thoughts when I am working through technical somethings like troubleshooting, writing code, etc. When I do this at home, drives my wife bonkers, tells me to keep it myself, doesn't want to hear it. Over the years I have worked with quite a number of engineers and technicians doing this when working in a lab environment. It gets pretty interesting with a group of us the same lab room "muttering under our breath" about some technical issue such as mixer harmonics bleeding into an IF strip.

The boss of the Windoze tech support at one of my shops had a swear jar front and center on his desk.😂

 

[Huntn]

I see some words as text strings when I've been unsure how to pronounce them in the past and so mentally see their phonetic spellings if I did ever look them up, e.g., the last name of writer J.M.Coetzee I still always see in my head as Coetzee (Afrikaans: [kut 'sɪə]) and can hear myself saying it too..

And if I never looked up such words, then weirdly when I see them yet again in print, I see them in my mind also as text images in a big, bold font. My brain is nudging me: Look It Up. Get It Right. Then it's not an interior monologue any more but dialogue and I'm sometimes offering up "Get Off My Case."

political sidebar: I actually like that infamous Zara raincoat I really don't care do u?​

I also see as text in my head any words I've ever found hard to type correctly because of the occurrence in a word of the same letter as a singleton AND as a repeated letter. There's some sort of mental-physical hesitation as I type when it's a word like "Cincinnati" or "narcissism".

Is that interior monologue? Sure, I guess. Or a struggle between physical dexterity and a visual memory.

I'm better off slowing down to type a remembered word's tricky spelling so I can "see it" in my mind, but when it comes to something like playing the piano, I'm much better off letting motor memory have the upper hand if it's about playing a tricky couple of measures in a memorized keyboard piece.​

I can sometimes see parts of the score for a memorized composition in my head while I'm playing it. Images of it emerge unbidden, and may have to do with my having been my own page turner: I often see those particular bars flash up when I play without a score, can even see any hand-penciled fingering notes! So my brain when I was learning the piece must have figured "ok she needs help here!" and emphasizes memory of those page-turn places. But later on at some random point when playing, if I realize I'm losing track of the piece, I can't usually fish up a visual memory in real time, so best shut all images out and just hope motor memory still has a grip on the thing.​

Back to lists: when I write "tofu" on a list, I see an image of the exact kind of tofu in the brand packaging that I mean to buy, colors and all detail.

When I put "Cheerios" on a list though, I don't even flash up an image of the yellow box.

Not sure how that works.

I mean I know why I don't write on a list what to my mind is the generic name of Cheerios:

"little cardboard tasting processed oats in the shape of a circular doughnut".​

is exactly why I write "Cheerios".

Just not sure why I don't see in my mind the image of the Cheerios box.

By same token I do understand why I don't write "Nasoya organic extra firm tofu" when an image of a packaging with that on it is exactly what I see in my mind when writing "tofu" on my list. I am just not sure why brain later says "is this it?" and shows me my mental image of Nasoya box when I look at the word "tofu" on the list.

So I think interior monologue observed may look/feel like laziness or just not there, but it's actually insistence of the brain on executing its own idea of efficient use of energy: "I got it... leave it to me."


I guess it's none of my biz why my brain is sure about what's a box of Cheerios in a store, without comparing the word I write on a list to an image it has stored somewhere up there in "our attic". I've never come home with the wrong cereal even when there are competitor store brands in boxes that are very similar. But I'll close with this: I've been seeing a box of Cheerios in the house since I was maybe ten or so. But tofu only since I was 35? So I'm a slow learner: my brain is sure what's Cheerios now. As for tofu it's still willing to ask "is this it?" and show me a picture.

Interesting, when I spell a hard word I never picture it, I just start spelling , and usually curse at the MRs spell check, when it does not get what I’m spelling. But sometimes I get it right Like conscious. 😁

 

[jeyf]

Apparently some time in my childhood I was talking to myself quite a lot. My mother would hit my knuckels with a ruler when she cought me doing it. Probably for the good bevause these days i outline a process on a journal i keep in a cloud service. It is on all my copmputers and the iPhone. Through out the day i can update my progress and add to the list.

I am retired now, my mother never hit me with a ruler but rather bought my my first Irish Setter "Shamus" that was my constant companion. Dogs, having low verbal skills, I could talk to him all day and never an arugment. I still have the Setter thing going, and its my constant companion.

Shamus.

 

[c deerinck]

I have no internal monologue at all. When I try, I tend to interrupt myself. I think way faster than even an auctioneer could talk. Many people here are saying they can't imagine what that would be like. The same is true for me, I can't imagine having to internally verbally say all of the things that I think. On top of that, I sometimes think things that can't really be put into words. Think about experiencing something, and knowing that even a video or a picture could never capture it. How could words possibly do it justice? How do you think about that memory? Only with words? I can't even imagine how limiting that would be, and yet from all of the above, that is how most people live. I'm speechless...

 

[LizKat]

I have no internal monologue at all. When I try, I tend to interrupt myself. I think way faster than even an auctioneer could talk. Many people here are saying they can't imagine what that would be like. The same is true for me, I can't imagine having to internally verbally say all of the things that I think. On top of that, I sometimes think things that can't really be put into words. Think about experiencing something, and knowing that even a video or a picture could never capture it. How could words possibly do it justice? How do you think about that memory? Only with words? I can't even imagine how limiting that would be, and yet from all of the above, that is how most people live. I'm speechless...

Oh I don't think most of us are saying we verbalize everything, or ever experience interior monologues as the only way of our being. Surely we all have experiences that don't lend themselves to verbalization or even imagery, just.... feeling, just being. A gentle breeze at the late sundown in summer, the look of moonlight on mundane objects standing in a snowfield that turns them all into fantastical things with no name, the feeling when an infant curls fingers around one of our own, a fishercat's harsh, haunting call in the dark... there's no monologue going on then for anyone really, right? it's all feelings and maybe a rush of assorted hormones.

I took the OP to be asking whether if and when we do experience an inner monologue, does it then take a known or familiar format like verbalization or visual imaging.

I certainly have times, especially when listening to music, that I couldn't begin to assign a type or format to what's happening in my consciousness or near-consciousness, and yet it's not necessarily devoid of thought. I mean there could be pattern recognition going on, or just a feeling of expanding spaciousness when I hear certain sacred or sung secular works, something like say the Brahms Requiem or Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde, even if part of my mind might also be analyzing harmonies or even taking a performer to task. I honestly don't think I form the words "Wow is he singing flat.." in my head when the tenor can't quite get there, it's just a kind of wince, or a nudging-up impulse: he's flat and I'm like c'mon man but there are no words happening.

There's not usually my own verbalization of a response going on then for me. That to me that would be something separate from the part of my experience of music that involves recognition of words, like an unspoken, unverbalized "oh that's in German" or "what a beautiful line there." Later on I might end up in a monologue that does end up verbalized, perhaps thinking about other performances of that work I just heard, or forming the idea I might want to buy a certain recording, etc.

 

[Septembersrain]

I feel quite jealous of people who do not have a constant internal narrator in their own voice going on every waking moment of their life.

I wonder if anxiety compounds this or if I have anxiety due to having it.

 

[AlliFlowers]

The only time that internal monologue is a problem is if it continues when you're ready for sleep. But that is rare. It's like a good friend, most of the time, and it is in tune with you and what you want.

 

[decafjava]

Among my inner monologues I sometimes think of writing posts on a particular subject here and I can "hear" (see?) the responses made by those MR members whose views and writing style I know pretty well.

 

[Huntn]

Among my inner monologues I sometimes think of writing posts on a particular subject here and I can "hear" (see?) the responses made by those MR members whose views and writing style I know pretty well.

You project a likely reply and can here that in your head Before hand?
[automerge]1581951780[/automerge]

I feel quite jealous of people who do not have a constant internal narrator in their own voice going on every waking moment of their life.

I wonder if anxiety compounds this or if I have anxiety due to having it.

If it is annoying you, it might be something you can learn to control through mediation. Try one of the free meditation apps. I like 1 Giant Mind, but I do not use the mantra they suggest. Instead I listen to and focus on my breathing and sometimes my heart beat. There is no inner monologue during these sessions.

 

[decafjava]

You project a likely reply and can here that in your head Before hand?
[automerge]1581951780[/automerge]

If it is annoying you, it might be something you can learn to control through mediation. Try one of the free meditation apps. I like 1 Giant Mind, but I do not use the mantra they suggest. Instead I listen to and focus on my breathing and sometimes my heart beat. There is no inner monologue during these sessions.

Yes I can...as well as hypothetical conversations with real people.

As for 1GiantMind which I find excellent, I get the monologues but I just let them pass like one would see a clump of debris (eg. sticks and leaves) pass by. I don't try to stop it but just let it pass then back to the mantra or whatever works for you.

 

[Huntn]

Yes I can...as well as hypothetical conversations with real people.

As for 1GiantMind which I find excellent, I get the monologues but I just let them pass like one would see a clump of debris (eg. sticks and leaves) pass by. I don't try to stop it but just let it pass then back to the mantra or whatever works for you.

This sounds like practicing counters based on expected interactions? I sometimes do that.

Just finished a 1GM session, my goal is to quiet my inner monologue a bit, spend more time observing outside of meditating, with less inner verbal processing.

What I have yet to accomplish is quiet my inner voice when reading or typing replies. I’m just curious if I can do it, not that I am projecting any particular benifit from doing so.

For the readers who say they have no inner monologue, I’ll clarify again, for my case, this is just my thoughts being verbalized in my head. It is not another personality talking to me or telling me what to do.

 

[A.Goldberg]

I'd love to get a bettter understanding of the construction processes behind interior monologues of multilingual people who grow up equally at ease in two or more languages. It has seemed to me as though their choice of not only words but the timing of shifts in languages may shed a little light on who they are or may become besides just "multilingual".

An example from my own childhood: two boys I knew well then, who were fluent in English and Spanish from birth, tended when speaking to each other to respond in whichever language one or the other had launched the conversation. They were brothers. One grew up to become a social worker, the other a small business owner. At work or at home, they both always spoke in the language in which they were first being addressed by their particular family member, client or customer.

But their little sister as a child had often paused for just a nano-beat in mid sentence --almost impatiently, the way a kid might when conversing with someone and in the distance suddenly hearing "Sara, time for dinner!"-- and her next word or next phrase might be in the other language. Sometimes then though she'd immediately shift back to the original language -- and all this in the presence of her brothers or other bilingual Spanish-English speakers in her hearing. She ended up as a poet and translator. If there were ever occupations meant for careful choosers of words, those are two of them.

I always found that contrast in how the kids spoke and their choices of careers just fascinating. So I've wondered sometimes what the interior monologue of a polyglot is really like, i.e. whether not just a "conversation" but also a debate over how to conduct it, even in privacy of one's own mind.

I was raised speaking English and Hebrew. Everyone in my family speaks both fluently. Preschool through 8th grade I went to Hebrew school where probably half the education was in Hebrew.

My inner monologue is primarily English, however I also do think in Hebrew, typically if what I am doing involves reading/writing/speaking/listening in Hebrew. If I learned something in Hebrew I’m more likely to think about it in Hebrew.

I took Spanish classes in late middle school through high school. I used to be decent in basic Spanish conversation, better at reading it. Unlike Hebrew however I would almost always have to convert between Spanish and English. It’s not intuitive.

I have dreams in English and Hebrew. When I’m very tired I have been known to confuse English and Hebrew words.

I can’t fully understand what it’s like to think without an inner monologue. To some extent I can understand an “autopilot” like thinking and I think I’m pretty good at abstract visualization. Sometimes when I do math I find I’m not thinking with an inner voice.

 

[mag33]

"and some people just have abstract non-verbal thoughts, and have to consciously verbalize them"

thats me. I never imagined others experience it differently

 

[Septembersrain]

"and some people just have abstract non-verbal thoughts, and have to consciously verbalize them"

thats me. I never imagined others experience it differently

Yeah, imagine a narrator on every single minute of waking life. Seriously, it's not enviable.

As for meditation. I am slightly able to "Shut myself up" when there is white noise. Which is why I need it for sleep. I have chronic insomnia.

Had it my whole life really.

 

[MisterSavage]

As for meditation. I am slightly able to "Shut myself up" when there is white noise. Which is why I need it for sleep. I have chronic insomnia.

I started using white noise for sleeping when there was construction near my place. Construction is long gone but I've been surprised at how much white noise helps me with sleeping.

 

[LizKat]

I'm one of those people that smoke alarm manufacturers might worry about... I'd build that caterwauling right into a dream if I had to, just so I could keep on gettin' my Zs once I had finally given up on a day and wandered upstairs to go to bed, with about 45 seconds to get there before my brain might say hey right here on the stair landing is good.

That's the case for me even though once I get upstairs I usually set a timer to play an audio book for awhile (and have to rewind it nearly the whole way back the next night). I should just stop abusing the capabilities of that poor ol' iPod touch sitting up there, either trapped in a 30-pin speakerdock or just running on bluetooth to a portable speaker. I left the device downstairs one night having refreshed content from the iTunes library on a laptop, and didn't even think about it again until I saw it sitting next to that machine on the coffeetable the next day.

So my internal monologue no matter its form doesn't seem to have much sway starting around bedtime. I'm sure there is some sort of nonverbal monologue upstairs about launching my audiobook routine but it seems eminently skippable. The more primitive part of my brain says it's lights out for the monologue when it's lights out for me, and it would just about take the hand of God to roust me out of that bed before dawn. I'm not going to complain... and I'm too old to dream of getting a replacement brain under warranty anyway.

 

[vrDrew]

I would certainly hope that everybody had at least some level of inner monologue going on.

The voice in your head that tells you: "Uh, this doesn't seem like a very good idea." Or: "Stealing money from mom's purse is wrong"

Maybe some people lack that voice. And maybe that explains some of the utterly immoral and often self-destructive behaviour that takes place. But I doubt it. I think even the worst criminals usually know that what they were doing was wrong.

 

[spooklog]

I tend to think visually. It is incredibly inefficient and awkward most of the time, but for certain things (such using the imagination to picture objects or situations), thinking visually can be useful. Another bonus with visual thinking is that, if what you are imagining is vivid enough, emotions come into play. I can really be drawn into a vivid visual scene and feel it. I can't speak for all those with a verbal internal monologue, but I imagine they are far more rational and less emotional when they think.

 

[Huntn]

I started using white noise for sleeping when there was construction near my place. Construction is long gone but I've been surprised at how much white noise helps me with sleeping.

Oh the slight difference between white noise and a clunky hotel AC unit, the latter is such a sleep disrupter!
The iPad offers some nice apps with sleepy time nature sounds.
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I would certainly hope that everybody had at least some level of inner monologue going on.

The voice in your head that tells you: "Uh, this doesn't seem like a very good idea." Or: "Stealing money from mom's purse is wrong"

Maybe some people lack that voice. And maybe that explains some of the utterly immoral and often self-destructive behaviour that takes place. But I doubt it. I think even the worst criminals usually know that what they were doing was wrong.

I’m thinking that the people without the voice can still warn themselves about certain bad ideas without words.

 

[arkitect]

[ So another member returns from unspecified adventures of some duration! I had recently noticed absence of more than a few people whose posts I've appreciated in the past, and I was starting to wonder if Cal Newport's "digital minimalism" had perhaps afflicted all of them, with or without their having known his book even existed. Allow me to say thanks again here for your having posted that link to a Jessye Norman rendition of the Mahler fifth Ruckert lieder back when we learned she had passed away. ]

Thanks for noticing.
After the MacRumours Spy disappeared I became a very erratic visitor. Probably a good thing productivity wise!
Digital Minimalism… hmmmm… I gave it a quick read after it was released to high acclaim but decided I am not quite that bad and so filed it away under "does not apply". Haha. I do love to kid myself though.

I am very happy you enjoyed the Jessye Norman clip. Sublime.