What is it for?
Not everyone does, I’ve had a lot of conversations with a lot of people on this topic.
People’s thought processes range from monologue to dialog to narration to silence to images to raw concepts without form.
I personally do not have a constantly running monologue, but rather have relatively short bursts of thought interspersed with long periods of silence.
I always find this conversation fascinating and it makes me wonder in what other ways people may experience the world differently.
I do have a constant internal monologue. Every word I read is spoken in my mind. My thought process is, to my awareness, me talking things out in my head.
Yeah, I also “hear” the words in my head as I read them, and that goes for everything.
I kinda wish I thought in shapes and colors though. While my imagination is okay, I get the feeling it’s not as… vivid or Shar as others imaginations are.
I don’t have one at all. Spent ages thinking that it was just a figure of speech, but when I found out I became fascinated by it.
The current theory is that at some early point in our evolution we literally had a voice in our head, not unlike how some forms of schizophrenia present.
It’s called the bicameral mind.
https://gizmodo.com/did-everyone-3-000-years-ago-have-a-voice-in-their-head-510063135
In my day to day life it makes little difference however, despite being an avid reader and writer I struggle tremendously to read aloud.
I don’t know for sure but I suspect it is connected.
In the article they bring up many questionable aspects of this idea, which also seems to lack in scientific support.
And so the bicameral mind remains a highly controversial idea
Absolutely. I’m no expert, and since there weren’t any studies performed on people from that era, I’d expect it to be taken as a theory rather than a fact.
Hypothesis not Theory
Pedantry, not conversation.
Still, you are correct.
In my day to day life it makes little difference however, despite being an avid reader and writer I struggle tremendously to read aloud.
Thanks, I actually wanted to post that as a question. I would have thought that reading silently would be harder.
I worked as a typesetter for years. I have a rather speedy reading pace (it isn’t inate, rather through practice)… but I do wonder if not having to ‘hear’ words changes the rhythm of reading.
I’m also fascinated if other folk perform accents in their head whilst reading? Do different characters sound different or is there one ‘voice’ that acts as a narrator?
For me different characters have different voices. The narrative is either the voice of the character whose perspective is currently shown (which can lead to conflicts if I don’t know the perspective at the start) or it is how I imagine the author to sound like or my own voice.
I won’t pretend in not a little jealous of that. I can only imagine the texture that adds to a novel. Plus, it’s like a form of creative collaboration… You are present in the text… How cool is that?
Do different characters sound different or is there one ‘voice’ that acts as a narrator?
Neither. I think of the idea of the words, rather than hearing the words in my mind. Which is to say, though I can read a sentence and string together the words I read in my mind, the l there is no voice to those words, no gender, no accent, no volume etc.
I do wonder if not having to ‘hear’ words changes the rhythm of reading.
Hadn’t thought of this…what’s your take on poetry, especially meter-forward? Like, Robert W Service or Robert Frost, I feel would be less interesting if they didn’t have their beat.
I don’t do voices or accents when I read. Everything is in the same ‘voice,’ which isn’t quite the same as my spoken voice. My internal voice enunciates much better and slightly lower pitch. It’s more like the voice I wish I had than the voice I do have. :)
Interesting you brought up Service… Grew up reading him as he’s from my home town.
I do like poetry, but I’m much more inclined to concrete work, or something closer to what William Burroughs was after.
The shape rather than the rhythm.
Never thought of it that way. Though I still adore Service for the narrative.
I like that your internal monologue is an idealised voice.
I do read extremely fast in my native language (Spanish). Feels like entire sentences go straight into concepts and my brain builds a whole world based on what I’m reading.
However I started reading in a verbalized way with my second and third languages (English and Swedish) because I was completely useless at pronunciation, while reading at a high level. So I had to learn the sounds and they started invading my reading, which I sort of resent.
But the verbalization is still very mild; faint, monotone, non-enunciated.
Some people talked about poetry and I hadn’t considered that my absolute lack of poetry-sense could be related. People have told me about the metrics and whatnot and it really doesn’t click. I have to sort of analyze a poem and explain it to myself in prose, and I imagine that defeats the purpose of poetry?
And there’s something else I’m interested in. When you think, do you think in a mixture of those languages? Or do you actively translate? Is it a conscious thing?
I am pretty sure it does. From what I’ve heard people that essentially “read out loud” inside their head tend to have a have a slower reading pace. I don’t think Anauralia is necessary to not do that, either.
if not having to ‘hear’ words changes the rhythm of reading.
Poetry instantly comes to mind. I have a very different experience when I silently read poetry vs. reading aloud or listening to someone read it aloud, especially when the poem is written with rhythm in mind.
it depends on if I heard a voice of that character before for example Batman is always Kevin Conroy and the joker is always Mark Hamill. another usecase is if I listened to the audio book then start reading a text book. Ray Potter shows up alot.
Out of curiosity do you visualize in your mind? Like if I say a stapler can you conjure one?
The people with both Aphantasia and Anauralia fascinate me.
Absolutely. My day job is as a conceptual artist (seriously, the hours are good and I get to travel). Visualising objects is a large part of that. I’ve also worked in video game level design and found thinking in terms of 3D space pretty easy too. Just no words in there, or specifically, no voice.
That sounds heavenly. Mine will not shut up. And when I’ve run out of current problems to worry about, I start thinking about all my past fuck ups an embarrassments. And that’s just in the time it takes to a simple activity. When I’m at work it is constant flipping back and forth between my anxious thoughts and doing my work and worrying about how I might be fucking up my work.
This describes me 100% and I fucking hate it. And I’m sorry you go through it, too.
Try vyvanse meds bro it will calm those thoughts. Obviously talk to a doctor about it
Mine seems to appear when I’m not on auto-pilot. If I’m heating a can of soup, there’s no real thought. I’m probably thinking about other things while carry out simple steps. If I can’t find something, it’ll pop in and say, “Where did I leave that?” Or maybe something like, “I should call Mom cause it’s New Year’s Day.” Another is, “I’m glad I remembered my umbrella,” when in rain. But I don’t have monologue about putting on my shoes or locking my door. Those are mechanical tasks while I think about something else in an abstract fashion.
Yeah this is similar to my experience. Some stuff gets done without that monologue, but I’m not completely without it.
Yep, I don’t, either. I think mostly subconsciously, then in raw concepts, then images, then words. I have to actively translate what I’m thinking into language in order to consciously understand it myself or communicate it, but I do better if I externalize the language through writing or speaking.
We’re very similar, I think. That externalisation as a way of understanding in particular.
I suspect that most people have a partial internal monologue, whereby some thoughts arise to the level of verbiage and others don’t. There is also variance in how self-aware we are of our thoughts themselves. I don’t think anyone can keep up effective, meta self-monitoring 100% of the time, so our own view of our thought process is probably skewed as well. Some people swear that every single thought they have is 100% verbalized. I think that’s impossible and they’re only counting verbal thoughts as thoughts. But no doubt some people verbalize more than others.
Insightful, I’ve found that most people change their answers at least slightly after having time to observe their thoughts for a while, we are geniuses at believing our own conjectures.
I have a mixture of types of thought processes. I mostly think in pictures and play things out in my head like a silent movie, but sometimes I have a monologue. Sometimes I think in a way I can’t describe with words.
Because sometimes the rubber ducky would be embarrassed at the questions I ask so I ask me the questions first.
I think one key in the success of our species is the ability to plan ahead and mentally simulate what will happen before actually doing it.
Doing this with language is not very different from imagining what will happen when doing a physical action.
I have imaginary conversations all the time where I simulate interactions with the people in my life and work. I’ll say something and then imagine their response and often go back and revise what I would say. This is how I prepare for conversations that might be delicate, where I want to get something across but not in a way that creates negative consequences.
Other people say that they verbalize literally everything, as in, “I need to throw this rock in a gentle arc if I want it to hit that other rock there, oh dear perhaps I should adjust my grip and throw underhand instead.” My opinion is that this is functionally impossible. You can’t drive a car by verbalizing every command as you go - put a blindfolded friend at the wheel and try it sometime! I think one of two things is happening to people who say their monologue is exhaustive: they are only counting verbal thoughts as thoughts and ignoring the sea of inchoate impulses that churns beneath them. Also, I think any time we turn our attention to our thoughts themselves, those thoughts become verbal. To say it another way, any thought you want to think about you have to first pin down and define. You render it in words by directing your attention to it. I believe this leads people to believe that all their thoughts are verbal because all the thoughts they’ve looked at are always verbal.
But I’d say this to those folks: have you ever forgotten the right word for something? There it is on the tip of your tongue but the word won’t come. This happens to everyone. And you’re clearly able to think about the whatness of the thing even in absence of the right word.
Truly nobody knows, it’s an open research question. And to complicate matters more we know (as others have mentioned here) that everyone doesn’t think in the same way.
We do actually know quite a bit about the Internal Monologue and other forms of intrapersonal communication.
There isn’t one single use for it or benefit of it (in the same way water has many uses)
Chomsky would say that the original purpose of language is to structure thought, with communication being solely secondary. (Or something like this, I don’t recall it word-by-word.)
If that’s correct, then internal monologues are simply a result of your brain processing your thoughts.
Yeah, language is an added analytical layer on top of our thoughts. We are clearly able to have thoughts without language (feral children for example are able to process their environment, plan and predict). But language adds a formality to it. Not to challenge Chomsky on his own turf but I don’t see how this can be separated from communication, since communication is how we acquire language. Does he really posit that even a feral child will have its own internal set of mouth sounds for organizing thoughts, even when it never speaks those to anyone? Seems backwards.
I would say we all have thoughts without language with varying levels of frequency, think about moments where you or others have said “ah i know what I want to say but forgot the word”
Chomsky’s concept of UG (universal grammar) is able to handle this. Since there would be a chunk of language that is innate (universal), that feral child would share it. So, as a conclusion from that, even if the feral child isn’t expressing it through vocalisation, since they lack an “application” of the UG (like Nahuatl, Mandarin, Quechua, English, Kikongo etc.), they’d still have some rather simple internal monologue.
…that said I think that Chomsky’s UG is full of shit. I do agree with him that the faculty of language might have developed first to structure thought; but my reasoning resembles a bit more yours, the role of language would be to formalise thought. Thinking without language is possible in the same way as moving across a village without roads - it’s doable but clunky, and you’ll likely take far more effort than with proper roads/ a language.
Not to challenge Chomsky on his own turf
Don’t worry. Everyone and their dog challenges him. Including himself, he’s often contradicting his own earlier statements.
What do you think evolved first - verbal communication or thoughts? Presumably we were able to think before we could speak, no? The words we have in our language are like pointers to internal concepts, and it seems to me that those internal concepts would have existed before language was a thing. The mouth-sounds as you put it are not the thoughts themselves, rather just labels for specific concepts. It might be possible and even convenient to think in mouth-sounds but it’s not necessary for logical thought.
I’m by no means a medical expert, so just a stab in the dark here - our brains constantly process all sorts of information. Whether that’s memories, input from your various senses, or a million other things. During that process, your brain is also trying to make sense of it all (“Why?”, “What does it mean”, “How?”, etc).
Our ability to communicate and express language is intertwined in this process, which of course is what gives you the perception of dialog. So in essence, I think its just our brains trying to make sense of… its process of making sense, if that makes sense?
On a side note, I’m practically dosing myself with semantic satiation with how many times I’ve used “sense” here (that last one being more tongue-in-cheek)…
Do you think we had internal monologue before having language?
It’s a bit difficult to say, but perhaps we did in say, maybe through the repetition of flashing images from our memory, or sounds, etc.
Even without language, that internal “making sense” of things / interpreting the world around us still exists - I’d imagine if you were to ask someone who was deaf (starting at a very early age) they’d probably say there is a monologue of some sorts, even if not by “sound”, whether that be the flashing images of various hand signs, or written words, etc.
I think it’s possible that internal language did exist before it could be vocalised. That is, before we evolved the necessary structures in the throat to make words, we were thinking according to basic grammatical rules e.g subject-verb-object. Words in human language are like labels for internal concepts, and those internal concepts would have existed before language was a thing.
That makes perfect sense, thanks! Seems like I was certainly onto something then. Part of me wishes that I had gone into this field as its very intriguing - perhaps in another life!
What I find interesting is that supposedly, not everybody actually has an internal monologue, I just can’t even imagine what that must be like. But then I start to wonder, do I even have an internal monologue, is what I experience an actual “internal monologue”? I assume that I have an internal monologue, I definitely talk to myself and I have thoughts running around my head all the time, but I don’t know that I “hear” an internal monologue or what having an internal monologue is supposed to be like. Is what I experience the same thing as what everybody else is experiencing?
My guess would be it’s a side-effect, kind of like pareidolia. Us being extremely social animals, so much that being cast away from the tribe in our hunter-gatherer days would spell certain death, our brains have become extremely attuned to face/emotion recognition and language. So we have a tendency of using words to express ideas, even to ourselves.
Speak for yourself! I have internal stereologue.
Peasant…Go quadraphonic or go home!!!
To freak us out when we’re a little bit too high…
Team Aphantasia!
I’m going to take a guess - survival.
By which you mean, it’s the part of our brain that we no longer really listen to, so it developed the ability to flat out tell us: “damn that’s a bad idea.” And “I told you so, idiot.”
In my experience, it’s for 2 things:
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Witty comebacks half an hour after the discussion is over and you’re on your way back home.
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Overanalyzing every stupid decision and mistake you have ever made.
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Pretty sure I read once that some people don’t.
It’s so you can pick nice clothes to wear in the morning. Imagine how horrible your outfits would be without it.
