I had a mini stroke that was classed as a TIA at the time, though it later turned out to have some lasting effects. It's a fascinating and overwhelming experience to unlearn reading.
To me, the immediate physical aspect was that all text started to look like Star Wars languages. Another aspect was that it was difficult to even concentrate on the text. It no longer stood out from the environment. It was an irrelevant detail, a decoration you wouldn't pay particular attention to.
I can also appreciate what the author is saying about how their perspective of the world shifted. I expect that her shift was a lot larger than mine, but mine already made me appreciate that in the modern world, when we look at things, we often seek to retrieve some bit of information. We don't look at them holistically. Our tunnel vision is tremendous.
As you are reading this comment, you are so focused on the words that you don't see the boxy proportions of the rectangular screen you're looking at. You don't see the contrast on the screen; you're not even paying attention to the colors, likely. The texture of your display is expected to be different on the back, the corners, and its surface. Your display is also a rectangular light, casting a shadow of your head behind you now. Some parts of the light are stronger than others; it's not a uniform light. The device you're reading this on (whether a monitor or a phone) has hot spots and cold spots on its chassis that you may not have thought about, despite looking at it or touching it for thousands of hours.
But if you can't read, you see all these things on a computer monitor, on a TV, on a road sign, on a book, and that's all that your brain finds significant about that object. That's quite interesting - how our language abilities shape our everyday perception of reality.
I would even say that it can be an enlightening experience to take a holiday from reading. Though I don't think anyone can come close to enjoying it, considering how much anxiety the thought of whether they'll learn it again causes. In some ways, experiencing the world around them freshly anew, without that anxiety (as the author has), is a blissful and beautiful experience few people have had in their lives.
I had gone blind in my right eye. There was one person standing before me at the reception in the emergency room arguing with the receptionist because he did not have health insurance (before the ACA). I remember thinking about a post card I saw in Powell's Books on Hawthorn St. in Portland Oregon out of the corner of my eye years earlier that said (paraphrasing) "Be thankful for our enemies, for they give us the opportunity to learn patience and understanding -- The Buddha." (The Buddha never said that.) While waiting I thought this was a good opportunity for me to learn patience and remain calm letting the man finish. That was a good thought because I was suffering from a stroke and if I had not been calm likely I wouldn't have survived. Turns out, every prior moment I had learned patience and understanding was for that one single moment.
I had a dissection of the right carotid artery also with a small aneurysm at the same location as the tear went through the artery wall. There was a massive blood clot dangling in my neck and I went blind because a little piece of this huge blood clot broke off and went into my retina which cut off oxygen to the nerves in my retina, fortunately, because if it had gone further into my brain I likely would have been paralyzed or died. There is about one hour window to clear the blood clot in the eye before permanent damage to the oxygen starved nerves starts. That morning I had been suffering from ischemic strokes.
By being calm I decreased my blood pressure so small pieces of the blood clot in my neck stopped breaking off going into my brain and the whole huge blood clot didn't break off which would have been lethal.
Had a minor stroke a couple of months ago - scans show two holes in my brain, one was in my right arm's motor control (I realised what was happening when I kept missing the keys on my laptop) which came right within hours. The other is a mystery, it's hard to think of things that are gone, I'm hoping it was something I don't need anymore from a long time ago like COBOL or Fortran
No one knows how he would deal in such a situation and cope with it, some would give up or even kill themselves, other fight to come back.
Being able to reflect on that traumatic experience in such a calm and thoughtful process is inspiring.
Side note, could it be possible that the 'inner voice', which the author lost during a while is what separate us from animals ?
She mentions being at peace, calm without it. Not thinking about the past nor the future, just present.
I kept thinking this experience made her behave just like an animal : can't speak, extremely limited thought process, basic instinct. Is that what separate us from ape ? A small part of the brain that gives consciousness.
Edit: author seem to have written a book called 'a stitch of time', if you enjoyed the reading.
> A small part of the brain that gives consciousness.
Not to get too tangental, but it was common thought at one time to think the brain is the center of consciousness. However, I have come across new data [1] that has convinced me that consciousness is entirely a full-body experience. According to the definition of some, consciousness might not even be a binary state, but rather a property of our universe like heat.
She didn't only lose her inner voice but the capacity to communicate and understand language properly. She also lost a lot of other, harder to detect, stuff. She also writes that she was capable of complex thought, just in a different way.
There are people naturally without an inner speech who can think just as well.
The Calm she speaks about is something else, it may be similar to animals or it may not but I doubt it was only caused by her loss of speech.
Beautifully written. Especially when you consider that the author suffered a brain injury to her language centers. Fascinating insights to how the mind works and how we process our world. I was supposed to be working, but I read the whole thing.
Yeah, I was struck by the thought of my child-self, perhaps 2 years old before I had a good grasp of the words I heard around me. Before I had language myself.
I scarcely remember but a couple things anyway, but even into the early years when I could speak, understand language, the memories of those times are as though of a time that seems not within the current continuum. It's like I was seeing the world but only through a small B&W TV.
This piece is a gift. Read it the second time today, but was only vaguely sure I've read it before (I think also through HN submission).
It might sound cynical to people who suffer from these severe neurological injuries.
But it also is also a great piece about "not thinking".
If you are a person who feels tormented and fascinated by inner monologue or generally have issues with self-perception, trauma, mental health, depression, this is a great read.
Especially if you feel trapped in your inner monologue. I'm sure I'm not the only person who feels like this more often than not.
Same message like many spiritual or self-help strategies (mindfulness, living in the now, etc).
But this story is visceral, captivating.
I'm not a doctor, but I would even recommend it as a therapeutic device.
A friend of my wife's showed me a video of herself, post-stroke, reading from a Barney (purple dinosaur) book. She read with a strange accent that was more of an exaggerated Southern mixed with something completely alien. It was fascinating, and saddening, to see the precise ways in which her linguistic ability had been hit.
My father recently passed, and on the way there had 3 strokes (he's been smoking since he was 8).
The unnerving thing about his first stroke recovery is that as the brain healed, his personality seemed to change.
My dad is friends with everyone, my mental picture is of him telling a fascinating story while everyone listens. For a few months, the confident man I'd known for 40 years became like a teenager, quiet and timid. I think the timidity came from him not being able to find the words as easily, but it felt like there was a different person inside him for a moment.
My mom's had some personality changes since coming down with dementia. For one, she doesn't attend church anymore. Church is really close by; with assistance she could walk or be driven there easily. She just doesn't want to go. She'd been a Catholic all her life, and was just suddenly tired of all that Catholic stuff, in a way I thought I'd never see her be.
My mom's personality changed a lot with dementia. After a couple of months she forgot she was a heavy smoker. Watching documentaries and sitcoms pre-dementia was replaced with aimless watch anything but not really caring about it at all. She lost a lot of self restraint so it was hard to go out to places because she'd make an insulting remark about a stranger. We tried anyway. This was all after she forgot who her children were so we were getting pretty late stage.
Well written - I do not possess an internal monologue (which apparently isn't uncommon), and a common thing people think is that it is like this author's description of "quiet" - yes, there is not a person "talking" in my head, but my head is anything but quiet most of the time. It just doesn't take the form of words/sound.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
> If this qualifies me as "having inner monologue" already then we're done.
It does, but we're not done - we just got the "never" out of the way. I still don't think anybody that literally NEVER has any inner monologue/dialogue could pass as functioning adult in our society today, which I will try to explain here. We did not get that much out of the way though, as there is still vast room between "most of the time" and "once every few months".
I think these are key questions, from my armchair position, if you will excuse that. I don't doubt that some people have much less or more frequent inner monologues. For example, people with ADHD may have, among many other things, a too frequent (or fast, or fast-jumping) inner monologue. I'm not claiming this is the cause or anything, but it could be a factor, or some kind of feedback loop.
> 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.
Language is just an extremely efficient encoding of reality. We are having this conversation right now, and the actual information encoded in it is orders of magnitudes higher than just the rules we are using. A word is just a sound or one combination of alphabet letters, yet it is attached to a million pathways of more words, each gaining or losing great amount of weight depending on the surrounding words. The rules are just there to make the pathfinding efficient.
To "know quite a lot" could be either, like I said, some hidden inner "encoding of thoughts" that has not yet been described or discovered, or actual language - perhaps mixed together with primitive "feelings" but impossible to use without language.
We know that the brain can produce this extremely dense and efficient encoding of information to communicate with each other. We know that most people also use this language internally, with a monologue or dialogues, to construct complex and simple scenarios. Now let's assume some people really don't have any inner monologue at all. A person would fall into either of these two categories:
1. Like the author describes, where she did not function like a "normal" person at all AND she was not aware of it, but others were well aware.
2. There is another "hidden" code, capable of the same complexity and efficiency, that has not been discovered or really described by anybody, that can be translated immediately to spoken or written language.
You can see that I find 2. very hard to believe, so either I'm making a strawman, or people that claim to have no inner monologue truly do have at least some degree of it.
> Let's put it this way: do you first cogitate the "class concept" or does the "class syntax" enable the "class"-cogitation?
So I started the bad computer analogy, and now I must own it. While technically possible to spontaneously conjure the class syntax and this making the concept, it's never really the case in general. The "class concept" existed first, described in a poorer way by existing syntax: a collection of functions that take a struct on which they mainly operate. The class-syntax, today, describes the class-concept much better than previous syntax, thus the programming language has evolved. Just like human language does, but human language is much more expressive and dynamic than computer language.
To get back to my doubting the general statement in the comments of "I have no inner monologue", could you answer some more questions?
When was the last time, or with what frequency if any, you imagine another person speaking in your head?
And yourself replying or making a statement or starting a conversation with someone else or even yourself?
I think you have locked on to the LLM-viewpoint quite strongly. I don't think I can agree with a lot of your presuppositions. Like "the rules are just there to make the pathfinding efficient" and "language is just an extremely efficient encoding of reality".
While very interesting I'd have a hell of time debating those issues in this kind of medium. If you take that as your starting point then I do understand why you have a hard time grasping the "lack of monologue"-thing. If language is the source of all raw cogitation then how could anyone possibly lack monologue and still function? Am I getting it? I think I get it and I'd agree if I'd take your framework as true.
> impossible to use without language.
Now I understand those types of statements. I am totally not in a position to say you are wrong, but I'd be careful with this because you seem to be a holding a flashlight and saying there is light everywhere you look.
All I can say is I just don't think language plays that large a role in cognition. Why not? That's an excellent question, but I cannot possibly do justice to that here - besides being a complete amateur. I can leave some clues or things that count to me as clues, perhaps. We are surrounded with enormous quantities of beings that utterly and completely lack language yet show tremendous intellectual sophistication. Our own children are completely non-verbal for a very long time and sure, while they won't be winning Nobel prizes at that stage, you can't possibly claim they are incapable of the very same cognitive maneuvering you showed in the coding example (abstraction, generalization, etc). To me it's just a matter of scale. We gained function, we added something new and fancy to the preexisting Mammalian machinery with language, but I don't think it's fundamental to raw cogitation.
> 2. There is another "hidden" code, capable of the same complexity and efficiency, that has not been discovered or really described by anybody, that can be translated immediately to spoken or written language.
3. All people use the same raw cognitive substrate but some feel the need / are wired to overlay it with running commentary. A running commentary they themselves can inspect, I might add. That's an interesting bit. If it is so foundational, what's inspecting it? Language again? Like an LLM-reasoning type of agent or agents?
I notice the question "What happens before the inner monologue? A deeper level of monologue?" didn't get addressed and I'm quite interested in it. What process produces the monologue you perceive as necessary for cogitation? It surely can't be a monologue again? At some point you have to admit these dialogues just "pop into existence" pre-baked, right? Out of what? What produced that if not some raw, unobservable, non-verbal cogitation? That non-verbal cogitation has to be capable of some kind of computation to make that happen or am I making some kind of error?
Honestly, that last question is rhetorical. I'm making all types of errors, but I hope you see I'm kind of on the fence on the language thing. I'm fully open to the fact that I just might not be perceiving the monologue.
I'd like to say that I'm not "locked on to the LLM-viewpoint", because I have been interested in the inner monologue / consciousness questions since I was a teenager and by pure chance read a somewhat crazy (and now outdated / partly debunked / never really a peer reviewed science theory) book: [The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976, Julian Jaynes)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origin_of_Consciousness_in...). It's at the very least a very entertaining read IMO, but must be taken with a grain of salt. On the other hand, the recent advances in LLM output might have been biasing me. I consider myself also an amateur of course, my knowledge is superficial.
So yes, my framework is that the language articulation is the thought itself, and that is why we (most people) consistently have/hear an inner monologue, or dialogues with others.
> Our own children are completely non-verbal for a very long time and sure, while they won't be winning Nobel prizes at that stage, you can't possibly claim they are incapable of the very same cognitive maneuvering you showed in the coding example (abstraction, generalization, etc).
I don't think a child that cannot yet speak, so typically around 2 years old, can do much cognitive maneuvering, or at least not significantly more than an a great ape. Of course it could be pure correlation, and as we age we learn and simply also learn to use language efficiently. But we also cannot rule it out. Hellen Keller is a somewhat interesting case of someone missing the language learning stage and then also essentially not developing a "consciousness" as we understand it.
> the question "What happens before the inner monologue? A deeper level of monologue?"
I do not have an answer. I'm afraid that there isn't one, just like there is an answer to "How do LLMs work?", beyond some technicalities about the core operations, matrices, weightings and whatnot. I think there is no indication that this is recursive in any sense. I cannot find the words to describe it, ironically, but it might be like other systems in nature which seem chaotic in detail and only seem ordered when you look at the whole.
If you allow me to indulge: maybe we are too deep and lost in the simulation now, there are no more curtains to peel back. A mask cannot look at who is behind itself. Is there really another hidden "code" inside our brain that could express the last two sentences more efficiently? Perhaps there is, and our mostly "outer" language simply cannot express it, because the inner hidden language is just much better. Or perhaps it's the other way 'round.
Edit: BTW you also didn't answer "when was the last time you imagined yourself or someone else talking in your head", and I am genuinely interested in the answer - for armchair science!
Back when I was taking CogSci classes in the 90's, The Bicameral Mind was introduced as a 'this is almost certainly completely wrong, but it makes a great starting point for a lot of great discussion', and it certainly bore out that way; our discussion groups using selections from the book as a starting point were some of the better ones. I agree with you; even now I think it's an interesting read.
Oh, the Bicameral Mind, how cool would it be if that was real. I also read it.
For armchair science: I cannot remember for the life of me. I never imagine scenes like that. Is that strange for you? How is that for you? Do you often do that? Is it like an entire scene playing out like a movie?
Yes, for me it sounds very foreign, to not to have it.
I almost constantly have fragments of scenes playing out, when I'm not doing something that requires concentration. Either myself telling something, ar asking, at someone or myself. Sometimes reversed. As I said, I think it's mostly fragments, or there is some kind of "fast forward" where the conclusion is articulated prematurely, and I suppose the exercise has reached its purpose.
Just FYI it’s pretty rude/insulting and not interesting to dismiss someone’s shared experience based on nothing but your own armchair feelings, and even moreso to concede if the person is telling the truth (how on earth could a person be lying or mistaken about this?) that they couldn’t be a functioning adult.
It’s honestly quite a narcissistic view that someone could not possibly think differently than you, and dismiss it out of hand. The other people in this comment thread sharing similar things make perfect sense to me.
I know that it can be perceived so, which is why I prefaced with "I know it's bad to say this - like telling someone who is ill that they are not - but I cannot believe that...".
I am only engaging with commenters who are interested in the conversation, and I'm NOT trying to put anyone down. I just want to get to know more exact meanings and nuances of "I don't have an internal monologue".
If I said "gosh, I can't believe you can actually think at a human speed, having to use words for everything! It's like having to speak out loud when you're reading, so slow! Have you been diagnosed by a professional on how to deal with this obvious handicap?" it would be pretty insulting, yes? Even if I said I wasn't trying to put someone down, because the implicit assumptions baked in to the very statements themselves.
All I can say is, as someone who also does not have an internal monologue, and can easily and happily go days without thinking in words (which is very, very different than not thinking at all), please just accept as a given that people like me exist, we're fine, do not feel like we have any deficits, and it's exceedingly frustrating to come across comments like yours whenever the subject comes up, because of the raw arrogance of it all. I can completely and honestly believe that you have a rich, engaging internal life, even if the quantity of words involved would drive me mad, because we're different people with different thinking styles. All I ask is for the same respect in return. If we can start there, then we can have a real conversation, which could be fun. I know that when I first learned that 'internal monologue' wasn't just a literary, poetically-descriptive term, but that people actually heard voices/words in their heads while thinking, it utterly floored me. That I'd made it to college without knowing this really threw me for a loop, and made me think about what other seemingly-core differences in cognition are out there. It really is a fascinating subject to think about.
Well, you added a tone there, removed the preventive apology, and added some kind of insult at the end. So I'm not interested in your conversation at all. I've made myself clear. You can go and revisit the other comments to find out about the other side too - you seem to not have understood what "inner monologue" is for most people, by what you are saying.
I didn’t take it negatively by the way. This is all so interesting and what you are saying is also absolutely not nonsensical. It’s all so hard to put it into .. words. :)
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.
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.
> "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?
> In this scenario, would the phrase "My favorite flowers are roses" have materialized in your mind?
That depends on the situation. I thought I'd mentioned it in this thread, but apparently I'd mentioned it on the post about aphasia a few days ago. I don't think in words anymore except when I'm either conversing with or thinking about conversing with someone else.
If I was just thinking to myself about my favorite things, that phrase would never pop into my head at all. It wouldn't even occur to me to even try putting it into words in that situation.
> 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?
Yes, I'm autistic (AuDHD), so I often replay social interactions in my head over and over and try to think of better responses than I was able to come up with on the spur of the moment, and this, necessarily, involves thinking in words.
So, while my natural mode of thinking post-stroke is now word-free, I am still capable of thinking in words and do so when I'm thinking about something I may need to communicate to someone else soon.
Immediately post-stroke, of course, I was incapable of thinking in words at all, but I rebuilt that capability over time. It definitely does not feel natural to me, still, to the point I sometimes stutter or pause for awkward seconds to find the right words if I'm suddenly asked to talk about a new topic I haven't rehearsed. I do have a safe subset of English that I try to stay within to avoid any potential stumbling.
I still think in my non-word way the vast, vast majority of the time, then translate to words, unless I'm saying something that's become an automatic response. If someone says to me, "How are you?" I immediately respond, "I'm doing well, thanks. How are you today?" all in words. But if I'm posed a novel question like yours, one that I've never considered before, I have to carefully find a way to translate my thoughts to words before I can answer.
How would you think through complex scenarios otherwise? Like: "How does the current US president influence global welfare?" (relevant, but rather trite, I know).
Genuinely curious how you could form an opinion or at least analyze the question without verbalizing the ensuing self-conversation in your mind. Much (abstract) thought is informed by language.
You convert the language statement into semantic space. That's where you do the theorizing and then you convert it back. I can't think in text space. It's way too slow and I very much suck at it.
It's hard to see how this works with such a complex question though. By its nature it's actually impossible to put into words. It's my theory that we all think like this, because it's literally impossible to think "in language", but some people need to have it as some type of security blanket and some don't.
Every time someone says they have some inner monologue I can ask where this comes from. Your inner monologue also needs a source and that can't be language again. You cannot source all thought you have about this question just from those words alone. Your mind is making all types of connections that might eventually be convertable into words, but are themselves absolutely not verbal.
Sometimes, I wonder if those with an inner monologue focus on that process as being their consciousness, because they often use it to self-reflect on their own thinking process. It's that meta-reflection that people seem to consider their consciousness.
For those of us without an inner monologue, perhaps it's similar, just with a different way of self-reflecting.
I'm in the weird position of having memories of me as a child with a detailed inner monologue, and memories of post-stroke me without an inner monologue. The old memories feel like someone else's memories. I even called them xenomemories for a few years after my stroke because they didn't feel like they belonged to me.
In those old memories, I thought of my inner monologue as "my thoughts" and "my consciousness," but I have no memory of what was going on beneath that level. The words just seemed to flow in a way that made sense to child me. It was like young me needed words to keep thoughts stepping forward in an endless chain of reflection and reasoning via language. Young me didn't value anything except the build artifacts (the words), so all the rest of my thinking process never made it into my memories.
It was the effects of losing those words that made me so hyperaware of everything else going on in my brain, and I had to build up a new understanding of who "I" even was.
All the recent talk about the potential for LLMs to "think" in latent space instead of words feels so very similar to my own experiences, going from words with well-defined meanings to something less sharp, but with more room for nuance. Your mention of thinking in semantic space feels right to me based on the way I think through complex problems today. Thinking in words is exceptionally slow and clumsy for me.
In a sense, it feels like I traded in a binary computer for an analog (or quantum) one, and just like computers, I would imagine each style of thought has its strengths and weaknesses.
It would certainly be nice if my word compiler wasn't so slow and buggy, though. It makes it a lot harder to leave permanent notes for myself or communicate with others.
Your perspective is unique given your circumstances. I can't imagine how it feels to operate in a different mode having traces of the previous one. Very interesting.
This issue is very complex. One of the thorny bits is that what you remember and what is germane are very different things. As humans we operate under the laws of psychology which necessitate interesting but ultimately quite inexplicable things like an "I" to somehow "anchor" our thoughts. I believe investigations into the nature of this "I" are still ongoing (after a few millennia). Perhaps different personalities can use different types of hooks to anchor this "I". Perhaps some are inclined to use language for this and others not.
Sometimes I wonder if it's just lack of introspection: the ones with inner monologue having accepted too soon that that's all there is to their minds and neglected to look underneath this chatter. They can see that this chatter must have a source as well. Surely they'll see this can't be another level of chatter, because I'll ask the question again and again. Ultimately all human cogitation is without source[1] and can't be anything other than purely spontaneous.
Anyway, I'm rambling. Good luck to you!
[1] "without source" meaning: not able to be observed by the subject itself
It certainly feels strange. The two epochs almost feel like past life and current life, with an unexpected and ineffable bridge between the two. I remember thinking in words, but it feels like someone else was doing that, because I certainly wouldn't do it that way today. It definitely makes me constantly question exactly who "I" am.
> Sometimes I wonder if it's just lack of introspection...
Maybe? I know I didn't introspect deeper than my words when I was a child, but that doesn't necessarily mean an adult doesn't introspect about it.
I asked my husband about it because he told me he has a running stream of words most of the day except when he's relaxing. He is aware that he has a layer beneath the words, but still thinks of the words as "his thoughts" and the layer beneath as "just his subconscious," that bubbled up things like emotions or memories in service of his thoughts.
So at least N=1, an inner monologuer did consider that his words weren't all of his thoughts, but he still considered the non-verbal stuff less important than his words. It was as if all he valued was the crystalized thought, not the underlying processes.
I have no inner monologue unless I switch it on consciously, which I don’t like doing as it slows down thinking by orders of magnitude.
In your example, I see things like graphs, numbers, maps, make connections and see possible futures, no explicit words involved.
Edit: I also tend to “simulate” what is going to happen by conjuring up a small video of people dealing with the situation, or myself in that situation.
a long time ago, we actually had to practice in order to be able to speak in our head without speaking out loud. so, in a way, we sort of used not to have an inner monologue, and had to develop one on purpose. now we do have one (though often it's more of an inner dialogue, because DID...)
Don't you ever think to yourself when waking up 'time to wake up' ?
Or when you see someone you don't like 'oh here is that motherfucker' ?
I mean the inner voice isn't like a deep discussion between you and you, its spontaneous stuff you just wouldn't say out loud.
I have a hard time believing some people don't have it.
Not the person you're asking, but as someone who also doesn't have an inner monologue, no, I literally never think either of those two things you gave as an example. I feel the feelings they describe, but they never bubble up to my thoughts in word form.
I also don't have this internal monologue. But I can talk in my head just fine if I want. But doing so is the same effort as talking out loud.
I suspect that it does make articulating my thoughts verbally to other people more difficult since I must go brain thinking to text before speech.
That's probably why I prefer textual communication so much more. I can take the time to read, think, and textualize the answer.
I also find it incredibly useful to pretend I am teaching in my head; thus producing the text; before going into a meeting on a given topic. Of course anything I haven't thought to reharse, I am now naked.
As for your specific example, instead of a concrete set of words about waking up or a specific insult. I simply think a similar concept.
Language is just a way of encoding semantic meaning. If your brain already knows that it is time to wake up or that it hates that guy, what's the point of encoding a description of that feeling into spoken language and replay it? That sounds inefficient.
I have an inner monologue, but most of the time (and especially when I want to work fast), I "disable" it.
Then my mind simply works in the "meaning space", where it can leverage other modalities (e.g., visual 3D representations of system behaviors).
When I write or talk in formal environments I "enable" it just to double check and polish what I want to say.
Language is just a way of encoding semantic meaning - this is a perfect explanation and im going to use it from now on, thanks. yea this is like me too.
curious, did you start reading at a very early age? I started around 3. this is what I personally think it is. It’s not like I dont have the ability to hear a narrative in my head, I just dont do it. I’ve suspected that since I began reading so early, it has something to do with it - and if you’re not capable of reading
/comprehending as fast as I can, like if you’re literally sounding out every word in your head you’d never be able to keep up with whatever it is I do. I’d be enormously frustrated by that process. But to me this is what “narrative voice people” must do in their heads.
or maybe it has to do (for me) being on the spectrum (high functioning)
> curious, did you start reading at a very early age? I started around 3
I did! I also learnt to read at 3. Your observation was really impressive.
I've never thought about it being the cause of my weird quirks, I thought it was actually another consequence/symptom of being wired a bit different, but maybe you are right. Have you ever met anyone else who learnt to read early? Do they also behave like that?
I don't know if I'm in the spectrum (I suspect I do, but I don't want to know). In any case, if I do, then I'm also a functioning one.
> if you’re literally sounding out every word in your head you’d never be able to keep up with whatever it is I do
Another possibility is that they overestimate how much they use their inner monologue without realizing. For example, I really doubt they think "time to move the left leg, now the right leg, now the left..." whenever they walk. Maybe they just don't enter into that "mode" as often as us
Language can encode information very densely. There is no point in describing "hate that guy". But it can be very efficient to have an inner monologue of "I hate that guy, but I must greet him friendly, or else I will be in trouble". If you'd just let yourself guide by feelings, you would be angry, or afraid, or genuinely happy to see that guy you hate.
We already know how to encode and decode it language, because we must communicate with others. It could be useful to also use this code internally, to create very complex scenarios fast.
My point is that "I hate that guy, but I must greet him friendly, or else I will be in trouble" is already being concluded by the brain at the semantic space way before running the language encoder and playing the inner voice. That voice already knows what is going to say before saying it.
The brain can extract those conclusions in mere milliseconds and act in consequence, and that doesn't mean being guided by feelings.
I'd argue that skipping the language lets you think in more complex scenarios where visualizing something is required, like when playing a sport, painting, or composing a melody.
Removing the noise of language also allows you to think in parallel and solve problems faster. In my case I'd say I can run a couple of "threads" only, but I wouldn't be surprised if top chess players could run a dozen.
Consider the possibility that the brain has not necessarily "concluded" what is being put into words, internally. That the monologue is the conclusion, which we are processing.
So we have two points of view, perspectives, or explanations. Yours is that there is some internal-mind code that is NOT language, which we are able to convert instantly to language to communicate with others. Most people then also have an internal monologue for unknown or orthogonal reasons, while some don't have it, without making any significant difference, because it is something like a side effect.
Mine is that the internal monologue is the thought itself. There is no other, hidden, code that can express the same complexity as the language that we use both to communicate with others and our own mind. That we don't need this internal monologue for a lot of things (consider driving a car), but it's a crucial mechanism for planning long term tasks, solving new problems, and what generally separates us from other intelligent life forms.
Not the poster you replied to. But maybe I should quickly define what I mean by inner monologue: thoughts in word form, utilizing language. I defined it this way because this is what most people seem to mean when they talk about an inner monologue.
In a sense, I do have an inner monologue (or dialogue, or multilogue), it's just not done in words unless I need to crystalize my thoughts into something I can communicate with others. My internal method of thinking is a language; it's just a non-verbal language that's only "spoken" by one person on Earth: me.
I am quite capable of planning long term tasks, solving novel problems, performing abstract thinking, etc., without using words at all. It does, however, mean I need to maintain a huge amount of state in my head. Serializing that state to words is very cumbersome for me, but extremely useful to help reduce the amount of state I need to keep in mind, so it's a tradeoff between spending the annoyingly long amount of time needed to linearize and serialize my thoughts to the outside world, and having more resulting mental bandwidth to deal with the more critical parts of a problem at the moment.
Story time... After I lost my language after the stroke, my mind seemed to have been shattered, like an ancient empire falling, breaking up into numerous squabbling kingdoms. I became aware of the different functions of my brain in a new way. In terms of language, to this day when I communicate with others, it feels like I think in my internal non-verbal language, then sort of toss it over the wall to another part of my brain which converts that to words.
When I was first re-learning how to communicate with others, I managed to "talk" that other part of my brain into round-tripping the translations. So I'd think a thought, the translator part would convert it to words, then the sister part would convert the words back to my own nascent internal language. My own internal language developed alongside my ability to communicate with others via this feedback loop.
I'd never heard of generative adversarial networks at the time, but that's basically what I was doing. Before managing to convince that part of my brain to create the feedback loop, I had barely managed to regain any words at all. Afterward, my vocabulary began recovering rapidly even as it became more feasible to express complex concepts in my new internal way of thinking.
One thing this GAN-style behavior made clear to me, was that language was a highly useful error-correction method. Each time the round trip garbled meaning in various ways, it clarified the sloppiness in my new thought style, shining a light on it that made it easier to see just how much further I needed to go to regain my ability to read, write, and speak.
Maybe if I'd had help regaining my language, I wouldn't have had to develop a unique internal "language" to be able to express thoughts in, and I'd natively think in words again. Hard to say. All I know is I was desperate to be able to think again, and I wasn't willing to wait until I regained my words, especially given how slow the process was initially.
So, only going from my own personal experiences, I wonder if internal language partially "evolved" as a means of thought error-correction, to review what one was about to say or do before saying or doing it. It's also obviously useful for working with others, and our ability to transfer knowledge even across centuries is remarkably useful, but I also wonder if inner monologue has been maintained in so much of the population even for internal thoughts because that error-correction allows easier self-reflection of our thought process?
Even I sometimes will say aloud the details of the problem I'm currently trying to solve as a means to double-check that I'm not missing anything obvious. I don't do it often, but it can help when I'm stuck. If the translator part of my brain can't figure out a good way to translate my thoughts into words, it's an excellent sign I'm overthinking the problem and need to refocus on less abstruse details.
I love that description of the quiet, not as something absent, but something incredibly present. The Quiet. I wonder if the experiences of that quiet are comparable to enlightenment during meditation.
Got about as far as being unable to read before I started crying.
After two Heart attacks, welcome to my last five years of passive acceptance.
Just about back up to reading so long as a sentence doesn't have too many concepts or TLAs. In which case, slow down and start again.
Had to learn to program again. I could remember the university lectures teaching programming (modula-2 - never used since) perfectly. I could remember reading the text books over the last 20 years (C, Ada, Visual basic, C++, ASP, C#, Delphi, Java, JavaScript) all of which I've programmed in but the fingers can not type the magic program words any more.
I've re-learnt C, I've prodded some of the bits I've completely forgotten the existence of (C unions of all things!), I've written half a pascal compiler. I've waded through Petzold's Windows Winforms C# book. I'm currently poking at relearning OOP with writing lisp interpreter from scratch (not just the meta-circular thing), but I seem to have side tracked into OpenGL, WebGL and ES.
After five years I've just about at the point where I can (technically) cope with a job again. But, s*t, agencies and CVs. I might hit retirement before I can deal with those again.
Meh, have fun.
Don't expect a reply - I've already forgotten the password for this account.
I posted a few days ago about my own experiences with aphasia as a teen. The term author came up with, "The Quiet," resonates with me. My own experience was also quiet, but not as peaceful as hers.
My stroke was a thief of thought; language fell apart, washed away, leaving me unable to read, write, or even conceive of words. Talking was something beyond me, to the point that I didn't notice when people were moving their mouths while speaking.
For about 3 weeks after my stroke, it seemed everyone was giving me the silent treatment, and I was worried I'd done something terribly wrong to the point nobody would even talk to me, yet I couldn't put any words together to ask them why they were so angry with me. Somehow, I also sensed that something was terribly wrong with me, but I couldn't quite grasp what it was; any time I tried, it slipped through my fingers like fog.
Yet, it was still very quiet, and that left me much more focused on sensations and immediate experiences than before or after. Apparently, I would stare at a tree, or at the snow as it fell. Simply existing. Feeling connected to the world in a new way, part of it, instead of separate from it. Maybe this was ultimate mindfulness, but it didn't feel that way. When I practice mindfulness now, there's still a sense of I-ness that wasn't present back then. All there was existence and connection along with a vague unease, knowing something was wrong.
Much later, they told me I only spoke 5 words after the stroke, all of them so-called "automatic" words like yes, no, and what.
For...reasons...my parents never took me to see a doctor about it, so I had to relearn how to read, write, speak, and listen on my own. Without words, I had to figure out other ways of thinking that didn't involve an internal monologue. Within weeks, I was already building up a new way of thinking to allow myself to understand what was happening in a way that didn't involve language, yet was still expressive enough to describe my experiences internally just as well as language had allowed. To this day, my natural mode of thinking involves no monologue, no words, no images at all.
I do remember what it was like to think in words all the time when I was younger, an unending flow that had carved a deep canyon in my mental landscape. But now that river is little more than a nearly dried up trickle and the canyon lies empty...except when I put words together to communicate with others.
Word-ing is now a very intentional activity for me, laying words like bricks, together with the mortar of understanding to build my own Tower of Babel, translating back and forth between my new way of thinking and the words I need to communicate with others. I've been told I have a very deliberate way of speaking in person, as though I'm carefully choosing each word, and this is why.
I sometimes wonder what my life would be like now if I'd never had the stroke, never lost my language. I suppose I'll never know.
I had a mini stroke that was classed as a TIA at the time, though it later turned out to have some lasting effects. It's a fascinating and overwhelming experience to unlearn reading.
To me, the immediate physical aspect was that all text started to look like Star Wars languages. Another aspect was that it was difficult to even concentrate on the text. It no longer stood out from the environment. It was an irrelevant detail, a decoration you wouldn't pay particular attention to.
I can also appreciate what the author is saying about how their perspective of the world shifted. I expect that her shift was a lot larger than mine, but mine already made me appreciate that in the modern world, when we look at things, we often seek to retrieve some bit of information. We don't look at them holistically. Our tunnel vision is tremendous.
As you are reading this comment, you are so focused on the words that you don't see the boxy proportions of the rectangular screen you're looking at. You don't see the contrast on the screen; you're not even paying attention to the colors, likely. The texture of your display is expected to be different on the back, the corners, and its surface. Your display is also a rectangular light, casting a shadow of your head behind you now. Some parts of the light are stronger than others; it's not a uniform light. The device you're reading this on (whether a monitor or a phone) has hot spots and cold spots on its chassis that you may not have thought about, despite looking at it or touching it for thousands of hours.
But if you can't read, you see all these things on a computer monitor, on a TV, on a road sign, on a book, and that's all that your brain finds significant about that object. That's quite interesting - how our language abilities shape our everyday perception of reality.
I would even say that it can be an enlightening experience to take a holiday from reading. Though I don't think anyone can come close to enjoying it, considering how much anxiety the thought of whether they'll learn it again causes. In some ways, experiencing the world around them freshly anew, without that anxiety (as the author has), is a blissful and beautiful experience few people have had in their lives.
Very eloquent description of the tyranny of competence.
That's what makes great art sometimes, sharing an obvious truth that everyone overlooks. (Proof of work kinda - difficult to find but easy to prove)
Hah, good point.
I had gone blind in my right eye. There was one person standing before me at the reception in the emergency room arguing with the receptionist because he did not have health insurance (before the ACA). I remember thinking about a post card I saw in Powell's Books on Hawthorn St. in Portland Oregon out of the corner of my eye years earlier that said (paraphrasing) "Be thankful for our enemies, for they give us the opportunity to learn patience and understanding -- The Buddha." (The Buddha never said that.) While waiting I thought this was a good opportunity for me to learn patience and remain calm letting the man finish. That was a good thought because I was suffering from a stroke and if I had not been calm likely I wouldn't have survived. Turns out, every prior moment I had learned patience and understanding was for that one single moment.
How do you believe calmness helped you? I am interested in that.
I had a dissection of the right carotid artery also with a small aneurysm at the same location as the tear went through the artery wall. There was a massive blood clot dangling in my neck and I went blind because a little piece of this huge blood clot broke off and went into my retina which cut off oxygen to the nerves in my retina, fortunately, because if it had gone further into my brain I likely would have been paralyzed or died. There is about one hour window to clear the blood clot in the eye before permanent damage to the oxygen starved nerves starts. That morning I had been suffering from ischemic strokes.
By being calm I decreased my blood pressure so small pieces of the blood clot in my neck stopped breaking off going into my brain and the whole huge blood clot didn't break off which would have been lethal.
Had a minor stroke a couple of months ago - scans show two holes in my brain, one was in my right arm's motor control (I realised what was happening when I kept missing the keys on my laptop) which came right within hours. The other is a mystery, it's hard to think of things that are gone, I'm hoping it was something I don't need anymore from a long time ago like COBOL or Fortran
That's so beautiful and deep.
No one knows how he would deal in such a situation and cope with it, some would give up or even kill themselves, other fight to come back.
Being able to reflect on that traumatic experience in such a calm and thoughtful process is inspiring.
Side note, could it be possible that the 'inner voice', which the author lost during a while is what separate us from animals ?
She mentions being at peace, calm without it. Not thinking about the past nor the future, just present.
I kept thinking this experience made her behave just like an animal : can't speak, extremely limited thought process, basic instinct. Is that what separate us from ape ? A small part of the brain that gives consciousness.
Edit: author seem to have written a book called 'a stitch of time', if you enjoyed the reading.
> A small part of the brain that gives consciousness.
Not to get too tangental, but it was common thought at one time to think the brain is the center of consciousness. However, I have come across new data [1] that has convinced me that consciousness is entirely a full-body experience. According to the definition of some, consciousness might not even be a binary state, but rather a property of our universe like heat.
[1] Found this video on this site, and I found it to be a fascinating discussion if you have the time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8iFtaltX-s
She didn't only lose her inner voice but the capacity to communicate and understand language properly. She also lost a lot of other, harder to detect, stuff. She also writes that she was capable of complex thought, just in a different way. There are people naturally without an inner speech who can think just as well.
The Calm she speaks about is something else, it may be similar to animals or it may not but I doubt it was only caused by her loss of speech.
Beautifully written. Especially when you consider that the author suffered a brain injury to her language centers. Fascinating insights to how the mind works and how we process our world. I was supposed to be working, but I read the whole thing.
Yeah, I was struck by the thought of my child-self, perhaps 2 years old before I had a good grasp of the words I heard around me. Before I had language myself.
I scarcely remember but a couple things anyway, but even into the early years when I could speak, understand language, the memories of those times are as though of a time that seems not within the current continuum. It's like I was seeing the world but only through a small B&W TV.
This piece is a gift. Read it the second time today, but was only vaguely sure I've read it before (I think also through HN submission).
It might sound cynical to people who suffer from these severe neurological injuries. But it also is also a great piece about "not thinking".
If you are a person who feels tormented and fascinated by inner monologue or generally have issues with self-perception, trauma, mental health, depression, this is a great read.
Especially if you feel trapped in your inner monologue. I'm sure I'm not the only person who feels like this more often than not.
Same message like many spiritual or self-help strategies (mindfulness, living in the now, etc).
But this story is visceral, captivating.
I'm not a doctor, but I would even recommend it as a therapeutic device.
A friend of my wife's showed me a video of herself, post-stroke, reading from a Barney (purple dinosaur) book. She read with a strange accent that was more of an exaggerated Southern mixed with something completely alien. It was fascinating, and saddening, to see the precise ways in which her linguistic ability had been hit.
She's fine now, though, so no worries.
My father recently passed, and on the way there had 3 strokes (he's been smoking since he was 8).
The unnerving thing about his first stroke recovery is that as the brain healed, his personality seemed to change.
My dad is friends with everyone, my mental picture is of him telling a fascinating story while everyone listens. For a few months, the confident man I'd known for 40 years became like a teenager, quiet and timid. I think the timidity came from him not being able to find the words as easily, but it felt like there was a different person inside him for a moment.
My mom's had some personality changes since coming down with dementia. For one, she doesn't attend church anymore. Church is really close by; with assistance she could walk or be driven there easily. She just doesn't want to go. She'd been a Catholic all her life, and was just suddenly tired of all that Catholic stuff, in a way I thought I'd never see her be.
My mom's personality changed a lot with dementia. After a couple of months she forgot she was a heavy smoker. Watching documentaries and sitcoms pre-dementia was replaced with aimless watch anything but not really caring about it at all. She lost a lot of self restraint so it was hard to go out to places because she'd make an insulting remark about a stranger. We tried anyway. This was all after she forgot who her children were so we were getting pretty late stage.
Well written - I do not possess an internal monologue (which apparently isn't uncommon), and a common thing people think is that it is like this author's description of "quiet" - yes, there is not a person "talking" in my head, but my head is anything but quiet most of the time. It just doesn't take the form of words/sound.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
I don't hear a voice either. Or imagine one. I can just talk to myself. Maybe we're all weird.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
> If this qualifies me as "having inner monologue" already then we're done.
It does, but we're not done - we just got the "never" out of the way. I still don't think anybody that literally NEVER has any inner monologue/dialogue could pass as functioning adult in our society today, which I will try to explain here. We did not get that much out of the way though, as there is still vast room between "most of the time" and "once every few months".
I think these are key questions, from my armchair position, if you will excuse that. I don't doubt that some people have much less or more frequent inner monologues. For example, people with ADHD may have, among many other things, a too frequent (or fast, or fast-jumping) inner monologue. I'm not claiming this is the cause or anything, but it could be a factor, or some kind of feedback loop.
> 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.
Language is just an extremely efficient encoding of reality. We are having this conversation right now, and the actual information encoded in it is orders of magnitudes higher than just the rules we are using. A word is just a sound or one combination of alphabet letters, yet it is attached to a million pathways of more words, each gaining or losing great amount of weight depending on the surrounding words. The rules are just there to make the pathfinding efficient.
To "know quite a lot" could be either, like I said, some hidden inner "encoding of thoughts" that has not yet been described or discovered, or actual language - perhaps mixed together with primitive "feelings" but impossible to use without language.
We know that the brain can produce this extremely dense and efficient encoding of information to communicate with each other. We know that most people also use this language internally, with a monologue or dialogues, to construct complex and simple scenarios. Now let's assume some people really don't have any inner monologue at all. A person would fall into either of these two categories:
1. Like the author describes, where she did not function like a "normal" person at all AND she was not aware of it, but others were well aware. 2. There is another "hidden" code, capable of the same complexity and efficiency, that has not been discovered or really described by anybody, that can be translated immediately to spoken or written language.
You can see that I find 2. very hard to believe, so either I'm making a strawman, or people that claim to have no inner monologue truly do have at least some degree of it.
> Let's put it this way: do you first cogitate the "class concept" or does the "class syntax" enable the "class"-cogitation?
So I started the bad computer analogy, and now I must own it. While technically possible to spontaneously conjure the class syntax and this making the concept, it's never really the case in general. The "class concept" existed first, described in a poorer way by existing syntax: a collection of functions that take a struct on which they mainly operate. The class-syntax, today, describes the class-concept much better than previous syntax, thus the programming language has evolved. Just like human language does, but human language is much more expressive and dynamic than computer language.
To get back to my doubting the general statement in the comments of "I have no inner monologue", could you answer some more questions?
When was the last time, or with what frequency if any, you imagine another person speaking in your head?
And yourself replying or making a statement or starting a conversation with someone else or even yourself?
I think you have locked on to the LLM-viewpoint quite strongly. I don't think I can agree with a lot of your presuppositions. Like "the rules are just there to make the pathfinding efficient" and "language is just an extremely efficient encoding of reality".
While very interesting I'd have a hell of time debating those issues in this kind of medium. If you take that as your starting point then I do understand why you have a hard time grasping the "lack of monologue"-thing. If language is the source of all raw cogitation then how could anyone possibly lack monologue and still function? Am I getting it? I think I get it and I'd agree if I'd take your framework as true.
> impossible to use without language.
Now I understand those types of statements. I am totally not in a position to say you are wrong, but I'd be careful with this because you seem to be a holding a flashlight and saying there is light everywhere you look.
All I can say is I just don't think language plays that large a role in cognition. Why not? That's an excellent question, but I cannot possibly do justice to that here - besides being a complete amateur. I can leave some clues or things that count to me as clues, perhaps. We are surrounded with enormous quantities of beings that utterly and completely lack language yet show tremendous intellectual sophistication. Our own children are completely non-verbal for a very long time and sure, while they won't be winning Nobel prizes at that stage, you can't possibly claim they are incapable of the very same cognitive maneuvering you showed in the coding example (abstraction, generalization, etc). To me it's just a matter of scale. We gained function, we added something new and fancy to the preexisting Mammalian machinery with language, but I don't think it's fundamental to raw cogitation.
> 2. There is another "hidden" code, capable of the same complexity and efficiency, that has not been discovered or really described by anybody, that can be translated immediately to spoken or written language.
3. All people use the same raw cognitive substrate but some feel the need / are wired to overlay it with running commentary. A running commentary they themselves can inspect, I might add. That's an interesting bit. If it is so foundational, what's inspecting it? Language again? Like an LLM-reasoning type of agent or agents?
I notice the question "What happens before the inner monologue? A deeper level of monologue?" didn't get addressed and I'm quite interested in it. What process produces the monologue you perceive as necessary for cogitation? It surely can't be a monologue again? At some point you have to admit these dialogues just "pop into existence" pre-baked, right? Out of what? What produced that if not some raw, unobservable, non-verbal cogitation? That non-verbal cogitation has to be capable of some kind of computation to make that happen or am I making some kind of error?
Honestly, that last question is rhetorical. I'm making all types of errors, but I hope you see I'm kind of on the fence on the language thing. I'm fully open to the fact that I just might not be perceiving the monologue.
I'd like to say that I'm not "locked on to the LLM-viewpoint", because I have been interested in the inner monologue / consciousness questions since I was a teenager and by pure chance read a somewhat crazy (and now outdated / partly debunked / never really a peer reviewed science theory) book: [The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976, Julian Jaynes)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Origin_of_Consciousness_in...). It's at the very least a very entertaining read IMO, but must be taken with a grain of salt. On the other hand, the recent advances in LLM output might have been biasing me. I consider myself also an amateur of course, my knowledge is superficial.
So yes, my framework is that the language articulation is the thought itself, and that is why we (most people) consistently have/hear an inner monologue, or dialogues with others.
> Our own children are completely non-verbal for a very long time and sure, while they won't be winning Nobel prizes at that stage, you can't possibly claim they are incapable of the very same cognitive maneuvering you showed in the coding example (abstraction, generalization, etc).
I don't think a child that cannot yet speak, so typically around 2 years old, can do much cognitive maneuvering, or at least not significantly more than an a great ape. Of course it could be pure correlation, and as we age we learn and simply also learn to use language efficiently. But we also cannot rule it out. Hellen Keller is a somewhat interesting case of someone missing the language learning stage and then also essentially not developing a "consciousness" as we understand it.
> the question "What happens before the inner monologue? A deeper level of monologue?"
I do not have an answer. I'm afraid that there isn't one, just like there is an answer to "How do LLMs work?", beyond some technicalities about the core operations, matrices, weightings and whatnot. I think there is no indication that this is recursive in any sense. I cannot find the words to describe it, ironically, but it might be like other systems in nature which seem chaotic in detail and only seem ordered when you look at the whole.
If you allow me to indulge: maybe we are too deep and lost in the simulation now, there are no more curtains to peel back. A mask cannot look at who is behind itself. Is there really another hidden "code" inside our brain that could express the last two sentences more efficiently? Perhaps there is, and our mostly "outer" language simply cannot express it, because the inner hidden language is just much better. Or perhaps it's the other way 'round.
Edit: BTW you also didn't answer "when was the last time you imagined yourself or someone else talking in your head", and I am genuinely interested in the answer - for armchair science!
Back when I was taking CogSci classes in the 90's, The Bicameral Mind was introduced as a 'this is almost certainly completely wrong, but it makes a great starting point for a lot of great discussion', and it certainly bore out that way; our discussion groups using selections from the book as a starting point were some of the better ones. I agree with you; even now I think it's an interesting read.
Oh, the Bicameral Mind, how cool would it be if that was real. I also read it.
For armchair science: I cannot remember for the life of me. I never imagine scenes like that. Is that strange for you? How is that for you? Do you often do that? Is it like an entire scene playing out like a movie?
Ah. Food for thought. Have a good weekend.
Yes, for me it sounds very foreign, to not to have it.
I almost constantly have fragments of scenes playing out, when I'm not doing something that requires concentration. Either myself telling something, ar asking, at someone or myself. Sometimes reversed. As I said, I think it's mostly fragments, or there is some kind of "fast forward" where the conclusion is articulated prematurely, and I suppose the exercise has reached its purpose.
You have good weekend and holidays too!
Just FYI it’s pretty rude/insulting and not interesting to dismiss someone’s shared experience based on nothing but your own armchair feelings, and even moreso to concede if the person is telling the truth (how on earth could a person be lying or mistaken about this?) that they couldn’t be a functioning adult.
It’s honestly quite a narcissistic view that someone could not possibly think differently than you, and dismiss it out of hand. The other people in this comment thread sharing similar things make perfect sense to me.
I know that it can be perceived so, which is why I prefaced with "I know it's bad to say this - like telling someone who is ill that they are not - but I cannot believe that...".
I am only engaging with commenters who are interested in the conversation, and I'm NOT trying to put anyone down. I just want to get to know more exact meanings and nuances of "I don't have an internal monologue".
If I said "gosh, I can't believe you can actually think at a human speed, having to use words for everything! It's like having to speak out loud when you're reading, so slow! Have you been diagnosed by a professional on how to deal with this obvious handicap?" it would be pretty insulting, yes? Even if I said I wasn't trying to put someone down, because the implicit assumptions baked in to the very statements themselves.
All I can say is, as someone who also does not have an internal monologue, and can easily and happily go days without thinking in words (which is very, very different than not thinking at all), please just accept as a given that people like me exist, we're fine, do not feel like we have any deficits, and it's exceedingly frustrating to come across comments like yours whenever the subject comes up, because of the raw arrogance of it all. I can completely and honestly believe that you have a rich, engaging internal life, even if the quantity of words involved would drive me mad, because we're different people with different thinking styles. All I ask is for the same respect in return. If we can start there, then we can have a real conversation, which could be fun. I know that when I first learned that 'internal monologue' wasn't just a literary, poetically-descriptive term, but that people actually heard voices/words in their heads while thinking, it utterly floored me. That I'd made it to college without knowing this really threw me for a loop, and made me think about what other seemingly-core differences in cognition are out there. It really is a fascinating subject to think about.
Well, you added a tone there, removed the preventive apology, and added some kind of insult at the end. So I'm not interested in your conversation at all. I've made myself clear. You can go and revisit the other comments to find out about the other side too - you seem to not have understood what "inner monologue" is for most people, by what you are saying.
I didn’t take it negatively by the way. This is all so interesting and what you are saying is also absolutely not nonsensical. It’s all so hard to put it into .. words. :)
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.
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.
> "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?
> In this scenario, would the phrase "My favorite flowers are roses" have materialized in your mind?
That depends on the situation. I thought I'd mentioned it in this thread, but apparently I'd mentioned it on the post about aphasia a few days ago. I don't think in words anymore except when I'm either conversing with or thinking about conversing with someone else.
If I was just thinking to myself about my favorite things, that phrase would never pop into my head at all. It wouldn't even occur to me to even try putting it into words in that situation.
> 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?
Yes, I'm autistic (AuDHD), so I often replay social interactions in my head over and over and try to think of better responses than I was able to come up with on the spur of the moment, and this, necessarily, involves thinking in words.
So, while my natural mode of thinking post-stroke is now word-free, I am still capable of thinking in words and do so when I'm thinking about something I may need to communicate to someone else soon.
Immediately post-stroke, of course, I was incapable of thinking in words at all, but I rebuilt that capability over time. It definitely does not feel natural to me, still, to the point I sometimes stutter or pause for awkward seconds to find the right words if I'm suddenly asked to talk about a new topic I haven't rehearsed. I do have a safe subset of English that I try to stay within to avoid any potential stumbling.
I still think in my non-word way the vast, vast majority of the time, then translate to words, unless I'm saying something that's become an automatic response. If someone says to me, "How are you?" I immediately respond, "I'm doing well, thanks. How are you today?" all in words. But if I'm posed a novel question like yours, one that I've never considered before, I have to carefully find a way to translate my thoughts to words before I can answer.
Thank you, these insights are extremely interesting!
I can't quite get my head around not having an inner monologue. Mine's been around since I can remember. Its absence sounds quite scary to be honest.
I feel the same way about having somebody constantly chatting in my head :) I'd assume for both of us it's mostly fear of the unknown.
How would you think through complex scenarios otherwise? Like: "How does the current US president influence global welfare?" (relevant, but rather trite, I know).
Genuinely curious how you could form an opinion or at least analyze the question without verbalizing the ensuing self-conversation in your mind. Much (abstract) thought is informed by language.
You convert the language statement into semantic space. That's where you do the theorizing and then you convert it back. I can't think in text space. It's way too slow and I very much suck at it.
It's hard to see how this works with such a complex question though. By its nature it's actually impossible to put into words. It's my theory that we all think like this, because it's literally impossible to think "in language", but some people need to have it as some type of security blanket and some don't.
Every time someone says they have some inner monologue I can ask where this comes from. Your inner monologue also needs a source and that can't be language again. You cannot source all thought you have about this question just from those words alone. Your mind is making all types of connections that might eventually be convertable into words, but are themselves absolutely not verbal.
Sometimes, I wonder if those with an inner monologue focus on that process as being their consciousness, because they often use it to self-reflect on their own thinking process. It's that meta-reflection that people seem to consider their consciousness.
For those of us without an inner monologue, perhaps it's similar, just with a different way of self-reflecting.
I'm in the weird position of having memories of me as a child with a detailed inner monologue, and memories of post-stroke me without an inner monologue. The old memories feel like someone else's memories. I even called them xenomemories for a few years after my stroke because they didn't feel like they belonged to me.
In those old memories, I thought of my inner monologue as "my thoughts" and "my consciousness," but I have no memory of what was going on beneath that level. The words just seemed to flow in a way that made sense to child me. It was like young me needed words to keep thoughts stepping forward in an endless chain of reflection and reasoning via language. Young me didn't value anything except the build artifacts (the words), so all the rest of my thinking process never made it into my memories.
It was the effects of losing those words that made me so hyperaware of everything else going on in my brain, and I had to build up a new understanding of who "I" even was.
All the recent talk about the potential for LLMs to "think" in latent space instead of words feels so very similar to my own experiences, going from words with well-defined meanings to something less sharp, but with more room for nuance. Your mention of thinking in semantic space feels right to me based on the way I think through complex problems today. Thinking in words is exceptionally slow and clumsy for me.
In a sense, it feels like I traded in a binary computer for an analog (or quantum) one, and just like computers, I would imagine each style of thought has its strengths and weaknesses.
It would certainly be nice if my word compiler wasn't so slow and buggy, though. It makes it a lot harder to leave permanent notes for myself or communicate with others.
Your perspective is unique given your circumstances. I can't imagine how it feels to operate in a different mode having traces of the previous one. Very interesting.
This issue is very complex. One of the thorny bits is that what you remember and what is germane are very different things. As humans we operate under the laws of psychology which necessitate interesting but ultimately quite inexplicable things like an "I" to somehow "anchor" our thoughts. I believe investigations into the nature of this "I" are still ongoing (after a few millennia). Perhaps different personalities can use different types of hooks to anchor this "I". Perhaps some are inclined to use language for this and others not.
Sometimes I wonder if it's just lack of introspection: the ones with inner monologue having accepted too soon that that's all there is to their minds and neglected to look underneath this chatter. They can see that this chatter must have a source as well. Surely they'll see this can't be another level of chatter, because I'll ask the question again and again. Ultimately all human cogitation is without source[1] and can't be anything other than purely spontaneous.
Anyway, I'm rambling. Good luck to you!
[1] "without source" meaning: not able to be observed by the subject itself
It certainly feels strange. The two epochs almost feel like past life and current life, with an unexpected and ineffable bridge between the two. I remember thinking in words, but it feels like someone else was doing that, because I certainly wouldn't do it that way today. It definitely makes me constantly question exactly who "I" am.
> Sometimes I wonder if it's just lack of introspection...
Maybe? I know I didn't introspect deeper than my words when I was a child, but that doesn't necessarily mean an adult doesn't introspect about it.
I asked my husband about it because he told me he has a running stream of words most of the day except when he's relaxing. He is aware that he has a layer beneath the words, but still thinks of the words as "his thoughts" and the layer beneath as "just his subconscious," that bubbled up things like emotions or memories in service of his thoughts.
So at least N=1, an inner monologuer did consider that his words weren't all of his thoughts, but he still considered the non-verbal stuff less important than his words. It was as if all he valued was the crystalized thought, not the underlying processes.
> Good luck to you!
Thank you! And to you, as well.
I have no inner monologue unless I switch it on consciously, which I don’t like doing as it slows down thinking by orders of magnitude. In your example, I see things like graphs, numbers, maps, make connections and see possible futures, no explicit words involved.
Edit: I also tend to “simulate” what is going to happen by conjuring up a small video of people dealing with the situation, or myself in that situation.
a long time ago, we actually had to practice in order to be able to speak in our head without speaking out loud. so, in a way, we sort of used not to have an inner monologue, and had to develop one on purpose. now we do have one (though often it's more of an inner dialogue, because DID...)
Don't you ever think to yourself when waking up 'time to wake up' ?
Or when you see someone you don't like 'oh here is that motherfucker' ?
I mean the inner voice isn't like a deep discussion between you and you, its spontaneous stuff you just wouldn't say out loud. I have a hard time believing some people don't have it.
Not the person you're asking, but as someone who also doesn't have an inner monologue, no, I literally never think either of those two things you gave as an example. I feel the feelings they describe, but they never bubble up to my thoughts in word form.
I also don't have this internal monologue. But I can talk in my head just fine if I want. But doing so is the same effort as talking out loud.
I suspect that it does make articulating my thoughts verbally to other people more difficult since I must go brain thinking to text before speech.
That's probably why I prefer textual communication so much more. I can take the time to read, think, and textualize the answer.
I also find it incredibly useful to pretend I am teaching in my head; thus producing the text; before going into a meeting on a given topic. Of course anything I haven't thought to reharse, I am now naked.
As for your specific example, instead of a concrete set of words about waking up or a specific insult. I simply think a similar concept.
Language is just a way of encoding semantic meaning. If your brain already knows that it is time to wake up or that it hates that guy, what's the point of encoding a description of that feeling into spoken language and replay it? That sounds inefficient.
I have an inner monologue, but most of the time (and especially when I want to work fast), I "disable" it.
Then my mind simply works in the "meaning space", where it can leverage other modalities (e.g., visual 3D representations of system behaviors).
When I write or talk in formal environments I "enable" it just to double check and polish what I want to say.
Language is just a way of encoding semantic meaning - this is a perfect explanation and im going to use it from now on, thanks. yea this is like me too.
curious, did you start reading at a very early age? I started around 3. this is what I personally think it is. It’s not like I dont have the ability to hear a narrative in my head, I just dont do it. I’ve suspected that since I began reading so early, it has something to do with it - and if you’re not capable of reading /comprehending as fast as I can, like if you’re literally sounding out every word in your head you’d never be able to keep up with whatever it is I do. I’d be enormously frustrated by that process. But to me this is what “narrative voice people” must do in their heads.
or maybe it has to do (for me) being on the spectrum (high functioning)
> curious, did you start reading at a very early age? I started around 3
I did! I also learnt to read at 3. Your observation was really impressive.
I've never thought about it being the cause of my weird quirks, I thought it was actually another consequence/symptom of being wired a bit different, but maybe you are right. Have you ever met anyone else who learnt to read early? Do they also behave like that?
I don't know if I'm in the spectrum (I suspect I do, but I don't want to know). In any case, if I do, then I'm also a functioning one.
> if you’re literally sounding out every word in your head you’d never be able to keep up with whatever it is I do
Another possibility is that they overestimate how much they use their inner monologue without realizing. For example, I really doubt they think "time to move the left leg, now the right leg, now the left..." whenever they walk. Maybe they just don't enter into that "mode" as often as us
Language can encode information very densely. There is no point in describing "hate that guy". But it can be very efficient to have an inner monologue of "I hate that guy, but I must greet him friendly, or else I will be in trouble". If you'd just let yourself guide by feelings, you would be angry, or afraid, or genuinely happy to see that guy you hate.
We already know how to encode and decode it language, because we must communicate with others. It could be useful to also use this code internally, to create very complex scenarios fast.
My point is that "I hate that guy, but I must greet him friendly, or else I will be in trouble" is already being concluded by the brain at the semantic space way before running the language encoder and playing the inner voice. That voice already knows what is going to say before saying it.
The brain can extract those conclusions in mere milliseconds and act in consequence, and that doesn't mean being guided by feelings.
I'd argue that skipping the language lets you think in more complex scenarios where visualizing something is required, like when playing a sport, painting, or composing a melody.
Removing the noise of language also allows you to think in parallel and solve problems faster. In my case I'd say I can run a couple of "threads" only, but I wouldn't be surprised if top chess players could run a dozen.
Consider the possibility that the brain has not necessarily "concluded" what is being put into words, internally. That the monologue is the conclusion, which we are processing.
So we have two points of view, perspectives, or explanations. Yours is that there is some internal-mind code that is NOT language, which we are able to convert instantly to language to communicate with others. Most people then also have an internal monologue for unknown or orthogonal reasons, while some don't have it, without making any significant difference, because it is something like a side effect.
Mine is that the internal monologue is the thought itself. There is no other, hidden, code that can express the same complexity as the language that we use both to communicate with others and our own mind. That we don't need this internal monologue for a lot of things (consider driving a car), but it's a crucial mechanism for planning long term tasks, solving new problems, and what generally separates us from other intelligent life forms.
Not the poster you replied to. But maybe I should quickly define what I mean by inner monologue: thoughts in word form, utilizing language. I defined it this way because this is what most people seem to mean when they talk about an inner monologue.
In a sense, I do have an inner monologue (or dialogue, or multilogue), it's just not done in words unless I need to crystalize my thoughts into something I can communicate with others. My internal method of thinking is a language; it's just a non-verbal language that's only "spoken" by one person on Earth: me.
I am quite capable of planning long term tasks, solving novel problems, performing abstract thinking, etc., without using words at all. It does, however, mean I need to maintain a huge amount of state in my head. Serializing that state to words is very cumbersome for me, but extremely useful to help reduce the amount of state I need to keep in mind, so it's a tradeoff between spending the annoyingly long amount of time needed to linearize and serialize my thoughts to the outside world, and having more resulting mental bandwidth to deal with the more critical parts of a problem at the moment.
Story time... After I lost my language after the stroke, my mind seemed to have been shattered, like an ancient empire falling, breaking up into numerous squabbling kingdoms. I became aware of the different functions of my brain in a new way. In terms of language, to this day when I communicate with others, it feels like I think in my internal non-verbal language, then sort of toss it over the wall to another part of my brain which converts that to words.
When I was first re-learning how to communicate with others, I managed to "talk" that other part of my brain into round-tripping the translations. So I'd think a thought, the translator part would convert it to words, then the sister part would convert the words back to my own nascent internal language. My own internal language developed alongside my ability to communicate with others via this feedback loop.
I'd never heard of generative adversarial networks at the time, but that's basically what I was doing. Before managing to convince that part of my brain to create the feedback loop, I had barely managed to regain any words at all. Afterward, my vocabulary began recovering rapidly even as it became more feasible to express complex concepts in my new internal way of thinking.
One thing this GAN-style behavior made clear to me, was that language was a highly useful error-correction method. Each time the round trip garbled meaning in various ways, it clarified the sloppiness in my new thought style, shining a light on it that made it easier to see just how much further I needed to go to regain my ability to read, write, and speak.
Maybe if I'd had help regaining my language, I wouldn't have had to develop a unique internal "language" to be able to express thoughts in, and I'd natively think in words again. Hard to say. All I know is I was desperate to be able to think again, and I wasn't willing to wait until I regained my words, especially given how slow the process was initially.
So, only going from my own personal experiences, I wonder if internal language partially "evolved" as a means of thought error-correction, to review what one was about to say or do before saying or doing it. It's also obviously useful for working with others, and our ability to transfer knowledge even across centuries is remarkably useful, but I also wonder if inner monologue has been maintained in so much of the population even for internal thoughts because that error-correction allows easier self-reflection of our thought process?
Even I sometimes will say aloud the details of the problem I'm currently trying to solve as a means to double-check that I'm not missing anything obvious. I don't do it often, but it can help when I'm stuck. If the translator part of my brain can't figure out a good way to translate my thoughts into words, it's an excellent sign I'm overthinking the problem and need to refocus on less abstruse details.
Thank you again for posting this. These insights are extremely revealing.
I love that description of the quiet, not as something absent, but something incredibly present. The Quiet. I wonder if the experiences of that quiet are comparable to enlightenment during meditation.
That's both creepy and extremely interesting. It almost sounds like an acid trip.
Got about as far as being unable to read before I started crying.
After two Heart attacks, welcome to my last five years of passive acceptance.
Just about back up to reading so long as a sentence doesn't have too many concepts or TLAs. In which case, slow down and start again.
Had to learn to program again. I could remember the university lectures teaching programming (modula-2 - never used since) perfectly. I could remember reading the text books over the last 20 years (C, Ada, Visual basic, C++, ASP, C#, Delphi, Java, JavaScript) all of which I've programmed in but the fingers can not type the magic program words any more.
I've re-learnt C, I've prodded some of the bits I've completely forgotten the existence of (C unions of all things!), I've written half a pascal compiler. I've waded through Petzold's Windows Winforms C# book. I'm currently poking at relearning OOP with writing lisp interpreter from scratch (not just the meta-circular thing), but I seem to have side tracked into OpenGL, WebGL and ES.
After five years I've just about at the point where I can (technically) cope with a job again. But, s*t, agencies and CVs. I might hit retirement before I can deal with those again.
Meh, have fun.
Don't expect a reply - I've already forgotten the password for this account.
I posted a few days ago about my own experiences with aphasia as a teen. The term author came up with, "The Quiet," resonates with me. My own experience was also quiet, but not as peaceful as hers.
My stroke was a thief of thought; language fell apart, washed away, leaving me unable to read, write, or even conceive of words. Talking was something beyond me, to the point that I didn't notice when people were moving their mouths while speaking.
For about 3 weeks after my stroke, it seemed everyone was giving me the silent treatment, and I was worried I'd done something terribly wrong to the point nobody would even talk to me, yet I couldn't put any words together to ask them why they were so angry with me. Somehow, I also sensed that something was terribly wrong with me, but I couldn't quite grasp what it was; any time I tried, it slipped through my fingers like fog.
Yet, it was still very quiet, and that left me much more focused on sensations and immediate experiences than before or after. Apparently, I would stare at a tree, or at the snow as it fell. Simply existing. Feeling connected to the world in a new way, part of it, instead of separate from it. Maybe this was ultimate mindfulness, but it didn't feel that way. When I practice mindfulness now, there's still a sense of I-ness that wasn't present back then. All there was existence and connection along with a vague unease, knowing something was wrong.
Much later, they told me I only spoke 5 words after the stroke, all of them so-called "automatic" words like yes, no, and what.
For...reasons...my parents never took me to see a doctor about it, so I had to relearn how to read, write, speak, and listen on my own. Without words, I had to figure out other ways of thinking that didn't involve an internal monologue. Within weeks, I was already building up a new way of thinking to allow myself to understand what was happening in a way that didn't involve language, yet was still expressive enough to describe my experiences internally just as well as language had allowed. To this day, my natural mode of thinking involves no monologue, no words, no images at all.
I do remember what it was like to think in words all the time when I was younger, an unending flow that had carved a deep canyon in my mental landscape. But now that river is little more than a nearly dried up trickle and the canyon lies empty...except when I put words together to communicate with others.
Word-ing is now a very intentional activity for me, laying words like bricks, together with the mortar of understanding to build my own Tower of Babel, translating back and forth between my new way of thinking and the words I need to communicate with others. I've been told I have a very deliberate way of speaking in person, as though I'm carefully choosing each word, and this is why.
I sometimes wonder what my life would be like now if I'd never had the stroke, never lost my language. I suppose I'll never know.