I found the revelation that people don't do this fascinating. I guess I assumed it was part of the human experience.
I had a conversation with a buddy of mine about what language he thinks in one time, due to English being a seconds language for him and it is funny because looking back on that conversation we both assumed that internal monologue was just a default.
I did notice a pattern in the minority of people that do not internal monologue, where overwhelmingly populated by females.
I didn't until some time in my childhood when one suddenly developed (I remember feeling puzzled when it happened, though I don't remember exactly when it happened). I still don't know if mine's "normal" or even how to find that out. I wouldn't say it's constantly active, exactly, if that's what normal is.
This is interesting, because this is close to how I'd describe my thoughts. Occasionally I can go fully abstract with good focus, but most of the time I'm monologuing. Do you ever find yourself struggling to switch over to abstract thought because the monologue is just a duplication of effort?
Yes. I find monologue useful for analysis, but abstraction necessary for creativity. Sometimes I have to distract the analytical part of my brain with a simple puzzle game or something in order to think abstractly/creatively.
Me too. Sometimes I notice my internal monologue is slowing me down, so I turn it off and let the thoughts flow without converting them into words. Other times, I feel like the abstract thoughts are coming too quickly, so I'm like "woah, slow down there!" and work my way through the same thought process again in words, to assure myself that I'm not skipping steps and jumping to conclusions.
That sounds like my experience. Though the slow working-through doesn't always have to be in words. It can be in pictures or in orderly logical lumps of knowledge that I don't have a good name for.
I'm like this, but when I have too much caffeine I notice that it's harder to turn the monologue off. It becomes a little shouty in fact. Brains are weird.
Brains are so weird! When I get deep into thought sometimes my internal monologue doesn't turn off but it sort of spinlocks by repeating bits of songs that are tangentially related to whatever it is that I'm thinking of abstractly. I have a sense in general that there are two parts of my brain that are semi-independent.
I play time-attack puzzle games; and some of my best times have been while I'm listening to an audiobook, music or deep in thought about some emotional problem. It feels like I actually perform both tasks better if I'm doing them simultaneously because my "vague processing" isn't interrupted by my "sharp processing" and vice versa.
When I have too much caffeine I've noticed that I have very strong ability to recall auditory information, specifically tunes. I get a sort of perfect-pitch effect where I can consistently recall music in the proper key and replay it in my mind. It also happens late at night.
How do you remember music? Can you try to describe how you recall it?
I have this problem with music/sound specifically. I cannot remember it at all. For example, I have favourite artist that I heard all of his albums 50+ times. If you play a random track of his to me I won't be able to identify it. Another example; My favourite all time soundtrack that I heard countless times, I cannot recall how it goes. If somebody asks me to "sing" the melody I will fail miserably. Oh and I don't know lyrics of any song. Any. I tried to learn though...
I still get tired of listening to the same tracks over and over again :( .
I find that I primarily am in the abstract, and the way I think of it is "sub" language. If I want to, I can try to translate the abstract into language, but the more abstract the thought the more difficult that translation becomes, especially in considering what context is necessary for that communication
I'm like that but when I go to thinking abstractly world I struggle with interacting socially and sometimes even with navigating physical space. I also sometimes need to voice my thoughts out loud if I'm in that state.
I agree. If preparing a talk or ”testing” sentence, I can turn on the internal monologue to do a quick check on how it sounds.
My default is non-verbal, however.
Agreed; I switch between them as well. When I have a monologue running, the most common content is trying out and editing drafts of sentences meant to express thoughts or feelings that have arisen without words. I've worked as a technical writer for somewhere around half of my career. I wonder if that career and my frequent self-editing are somehow causally related (in one direction or the other).
Also, I occasionally seem to stop thinking entirely and just experience sensations, perceptions, and sometimes emotions. I rather like those intervals, and am prone to try to sort of savor them. They generally don't last very long before thoughts start popping up again.
I went to a Buddhist college for a while, and the curriculum included quite a lot of meditation. I wonder sometimes if those episodes without apparent thought are related in some way to the many hours of sitting I did (and still sometimes do). I don't really know, though. Maybe all that sitting taught me how to allow thinking to peter out. Or maybe it taught me to notice when it does and not interfere with the process. Or maybe it's completely unrelated.
I've never heard my voice in my head. When I hear folks talk about it, I assume something like this scene from a game where the character Jaina is blaming herself for numerous failures. Though perhaps the 1984 version of Dune would be closer? [2]
I can, but never have by default. I assume folks are talking about a behavior that is not induced consciously, as if they have their own situational narrator.
I figured everybody had internal monologue. Sometimes when I'm at work and in the zone, in the moment I realize I'm not sure if my voice was in my head or if I said it out loud on accident.
Interesting. I've been actively suppressing verbalization whenever it comes up as far as I can remember -- it is annoying af, as annoying as those silly tunes that get stuck in your head.
Not sure if that actually affected amount of internal monologue I do have, but I definitely don't have it on all the time. Mostly when rehearsing an actual past or expected conversation.
Do you have any tricks on suppressing verbalization? I've found that it feels really wasteful when I realize that half my thoughts are just acting as a translator for the abstract side, instead of keeping it abstract until I get to something I need to verbalize.
Maybe try reading using a speed reading app. I use Comfort Reader [0]. When the words fly by really fast you have to stop sounding the words in your head or won't be able to read the full sentence. For me thinking is like writing and reading to myself so it helps.
Could internal monologue a vestige of bicameralism?
>Bicameralism[Note 1] (the condition of being divided into "two-chambers") is a hypothesis in psychology that argues that the human mind once operated in a state in which cognitive functions were divided between one part of the brain which appears to be "speaking", and a second part which listens and obeys—a bicameral mind.[0]
Weirdly, I think that his theory makes sense without leaning on bicameralism at all. Internal monologues could be a recent development with very few obvious physical changes in the brain that caused it, and the cultural interpretation of it could have changed.
People think of the idea of 'the mind' and 'the self' being obvious and self evident, but they are anything but, and it took a lot of brilliant philosophers and poets to come up with words to talk about it and metaphors to use. It seems completely believable to me that bronze age people did not have a clear understanding of what thought was and what was doing the thinking.
My opinion is that the "internal talk" is a result of our adaptation to human culture from the last thousands of years. This happens because several thousand years ago we had no language, at least not as developed as in the modern world. I guess the same is true for hearing music inside your mind, since there was no music (as we understand nowadays) a few thousand years ago.
> I would tell them that I could look at myself in the mirror and have a full blown telepathic conversation with myself without opening my mouth and they responded as if I had schizophrenia. One person even mentioned that when they do voice overs in movies of people’s thoughts, they “wished that it was real.”
I think this author has an inaccurate understanding of people who do not have an "auditory" inner monologue.
Think of it this way: a lot of people don't vocalize text as they read it. I do not. I am still able to read, and I still "understand" what is being read, but I don't need to turn it into voices and sound it out, to gain that understanding. Tbh, I find it slows me down.
Inner monologues are the same way. People still have rich inner "conversations" even if they aren't vocal ones. Which is what I do -- I'm not really sure the best way to describe it, but I'm able to have a "debate" between inner arguments without mocking it out as two people talking to each other (I mean, I can if I want to -- but I find it unnecessary and slow, personally). I'm sure a lot of people are the same way.
I think the author is getting a bit high on the idea that he has a richer inner life than the people around him, and needs to think about alternate interpretations.
My interpretation is that the author isn't referring to people who suppress vocalization by choice but rather to people who can't enable vocalization in the first place.
Similarly, not everyone can visualize things in their mind. Pixar's founder Ed Catmull did a survey of Pixar employees and, interestingly, there wasn't that big of a skew of artists who are able to mentally visualize.
My wife has this. One day we had a similar realisation as the article’s author. It was fascinating to discuss and explained so much about how we went about making choices over anything visual, from clothes to home decor (I tend to be in charge of both for our family as I can visualise).
I use visualisation a lot for work, especially when designing or understanding process flows, so not having that ability seems so alien to me.
I'm a very visual person, but I can't visualize faces at all. I have no problem remembering faces, but I can't visualize them. When I'm fully awake, I can sort of visualize other things, but it's never perfectly clear. But when I've just woken up, I can lucid dream, and then I can consciously visualize really complex 3d structures, and design mechanisms in my head much more easily than I can using CAD software when I'm fully awake. The brain is truly amazing and very odd sometimes.
What about visualizing the picture of a face ? Or alternatively, like you seem to be able to visualize 3d structures, can you imagine a wax or clay sculpture of the face of the person (i.e. if you have a sculpture laying around which has a face take a look at it and try to visualize it in your head), or a coin head profile.
Once you get it to successfully visualize with one way morph it continuously into the case you don't successfully visualize yet and push the frontier. For example if you get it to work with a small sculpture try it with a bigger one.
Or try to look at a real person face as if it was a sculpture or an object. Try changing the way you gaze at the face. Sometimes, even more so with people we care about, we don't look at them like we would look at an object but we are rather trying to look at the soul behind the mask.
With faces, it's odd. When I go to visualize someone, I kind of get a fleeting glimpse, and then it fades and I can't make out anything except, somewhat blurred, their hairline. No face at all. I'm pretty sure I know exactly what they look like - the recognizer is absolutely fine - but if I try to construct an image, it goes away. On the other hand, if I had to, I could probably draw a reasonable likeness from memory by a process of successive refinement, or I could sculpt a likeness from clay. But visualize internally - no, can't do it.
I think it might be that when I'm fully awake, I can't maintain detailed visualizations very effectively. Faces are really important to us, but perhaps imperfect visualizations of faces fail to pattern match well enough against my recognizer, and so it blanks them. Like I say, I get the briefest glimpse in my visualization, but then it blanks. But maybe I'm over-rationalizing, and my brain is just weird.
I can visualize but not very well, if I were to try to actively visualize a structure I'm pretty sure it would be rotated wrong or have different problems. When I was in high school I had a test that put me in the lowest 3% of the population for visual understanding of things (like put these blocks together to make this shape) and the top 95% for reading comprehension.
Generally instead of visualizing something I would tend to have an internal monologue on how it should work. Even if I am drawing something programmatically I would describe the logic for getting what I want, rather than visualizing what it should look like.
"I can visualize but not very well, if I were to try to actively visualize a structure I'm pretty sure it would be rotated wrong or have different problems"
Some claim that's nearly everyone. Someone did an experiment where they asked a bunch of people to draw a bicycle, which they had all seen in their lives, from memory without a model. Not a particular bicycle, just "a bicycle". The configurations were very diverse and different from the geometric/physical arrangement of real ones.
I have both. My mind's eye is blind and my mind's ear is deaf. The inside of my head is a pretty empty place where I inhabit it, cue the jokes. Thoughts just pop into my head from some other part of my brain. When I'm thinking about how to word something, I feel my mouth start to form the words, though my mouth doesn't move. Maybe I'm sub-vocalizing, I don't know. When I'm thinking hard about something, I just sort of "go away" for a bit and come back, hopefully with an answer. I thought this was normal for everyone, until I read about aphantasia a year or two ago.
I suspect this is why sounds or pictures are so distracting to me. The thing that everyone does where they play a tv show in the background doesn't work for me. If I hear it, I have to concentrate on it. It takes a mental effort to ignore it. So when I'm at home I keep everything off unless I'm ready to watch or listen to it.
That is nice. I can't conjure an image like that at all. Also, seeing a graphic image doesn't stick with me very long since I don't keep seeing it like a lot of people apparently do. People with aphantasia would probably do better moderating images than those without. Still not great, though, because while I can't see the image again I would still remember the circumstances involved.
Interesting. I have very little mental visualization and find ignoring TVs to be extremely difficult. I had thought it was because I grew up in a house that did not have a TV on very often.
It's very possible that it's not related. I frequent r/aphantasia on reddit and we're always asking the community if they have certain quirks to see if it's related and the results always end up mixed.
This reminds me of some other recent articles about topics like aphantasia (no visual imagination) and severely deficient autobiographical memory (SDAM). People who have these conditions do not realize how different other people think.
I'm one of those that has aphantasia. No visual or auditory imagination for me, so no running monologue in my head, or view of sentences. Or, if it's happening, I can't hear it or see it. Thoughts come to me as concepts, and sort of just pop into my head. Had no idea until a year or two ago that this wasn't how it worked with everyone.
How many thoughts/ideas/things can you process simultaneously?
I can probably do up to 8 different subjects/thesis, but I also can imagine in: audio, touch, sound, color, space, abstract, visual, time, taste, smell, linguistic, and hyperdimensional. Couple of these things I had to practice though.
That's a hard question for me to answer. I know it sounds weird but "I" am not the one doing the thinking. It happens elsewhere in my brain; I only get notified of the results. So my answer is either 1, 0, or "no idea", depending upon how you look at it. I can keep track of a lot of pieces of a large process or program all at once, but it's happening in the abstract, I guess. This might just be a communication problem, though.
In terms of the senses, I can walk into a busy scene and take everything in. The sounds, the sights, the smells, etc. I seem to be more situationally aware than a lot of other people I interact with. Just no record button. Notes I make to myself or overall impressions stay, but I would not be very helpful as a witness to a crime if I wasn't trying to memorize what I was seeing in the specific.
This is a difficult thing for me to "look at", in some ways I don't do much thinking at all, but am still successful and am thought of as that guy that can figure out the problem when others are stuck.
You noted the possibility that you might have mental images or monologue but don't experience them. That's interesting.
I expect someone will object that it's logically contradictory to propose that you have an inner monologue but don't experience it; I don't think it is, actually.
I get migraines. I've experienced them for about forty-five years. They're not just headaches. They're some kind of unusual neural and vascular activity in the brain that can cause a whole slew of weird effects.
One effect that I've experienced many times is called scotoma. It's a phenomenon where a region of the visual field is taken over by a vivid abstract pattern. Scotomas take various shapes, but they generally have a few things in common: they are more vivid than real seen objects; they often flicker rapidly and may move slowly; they often have high-contrast black-and-white-striped zigzag patterns; they may be surrounded by faint or vivid colorful auras that pulse or stream.
I've seen lots of scotomas over the years with all of these attributes.
One time just a few years ago I was reading a good book and I began to notice the mild visual distortions that alert me to an oncoming scotoma. There's nothing much I can do about them, and I was really interested in the book, so I sort of shrugged and figured I'd continue reading until I had to stop.
I never had to stop.
The scotoma came on full-force and took over the center of my visual field. I couldn't see anything except the scotoma directly in front of me.
Nevertheless, I was able to continue reading without any trouble. Well, the scotoma was distracting, but it didn't prevent me from reading.
As you can imagine, I found this really weird. If you don't believe me, I don't really blame you. I found it so surprising that I started reading the book aloud, as if that would somehow serve as a reasonable test that I wasn't simply making up the contents of the book without realizing it.
I continued reading. The scotoma eventually faded away, and I could confirm that, yes, the pages I had read while I couldn't see them were just as I had heard myself reading them aloud.
This experience suggests to me that seeing the book is one process, but consciously experiencing the seeing of it is another, completely separate, process. The migraine sabotaged my ability to consciously experience seeing the book, but it didn't interfere with the process of actually seeing or reading it.
If that's true, it suggests that the process of running an internal monologue, or of constructing internal images, could be separate from the process of being conscious of them. Perhaps you indeed have an internal monologue and you simply don't experience it?
That's really interesting. I can believe it happens. Some portion of your brain is still seeing the words, since the retina and optical nerves aren't affected, it's just that your visual field is getting interference from somewhere else. Like getting interference on an old CRT monitor with a magnet. It affects what you can see, but it doesn't stop anything from seeing the data come through the graphics card itself.
The reason I wonder about whether I am seeing things on a "screen" I can't access has to do with my ability to recognize things. When I see something I've seen before, I immediately recognize it, just like normal people do. So it's saved off somewhere, I just can't access it in the meantime. So it's possible that when I try to imagine a beach or whatever, it's appearing on a screen I can't see. I think of it as if my visual projector has a burnt out bulb. It could be showing it to me if I could somehow change the bulb, possibly.
I realized a few years ago that I have aphantasia, and it blew my mind that most people could conjure images of things when they closed their eyes (to some greater or lesser degree, but more than my zero degree).
I didn't realize that, for example, "mental image" was not just, like, a metaphor for thinking. When I close my eyes, it's black. Just, black. Well, you know, depending on how bright the lights are, etc.
> I realized a few years ago that I have aphantasia, and it blew my mind that most people could conjure images of things when they closed their eyes (to some greater or lesser degree, but more than my zero degree).
Then it might blow your mind further to know that I can visualize things easier with my eyes open. I overlay them onto my visual field and they're _far_ more vivid with my eyes open than shut, by an order of magnitude at least.
That would have blown my mind a few years ago before I knew about aphantasia, but not any more. I have spent a while digging deeper into it, and it has even come up in my recent graduate studies in cognitive science (to the great amusement of my program colleagues).
I am 100% jealous of your ability to do that, however.
I have recently learned that it might be possible to train myself to invoke mental images. There is a technique where a person with aphantasia sits their eyes shut and starts by imagining, e.g., a green apple. But you don't imagine it fully at first. You start with its different qualities, like imagine roundness for a while. And then greenness. Then shininess. Then some gradient. Then a stem. Then more detailed shape. Et cetera.
I have had a tiny bit of success with this technique, or at least I have fooled myself into thinking I have? If I try this, after a while I can start to picture a green apple, though it is like a faint, faded ancient photograph with almost no color or detail and certainly no vividness. But there does seem to be some little bit of something there.
>When I close my eyes, it's black. Just, black. Well, you know, depending on how bright the lights are, etc.
Maybe you already know this, but non-aphantastic (heh) just see black too. When we visualize something, it's a very different experience from seeing anything at all. It's more the knowledge of "if I could see this thing, this is how it would look".
I'd be very interested in knowing what really happens in our brains. It feels like stringing together a bunch of information and assembling a spectral "print preview" that you can't really see.
I've been fascinated by this concept ever since I studied American Sign Language in university. When I spent enough time signing, I stopped thinking in words.
My thoughts became more abstract, quieter. It was actually kind of nice, peaceful. I don't know that I was any smarter or able, but it was a notably different experience in a minor way.
But then I graduated, moved, and stopped spending 1-2 nights per week at the campus pub signing with other students. And it all slowly went back to a loud internal monologue instead.
I wonder if this is related to (forgive the term) grammar-nazi-ism. I'm pretty sure I don't have any inner-monologue, at least the concept of it sounds weird to me. I'm also super picky about grammar: if someone writes "its cold out today" I have to re-read the sentence to try to understand it. I don't "hear" "it's cold" in my head, I parse "its (posessive) cold" which doesn't make any sense, and I have to go back and re-read it to fix the writer's error.
For me it's more about a and an, if someone were to write: "I installed a HDMI cable" my inner monologue will actually yell as it passes over the "a" to heavily emphasize the mistake.
Depending on how annoyed it is, it might even respond... "Really? Did you really install _A_ HDMI cable today? Really? Maybe you installed _AN_ HDMI cable?"
Acronyms are generally the worst for a/an situations as depending on if you personally pronounce the acronym as a whole word or spell it out in letters the rule might change.
I have experiences like those of the previous poster, but I also experience when listening to speech, so it's not specifically visual, at least for me. And no, I don't experience speech visually (unless I'm reading a text transcript).
I can testify that both rumination and worry can occur without an inner monologue. I have a monologue sometimes, and none other times. I can ruminate or worry in either case.
I have internal monologue sometimes, and I also have the characteristic you're describing here. It's sort of pleasing somehow to discover that someone else has similar parsing issues.
I tend to get stuck on failed parses, which sometimes makes conversation awkward. Some failed parses are funny, or they might prompt me to substitute homophones in a search for a parse that works. Sometimes the results make me laugh, and that can lead to occasional awkwardness.
The hardest thing for me to come to own up for myself is not just taking responsibility for my own inner monologue, but realizing that thoughts encompass much more than my inner monologue. I have wordless thoughts are deeper, more subtle and these things are thoughts too. I have to take responsibility for these as well.
It makes sense once you think about animals, who don't have a formal language yet clearly are capable of thought.
Something I discovered within the past year is that if I know a song fairly well, I can "play it" silently in my head, and be entertained. The experience isn't quite as emotionally resonate as listening with headphones, but it's not so far off either. It's useful when I'm bored.
...can anyone else do this? I actually find it supremely weird.
No, I think that's pretty normal. I do it all the time.
I can even "compose" my own music (it can be any genre, with any type of instruments, and even include voices), but I have no ability to play instruments myself. I'd love to get into music, but just don't have the time.
My literature professor back in college said he "listened to" classical music in his head during his morning runs. I just assumed everyone did it based on sample size 2.
>No, I think that's pretty normal. I do it all the time.
[Edit: Currently I "listen" to a lot of Georgios Papadopoulos, heh!]
>I can even "compose" my own music
I can relate! Unfortunately, I'm totally untrained regarding music. I once tried to enter one of the melodies in my head (simplified) into a music program, and it took forever, because I had to find the correct notes by trial and error: "Not that one. Neither that one. Still wrong. Not quite. This one is it! Next note..."
I think this kind of trial and error is actually the best way of learning an instrument. My guitar teacher did exactly what you did (but on a keyboard) when he was a kid, and even got feedback from his parents on whether he hit the right keys. He's a hell of a guitar player now, surely among the (subjectively) very best in my country.
> it's so slow and frustrating that the melody in my head just disappears.
Use a microphone to record yourself humming the melody first, so you can get the original back if you forget it.
Separately, I'll mention that imitone (https://imitone.com) works surprisingly well. The transcriptions don't come out perfectly by any means, but they provide a base that you can then clean up.
Man I can't even imagine. I realize a while back that I don't actually hear music in my head when I have an earworm, instead I hear a representation of it made entirely of what would be vocalized sounds. So if I'm hearing the guitar solo from November Rain, its kind of like someone (me, really) going 'bowwwww owww nah nahhhh nah nahahhhhhhh wan nah nah nah nah wah wah' rather than actual guitar noises, but then it's followed up by the singers legitimate voice.
My wife found this pretty weird. I suspect it's related to my also experiencing aphantasia. It could be some form of mental lossy compression, where the brain knows it can roughly replicate what it heard using the limited set of vocalizations it already knows instead of actual note/instrument combinations.
Maybe it's a combination of both, and you're just more attuned to the nuance? It's funny, when you mentioned November Rain I did the guitar noises, in my voice, in my head. Great, now that's stuck in there. Thanks. But something like the Star Wars sound-track. I do hear a more instrumental version, although for parts that I can sing I also get some ghostly sensations in my tongue and throat.
I'd like to explore this aphantasia idea a bit more. I would classify myself as very visual, but on thinking about this more ... it's not like I have a high-fidelity visual impression of the imagined object in my mind's eye. It's more like a physical / tactile impression of presence. Is that what it's like for you?
As I'm sitting here, I'm thinking of describing it as ...
If I shut my eyes I still know roughly where the monitor corners, the keyboard, the table corners, the wine-bottle, the apple, etc. are. It's not like I'm seeing them, but I can spatially query them and perform operations on them. So is this a difference in internal perception, or is it a difference in how we describe those internal states?
I think in a very spatial way. I can roughly imagine objects or scenes as something like a 3d graph of connected points. I can imagine the facade of my house if I close my eyes only by sort of tracing its shape, in which case I can feel my eyes moving along that dimension as I do it. I cannot imagine a person's actual face, which I'm told is really weird, although I'm very good with recognizing them when I'm shown them. I can generally map out a location as if I was overhead once i've walked through it, but only really as a spatial scene. Closing my eyes is kind of what I imagine its like to be blind.
For very simple objects, I can vaguely visualize them like a drawing from an early 80's graphics demo, but that's about as good as it gets.
See, what intrigues me about this is I wonder if you're just more nuanced and precise in your description. I always thought of myself as being very visual, and I'm like ninety-nine point something percent of spatial ability, and yet your description seems like a fairly accurate description of what I experience.
The problem is that the descriptions depend on so many subjective things. For instance what does it mean to be able to see someone's face in one's mind? At what resolution question mark at what level of detail? I mean it seems like a lot of people with uncorrected vision can't even see faces to any standards I would consider seeing. So could it be that you're holding your mental visualizations too too high a bar and comparing them with people you have a low bar for mental visualizations?
Edit .. your description of having to trace out the facade is particularly apt to me. It's almost like some kind of DRAM thing where I have to refresh my mental image by touching / scanning parts of it or it goes away.
That's what I always thought originally, but from when I've spoken with other people about it, it's not the normal way of 'visualizing'. In particular, not being able to do things like imagine a persons face is pretty odd. Similarly, when i'm told to "imagine you're in your childhood bedroom" or "imagine you are on a hot desert island", I can't get anything going, while I'm told most people will construct a detailed mental scenery of it.
Like growing up, I always assumed that those scenes where someone's imagination goes wild and they envision other characters doing crazy things (see: the entirety of Scrubs) were just a literary device, but apparently that's at least sort of close to how a normal brain actually works.
The DRAM comparison is pretty good. Or like having a plastic film over the world that you need to press down on to see anything through.
> its kind of like someone (me, really) going 'bowwwww owww nah nahhhh nah nahahhhhhhh wan nah nah nah nah wah wah' rather than actual guitar noises, but then it's followed up by the singers legitimate voice.
That is super interesting!
I would assume that if you audiolize instruments as you making instruments sounds with your mouth, you would audiolize other people as you mimicking them as well...
I mean, when I read your post above, my inner voice does it in a neutral me voice, because I have no clue what you actually sound like. But if I read a text message or something from a friend of mine, I read it in their voice, because I know what they sound like.
If I try to do it right now, I can only really generate a sort of average tone that I associate with them, or maybe a phrase they say commonly. I can't really synthesize a new sentence though, so there's something in there relating to memorability too. If I try to imagine my wife saying things that I know for a fact she said this morning, I just hear myself imitating her.
I think you're right. It might also partially be an acquired skill. As a musician I hear a lot more details in music than a non-trained ear normally would. This naturally makes it easier for me to recall music with more detail. If you aren't trained and have a low level of musicality then I would assume you'd only memorize/remember the main parts of the song/passage, like the "sound" of the guitar playing that solo, whereas I hear the piano comping (or is it just another guitar? I remember piano :D), bass & drums, all while picturing how to actually play the solo on the guitar.
Like a non-musician hearing a guitar riff would just replay it as "nana nana na, na-naa" or something simple whereas I would be able to hear it in exact detail and how it interacts with the rest of the band melodically as well as rhythmically.
I cannot 'play music in my head'. I can recall vaguely what it felt like to have been listening to a specific piece of music, but not much further than that.
Possibly related, I have a very poor ability to visualise anything internally. (I cannot, for example, "picture a beach in my head")
In fact, most things I try to hold in my head evince nothing more than a foggy recollection.
It has been this way for as long as I can remember.
When you say play do you mean like a musician or do you mean like hitting play on a music player, if the latter I can do that, I suppose what would stop people is not a good memory for music.
I can do this too. I also will sometimes unconsciously bop along to the music.
One time, a friend's Dad asked me why I was rocking back and forth. I think he thought I had a nervous tick. In reality, I was "listening to a song" and didn't even realize I was moving along to it. Seems to happen most often when I'm bored.
I do the same, but unintentionally and the songs that seem to pop into my head are all songs I hate. It's incredibly rare that my favorites end up playing, but rather repetitive Pop crap. This isn't even a comment about Pop Music, as even though I don't really listen to Pop, I've heard plenty that I like. But not the songs that fly around in my head all day; Pure garbage.
Edit: As I was typing this, "La Macarena" popped into my head.
I specifically avoid viral earworm songs because I am very prone to getting them stuck in my head. I can have the same song playing "in the background" non-stop in my mind for days. I have songs in my dreams and I'll wake up with them still playing in my head. Sometimes it will just be a single bar of a song, or just a piece of it looping.
To this day, I have never once listened to "Chocolate Rain" or Rebecca Black's "Friday" because I fear never being able to turn them off. (I avoided Taylor Swift for, like a decade, but now just thinking about means I've got "Shake it Off" playing.)
Writing this out now makes me realize how weird this all sounds...
I have the exact same experience. It may even, unintentionally, be the _reason_ I don't listen to Pop music. It's generally not even a whole song - usually not even the chorus. I'll get a 2-4 second loop in my head of some insignificant section of a crappy song for 2 or 3 whole days.
Like you, it will sometimes start when I'm sleeping. I won't remember much of the dream, but the song is still there, echoing as it was in whatever setting my dream took place.
I also get ear worms, although not as bad as you seem to get them.
One trick that works for me is to over-saturate your brain with it. Got an annoying song on your mind? Find it in spotify, put on headphones, and listen to it on repeat until you're sick of it.
Funny anecdote. Back when I worked at EA, a couple of guys hacked together a system to share music on the internal LAN. (This was before the days of Spotify and friends.) Everyone would put their ripped albums on it and anyone could listen to anyone's stuff. It was pretty rad.
They also added some metrics tracking so you could look people up and see how many different albums they'd listened to, how many times, etc. There were leaderboards for who could cover the most stuff.
I thought it would be funny to "win" by listening to "Butterfly" by Smile.dk[0] more than any other song had been listened to. It listened to it on a loop for weeks. I, for reasons I cannot really explain years later, actually did listen to it and not just let it play at zero volume. It was a weird experiment in neurological satiation. At some point, it no longer annoyed because it just was, like the sound of my own heartbeat.
I've also had songs get stuck in my head for as long as I can remember. What surprised me was the realization that I could (A) consciously initiate and turn off a mind-song, and (B) actually be entertained by the mind-song.
My "mind's eye" is pretty strong as well, but I would never mentally look at a painting or watch a movie to pass the time. Yet it seems to work for music.
The way I solved this is by stopping completely to listen to pop songs. I will actively avoid the radio or web stations so I won't be "contaminated" by these cheap songs. I actively look for more complex music: jazz/classical style and similar.
I once read that to get the loop out of your head, you have to "finish" the song, i.e. play it to the end, either in your head, sing it or play it on the stereo.
Yup, have been able to do that as long as I remember. It's great for pub quizzes where they play the start of a song, I listen to the rest in my head until I've worked out the song's name.
Isn't this the experience of getting a song "stuck in your head?"
Most well-trained musicians can read a score and construct the sounds mentally. It's an essential skill for composers and conductors, and useful for others.
In the aphantasia discussions that are closely related to this, it was revealed that some graphical artists have it and actually can't visualize things in their head, yet they're able to draw things on command.
Which is completely mind-boggling to me.
So there's probably people who can compose music without being able to audiolize it in their heads first, as strange as that sounds.
I have experienced something similar, namely hypnagogic hallucinations, usually when waking up, that sound exactly note for note the same as the recordings. Strawberry Fields Forever was the most memorable. To my mind experiences like this and particularly vivid dreams show that our mental capacity for self-stimulating is profoundly more extensive than most people believe. I can't think of any reason why you couldn't have a kind of state of lucid wakefulness effectively functioning as an overlay of what your sense organs are telling you. Imagine for example a race car driver who sees the line as clearly as in one of the simulation games that enables it.
Edit: I've also had vivid hypnagogic visual hallucinations intentionally. It's a kind of fun game to play, seeing my bedroom clearly with my eyes closed, or checking the time on my watch while same. Obviously I'm conscious and aware that I'm not really checking the actual time, but not particularly surprisingly I'm pretty close since I tend to wake about the same time every day.
In case you're interested: "hypnogogic" refers to experiences you have while falling asleep. The word for experiences you have while waking up is "hypnopompic".
"The hypnagogic state is rational waking cognition trying to make sense of non-linear images and associations; the hypnopompic state is emotional and credulous dreaming cognition trying to make sense of real world stolidity." [1]
Thank you for the clarification. I've never noticed any distinction between these two states. Perhaps that's why I conflate them. I suppose that stands to my point about the richness of autostimulated experiences.
My wife doesn't like listening to music in the car, but one of the local radio stations will show the title/artist on the center console. So I put the radio on with the volume at 0, I hear the song in my head, and she has silence :)
I'm a drummer and my wife always gets mad at me for drumming on things. I have a song in my head and can hear all the parts really well even over whatever sounds my taps are making. So in my head I'm drumming along and it sounds super good, but to the rest of the world it's just monotone taps on a table or whatever.
I found that when some particular song is getting too much of my internal "air time", the best way to get rid of it is actually to find it (personal collection, youtube, google music, spotify - whatever you are using) and just to listen to it from beginning to the end. HTH.
Yeah I can also do this (sometimes), the experience is the same as yours: I can't quite emotionally resonate with the song as I would if I were hearing it IRL, but if I know the song quite well I can get all the details right.
It is particularly intriguing to be able to "sing" using other people's voices, since the lyrics of the song "feel" the same way as my inner voice, passing through (I assume) the brain's phonological loop.
Once I had this really weird experience, where in certain conditions, certain muscles would resonate exactly with the song playing in my brain (and not just the rythm, even minor details were somewhat transferred, as if my brain was redirecting raw PCM audio from my brain directly to the nerves); I was really excited about this, as there was potential for a direct non-invasive neural interface to my brain, capable of extracting original songs directly from my brain without any instruments; unfortunately I could not replicate this weird behaviour reliably, and I also felt a bit weird in my brain when trying to do so, so I just dropped the matter.
Yes, I think the inability to do this seems to be associated with aphantasia. Most people do not have aphantasia, therefore I'd expect most people are able to do this.
I think similarly that most people who do not have an internal dialogue experience aphantasia - the ability to replay or simulate sensory experiences mentally. Personally I do not often have thoughts "racing" through my head - maybe one main one, maybe zero - and I think this related to my aphantasia.
Absolutely. I work extremely long hours, so I've noticed that when I'm particularly tired, my "mental iPod shuffle", as I call it, will go into extreme mode. Sometimes reading a single word or sentence is enough to remind me of a song, and BOOM it's immediately playing in my head.
I now basically have actual music on nearly 24/7 to drown that out otherwise it can get pretty annoying – especially if the song that's stuck in my head isn't one I actually enjoy.
I can play a whole song in my head, and then realize that I don't know the words, and when I try to get the words out of the song in my head, I can't understand them, because my brain only committed the musical parts, not the lyrical parts.
I can even hear the vocals, they're just gibberish until I make a conscious effort to memorize them.
I haven't done it for many years but you've reminded me that I could sometimes play songs in my head and actually hear it. Only very softly though, like old-fashioned headphones on a very low volume.
I still have music in my head very often - I play piano and I'm always getting ear worms, but it must be at least 20 years since I last physically heard my mental music playing. I wonder if I can get it back?
Yep, I can totally do this. It's normally not the whole song, just a section of it (but that doesn't bother me). It's a particularly common thing for me to do in bed, using the last song I heard that day.
Yep, I do this. In fact, sometimes when I'm meditating and focusing on my breath, I start hearing a song. I often ask, "Is that still being mindful or is it cheating?" I usually settle on cheating and my brain tries to focus in on the breath again. Sometimes I just let it play.
You know what's really weird? If I don't know all the lyrics to a song, I can sometimes listen to it in my head and hear the parts of the song I don't consciously remember.
I find that if I'm in a noisy environment, like a moving car, if I think hard about a song, it feels like I can faintly hear it. I guess it's a side effect of the brain trying to find a recognizable pattern in the noise. I used to especially appreciate this in the days before it was easy to actually hear any song on demand, when I would have had to either buy the album or record the song off the radio.
This is the norm for me. If I am awake, I almost always have music playing in my head, from pop songs to classical to little nondescript melodies. Sometimes this can be quite annoying.
And then there is Aphantasia[1]. I didn't realize this was a thing. When people spoke about picturing something in my mind, I always assumed they weren't being literal. Discovering they were was shocking. It's such a foreign concept to me, to picture something in my mind literally.
I saw this viral tweet and I hoped that was more scientific information to read, because I'm a little confused. I don't see enough information here to even determine which type of person I am. Of course I've always heard of "internal monologue" and of course I think about things using language. But I also don't "hear" anything, and definitely not something that literally sounds like my voice speaking. But if I were to try to explain my thought process, I likely would describe it as myself expressing thoughts using language as if I were speaking.
Obviously this gets deep into the philosophy of qualia, but do we have evidence that there are two very different modes of thinking? Could this not just be different analogies people have adopted to describe their thinking?
An Instagram poll isn't a great tool to study this. I would like to see a psychological or neurological study about this idea. As of now, I'm pretty skeptical that the dichotomy exists. It sounds like the claim that "some people describe their brains like a computer, while some people describe their brains like a library." Computers and libraries are very different physical objects, yes, but the choice of analogy doesn't really tell me much about how people are experiencing their own thought processes.
Of course, if it's true that the majority of people do actually experience auditory hallucinations of their own voice speaking all of their thoughts, then my criticisms here are invalid, and I'm definitely in the other group of people.
I would not say that it is auditory hallucinations as in you don't actually hear the voice in your ears. But you thoughts are in a voice in your head that is distinctly your voice or your identity. At least that is my experience and it sounds like what the author is describing to me.
It is indeed an intriguing topic to consider. I hear something like my own voice both when I am thinking throughout the day and when I am writing, such as right now I hear my “imaginary voice” speaking what I’m typing out.
The idea of ones own voice is hard to describe. I perceive it as similar to what my voice sounds like, but from heard from within, almost like you’ve rolled off a bunch of the high-end. Imaginary voice is much more consistent in volume and tone for me too than speaking, much less emotional, almost no variety in pitch.
I wouldn’t say I think in full-sentence monologues all day, but I guess I think in fragments of sentences? It’s one of those things that is hard to look back and remember doing and explain how you did it, kind of like breathing. It’s just automatic.
I wonder if some of the “no monologue” people aren’t much different from the rest of us, but they just didn’t articulate their process the same way. I can kind of identify with the concept map thing, so I could probably answer differently depending on mood or how I felt when I read the survey.
I'm just sitting here overlooking a mountain and was feeling/thinking/interpreting one of the hills while reading this and realized it actually gets cumbersome if you try to describe it with words, first I thought "hilly", then thought "steep" was more of what I was feeling but after further analysis (of the past moment) the feeling/experience also encompased "rugged", "majestic"...
Super interesting topic overall. I wonder whether these people without inner dialogue are unable to recall music (with lyrics)?
I can easily "transform" my inner voice to be in the voice of Darth Vader (like someone here interestingly pointed out). I find it peculiar that there are people who cannot and their inner life must feel different than mine. I wonder how depression fits into this. I'd think you'd certainly be more prone to get depressed if you are able to tell yourself how stupid/worthless you are. I wonder how that manifests non-verbally.
Someone linked to an article by Feynman in this thread which demonstrated two different kinds of counting - using your voice and seeing the numbers visually. Quite interesting read: http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/607/2/Feynman.pdf
For me it can be "auditory" in the same way that I can "see" pictures of things I'm thinking of inside my head. My understanding is when you're visualizing something in your head -- say, your partner's face -- the visual cortex is activated as if you are actually seeing it. The same goes for my thoughts.
Not every thought is actually.... auralized? auditorialized? ...though. There's some sort of default mode that I operate in most of the day. I don't have to "hear" every single thought I have, I'm able to take in information and perform common actions without hearing thoughts. But, as soon as I go into "conscious" mode, nearly everything becomes sounded out internally. For instance, when programming, I'm constantly having a real internal conversation along the lines of, "Okay, so if this value is Y here, but then this transformation happens, then..." And yes, this occurs in my voice, or at least how my voice sounds to me when I speak. (Sometimes, when I'm really in the flow of it, I'll even start unintentionally voicing it out loud.) I actually like this, because it forces my thoughts to slow down -- when I'm really thinking through a hard problem, I have no choice but to think at the speed of my monologue. It's like built-in rubber-duck debugging.
Having said all of this, we know that thoughts can be expressed differently in different people because deaf individuals (who were born deaf) certainly do not have an ongoing auditory inner monologue.
I mean, at the end of the day, a thought is just a pattern of firing neurons, so what precise neurons are involved is going to impact how you experience that thought.
I'm working on a PhD in cognitive science. Something that I think relates to this is the idea of Emboddied Cognition [0], and in particular off-line emboddied cognition, where you use sensorimotor mechanisms in your body while thinking, even if you're not actually interacting with the environment. In this case it would be your brain activating the same audio processing areas you use when sound enters your ear, even though you're generating the sounds inside your head while thinking.
"of course", no most of my thoughts are not expressible in any language. Why would they? Thoughts are so much richer than any language can possibly express. How to solve this physics problem? If I had to do it via a monologue it would take forever. Same with programming. Instead I just think the thoughts directly and just solve the problem without verbalizing anything.
Of course this makes it harder to tell others what you are doing, but I don't see how you could possibly solve any problems at all while being limited to thoughts you can verbalize.
> Thoughts are so much richer than any language can possibly express.
I'm not sure about that. Couldn't it just be that we sometimes don't understand our own thoughts? If you can't describe one of your thoughts with language, I would say that you must not understand that thought. And of course we sometimes have thoughts which we don't understand.
I think that understanding our own thoughts is something that needs to be worked on, both individually (we certainly should be better at is as adults than as children) and collectively (science and philosophy should allow us to keep improving our understanding of our own thoughts).
> If you can't describe one of your thoughts with language, I would say that you must not understand that thought.
I've heard that before and it is definitely bullshit, thinking like that will just hold you and others back. It is true that if I can't describe it in words then I can't prove to others that I understand it, but it isn't true that I can't prove to myself that I understand it using my own minds language.
If you aren't fluent in your own minds language then you'll have a hard time understanding your own intuition, feelings etc, how can you learn to understand things like math and programming when you don't even understand your own intuition? My guess is that people don't understand themselves, they believe that the words made them understand math when in fact the thoughts they aren't hearing made them understand math. I see that clearly in my mind, but to people who rely so heavily on words it might be hard to see.
I’m not sure how it would hold you back. On the contrary, it should motivate you to seek further understanding of your thoughts.
To me, it just doesn’t make sense definitionally to say you understand anything if you can not describe it in language. It would be like saying you understand an algorithm but you can’t express it as a computer program.
But this isn’t to say that you cannot act in accordance with your thoughts even if you don’t understand them! It can be useful to make decisions based on intuition even if you can’t describe in words what motivated the decision. Surely we all do that quite often. But it’s even better to be able to understand those thoughts and account for them using words!
To me it doesn't make sense to say definitionally that you can't understand without expressing in an external language.
First, my understanding even of English is nuanced and not entirely shared. There are lots of times where I capture something in prose but feel and even explicitly state that the the words don't really completely capture the meaning and I'm relying on a shared understanding of the connotations of the words to convey what they do not. This implies that we have a strong grasp of our intended meaning that supercedes the meaning captured in language.
Also, there have been many times where I'll learn a new word, especially words borrowed from other languages, and think, "Ah! Now I can more exactly express what I'm thinking!" My understanding hasn't changed at all, I'm just better able to express it in language.
Another example: there are a lot of concepts, geo-spatial relationships between dimensional objects for example, that I never consciously verbalize, even internally, yet I can clearly hold in my head.
It does seem plausible that this is another difference in mental models between people.
Perhaps thoughts is the wrong word, since they as a concept often are associated with words, but the things that go through my mind are concepts, and I often have a word label for them, sometimes it's right there, sometimes it's not. Sometimes I have concepts in my head that have no label, and that I can express, but the concept which I can imagine in a few seconds often requires a couple paragraphs to describe directly.
Another argument for OPs view (with the caveat above) is that these concepts must predate speech. We have an imagination before we have speech, and that obviously doesn't require words.
I would not say that my internal monologue is entirely auditory, but there's an auditory element to it. I sometimes sort of 'see' the words or concept I'm thinking about, and if i focus on it, I think I can switch from one to the other.
I used to, but I intentionally stopped and cleared my mind every time I did it for half a year, and now I only think in language when I'm trying to compose a speech or write.
So that's a thing you could try if you want to see for yourself, in case I'm a P-zombie.
A similar subjective experience just came up recently[1] on HN as an aside in an article posted about Derek Parfitt:
> He attributes [his severely deficient autobiographical memory] to his inability to form mental images. Although he recognizes familiar things when he sees them, he cannot call up images of them afterward in his head: he cannot visualize even so simple an image as a flag; he cannot, when he is away, recall his wife’s face. (This condition is rare but not unheard of; it has been proposed that it is more common in people who think in abstractions.)
That article was from 2011, before the term aphantasia was coined in 2015[2] and (arguably) popularized in 2016[3]. Most folks also assume that everyone uses their visual cortex to process memories while that idea sounds absolutely implausible to some relatively small percentage of the population.
I don't know enough about SDAM to know if it's the same thing as visual aphantasia, but they are presumably related. I am unable to visualize anyone's face (or, really, anything at all that isn't a black void), yet I can easily recognize the person (especially if I know them well) and I can describe them. What I can describe about them are whatever notes I've made about them to myself along the way (round face, black hair, mustache, broad chin, etc).
I had a surprising conversation with a talented artist a while back and while we were discussing methods it came up that they always had to work from a model or photograph because they could not recall images, at all, from memory.
I think it's more common for people with this to cope by thinking in terms of abstractions, rather than the other way around.
The flag's a great example. Can't call up an image of a flag, but I can hold a kind of inferred 'essense' of a flag based on the abstract idea. Rectangle, some dividing lines depending on the country, kinda a wavy shader effect on the edges, probably a pole off to one side holding it up. But that's as rich as the image gets.
If internal monologue is supposed to be an actual voice that you perceive vividly then yeah, that's not present either.
I'd posit that the strength of the internal monologue is tied to one's propensity and skill in language. People that think primarily in linguistic terms probably have an easier time forming their thoughts into the structure of language, whereas a person who interprets the world in primarily in visual or spatial terms would see more mental images, maps, or connections.
Unfortunately, we live in a society strongly dominated by language, so the "cultural toolset" for understanding and controlling thoughts is optimized for linguistic thinkers. I often wonder what a society structured around visually-oriented people would look like.
And I'd posit that you're wrong. :-) The reason? I do neither.
I do not have an internal monologue. I can construct one if I want to, but I do not have an "inner voice". When I type this, I do not prepare the sentences before I type them. They come to me as I type. I know exactly what I want to convey, but the sentence doesn't exist inside my head as a recognizable language or as any structure I can describe. The funny part? I don't think in neither English nor Norwegian (my native language), and I never have.
When it comes to imagery - I cannot construct a clear image of much at all in my head. I can, if I try hard, construct vague images of my mother, father, wife, daughter and very close friends in my head - but they're vague. Very, very vague. I have no problem recognizing people, though.
I do have fantastic spatial skills. If I walk through an area, I can see imagine it from different angles and positions - but not as a picture. It's abstract, without imagery. It's difficult to explain how it's processed in my head. I can spin things and know exactly how things will "look" from a different angle .. but I can't "visualize" it. This seems self-contradictory - but let me try to give a real life example. I visited Manila some 15 years ago. 10 years ago (5 years after being there) - I was going to show someone where I'd been on google maps. I had never looked at the area on a map before. I could just zoom in on the city, start from the airport, recognize the patterns from above, and zoom in on various things I had visited - switch to street view and show it from the angles I wanted. In seconds.
I can visit woods I've been to 20 years ago, and recognize where I am, and know the paths.
Still, no inner monologue. Not much mental imagery. Heck of a lot of connections though - but very very abstract.
I was saying more that "language" is just one way of processing, along with "visual" and "spatial" and perhaps innumerable others. It sounds like you have a spatial method of processing the world.
> I can spin things and know exactly how things will "look" from a different angle
This is essentially the spatial equivalent to the inner monologue of the language-oriented processor.
Interesting. When I've seen other describe this kind of spatial skill, I've always imagined it being with imagery. Which I don't have. I wouldn't be able to draw an image of it, except xkcd-like 2-d stuff.
I like to think that I have "hardware acceleration" for typing on QWERTY keyboards because I am so used to it that I do it unconsciously.
But when I smoke weed, I have to actively think about the position of keys in the keyboard in order to type coherent things. I have to type "by software".
The point is: maybe for some people, their spoken language is "hardware accelerated" and for others, thinking in words is too computationally expensive, so they resort to less expensive methods.
Or maybe it's the opposite. Thinking abstractly is the computationally expensive method but the improvement in decision making isn't worth the effort.
Disclaimer: I know absolutely nothing about psychology or neuroscience. I just like to think about it.
YMMV, but I find cannabis consumption requires that _pretty much every subsequent action_ be done at a conscious level for the duration of its effects. Reading, coding, speaking, typing, etc. This can occasionally yield interesting results by forcing you to think through minute aspects of everyday things - and sometimes by extension craft questions you might not normally think to ask - but at least for me it seems to disable the majority of unconscious "muscle memory" systems. "hardware acceleration" is a perfect phrase to describe them though!
It is the observation of linguists that some language processing is hardware accelerated. But hardware acceleration comes in a great many varieties, anywhere from having a slightly smaller partially specialized neuron group in the frontal lobe, to having genetically preconfigured sections in lower brain, to not needing the signals to travel to the brain at all, as demonstrated by headless chickens, and government officials.
What does the author mean with "hearing his voice" though? People can have different interpretations of what it means to "hear".
In what sense can it be compared with hearing actual sounds? Does it have the same quality. Does he perceive his mental dialogue like an overlay on top of "external" sound?
I've been wondering the same thing when people say they "see" or "visualize" something: do they actually, visually see it in front of them, or not?
For me, the internal monologue and visualization are all just "mental" events. It doesn't share any qualities with the other sensory faculties: they are all quite distinct for me. Just like seeing and hearing, mental events also have a "spectrum", ranging from nothing at all (no thought), to "quiet" (abstract thinking and forming mental facsimiles of sensory perception) to "loud" (mentally "speaking" full sentences to myself, which I do the least).
Yeah, I'm a bit perplexed on this. I sometimes have conversations in my head, or imagine a conversation with someone else I might run into. But by the same token, there's no "voice" to the conversation; it doesn't "sound like" anyone; sometimes i think through something before saying it, other times i just say things without saying it in my head first.
Not only that but my inner voice can do impressions: I can have "it" do accents or imitate specific people whose voice I know well.
Also sometimes (albeit rarely) a thought might actually make me smile or even laugh out loud a little out of surprise with no external input so to speak.
Quite weird, come to think of it... do others do this too?
Yes. A lot of my job includes doing voices and impressions, replicating sounds. I've always been a mimic and had a curiosity about sound. So I guess when I'm thinking about an accent or particular voice I'll be going over knotty bits in my mind, trying to nail how to attack a sound with the musculature of the mouth and throat.
I dream up movies and songs and all sorts of rich fantasies in my head, and I do this constantly. As a consequence of this, I never get bored as I've got an incredible imagination to lean on.
I think about movies I want to make, startups I want to create, the change I want to put into the world. New songs on my commute, goals I want to accomplish, what I could do with time travel. I'm always working on the structures of my different dream worlds, modifying the rules and the characters, exploring how they interact. The languages they speak, and the rules of the magic and science systems that form the bounds of their existence.
I have never once in my life been bored. Not once. I can sit in an empty room and just daydream.
If I play music or walk or run, this imaginative power is supercharged and becomes a transcendent experience. It's why I love running and headphones. I haven't taken drugs, but I imagine it's something like that. It's a pure, unfettered deluge of dopamine. I can also walk in circuits and circles around my house doing this and can waste hours in fantasy. Entire weekends can be "wasted" this way.
I think this is a source of my ADHD. I've got instant dopamine fixes from my raw imagination and it's incredibly hard to do anything else as I can always give myself something better to do by just daydreaming.
As an aside, the dreams that I have when I sleep are almost like movies. They have intricate (but often nonsensical) plots, and I'm seldom even involved.
The main thing I want to do with my life is to create tools so I can get this out of my head and out into the world.
I wonder how many other people daydream like this and have a vibrant inner creativity?
I do exactly the same. Started when I was 6, walking around in circles, just imagining things. Music makes it even easier. It also helps deal with frustrations and anxiety by imagining catarthic scenes.
I still spend an hour each day doing that during my commute.
I've found that improv theatre and writing books really helps with the "getting it out of my head" part.
I used to have such an imagination when I was young: before going to sleep, I would always reimagine the movies I just watched or the books I just read, factoring myself into the story (often as a coprotagonist, not particularly OP but helpful in many ways), sometimes going a bit meta trying to explain my presence to the characters, tweaking their response, trying not to trigger the obvious self-doubting panic that would ensue if someone told you your reality isn't actually "real".
I even had a cross-universe canon for my character: I often had wings (watching Winx club as a kid helped), and sometimes took characters on a multi-dimensional ride in my magic hyper-technological flying car, big as a house on the inside, capable of traversing space and time.
I absolutely feel the same way about music, it manages to turn any world, even a simple concept into a fantastical and magical music video of sorts.
As I went on with my life I somewhat lost this ability, possibly due to the highly technical nature of my job and hobbies, however I still love reading and watching good fantasy stories, and sometimes, when I feel like it, I still fantasize by joining the story and aiding the main characters in saving the world (and music still can transport me away to another world, like before).
I have often considered the enormous power, and just as enormous limtations of modern creativity tools.
I honestly can't wait for neural interfaces: when everyone will be able to extract images and audio directly from their brains.
It will truly be a revolution for the media industry, a change as big as the introduction of computers.
It will also give way to haunting new aspects of copyright law: what happens if someone publishes a YouTube neural video that uses copyrighted characters, do we prohibit people from even thinking about copyrighted IP?
Do we beam films using widevine L0 DRM directly to people's brains, immediately removing all memories of them after they were seen to avoid copyright infringement?
Those will truly be interesting times, and I would really love to live to see them.
Have you read "The Continent of Lies" by James Morrow? I can't remember how I came across it, not quite my normal reading fare, but it delves into some of what you are talking about.
> I would always reimagine the movies I just watched or the books I just read
When I was a teenager, I went through this phase where I would dream of myself as the hero of a book I just read. And if I knew the hero would die at some point, I would always modify my dream so I didn't die :)
The first part of your comment reads like my own thoughts. I still find myself incorporate new fictions into my mental canon. Over time the framework has changed significantly, but its roots are still noticable. Some of my earliest memories are of me playing around with this fantastical dreamscape. Nowadays I generally dive into these sorts of day dreams whenever I'm walking/biking alone, or showering. Music or white noise can help me get into it more.
Neural interfaces will be a game changer. I'm so excited for them.
I have the same thing going on in my head. Sometimes I think that this has a negative effect on me, because it's very easy for me to procrastinate, because all I need for that is to daydream.
It helped me through school though. I cannot imagine going through classes without daydreaming. It sounds like torture.
I believe I am similar. I have often thought that I would not consider locked-in-syndrome to be as bad as others express as a worse-than-death fate. I think I would just happily continue wandering within my meandering mind.
I think it is detrimental to achieving things though. Actually doing things takes far more discipline and that's time that could be used for coming up with more internal ideas.
As a side note to this, I also have aphantasia. So I don't get any images. Just concepts,dialog, connections etc.
Yeah, I don't know about that. I definitely have aphantasia but have a strong inner monologue and can (roughly) hear things in my mind.
The only reason I have an understanding of what a "mind's eye" might be like is that I do dream visually. This is apparently not uncommon among aphatasics.
While discussing lucid dreaming with my partner, we both learned that she has aphantasia. I think it blew my mind more than it did hers. Things like, "I pictured that character so much different when I read the book" after watching a movie-- she always thought people were just saying that because they had different ideas of the characters mannerisms, or the text conveyed something different to them... Not that they could actually play out a scene in their head.
It got me thinking about a lot of ways we go about teaching. Math for example - my partner struggled with calculus in uni when presented an equation she hadn't seen something similar to before. It never occurred to me that people couldn't attempt to "graph" something in their head.
Luckily legal prodrugs of LSD exist, compounds which metabolize into LSD before reaching the brain like 1P-LSD and ALD-52. In the United States, you can order these off the clearnet without fear of legal repercussions, unlike shrooms. (although psilocin has its own collection of legal prodrugs available including, for example, 5-MeO-DMT and 4-HO-MET).
A lot of that stuff is toxic. People take these drug analogues, get sick, then blame the base molecule their government scared them from getting. Anything that's a prodrug has to be processed by your liver first. It puts extra strain on your liver, whereas the original molecule is already what you wanted.
It is not only healthy, but a great ability to be respected and cultivated. It is also good to learn to not do this. Saying it's unhealthy is like saying /dev/random is unhealty, but /dev/null is, or stars are bad but empty space is good. Both are quite useful. (let's please not have that talk about cryptographic qualities of /dev/random). My experience is that if you can easily tap into endless creativity and also experience the calmness of no-thought at will, you will have greater abilities than average in most situations. Meditation, among other things, can help you be more adept at either.
Your comment has helped assuage some fears of mine regarding meditation. I've been meditating most days for the past month now, and plan to continue to do so, but just within the past few days I've realized that I no longer effortlessly see amazing colours and shapes whenever I close my eyes. I'm worried that meditation is diminishing that creative aspect of my mind that produces such vivid imagery automatically. Ideally I want to keep my creativity intact, while also getting my neurosis under control.
No free lunches. You want creativity? Ok, go let your mind be feral like Van Gogh's or Kurt Cobain's. You want sanity? Become a perfect meditator and let those branches of thought die out without reacting to them. In return you can think like Spock.
If I could press a button, I would trade almost all my creativity for sanity/logic.
Not fractals or like a kaleidoscope. I'm not sure I have the words to explain it in any understandable way, and I'm certain that I lack the skill to do it justice. Usually it starts as blots of colour/brightness, as well as gradients (both radial and linear), and some more exotic images. Then if I keep paying attention they'll start to morph into all sorts of different things. These can be abstract imagery (not entirely unlike a kaleidoscope I suppose), but more often the abstract imagery is just a backdrop or peripheral image. Where I'm looking I'll see the images morph into objects, people, locations, etc., and most strangely, concepts. I'm not sure how to explain that last bit, but sometimes in these visualizations I'll just see something that is very clearly a concept/idea itself. I don't have much control over what I see like this, unlike daydreaming where I have almost complete control, or sleep deprivation induced hallucinations where I have control proportional to how awake I am. What I can do is when I see something that I like and want to see more of, I can focus on it. This generally helps prevent it from morphing into something different, but it only works for so long as I can maintain a strong focus on it, so I inevitably lose my grasp on it after some time.
Typing this all out now I realize it sounds strange, and I haven't heard anyone else talk about this in particular. For reference I have low-grade synesthesia (among a whole host of mental abnormalities compared to my peers), my family has a history of mental illnesses, and I'm just about the most neurotic person I know. I have never used any illicit drugs (including marijuana, which is fortunately now legal in Canada). I've considered trying LSD or psilocybin, but I'm worried about having a bad trip. I have however experienced many sleep deprivation induced hallucinations, as well as several fever dreams, dissociative episodes, and panics attacks. I've been told by a trusted source that fever dreams can be somewhat similar to using psilocybin.
I've heard about that sort of thing be experienced through yoga/meditation (and have seen stuff myself on occasion), but who knows what our brains are doing in those states. Perhaps you're naturally inclined to be able to experience those sorts of things...
I had the same thing. The more anchored it became to reality through supportive others and responsibility and commitment the quieter it became. Writing out my ideas and then really thoroughly and deeply exploring one that means something to gave a weight to bear on my psyche that quietened the others.
Ze Frank has a good video on this where he quotes Jung's work. https://youtu.be/u2cMjeSvZSs?t=184
Artists say life begins when you leave your comfort zone, in regards to making good art.
I find it still an important driver in life to follow that burst of ideas. The only way for me to raise up an idea structure or skill is to follow that buzz upwards. My capacity to imagine is jammed packed with meaningful content now and it grows a weight of it's own.
I can relate, as I do this all the time, being inside my head, a mashup of multi-verses, projecting myself in alternate realities, being able to time-travel in to the future and opening a conversational 1-on-1 portal to my present self, to answer the question like Dr. Banks from the movie Arrival or when Brand reaches out to her past self in Interstellar, all while taking bus home, or while taking a long shower.
I can watch an entire movie inside my head from another character's point of view or vantage point.
I'm also able to on the spot improv storytelling, something that I was able to do easily as a teen during summer camps and recently I got introduced to the world of DnD which got my mind racing and volunteered to become a DM.
Loneliness is a rarity for me as I feel content wandering off, writing and art is my way of projecting to this world, which I have plucked out from the sea of infinite realities through dreams and daydreaming.
When someone talks to me, asks me a question/opinion or solution, a whole mindmap/flowchart,timeline appears before me which I can navigate spatially in 3d.
When someone asks for direction or trying to find out where I am, I literally see a 3d flyover or bird's eyeview from where I'm standing.
When I dream, not only that I dream in colors but they have a feel to it like watching something nostalgic or when I travel. Sometimes dreams has visual filters as a part of it. Have you dreamed being inside a cartoon/comicbook, painting or noir movie?
I do have a hard time turning my brain off which sucks when trying to go to sleep.
I can do all the things you mention. I do also have a hard time "turning my brain off". Actually, I don't think I can do it. But I do have a way to sleep quickly.
It may not be the same for you but you probably can adapt it to whatever suits you. It's about coziness.
There are several cozy scenarios that are ideal for me to sleep. I just teleport myself there and I do stuff.
My favorite by far is the one in the wilderness. I read a book once about a guy from the neolithic who had to run away from his village with his dog. I imagine myself there. There's nothing around me. Only several small villages kilimeters away. I'm alone with my dog. The sun is almost set and it's getting chilly. There's a little cave nearby where I can take refuge for the night. I'll go gather some wood and make myself confortable inside. Then I'll sit by the fire eating some of that smoked meat I have left and I'll just rest my head down. At that point I'm already sleeping.
I also do this quite a bit and recently I noticed it's been getting more intense. When this happens it's usually because someone's been talking to me for 10+ minutes straight without me saying a single word, and I get this physical feeling like they're getting further away or their head is getting smaller. Does anyone else experience this?
Same here. My “inner world” never stops unless I force it too (I like meditating occasionally for some mental-peace-and-quiet.)
Other than forcefully pausing it that way, it runs 24/7/365 and is incredibly vivid.
I can also have multiple “tracks” running at once internally, but I generally have one “in focus” and another 1 or 2 sort of there in the background dimly. I’m aware of what all tracks are currently up to though at any given point.
Generally it’s just brainstorming ideas, playing back memories, imagining fantastical worlds/stories for internal entertainment, or wondering about things.
It’s not always positive, and keeping it all under control can be difficult, but I definitely think the pros outweigh the cons.
Very interesting. I am not sure that I am one or the other.
My thoughts form in a soup of cognition. Then if I pay attention become words, or smeeld, sounds, tastes....
Related: I play guitar in two rock bands. I have to reach a state in my mind between attention and inattention to do well. For example if I count beats I loose my rhythm. But if I stop paying attention I loose... So I need to be in a intermediate state.
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 517 ms ] threadI had a conversation with a buddy of mine about what language he thinks in one time, due to English being a seconds language for him and it is funny because looking back on that conversation we both assumed that internal monologue was just a default.
I did notice a pattern in the minority of people that do not internal monologue, where overwhelmingly populated by females.
Prior to this I had made the assumption that everyone has an internal dialogue.
I'm 36.
I play time-attack puzzle games; and some of my best times have been while I'm listening to an audiobook, music or deep in thought about some emotional problem. It feels like I actually perform both tasks better if I'm doing them simultaneously because my "vague processing" isn't interrupted by my "sharp processing" and vice versa.
I have this problem with music/sound specifically. I cannot remember it at all. For example, I have favourite artist that I heard all of his albums 50+ times. If you play a random track of his to me I won't be able to identify it. Another example; My favourite all time soundtrack that I heard countless times, I cannot recall how it goes. If somebody asks me to "sing" the melody I will fail miserably. Oh and I don't know lyrics of any song. Any. I tried to learn though...
I still get tired of listening to the same tracks over and over again :( .
Also, I occasionally seem to stop thinking entirely and just experience sensations, perceptions, and sometimes emotions. I rather like those intervals, and am prone to try to sort of savor them. They generally don't last very long before thoughts start popping up again.
I went to a Buddhist college for a while, and the curriculum included quite a lot of meditation. I wonder sometimes if those episodes without apparent thought are related in some way to the many hours of sitting I did (and still sometimes do). I don't really know, though. Maybe all that sitting taught me how to allow thinking to peter out. Or maybe it taught me to notice when it does and not interfere with the process. Or maybe it's completely unrelated.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NDj2aaxixxo [ WoW Spoiler: Realm of Torment]
[2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A54yfyi00dI Dune: Fear and Pain
I feel like yapping to myself all day was critical to developing writing/verbal skills.
Not sure if that actually affected amount of internal monologue I do have, but I definitely don't have it on all the time. Mostly when rehearsing an actual past or expected conversation.
I find that both have kinda the same effect -- all useful thought process get interrupted, including the abstract part.. :/
[0] https://f-droid.org/en/packages/com.mschlauch.comfortreader/
>Bicameralism[Note 1] (the condition of being divided into "two-chambers") is a hypothesis in psychology that argues that the human mind once operated in a state in which cognitive functions were divided between one part of the brain which appears to be "speaking", and a second part which listens and obeys—a bicameral mind.[0]
0.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism_(psychology)
> The primary scientific criticism has been that the conclusions drawn by Jaynesv [i.e., bicameralism] had no basis in neuropsychiatric fact.
People think of the idea of 'the mind' and 'the self' being obvious and self evident, but they are anything but, and it took a lot of brilliant philosophers and poets to come up with words to talk about it and metaphors to use. It seems completely believable to me that bronze age people did not have a clear understanding of what thought was and what was doing the thinking.
I think this author has an inaccurate understanding of people who do not have an "auditory" inner monologue.
Think of it this way: a lot of people don't vocalize text as they read it. I do not. I am still able to read, and I still "understand" what is being read, but I don't need to turn it into voices and sound it out, to gain that understanding. Tbh, I find it slows me down.
Inner monologues are the same way. People still have rich inner "conversations" even if they aren't vocal ones. Which is what I do -- I'm not really sure the best way to describe it, but I'm able to have a "debate" between inner arguments without mocking it out as two people talking to each other (I mean, I can if I want to -- but I find it unnecessary and slow, personally). I'm sure a lot of people are the same way.
I think the author is getting a bit high on the idea that he has a richer inner life than the people around him, and needs to think about alternate interpretations.
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-47830256
I wonder if there's an intersection of people who do not have an internal monologue nor a "mind's eye?"
I use visualisation a lot for work, especially when designing or understanding process flows, so not having that ability seems so alien to me.
Once you get it to successfully visualize with one way morph it continuously into the case you don't successfully visualize yet and push the frontier. For example if you get it to work with a small sculpture try it with a bigger one.
Or try to look at a real person face as if it was a sculpture or an object. Try changing the way you gaze at the face. Sometimes, even more so with people we care about, we don't look at them like we would look at an object but we are rather trying to look at the soul behind the mask.
I think it might be that when I'm fully awake, I can't maintain detailed visualizations very effectively. Faces are really important to us, but perhaps imperfect visualizations of faces fail to pattern match well enough against my recognizer, and so it blanks them. Like I say, I get the briefest glimpse in my visualization, but then it blanks. But maybe I'm over-rationalizing, and my brain is just weird.
Most visual information is processed by your Occipital Lobe.
But facial information is processed by your Temporal Lobe.
To be fair, facial recognition is a major part of human cognition, so this isn't all that surprising that it's specialized.
Generally instead of visualizing something I would tend to have an internal monologue on how it should work. Even if I am drawing something programmatically I would describe the logic for getting what I want, rather than visualizing what it should look like.
Some claim that's nearly everyone. Someone did an experiment where they asked a bunch of people to draw a bicycle, which they had all seen in their lives, from memory without a model. Not a particular bicycle, just "a bicycle". The configurations were very diverse and different from the geometric/physical arrangement of real ones.
I suspect this is why sounds or pictures are so distracting to me. The thing that everyone does where they play a tv show in the background doesn't work for me. If I hear it, I have to concentrate on it. It takes a mental effort to ignore it. So when I'm at home I keep everything off unless I'm ready to watch or listen to it.
> Kopfkino happens when you involuntarily use your imagination to think of troubling or disgusting things in graphic detail.
> From the german words kopf, head and kino, cinema.
> After i heard 'granny pussy' i had the most disgusting kopfkino.
(Just realized, I need to remember this one as a nice german word with no english equivalent)
I can probably do up to 8 different subjects/thesis, but I also can imagine in: audio, touch, sound, color, space, abstract, visual, time, taste, smell, linguistic, and hyperdimensional. Couple of these things I had to practice though.
In terms of the senses, I can walk into a busy scene and take everything in. The sounds, the sights, the smells, etc. I seem to be more situationally aware than a lot of other people I interact with. Just no record button. Notes I make to myself or overall impressions stay, but I would not be very helpful as a witness to a crime if I wasn't trying to memorize what I was seeing in the specific.
This is a difficult thing for me to "look at", in some ways I don't do much thinking at all, but am still successful and am thought of as that guy that can figure out the problem when others are stuck.
I expect someone will object that it's logically contradictory to propose that you have an inner monologue but don't experience it; I don't think it is, actually.
I get migraines. I've experienced them for about forty-five years. They're not just headaches. They're some kind of unusual neural and vascular activity in the brain that can cause a whole slew of weird effects.
One effect that I've experienced many times is called scotoma. It's a phenomenon where a region of the visual field is taken over by a vivid abstract pattern. Scotomas take various shapes, but they generally have a few things in common: they are more vivid than real seen objects; they often flicker rapidly and may move slowly; they often have high-contrast black-and-white-striped zigzag patterns; they may be surrounded by faint or vivid colorful auras that pulse or stream.
I've seen lots of scotomas over the years with all of these attributes.
One time just a few years ago I was reading a good book and I began to notice the mild visual distortions that alert me to an oncoming scotoma. There's nothing much I can do about them, and I was really interested in the book, so I sort of shrugged and figured I'd continue reading until I had to stop.
I never had to stop.
The scotoma came on full-force and took over the center of my visual field. I couldn't see anything except the scotoma directly in front of me.
Nevertheless, I was able to continue reading without any trouble. Well, the scotoma was distracting, but it didn't prevent me from reading.
As you can imagine, I found this really weird. If you don't believe me, I don't really blame you. I found it so surprising that I started reading the book aloud, as if that would somehow serve as a reasonable test that I wasn't simply making up the contents of the book without realizing it.
I continued reading. The scotoma eventually faded away, and I could confirm that, yes, the pages I had read while I couldn't see them were just as I had heard myself reading them aloud.
This experience suggests to me that seeing the book is one process, but consciously experiencing the seeing of it is another, completely separate, process. The migraine sabotaged my ability to consciously experience seeing the book, but it didn't interfere with the process of actually seeing or reading it.
If that's true, it suggests that the process of running an internal monologue, or of constructing internal images, could be separate from the process of being conscious of them. Perhaps you indeed have an internal monologue and you simply don't experience it?
The reason I wonder about whether I am seeing things on a "screen" I can't access has to do with my ability to recognize things. When I see something I've seen before, I immediately recognize it, just like normal people do. So it's saved off somewhere, I just can't access it in the meantime. So it's possible that when I try to imagine a beach or whatever, it's appearing on a screen I can't see. I think of it as if my visual projector has a burnt out bulb. It could be showing it to me if I could somehow change the bulb, possibly.
I didn't realize that, for example, "mental image" was not just, like, a metaphor for thinking. When I close my eyes, it's black. Just, black. Well, you know, depending on how bright the lights are, etc.
Then it might blow your mind further to know that I can visualize things easier with my eyes open. I overlay them onto my visual field and they're _far_ more vivid with my eyes open than shut, by an order of magnitude at least.
I am 100% jealous of your ability to do that, however.
I have recently learned that it might be possible to train myself to invoke mental images. There is a technique where a person with aphantasia sits their eyes shut and starts by imagining, e.g., a green apple. But you don't imagine it fully at first. You start with its different qualities, like imagine roundness for a while. And then greenness. Then shininess. Then some gradient. Then a stem. Then more detailed shape. Et cetera.
I have had a tiny bit of success with this technique, or at least I have fooled myself into thinking I have? If I try this, after a while I can start to picture a green apple, though it is like a faint, faded ancient photograph with almost no color or detail and certainly no vividness. But there does seem to be some little bit of something there.
Maybe you already know this, but non-aphantastic (heh) just see black too. When we visualize something, it's a very different experience from seeing anything at all. It's more the knowledge of "if I could see this thing, this is how it would look".
I'd be very interested in knowing what really happens in our brains. It feels like stringing together a bunch of information and assembling a spectral "print preview" that you can't really see.
My thoughts became more abstract, quieter. It was actually kind of nice, peaceful. I don't know that I was any smarter or able, but it was a notably different experience in a minor way.
But then I graduated, moved, and stopped spending 1-2 nights per week at the campus pub signing with other students. And it all slowly went back to a loud internal monologue instead.
And as a visually-oriented person you would also be less likely to have an inner monologue.
Depending on how annoyed it is, it might even respond... "Really? Did you really install _A_ HDMI cable today? Really? Maybe you installed _AN_ HDMI cable?"
Acronyms are generally the worst for a/an situations as depending on if you personally pronounce the acronym as a whole word or spell it out in letters the rule might change.
I tend to get stuck on failed parses, which sometimes makes conversation awkward. Some failed parses are funny, or they might prompt me to substitute homophones in a search for a parse that works. Sometimes the results make me laugh, and that can lead to occasional awkwardness.
It makes sense once you think about animals, who don't have a formal language yet clearly are capable of thought.
...can anyone else do this? I actually find it supremely weird.
I can even "compose" my own music (it can be any genre, with any type of instruments, and even include voices), but I have no ability to play instruments myself. I'd love to get into music, but just don't have the time.
My literature professor back in college said he "listened to" classical music in his head during his morning runs. I just assumed everyone did it based on sample size 2.
[Edit: Currently I "listen" to a lot of Georgios Papadopoulos, heh!]
>I can even "compose" my own music
I can relate! Unfortunately, I'm totally untrained regarding music. I once tried to enter one of the melodies in my head (simplified) into a music program, and it took forever, because I had to find the correct notes by trial and error: "Not that one. Neither that one. Still wrong. Not quite. This one is it! Next note..."
I've tried that and it's so slow and frustrating that the melody in my head just disappears.
Use a microphone to record yourself humming the melody first, so you can get the original back if you forget it.
Separately, I'll mention that imitone (https://imitone.com) works surprisingly well. The transcriptions don't come out perfectly by any means, but they provide a base that you can then clean up.
My wife found this pretty weird. I suspect it's related to my also experiencing aphantasia. It could be some form of mental lossy compression, where the brain knows it can roughly replicate what it heard using the limited set of vocalizations it already knows instead of actual note/instrument combinations.
As I'm sitting here, I'm thinking of describing it as ... If I shut my eyes I still know roughly where the monitor corners, the keyboard, the table corners, the wine-bottle, the apple, etc. are. It's not like I'm seeing them, but I can spatially query them and perform operations on them. So is this a difference in internal perception, or is it a difference in how we describe those internal states?
For very simple objects, I can vaguely visualize them like a drawing from an early 80's graphics demo, but that's about as good as it gets.
The problem is that the descriptions depend on so many subjective things. For instance what does it mean to be able to see someone's face in one's mind? At what resolution question mark at what level of detail? I mean it seems like a lot of people with uncorrected vision can't even see faces to any standards I would consider seeing. So could it be that you're holding your mental visualizations too too high a bar and comparing them with people you have a low bar for mental visualizations?
Edit .. your description of having to trace out the facade is particularly apt to me. It's almost like some kind of DRAM thing where I have to refresh my mental image by touching / scanning parts of it or it goes away.
Like growing up, I always assumed that those scenes where someone's imagination goes wild and they envision other characters doing crazy things (see: the entirety of Scrubs) were just a literary device, but apparently that's at least sort of close to how a normal brain actually works.
The DRAM comparison is pretty good. Or like having a plastic film over the world that you need to press down on to see anything through.
That is super interesting!
I would assume that if you audiolize instruments as you making instruments sounds with your mouth, you would audiolize other people as you mimicking them as well...
I mean, when I read your post above, my inner voice does it in a neutral me voice, because I have no clue what you actually sound like. But if I read a text message or something from a friend of mine, I read it in their voice, because I know what they sound like.
Can you also imagine your friends' voices?
Like a non-musician hearing a guitar riff would just replay it as "nana nana na, na-naa" or something simple whereas I would be able to hear it in exact detail and how it interacts with the rest of the band melodically as well as rhythmically.
Possibly related, I have a very poor ability to visualise anything internally. (I cannot, for example, "picture a beach in my head")
In fact, most things I try to hold in my head evince nothing more than a foggy recollection.
It has been this way for as long as I can remember.
One time, a friend's Dad asked me why I was rocking back and forth. I think he thought I had a nervous tick. In reality, I was "listening to a song" and didn't even realize I was moving along to it. Seems to happen most often when I'm bored.
Edit: As I was typing this, "La Macarena" popped into my head.
To this day, I have never once listened to "Chocolate Rain" or Rebecca Black's "Friday" because I fear never being able to turn them off. (I avoided Taylor Swift for, like a decade, but now just thinking about means I've got "Shake it Off" playing.)
Writing this out now makes me realize how weird this all sounds...
Like you, it will sometimes start when I'm sleeping. I won't remember much of the dream, but the song is still there, echoing as it was in whatever setting my dream took place.
Since I don't know the song it is of course just the chorus.
One trick that works for me is to over-saturate your brain with it. Got an annoying song on your mind? Find it in spotify, put on headphones, and listen to it on repeat until you're sick of it.
They also added some metrics tracking so you could look people up and see how many different albums they'd listened to, how many times, etc. There were leaderboards for who could cover the most stuff.
I thought it would be funny to "win" by listening to "Butterfly" by Smile.dk[0] more than any other song had been listened to. It listened to it on a loop for weeks. I, for reasons I cannot really explain years later, actually did listen to it and not just let it play at zero volume. It was a weird experiment in neurological satiation. At some point, it no longer annoyed because it just was, like the sound of my own heartbeat.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzcvRDWgRIE
My "mind's eye" is pretty strong as well, but I would never mentally look at a painting or watch a movie to pass the time. Yet it seems to work for music.
Works reasonably well for me.
Isn't this the experience of getting a song "stuck in your head?"
Which is completely mind-boggling to me.
So there's probably people who can compose music without being able to audiolize it in their heads first, as strange as that sounds.
I should add that I find myself with a song stuck in my head all the time as well.
But have you heard of Bob Milne? He can listen to four different symphonies in his head at the same time: https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/14867...
Edit: I've also had vivid hypnagogic visual hallucinations intentionally. It's a kind of fun game to play, seeing my bedroom clearly with my eyes closed, or checking the time on my watch while same. Obviously I'm conscious and aware that I'm not really checking the actual time, but not particularly surprisingly I'm pretty close since I tend to wake about the same time every day.
Thank you for the clarification. I've never noticed any distinction between these two states. Perhaps that's why I conflate them. I suppose that stands to my point about the richness of autostimulated experiences.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnopompic
I do it frequently. Sometimes I can't stop myself from doing it, which can be annoying.
It is particularly intriguing to be able to "sing" using other people's voices, since the lyrics of the song "feel" the same way as my inner voice, passing through (I assume) the brain's phonological loop.
Once I had this really weird experience, where in certain conditions, certain muscles would resonate exactly with the song playing in my brain (and not just the rythm, even minor details were somewhat transferred, as if my brain was redirecting raw PCM audio from my brain directly to the nerves); I was really excited about this, as there was potential for a direct non-invasive neural interface to my brain, capable of extracting original songs directly from my brain without any instruments; unfortunately I could not replicate this weird behaviour reliably, and I also felt a bit weird in my brain when trying to do so, so I just dropped the matter.
I think similarly that most people who do not have an internal dialogue experience aphantasia - the ability to replay or simulate sensory experiences mentally. Personally I do not often have thoughts "racing" through my head - maybe one main one, maybe zero - and I think this related to my aphantasia.
I now basically have actual music on nearly 24/7 to drown that out otherwise it can get pretty annoying – especially if the song that's stuck in my head isn't one I actually enjoy.
https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/14867...
I can even hear the vocals, they're just gibberish until I make a conscious effort to memorize them.
I still have music in my head very often - I play piano and I'm always getting ear worms, but it must be at least 20 years since I last physically heard my mental music playing. I wonder if I can get it back?
You know what's really weird? If I don't know all the lyrics to a song, I can sometimes listen to it in my head and hear the parts of the song I don't consciously remember.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia
Obviously this gets deep into the philosophy of qualia, but do we have evidence that there are two very different modes of thinking? Could this not just be different analogies people have adopted to describe their thinking?
An Instagram poll isn't a great tool to study this. I would like to see a psychological or neurological study about this idea. As of now, I'm pretty skeptical that the dichotomy exists. It sounds like the claim that "some people describe their brains like a computer, while some people describe their brains like a library." Computers and libraries are very different physical objects, yes, but the choice of analogy doesn't really tell me much about how people are experiencing their own thought processes.
Of course, if it's true that the majority of people do actually experience auditory hallucinations of their own voice speaking all of their thoughts, then my criticisms here are invalid, and I'm definitely in the other group of people.
It is indeed an intriguing topic to consider. I hear something like my own voice both when I am thinking throughout the day and when I am writing, such as right now I hear my “imaginary voice” speaking what I’m typing out.
The idea of ones own voice is hard to describe. I perceive it as similar to what my voice sounds like, but from heard from within, almost like you’ve rolled off a bunch of the high-end. Imaginary voice is much more consistent in volume and tone for me too than speaking, much less emotional, almost no variety in pitch.
I wouldn’t say I think in full-sentence monologues all day, but I guess I think in fragments of sentences? It’s one of those things that is hard to look back and remember doing and explain how you did it, kind of like breathing. It’s just automatic.
I wonder if some of the “no monologue” people aren’t much different from the rest of us, but they just didn’t articulate their process the same way. I can kind of identify with the concept map thing, so I could probably answer differently depending on mood or how I felt when I read the survey.
Super interesting topic overall. I wonder whether these people without inner dialogue are unable to recall music (with lyrics)?
I can easily "transform" my inner voice to be in the voice of Darth Vader (like someone here interestingly pointed out). I find it peculiar that there are people who cannot and their inner life must feel different than mine. I wonder how depression fits into this. I'd think you'd certainly be more prone to get depressed if you are able to tell yourself how stupid/worthless you are. I wonder how that manifests non-verbally.
Someone linked to an article by Feynman in this thread which demonstrated two different kinds of counting - using your voice and seeing the numbers visually. Quite interesting read: http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/607/2/Feynman.pdf
Not every thought is actually.... auralized? auditorialized? ...though. There's some sort of default mode that I operate in most of the day. I don't have to "hear" every single thought I have, I'm able to take in information and perform common actions without hearing thoughts. But, as soon as I go into "conscious" mode, nearly everything becomes sounded out internally. For instance, when programming, I'm constantly having a real internal conversation along the lines of, "Okay, so if this value is Y here, but then this transformation happens, then..." And yes, this occurs in my voice, or at least how my voice sounds to me when I speak. (Sometimes, when I'm really in the flow of it, I'll even start unintentionally voicing it out loud.) I actually like this, because it forces my thoughts to slow down -- when I'm really thinking through a hard problem, I have no choice but to think at the speed of my monologue. It's like built-in rubber-duck debugging.
Having said all of this, we know that thoughts can be expressed differently in different people because deaf individuals (who were born deaf) certainly do not have an ongoing auditory inner monologue.
I mean, at the end of the day, a thought is just a pattern of firing neurons, so what precise neurons are involved is going to impact how you experience that thought.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embodied_cognition
"of course", no most of my thoughts are not expressible in any language. Why would they? Thoughts are so much richer than any language can possibly express. How to solve this physics problem? If I had to do it via a monologue it would take forever. Same with programming. Instead I just think the thoughts directly and just solve the problem without verbalizing anything.
Of course this makes it harder to tell others what you are doing, but I don't see how you could possibly solve any problems at all while being limited to thoughts you can verbalize.
I'm not sure about that. Couldn't it just be that we sometimes don't understand our own thoughts? If you can't describe one of your thoughts with language, I would say that you must not understand that thought. And of course we sometimes have thoughts which we don't understand.
I think that understanding our own thoughts is something that needs to be worked on, both individually (we certainly should be better at is as adults than as children) and collectively (science and philosophy should allow us to keep improving our understanding of our own thoughts).
I've heard that before and it is definitely bullshit, thinking like that will just hold you and others back. It is true that if I can't describe it in words then I can't prove to others that I understand it, but it isn't true that I can't prove to myself that I understand it using my own minds language.
If you aren't fluent in your own minds language then you'll have a hard time understanding your own intuition, feelings etc, how can you learn to understand things like math and programming when you don't even understand your own intuition? My guess is that people don't understand themselves, they believe that the words made them understand math when in fact the thoughts they aren't hearing made them understand math. I see that clearly in my mind, but to people who rely so heavily on words it might be hard to see.
To me, it just doesn’t make sense definitionally to say you understand anything if you can not describe it in language. It would be like saying you understand an algorithm but you can’t express it as a computer program.
But this isn’t to say that you cannot act in accordance with your thoughts even if you don’t understand them! It can be useful to make decisions based on intuition even if you can’t describe in words what motivated the decision. Surely we all do that quite often. But it’s even better to be able to understand those thoughts and account for them using words!
First, my understanding even of English is nuanced and not entirely shared. There are lots of times where I capture something in prose but feel and even explicitly state that the the words don't really completely capture the meaning and I'm relying on a shared understanding of the connotations of the words to convey what they do not. This implies that we have a strong grasp of our intended meaning that supercedes the meaning captured in language.
Also, there have been many times where I'll learn a new word, especially words borrowed from other languages, and think, "Ah! Now I can more exactly express what I'm thinking!" My understanding hasn't changed at all, I'm just better able to express it in language.
Another example: there are a lot of concepts, geo-spatial relationships between dimensional objects for example, that I never consciously verbalize, even internally, yet I can clearly hold in my head.
It does seem plausible that this is another difference in mental models between people.
Another argument for OPs view (with the caveat above) is that these concepts must predate speech. We have an imagination before we have speech, and that obviously doesn't require words.
I used to, but I intentionally stopped and cleared my mind every time I did it for half a year, and now I only think in language when I'm trying to compose a speech or write.
So that's a thing you could try if you want to see for yourself, in case I'm a P-zombie.
> He attributes [his severely deficient autobiographical memory] to his inability to form mental images. Although he recognizes familiar things when he sees them, he cannot call up images of them afterward in his head: he cannot visualize even so simple an image as a flag; he cannot, when he is away, recall his wife’s face. (This condition is rare but not unheard of; it has been proposed that it is more common in people who think in abstractions.)
That article was from 2011, before the term aphantasia was coined in 2015[2] and (arguably) popularized in 2016[3]. Most folks also assume that everyone uses their visual cortex to process memories while that idea sounds absolutely implausible to some relatively small percentage of the population.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22037240
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001094521...
[3] https://www.facebook.com/notes/blake-ross/aphantasia-how-it-...
The flag's a great example. Can't call up an image of a flag, but I can hold a kind of inferred 'essense' of a flag based on the abstract idea. Rectangle, some dividing lines depending on the country, kinda a wavy shader effect on the edges, probably a pole off to one side holding it up. But that's as rich as the image gets.
If internal monologue is supposed to be an actual voice that you perceive vividly then yeah, that's not present either.
Unfortunately, we live in a society strongly dominated by language, so the "cultural toolset" for understanding and controlling thoughts is optimized for linguistic thinkers. I often wonder what a society structured around visually-oriented people would look like.
I do not have an internal monologue. I can construct one if I want to, but I do not have an "inner voice". When I type this, I do not prepare the sentences before I type them. They come to me as I type. I know exactly what I want to convey, but the sentence doesn't exist inside my head as a recognizable language or as any structure I can describe. The funny part? I don't think in neither English nor Norwegian (my native language), and I never have.
When it comes to imagery - I cannot construct a clear image of much at all in my head. I can, if I try hard, construct vague images of my mother, father, wife, daughter and very close friends in my head - but they're vague. Very, very vague. I have no problem recognizing people, though.
I do have fantastic spatial skills. If I walk through an area, I can see imagine it from different angles and positions - but not as a picture. It's abstract, without imagery. It's difficult to explain how it's processed in my head. I can spin things and know exactly how things will "look" from a different angle .. but I can't "visualize" it. This seems self-contradictory - but let me try to give a real life example. I visited Manila some 15 years ago. 10 years ago (5 years after being there) - I was going to show someone where I'd been on google maps. I had never looked at the area on a map before. I could just zoom in on the city, start from the airport, recognize the patterns from above, and zoom in on various things I had visited - switch to street view and show it from the angles I wanted. In seconds.
I can visit woods I've been to 20 years ago, and recognize where I am, and know the paths.
Still, no inner monologue. Not much mental imagery. Heck of a lot of connections though - but very very abstract.
> I can spin things and know exactly how things will "look" from a different angle
This is essentially the spatial equivalent to the inner monologue of the language-oriented processor.
But when I smoke weed, I have to actively think about the position of keys in the keyboard in order to type coherent things. I have to type "by software".
The point is: maybe for some people, their spoken language is "hardware accelerated" and for others, thinking in words is too computationally expensive, so they resort to less expensive methods.
Or maybe it's the opposite. Thinking abstractly is the computationally expensive method but the improvement in decision making isn't worth the effort.
Disclaimer: I know absolutely nothing about psychology or neuroscience. I just like to think about it.
In what sense can it be compared with hearing actual sounds? Does it have the same quality. Does he perceive his mental dialogue like an overlay on top of "external" sound?
I've been wondering the same thing when people say they "see" or "visualize" something: do they actually, visually see it in front of them, or not?
For me, the internal monologue and visualization are all just "mental" events. It doesn't share any qualities with the other sensory faculties: they are all quite distinct for me. Just like seeing and hearing, mental events also have a "spectrum", ranging from nothing at all (no thought), to "quiet" (abstract thinking and forming mental facsimiles of sensory perception) to "loud" (mentally "speaking" full sentences to myself, which I do the least).
Fascinating topic!
Also sometimes (albeit rarely) a thought might actually make me smile or even laugh out loud a little out of surprise with no external input so to speak.
Quite weird, come to think of it... do others do this too?
I think about movies I want to make, startups I want to create, the change I want to put into the world. New songs on my commute, goals I want to accomplish, what I could do with time travel. I'm always working on the structures of my different dream worlds, modifying the rules and the characters, exploring how they interact. The languages they speak, and the rules of the magic and science systems that form the bounds of their existence.
I have never once in my life been bored. Not once. I can sit in an empty room and just daydream.
If I play music or walk or run, this imaginative power is supercharged and becomes a transcendent experience. It's why I love running and headphones. I haven't taken drugs, but I imagine it's something like that. It's a pure, unfettered deluge of dopamine. I can also walk in circuits and circles around my house doing this and can waste hours in fantasy. Entire weekends can be "wasted" this way.
I think this is a source of my ADHD. I've got instant dopamine fixes from my raw imagination and it's incredibly hard to do anything else as I can always give myself something better to do by just daydreaming.
As an aside, the dreams that I have when I sleep are almost like movies. They have intricate (but often nonsensical) plots, and I'm seldom even involved.
The main thing I want to do with my life is to create tools so I can get this out of my head and out into the world.
I wonder how many other people daydream like this and have a vibrant inner creativity?
I still spend an hour each day doing that during my commute.
I've found that improv theatre and writing books really helps with the "getting it out of my head" part.
I even had a cross-universe canon for my character: I often had wings (watching Winx club as a kid helped), and sometimes took characters on a multi-dimensional ride in my magic hyper-technological flying car, big as a house on the inside, capable of traversing space and time.
I absolutely feel the same way about music, it manages to turn any world, even a simple concept into a fantastical and magical music video of sorts.
As I went on with my life I somewhat lost this ability, possibly due to the highly technical nature of my job and hobbies, however I still love reading and watching good fantasy stories, and sometimes, when I feel like it, I still fantasize by joining the story and aiding the main characters in saving the world (and music still can transport me away to another world, like before).
I have often considered the enormous power, and just as enormous limtations of modern creativity tools.
I honestly can't wait for neural interfaces: when everyone will be able to extract images and audio directly from their brains. It will truly be a revolution for the media industry, a change as big as the introduction of computers.
It will also give way to haunting new aspects of copyright law: what happens if someone publishes a YouTube neural video that uses copyrighted characters, do we prohibit people from even thinking about copyrighted IP?
Do we beam films using widevine L0 DRM directly to people's brains, immediately removing all memories of them after they were seen to avoid copyright infringement?
Those will truly be interesting times, and I would really love to live to see them.
When I was a teenager, I went through this phase where I would dream of myself as the hero of a book I just read. And if I knew the hero would die at some point, I would always modify my dream so I didn't die :)
Neural interfaces will be a game changer. I'm so excited for them.
It helped me through school though. I cannot imagine going through classes without daydreaming. It sounds like torture.
I think it is detrimental to achieving things though. Actually doing things takes far more discipline and that's time that could be used for coming up with more internal ideas.
As a side note to this, I also have aphantasia. So I don't get any images. Just concepts,dialog, connections etc.
The only reason I have an understanding of what a "mind's eye" might be like is that I do dream visually. This is apparently not uncommon among aphatasics.
It got me thinking about a lot of ways we go about teaching. Math for example - my partner struggled with calculus in uni when presented an equation she hadn't seen something similar to before. It never occurred to me that people couldn't attempt to "graph" something in their head.
If I could press a button, I would trade almost all my creativity for sanity/logic.
Are they fractal shapes, or like you'd see in a kalaidoscope perchance?
Typing this all out now I realize it sounds strange, and I haven't heard anyone else talk about this in particular. For reference I have low-grade synesthesia (among a whole host of mental abnormalities compared to my peers), my family has a history of mental illnesses, and I'm just about the most neurotic person I know. I have never used any illicit drugs (including marijuana, which is fortunately now legal in Canada). I've considered trying LSD or psilocybin, but I'm worried about having a bad trip. I have however experienced many sleep deprivation induced hallucinations, as well as several fever dreams, dissociative episodes, and panics attacks. I've been told by a trusted source that fever dreams can be somewhat similar to using psilocybin.
Ze Frank has a good video on this where he quotes Jung's work. https://youtu.be/u2cMjeSvZSs?t=184 Artists say life begins when you leave your comfort zone, in regards to making good art.
I find it still an important driver in life to follow that burst of ideas. The only way for me to raise up an idea structure or skill is to follow that buzz upwards. My capacity to imagine is jammed packed with meaningful content now and it grows a weight of it's own.
I can watch an entire movie inside my head from another character's point of view or vantage point.
I'm also able to on the spot improv storytelling, something that I was able to do easily as a teen during summer camps and recently I got introduced to the world of DnD which got my mind racing and volunteered to become a DM.
Loneliness is a rarity for me as I feel content wandering off, writing and art is my way of projecting to this world, which I have plucked out from the sea of infinite realities through dreams and daydreaming.
When someone talks to me, asks me a question/opinion or solution, a whole mindmap/flowchart,timeline appears before me which I can navigate spatially in 3d.
When someone asks for direction or trying to find out where I am, I literally see a 3d flyover or bird's eyeview from where I'm standing.
When I dream, not only that I dream in colors but they have a feel to it like watching something nostalgic or when I travel. Sometimes dreams has visual filters as a part of it. Have you dreamed being inside a cartoon/comicbook, painting or noir movie?
I do have a hard time turning my brain off which sucks when trying to go to sleep.
It may not be the same for you but you probably can adapt it to whatever suits you. It's about coziness.
There are several cozy scenarios that are ideal for me to sleep. I just teleport myself there and I do stuff.
My favorite by far is the one in the wilderness. I read a book once about a guy from the neolithic who had to run away from his village with his dog. I imagine myself there. There's nothing around me. Only several small villages kilimeters away. I'm alone with my dog. The sun is almost set and it's getting chilly. There's a little cave nearby where I can take refuge for the night. I'll go gather some wood and make myself confortable inside. Then I'll sit by the fire eating some of that smoked meat I have left and I'll just rest my head down. At that point I'm already sleeping.
If you try this, report back.
Other than forcefully pausing it that way, it runs 24/7/365 and is incredibly vivid.
I can also have multiple “tracks” running at once internally, but I generally have one “in focus” and another 1 or 2 sort of there in the background dimly. I’m aware of what all tracks are currently up to though at any given point.
Generally it’s just brainstorming ideas, playing back memories, imagining fantastical worlds/stories for internal entertainment, or wondering about things.
It’s not always positive, and keeping it all under control can be difficult, but I definitely think the pros outweigh the cons.
My thoughts form in a soup of cognition. Then if I pay attention become words, or smeeld, sounds, tastes....
Related: I play guitar in two rock bands. I have to reach a state in my mind between attention and inattention to do well. For example if I count beats I loose my rhythm. But if I stop paying attention I loose... So I need to be in a intermediate state.