It was recently brought to my attention that most people don’t. I find that…literally impossible to believe.
So, do you have an inner monologue? Do you talk to yourself? Do you get lost for hours in your imagination? Just spend time thinking? When you read, is there a voice that reads the things or do you just…see the words or something.
No I have no inner monologue. My thoughts take the form of incorporeal ideas rather than a run-on concrete sentence
Wow. That’s fascinating.
Do you ever become aware of your voice and get annoyed by it? Like manually breathing or something
I’m always aware of my inner voice. It’s how I interpret the world, analyse stuff, think etc. But sometimes it goes into the “background” like if I’m engrossed in a show or a book or talking to someone.
Now I'm suddenly wondering if there's any correlation between thinking in words vs. ideas/pictures and being able to rotate 3D objects in your brain
…what
Like, can some people not rotate 3D objects? Lol. I have trouble with 4D objects but 3D is basic.
i used to be much better at it but over time my ability to hold images of any kind in my head has broken down as my working memory has degraded. faces of friends are amorphous and nondescript - more placeholders for the idea of a face than an actual detailed image whereas i used to be able to visualize in extreme detail.
i've had pretty bad cognitive decline over the years via depressive pseudodementia/lack of stimulation and my memory got particularly fucked up after i had electroconvulsive therapy so i'd imagine that's why
that being said i have a very strong inner monologue that i know i at least partially consciously developed as a way to cope with isolation and loneliness - i would talk to myself and narrate what i was doing or thinking because i rarely if ever talked to anyone else. as a child i thought more directly in concepts and images instead of words.
:meow-hug: im sorry your going through that.
Some people have trouble doing it. Not sure why
I have periodic dissociative states that will happen maybe once a year for 5-10 minutes and during that period I can't visualize objects with proper proportions, like if I imagine a person their hands or legs will be comically oversized. It's apparently a known phenomenon that a teacher brought up once but it's happened to me since I was small.
I've had one of those! I'd see my partner as if they were really far away, then blink and feel like they were right at my face, plus other crazy stuff - time was choppy, couldn't get oriented spacially, etc . Felt like I was stuck in a shitty short film from a kid that didn't know how to edit, light or operate the camera. It lasted a whole morning
I can't render visuals at all. I do see things when I'm dreaming and when I'm drifting off to sleep, but otherwise when I close my eyes it's just black. It's more like my brain stores a bunch of interconnected information about an object - thoughts, feelings and memories associated with it - that could be generated into an image if run through the right interpreter. I still sort of know what an object looks like, though, and I work as a graphic designer for a living.
Who knows, maybe some people have 2003 era intel extreme graphics crammed into their brains.
So how does a normal day work for you? When you’re hungry, do you feel the hunger pangs, and mentally say “I’m hungry, I should eat.” And then think (in words and sentences) of the different things to make or to order food or buy it etc? And after that conversation you decide what to do?
No I feel the hunger pangs and I imagine myself eating or making a sandwich (or whatever), and that propels me to action
So what is your experience with reading like? And if you're typing out a comment on this thread, do you think of what you're going to say beforehand, or do the words just appear on the screen without conscience thought?
Reading is kind of like what that other commenter in the thread said about "observing the meaning of words as if they were logograms". Maybe if a character is speaking I'll give them a voice in my head but when nobody is talking I'm busy trying to construct the scene with the description the author gives me.
As for typing a comment, that's kind of like speaking, so I need to have a voice in my head that's telling me what I want to say.
That sounds kind of like an internal monologue
Is it a monologue if you're talking to someone else
Do you ever think in words or sentences? When does it happen?
Sure, perhaps when I'm trying to process a difficult sentence or something similar to that I can think in words and sentences. But that's not what my brain defaults to.
WOW
How do you work through complicated instructions/processes? I have to walk myself through it as if I were reading the instructions to someone else, whether it's an inner monologue or out loud
The first "complicated process" that comes to mind is an algebra problem, and for things like that I often visualize what needs to happen. For example if a number needs to be subtracted to go on the other side I picture the number physically moving to the other side of the equation in my brain