Maybe I just misunderstand what an inner monologue is, but how can people claim not to have one? Are their heads empty and they’re just reacting to stimuli?
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Most of the thinking everyone does happens without an internal monologue.
For example, have you ever forgotten a word or been unable to express yourself verbally? Surely that wouldn’t be possible if the only way you could form thoughts was to have them spoken inside your mind. Have you ever recognized someone but forgotten their name? How could you do that if your thoughts were based on an internal monologue?
Even in practice an internal monologue is far from complete. You might think “I need to make dinner,” but understand a myriad of underlying steps and concepts without internally verbalizing them. You could understand the concept of needing to prepare dinner just the same way, without the internal monologue.
After all, what motivates the internal monologue if you didn’t understand something prior to that point?
me : ” i’m not going to be that guy again… ” friend : ” you’re not gonna be the guy i was once too! “
I do have an internal monologue, but it is not *all* of my thoughts.
* I read mathematics without fully translating it to English.
* My ‘minds-eye’ is not very vivid, but I don’t have aphantasia so some thoughts are images with no words.
* I feel emotions, and while I *can* put them into words, they are not *automatically and ititially* words in my head.
* I can reason about shapes and their relationship, without having to use words to describe my ideas in my head
* Sometimes I stop and think to work out what to say, because I don’t quite have a thought in words yet.
I’d say that overall, about 50% of my thoughts feel like they are my internal monologue. Like:
* as I type this, I’m internal monologuing the words I type, and experience this as my putting thoughts into the screen through my keyboard (I can type very fast)
* When I read, that is my internal monologue audio-booking inside my head.
* And plenty of my other thoughts are in words
But, as shown by my list above, not all my thoughts are words.
Perhaps even when my thoughts are words, they didn’t *have* to be words.
So, if someone else were to have a higher % of non-word thoughts, that sounds very plausible to me.
And if for some people it is 100% non-word thoughts, then I suppose that’s possible too.
I don’t really have an internal monologue, but my head is far from empty, instead I tend to think in a combination of images, emotions and concepts. In fact, if I am really struggling with a problem I often have to talk about it out loud to myself (or write it down somewhere if I am surrounded by people) Just to get my thoughts into some sort of order so I can start to break down the problem
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