470
TIL that some people do not have an inner voice and think in different nonverbal ways.
(humanities.ku.dk)
this post was submitted on 15 May 2024
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I'm one of the 5-10%. I always sucked at verbal memory tasks. Didn't know some people have an real, interpretable internal monologue until a few years ago. I thought thinking nonverbally was the default. I even specifically remember watching shows and movies where you listen to a character's internal internal monologue and thinking "this is dumb, that's not how thinking works". Turns out it is, and I'm just in the minority! Now I make an effort to manually start an internal monologue when I'm doing anything that requires a lot of verbal processing, like listening to instructions at work. It helps, but I can still tell that I have a deficit compared to most people when it comes to those things.
Your anecdote seems to support that it's a learned behavior/skill, which tracks for me. I have a very active internal dialogue that's difficult to turn off. I say dialogue instead of monologue because I often make up "other voices" that bounce ideas off each other, and this generally happens without my conscious effort. I think I developed this because as I was growing up I was encouraged to pray regularly, and I was very fanatically religious as a kid so I did so as often as I could. I prayed silently so often in fact that my thoughts were basically a constant one-sided monologue directed to god. Whenever I would daydream or let my imagination wander I would imagine god responding, and eventually the constant monologue became a dialogue. I would work out problems or make decisions by having conversations with an imaginary god. When I stopped believing in god the second voice never went away, I just started recognizing it as my own.
Okay, now I have to know if religious individuals are more likely to have an inner voice. That just makes sense!!!
Perhaps! I also think internal monologues can develop just from learning to read and write silently. Having an inner voice makes it easier to absorb the information in a book or to plan out your writing in advance.
I think all of our brains are wired different and the different wiring leads to advantages in one thing but it's probably a disadvantage for others. For instance I have no inner voice but my reading speed, with comprehension, is well faster than nearly anyone I've ever met. I can even sometimes recall precisely where on a page a given word or phrase was located, even years after reading the material. However I'm almost entirely unable to imagine a 3 dimensional object and rotate it in my "minds eye".
That does make me wonder if maybe I use my inner voice as a bit of a crutch when I'm reading, but I think it helps me infer tone and get immersed in what I'm reading. Perhaps I am sacrificing some reading speed but I do believe it helps me with comprehension and memory.
Though I will add that it's more the concepts that I remember than the words themselves. Give me a quote and I couldn't tell you what page and where on the page it was, but I could tell you what was happening in that scene, what happened before and after, what the character was feeling and why they said it, who they said it to and so on.
I have an inner voice but I don't use it when I'm reading, which is maybe why I am a very fast reader.
I tend to use it when pondering on things. That said I just noticed that when composing and cross-checking this text for posting, I also used it.
Curiously, nowadays my inner voice is not just in my own mothertongue but can be in just about any of the languages I know enough for basic conversation. It's probably related to, because my foreign language skills are so advanced (I can speak about 7 languages) that I've long stopped translating to my native tongue in my mind and concepts just translate directly from those foreign languages. Also, I've lived in a couple of countries and as I would eventually end up mainly speaking the local language, my inner voice would also, eventually, end up also using that language.
very interesting because I moved back to my home country 5 yrs ago after living abroad for 24. still think in my secondary language after being alone with my thoughts long enough
Yeah, I have a similar experience of still thinking in a foreign language even though I've been back in my homeland for years after 2 decades abroad.
I suspect my thinking language still being generally English is probably because I keep getting exposed to English-language media. I've noticed that, for example, if I think about my time living in The Netherlands or are exposed to Dutch-language media, my thinking often switches to Dutch.
Same on remembering exactly where i read something. I used to be a fast reader - out of practice. Maybe it's being able to skim instead of hearing every word?
There's actually a theory that back in ye olden times when inner monologues first started, people thought it was God talking to them because it was a new phenomenon and that didn't have any way to understand that it was some kind of evolution of consciousness, not a god.
Yeah Jensen's work. It is mostly considered pseudoscience today but there some who think it has value.
I mean the NVIDIA stock price speaks for itself, I think Jensen is onto something
Ha! Good one.
On a serious note here are the issues
I do agree some of it rings true. Just very hard to pin down what exactly.
I am trying to wrap my head around this. So if you are just walking down the street alone, watching cars go by, not reading, there a voice? What would it even be saying?
Yes, multiple voices, probably debating what I'm going to cook for dinner later. At this point I might be going a bit too far anthropomorphizing the voices, it's not like actual separate personalities, they're all me. It's more like perspective taking. I'm engaging in a conversation with myself and the different voices will take different stances. For example I might have a "lazy voice" that just wants to eat leftovers and a "craving voice" that wants to cook tacos. I decide what to do by having the voices hash it out.
As I'm describing this it all sounds very intentional and like I'm playing pretend, but it really is just automatic.
I guess I have something similar, but it's all just nonverbal feelings. I don't argue with myself about getting up in the morning, I just feel comfortable, lazy, frustrated, determined, and rarely tell myself "get up" but that's the only voice part.
Whoaaaa that's so interesting. I grew up silently praying in the daily as well, and also tend to have dialogues going on in my head. Also a stream of unsolicited advice, which is less pleasant... But I'd probably miss it if it went away.
Learning to get over religious shame and guilt took quite some time for me, and I still have to catch myself sometimes when an inner voice says things I no longer believe/agree with. Part of getting over that meant cultivating other voices. When one voice bites another bites back lol.
As a plus I'm very good in a debate.
like the devil and the angle on each shoulder type thing?
TIL. I'm one of the 5-10% as well!! I have not noticed a deficit in verbal memory... I'm more interested reading the comments and learning today that people have inner voices?!?
Yes! You've seen TV shows where people are thinking words in their heads or whatever...based on reality!
I think of cartoons - some people have word bubbles for ideas - some of us just have a lightbulb.
Basically if I know you well I hear your voice in my head argue for a pov I know you hold. If you are say a safety-first kinda guy I will hear you lecture me when I am not being safe. I got a committee arguing all the time and I admit it sometimes becomes hard to remember if I mentioned X to my mental version of someone or the real someone.
Yes I am aware that the voices I hear are not real. It is just the way my brain is presenting information to itself. Like writing down notes in different colored inks. It is all the same letters and words but with an added change.
You get to think in ways that other people can't. You actually have a super power. Don't sleep on that! You rock
I'm with you. Your movie reference really helped solidify it. I assumed I was one of the lonely minds, but this made it clear.
Some things that seem associated with this are my constant cravings for social interaction and intellectual conversation. I can't give it to myself. I have never understood how people can just do nothing. I never had an invisible friend as a kid. There are many things people say and do that could be explained by having personal voices. There are many struggles with communicating to others that have already had a conversation with themselves before I can share a full thought.
I drive my office mates crazy because the thoughts in my head just come out of my mouth, especially if I'm bored or nervous.
"It helps, but I can still tell that I have a deficit compared to most people when it comes to those things."
I was totally gonna ask you about this until I got to the end! It seems like thinking without any kind of internal monologue would be incredibly abstract which might be good for some things but it would probably suck ass for trying to remember or understand extremely detailed instructions and things like that! I'm so curious what it's like to think the way you do and I wish I could flip a switch for a little bit to experience it because it's kind of hard to really imagine what I would be like.
It's strange because while we can use words to describe our thought processes, understanding how someone else thinks isn't really possible since we only have one frame of reference (our own minds) and words can only go so far in describing cognition. We can only observe differences in task performance and speculate as to the underlying causes on a cognitive level, maybe make some correlations here and there in the process. So weird!
It’s a two-edged sword. Sometimes it can be really mean to you :(