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".
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.
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.
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?