For me there’s two separate participants, a ‘talker’ and a ‘listener’. My mind identifies more with the talker, because that’s the one that has agency. Since there are two participants, both of which are me, I talk in 1st person plural (‘we’ve got to do …’, 'we thought about this earlier’). I stopped being afraid of being alone after I started having an internal dialogue around the age of 11, since having a second participant in the conversation meant I was always in company.
Edit: Wow, looks like there’s a lot more diversity in this than I was expecting
No monologue, no images, no sound. Just… concepts. It’s a bit weird.
Even weirder is that I can actually conjure images while asleep (or about to sleep, or barely just woke up).
I loved books as a kid, but never understood why people preferred them to movies where you could actually picture what is happening on the page. It took me until my mid 20s to figure out my experience was different to other people’s.
I can get lost in my imagination, it’s just not visual or auditory
I have the same. I believe it’s aphantasia, but I am self-diagnosed so I could be wrong.
I found out about this a couple years ago when my wife started a conversation with me like “do you know some people can’t picture things?”. I had several follow up questions because I thought it was just a figure of speech for the first ~30 years of my life.
My internal voice is exactly like me speaking out loud. If I don’t “speak” in my mind there’s nothing, just like if I don’t speak I’m not saying anything out loud.
For me the internal monologue is exactly the same as my ‘external’ monologue when I tell people about myself or do something together with someone and explain my actions. So it’s always first person singular, for example: “I’ve reflected on this multiple times but still don’t quite understand it”, “Okay, I need to turn right now” or “God I’m so freaking tired of this shit! I’m done. Fuck them all”. There’s no internal split and if I was saying what I’m thinking out loud in front of someone, it’d sound completely normal.
This is what I experience, and consider normal.
I’m surprised at the range of responses.
I think this is the closest to my experience. Maybe it has to do with the fact that I’ve been writing and expressing my opinions online for so long that I can “stream of consciousness” whatever I’m currently thinking into text
Stream of consciousness, very much like Ulysses but even less readable.
Layers of depth in a fluid is the best metaphor I have.
The ‘top’ ‘layer’ is the ‘loudest.’ It has the word-thoughts. If I want to solidify ideas and plans into an expressible form, it happens here. Almost everything that comes out of my mouth is formed into word-thoughts first, and then repeated aloud. If I want to ‘rubber duck’ a problem, I do it here. Sometimes ‘bubbles’ come from below and disrupt the structure of these thoughts.
The next ‘lower’ ‘layer’ is the image space. Things I am actively imagining are here. Images, 3D forms, music, conceptual mapping, etc.
The next ‘lower’ is the semi-conscious. Thoughts I haven’t established fully into expressible thoughts or images are here in half-graspable form. Sometimes it feels like something lower pushes elements up into this space as ‘important.’ Sometimes those things are pushed up strongly enough they press into the layer above.
I can sometimes sense things happening deeper down, parts that are processing inputs in ways my metacognition can’t perceive.
Across the whole space is a certain turbidity representing emotional disruptions and physical mental hindrances like lack of sleep, etc.
I have a voice that declares something as fact. Then I have a voice that is skeptical. Then I have another voice that is skeptical of the skeptic. Finally I have a voice that wants more info/evidence. I do not make it through all four voices with every thought, and the first voice fucking hates me
If it’s not music lyrics/no lyrics music, some other thing I have on my mind that isn’t something I came up with, a remix of something I have seen, or a memory and/or dream, I usually end up having fantasy conversations where it’s me but using someone else’s voice. Specifically because I don’t currently like my voice and think I sound like a gremlin.
When I forget what I’m doing my brain makes a sound like an engaged phoneline from the 1990s
I usually stop thinking so the voices argue with each other instead of me
Sometimes I just talk to myself.
Sometimes I talk with a random character. I can feel agency (or illusion of Independent agency) from anyome at this point, whether I want an anime waifu to “talk back” or to play out a dialogue I’m supposed to have with an IRL person soon.
And sometimes I talk with my inner companions. There are a few characters I have built stable, genuine relationships with over years.
Btw. at some point I started seeing my mind as a process rather than an entity (or set of entities). And like in other complex processes, it would be strange if we couldn’t observe any internal contradictions in it.
My internal monologue is constant. Unless I’m using my language processing capacity for something else (e.g. listening to a podcast or reading text) then my brain is full of verbal diarrhoea. I’ll count each step on my way up a staircase just to fill the dead air in my head.
This is pretty close to my experience, including the counting.
I was surprised to learn that not everyone counts things like stairs automatically.
My base thoughts are non-verbal. Sometimes I describe it like shapes in a hyperdimensional vector space.
My internal monologue is basically just practicing translating these base thoughts into language, to explain concepts to others.
This describes my mind pretty accurately. Except for one thing: the hyperdimensional vector space thoughts are usually accompanied by a soundtrack of some stupid song I got stuck in my head for the last 3 days.
Songs get churned into the vector space. When there’s a song stuck in my head, I’m thinking about songs with similar timbre, similar time signature, similar chord progressions. I’m remixing hooks and adding parody lyrics. The stupider the song, the more intricate the fugues and variations.
And everything draws me to cusps, inflection points, local extrema, global extrema. There are “pure” or “right” configurations of thought that scratch an internal itch for elegance. Maybe that elegance is revelatory, bringing me closer to a more profound understanding of the universe around me. Maybe every line of It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me ends with the words “a bright orange pair of pants”. I trust the process.
This analogy started to feel particularly accurate for my own experience when I started learning a second language. I realised that I wasn’t learning what one word meant in another language, but instead, attaching the two words to a deeper idea/concept. It means that I’d often understand what I was hearing, but even when I was listening in my new language, I didn’t automatically have the translation to my native language (English).
And my thoughts/internal experience is like that. I can pull the words out to describe the thing, but the actual thought itself, the concept that I’m using the word to describe is where I would say my thoughts naturally sit
I don’t have one…
I think plenty of people are like that too. Would you say you spend most of your time while conscious in the present? Because for me, this internal dialogue causes me to ignore my surroundings and consequentially I end up spending a large part of my waking hours ignoring my actual surroundings.
I’d say that’s a pretty reasonable summary. I mean, I can think about the future and the past of course, and I can stress about them both too, but none of that takes the form of a dialogue, nor does it have any sense of participants. There’s just my thoughts, in the moment, about the future and what might happen.
Now I’m curious, have you studied/speak any other language? If you learned later, what would you say was the comparative difficulty? I ask since it seems the dominance english in my internal monologue clouds what I intend to say some times
I learned (am learning) Spanish later in life and it has actually been quite interesting because of this. I have aphantasia, so no mental images either, and I’ve always described my thinking and thoughts as being about the concepts and ideas of words, with the words something that I can summon if I need to.
And learning Spanish via translation and memorisation was really painful, and honestly, not enjoyable. I eventually stumbled across the comprehensible input method, which doesn’t try and translate your target language to another language. It just builds up from scratch, you learn from simple words and sentences, with strong visual support and repetition etc, getting more complex the more exposure to the language you get. And this method clicked with me. I’m only at B1 or so with Spanish, but I can listen to a native speaker and understand them, but if you asked me what they said, I would have to then convert what I heard to English after the fact.
I’ve often said that it worked because both English and Spanish attach words to the behind the scenes concepts, and I’m mapping to that.
This sounds psycho or sociopathic.
Having or not having an internal monologue has nothing to do with being sociopathic, and it’s extremely rude to suggest it is. You now have a great opportunity to learn about how a large swath of other people experience consciousness.
Yep, you got me! That must be exactly what it means!
Are you familiar with Aphantasia by any chance? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia
Edit: In case anyone finds out through this comment, remember that discovering this does not change anything about your life or who you are. It’s just that most others work differently to what you used to think.
Yep, very familiar :)
I have aphantasia!
Sometimes the monologue is so loud I end up accidentally vocalising (whispering) it. I think it might be partially caused by the fact I have ADHD and a monologue like this is a way to keep my brain stimulated (thought wise, but also socially) when there’s no input from the outside.
I don’t have one. No sound and no detailed images.
Mine is just constant words. Constant narration of everything. With occasional music breaks, because there’s always pop music going through my head too.
Me too. In fact my stream before this was “Jesus this is taking so long to load wtf. I should take this as a sign to go to bed. Oh… My meds wore off. I’m thinking ALL the words again. Man I’m glad people can’t hear my thoughts. Well, it probably would’ve made the ADHD diagnosis easier. Oh hey, it finally loaded!”
Anyone else having hella load times on Lemmy lately or is it just my app or instance? Lol
Same lol
