No internal monologue

[Rahn127]

I recently discovered that there are some people in this world who have no internal verbal thoughts within their own mind.

I had always taken this as a given that everyone could talk to themselves within their own mind, but apparently it's not.

Some people don't have the ability to do it.

I'm still a bit shocked by this revelation.
I guess I just wanted to know if any of you have heard of this before.

It makes me wonder if there are other attributes that I have or don't have that aren't the same as my fellow human beings.

[The Valkyrie]

Yes, the voices don't speak to everyone.

[ignoramus]

Isn't that just called "thinking" :dunno

[Gawdzilla Sama]

[downbeatplumb]

I recently discovered that there are some people in this world  who have no internal verbal thoughts within their own mind.

I had always taken this as a given that everyone could talk to themselves within their own mind, but apparently it's not.

Some people don't have the ability to do it.

I'm still a bit shocked by this revelation.
I guess I just wanted to know if any of you have heard of this before.

It makes me wonder if there are other attributes that I have or don't have that aren't the same as my fellow human beings.

Yes. My best friend doesn't have voices and is very interested in what its like to have them. He cant imagine what its like.

I envy him at night sometimes.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Yes. My best friend doesn't have voices and is very interested in what its like to have them. He cant imagine what its like.

I envy him at night sometimes.

It's quieter.

[The Grand Nudger]

It's a stretch to consider people incapable if they don't report inner monologue. Not everyone trusts that kind of self reporting as an accurate description of actual function. Smart money says it's not an issue of ability, though, more like disposition. There's an "inner" report for every external sense. A control based explanation for the phenomena has experimental support. Inner monologue in those who report as much appears to be correlated with the system we use to assess and process external speech. Additionally, it's correlated with a process we employ to predict speech, to reduce the field of external attention - particularly when we're speaking. All of this, so that the sound of our own voice (and possibly other human voices) doesn't interfere with attending to other important environmental sounds. This occurs in people even when they don't report inner monologue and could explain why there's a segment of people who don't report the experience. It acts as noise cancellation, a signal filter. Whatever else it is or may be, it's zeroing out a flood of functionally less useful and possibly detrimental information. This is done subconsciously..and fwiw, the majority of people who report inner monologue rate it as either infrequent, or largely subconscious, itself.

We sometimes (sorta) hear (some version of) ourselves but we don't notice it until we attend to it.....and when we do..we suspect that we're doing it more often than we notice. OTOH, most of us have had at least one deeply introspective sense of narration. Explicit, directed, profound even. Really sorting ourselves out, lol. Perhaps this is a novel application for a function adapted to a more fundamental aspect of our biology.

[brewer]

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/article...objectonly

[Abaddon_ire]

Out of curiousity, I raised this topic with my eldest tonight.

Surprise #1 was that he had already read about it.

His thoughts were roughly thus (I didn't record it, so you will just have to put up with my paraphrasis.

He said that he considered it to be the oddest thing, since neither he nor I could imagine what it would be like to have no internal monologue.

But take the cat (who was at the time curled under a blanket) He can communicate when he wants in, or out, or food or a cuddle perfectly well, it follows that he must have some mental map of what those are and how to indicate which he wants. But he has no language, so clearly cannot have the internal monologue you or I would have. He may instead be operating from a language of concepts, desires, mental images and so forth, not anything we would immediately recognise as an internal monologue.

Given that he will start his degree in Applied Languages next October, I found his thoughts quite interesting.

[Rahn127]

When I hear people talk out loud and say things that probably should have stayed inside their own head, I now have to wonder if they don't have an internal monologue.

Every thought is spoken out loud.

You're walking the streets and someone tells
"What are you lookin' at ?"

Or someone says something brutally honest.
"That hat looks stupid on you."

Perhaps these rude people just can't help themselves and aren't actually trying to be rude.