No internal monologue

[Darwinian]

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.

Aaah, I'm your best friend   

But yes, this is true. Until about a year ago I had no idea what an internal monologue was and although I had heard of the phrase hadn't given it much attention.

It wasn't until downbeatplumb was talking about people thinking they were possessed because of the voices in their head and not realising it was their own voice and was quite normal that is slowly dawned on me that some people, perhaps most could actually 'hear' a voice chatting away in their head.

I'm still not quite sure what this must be like but if it's anything like I imagine, actually having a voice in your mind that you are not personally generating quite deliberately as if talking to yourself, which I can do if I concentrate, is surely the stuff of nightmares and the fact that it seemingly doesn't plummet you down the road to madness is quite staggering.

When I think of things, solving problems, what I'm doing later etc. etc. I tend to do it in terms of images, scenarios, abstract thoughts that don't really connect with normal reality but which seem to make perfect sense to me.  The only time actual words pop up in my conscious mind is when I might, for example, be wondering what I should say to someone or, like now, am reading the words I write just after I have just written it, but not before, which I'm now given to understand is not the usual way around.

For me, words describe the thoughts and unless I'm talking or describing something, the words are simply not needed.  

Another thing, downbeatplumb has told me he can actually 'hear' words, indeed, whole sentences in his head as if someone, obviously himself, were chatting to him, keeping him awake at night.  I can't imagine anything more likely to send me insane

Also, and again I have no idea how normal or not this is, when I do deliberately 'talk' to myself in my own mind, it is quite silent.

My son has just read this and called me a weirdo