This originally popped up on the internet a year ago, but I only heard about it today:
Fun fact: some people have an internal narrative and some don't
As in, some people's thoughts are like sentences they "hear", and some people just have abstract non-verbal thoughts, and have to consciously verbalize them
And most people aren't aware of the other type of person
— Kyle 🌱 (@KylePlantEmoji) January 27, 2020
The fuck? I have no idea what it could be like not to have an interior monologue. Mine is more or less active 24/7 and practically every substantial action I take is the result of some kind of internal debate with myself. If I didn't have that going, how would I even think?
In any case, this is apparently for real:
Russell Hurlburt, a psychology professor at the University of Nevada, has been studying what he calls inner experience for more than 40 years. "It's the most interesting topic on the planet," he said.
He has written six books on it and worked with hundreds of participants. He gives them each a beeper and when it goes off at random times throughout the day, they have to note what's going on in their minds. He said people generally think in five ways. Some people experience them all.
This got me curious. Supposedly about one person in five has no interior monologue, so I started calling friends and family. On my seventh try I found a friend who doesn't experience thought that way. We talked for a bit, but it was sort of like describing sight to a blind person. If you don't think in words, then how do you think? He tried to describe it, but wasn't really able to.
This literally changes my view of what it means to be human. I'm not sure what to make of it, but I plan to read more about it and report back.
Check this out:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/01/book-review-origin-of-consciousness-in-the-breakdown-of-the-bicameral-mind/
See also Kahneman, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking,_Fast_and_Slow
Of course! But everyone interested in this should already be familiar with Julian Jaynes!
More interesting, I think, is Scott's similar article here:
https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/11/03/what-developmental-milestones-are-you-missing/
(building on David Chapman's explorations in this area).
I know this article will not be popular, but to me it explains 95% of my internet interactions -- I go into an interaction assuming a certain type of person on the other end, whereas in fact the person on the other end is operating two levels below me.
As I say repeatedly: I assume I'm talking to Luria and it turns out to be just another Peasant.
Similar (and this crowd will hate it even more)
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CKpByWmsZ8WmpHtYa/competent-elites
I read Jaynes around 1981 as an undergrad pysch major after a professor talked about it a bit. It was fascinating, but I didn't really give it the attention I should have -- too busy with job, girlfriend, and studying and writing papers for actual courses I was taking . The article you linked re-kindled my interest 40 years later!
If you don't think in words, it stands to reason that it would be difficult to impossible to describe your thought process in words.
I love this topic! Getting some insight into your internal experience is one of the things I find most compelling about meditation.
There's a lot of speculation here about connecting whether or not someone has a verbal internal monologue with their ability to verbalize their thoughts, introversion/extroversion etc. I'm gonna push back on that a bit.
I'm a very verbal person (I love puns, language, etc.) and a fairly introverted person, but I wouldn't say I have an inner monologue as such. I do think words to myself, but I find that it's typically when I'm rehearsing thoughts that I want to externalize. For example, prior to writing this comment sentences popped into my head with some ideas for what I might write. But in my day-to-day life, I'd say the bulk of my thoughts are nonverbal.
Depending on what I'm thinking about, I might describe a lot of my thoughts as... spatial? Like, the ideas are these sort of invisible blocks, connections, motions that may or may not fit together in a satisfying way.
For people who have a strong inner monologue, I'd be curious to hear what happens when you sit with your thoughts and really pay attention to them. What happens when you think about something that doesn't have a precise word for it? Or when you intend to take some sort of motion, like walking across the room? Or recall an image?
Excellent question. Are people with different internal styles more likely or less likely to be involved in different activities, such as, do people with high verbal inner monologue find meditation more or less difficult?
Yes and no.
Temple Grandin is, of course, a real person and has written extensively on this, both in the context of people and (as much as is possible) other mammals.
John Elder Robison (Augusten Burroughs' brother) is not as well known but has also written extensively including a truly FASCINATING account of when his thinking style was modified by TMS (transcranial magnetic stimulation).
I don't think in words but I write fiction as a hobby.
Cogitate that!
What are the odds that most introverted people have strong inner voices? I bet it's strong.
I mean, the hardest part of being in a group is that I can't hear myself think, to the point that it's all just unwanted noise.
I'd be interested to know if these inner thinking modes have other correlations as well: concrete vs. abstract? All the Myers-Briggs binaries?
I think the term "consciously verbalize" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. What does that even mean?
Having not read any of his books, I suspect all people think roughly the same way, but just have five different ways of describing the experience.
I do both. Most of my thoughts are in words. Some however are more like looking at an image rather than reading a book. These abstract thoughts are hard to articulate even to myself. I assumed, and still do frankly, that everyone thinks this way.
I think I'm the same, if I'm understanding you correctly.
"I think I'm the same, if I'm understanding you correctly."
This line is so poetically and philosophically cool it should be called DesCartes' Appendix.
And if thinking in words is how one thinks, how does a baby think before it learns language?
And if we think in words, then people of different languages would seemingly have different "thoughts" about the same subject.
For that matter, what is a "word" if it is not spoken?
My son is deaf. I asked him if he had a little guy in there signing to him. He had no idea what I was talking about. And like you, Kevin, we had no common vocabulary to discuss this.
My other son has ADD. He says he has dozens of voices talking to him, all at once.
I personally have a monologist who is disinclined to shut up. But I also have a personal juke box playing a song nearly full time. This morning, it's a Christian Contemporary song that I haven't heard outside my head in at least a few weeks, so who knows why the jukebox picked THAT song.
I frequently have small bit of a tune that play on repeat. Sometimes the words, sometimes just the melody. When I do take the time to listen to my inner dialog, it's always in words and sentences.
I have a cat that is fascinated by melting ice. We give her ice chips and she will stare at them until they melt away. She is obviously thinking about them. She is a pretty smart cat and can do a few tricks and understands some of our words and gestures but I doubt she is thinking in words.
This "either/or" seems a bit simplistic to me; why not both? Or many, depending on ... lots of things?
I'll think in explicit words or sentences when I'm formulating something for verbal expression -- e.g., this comment -- or when I'm trying to think through something difficult that requires precise definition or logic, but at other times a nonverbal concept will do, and I'm pretty sure that even when I think in words there is a nonverbal impulse or concept that precedes them.
And of course all this happens in the "rational" mind, vs. the deeper instinctive one.
Interesting topic definitely, but may be a bit of a minefield for blog posting ...
I am this way too.
An example of a person would did not have an interior monologue, then acquired one.
I never thought with language until now. This is my story.
I think I'm very different from most people because of one main thing. I never thought with language. Ever. I moved to Canada when I was 2 from Asia, and have been basically been around English speakers my whole life. I'm in my twenties now and I can speak it relatively well, and can understand every single word. However, growing up, I never ever thought with language. Not once did I ever think something in my mind with words like "What are my friends doing right now?" to planning things like "I'm going to do my homework right after watching this show." I went through elementary school like this, I went through Highschool like this, I went through University like this...and I couldnt help but feel something was off about me that I couldnt put my hand on. Just last year, I had a straight up revalation, ephiphany....and this is hard to explain...but the best way that I can put it is that...I figured out that I SHOULD be thinking in language. So all of a sudden, I made a conscious effort to think things through with language. I spent a years time refining this new "skill" and it has COMPLETELY, and utterly changed my perception, my mental capabilities, and to be frank, my life. I can suddenly describe my emotions which was so insanely confusing to me before. I understand the concept that my friends are still "existing" even if they're not in site by thinking about their names. I now suddenly have opinions and feelings about things that I never had before. What the heck happened to me? I started thinking in language after not doing so my whole life. It's weird because I can now look back at my life before and see just how weird it was. Since I now have this new "skill" I can only describe my past life as ...."Mindless"..."empty"....."soul-less".... As weird as this sounds, I'm not even sure what I was, If i was even human, because I was barely even conscious. I felt like I was just reacting to the immediate environment and wasn't able to think anything outside of it. It's such a strange time in my life. It feels like I just found out the ultimate secret or something. .....Can anyone relate, or understand what Im saying? Can anyone explain what is happening to me? I have no idea where to even post this but this has been on my mind ever since I've been able to think about it.
https://www.reddit.com/r/self/comments/3yrw2i/i_never_thought_with_language_until_now_this_is/
As a mechanical engineer, I often explain ideas and concepts to a colleague by pulling out a piece of paper and sketching it. If it's a new idea, I often find that I haven't internally verbalized it until attempting to explain it to a colleague, and the sketch is the more direct expression of the thought. This implies a non-verbal mode of thought. Using a sketch to explain a concept is very common in my professional experience. Oddly, I find that engineers are usually poor sketch artists.
Yes! I'm often asked to troubleshoot issues for others and the person I'm assisting has trouble verbalizing what the issue is. I'm also asked to train the team of end users on how to reconcile contracts, many folks quite simply cannot grasp the concepts needed to undertake the task, they want a world where everything is black and white laid out before them. The trouble is that the simple problems are already resolved by automation, the systems and interfaces are smart enough to handle the simple stuff. The people now need to take on the stuff that computers and interfaces cannot handle.
The biggest issue with some users is that they cannot convert an issue into a short succinct problem statement with steps to problem resolution.
I think Donald Trump must be one of these non-verbal thinkers. Unless he's reading, he only speaks in a stream-of-consciousness style. He seems to be unable to prepare and internally rehearse his words. Also, he seems unable to rationalize. He doesn't come up with post hoc explanations for impulsive acts, which would seem to require an internal monologue.
That is a very interesting observation and would explain a lot about him. That may be the reason he comes to believe his own lies so easily.
I have an extensive and very active internal monologue, but I also have other non-verbal thought processes. These are difficult to describe, not so much because they're non-verbal, but rather because they're on the edge of conscious/unconscious thought, so there's not much to grab onto, so to speak. I also have a mild number/color synesthesia*.
The best way I can describe the most common of my non-verbal thought processes is "semi-abstract image association." An example of this is the Nicobar Pigeon Incident of a few days ago. I have never seen a Nicobar Pigeon in the wild (or in a zoo, as far as I'm aware). I've never even been to any of the places where they occur in the wild. I've seen illustrations in field guides, and probably photographs as well, although I don't remember any specific ones. When I saw Kevin's photo, I knew instantly what it was. Or rather, I knew that I knew what it was, even though I couldn't put a name to it. The things that went through my mind when I saw the photo were images of islands, maps of Southeast Asia and the South Pacific (including only tangentially-related map-like images, like visualizations of container ship traffic volume through the Strait of Malacca).
I also had non-verbal but also non-visual thoughts of something about this pigeon being unique in some way, although I couldn't remember what specifically. (This turned out to be the fact that it was the closest living relative of the Dodo, and that it isn't closely related to any other living pigeons or doves.)
Anyway, I couldn't immediately put a name to the bird, so I started to look up other kinds of pigeons that are also found in the Australasia/South Pacific region. I began by typing in "crested pigeon," and before the results even came back from Google, the name "Nicobar Pigeon" suddenly popped into my head, for no obvious reason.
*I once freaked my wife out by telling her that I found it more difficult to remember telephone numbers with lots of 6s, 7s, 8s, or 9s in them, because those digits, being deep green and blue, are darker and therefore harder to distinguish.
I agree that 6, 7, and 9 are somewhere in forest green - indigo spectrum, but imho 8 is more of an ochre. Possibly because of the similarity between "octo/ocho" and "ochre"? But maybe that's just a coincidence.
Nobel Prize winning physicist Richard Feynman wrote an essay about thinking in words vs pictures! “It’s as Simple as One, Two, Three…” Free to read on the Caltech Library website: https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/607/2/Feynman.pdf
“…I told them all the things I could do while counting to myself, and said the only thing I absolutely could not do while counting to myself was talk. One of the guys, a fella named John Tukey [the mathematician who invented the terms ‘bit’ and ‘software’], said, “I don’t believe you can read, and I don’t see why you can’t talk. I’ll bet you I can talk while counting to myself, and I’ll bet you you can’t read…”
I think I have a mix of all five of those mental states in a constant churn, one or another popping up randomly while the others twitter away impatiently in the background.
Reading and writing obviously brings forward the inner monologue, which right now wants to ask,
do people with more interior monologue have an easier time learning other languages, or are one of the other styles more likely to be bi-lingual?
There's a long-running debate about thought: is thought conducted in a natural, spoken (or signed) language or is there some lower level languagae (mentalese) that provides a compositional structure from which natural language emerges?
Helen Keller, who was deaf and blind from the age of nineteen months, was asked if she possessed thought before she learned sign language. On different occasions she gave different answers: on one occasion she said there was no thought before she learned to sign and on another occasion she said that she possessed a kind of non-verbal thought.
There was also the case of Laura Bridgman. She was born on a family farm at Hanover, New Hampshire in 1839. When she was two years old, scarlet fever left her deafblind. When she was about seven years old, she was sent to a school for the deaf and blind where she learned to communicate with a form of tactile communication known as fingerspelling. Eventually she learned to write. She wrote poignant letters home expressing how she was lonely and that she missed her family. Clearly she had memories of her life before she learned a language. Were these memories mental images without language?
The other day I saw the first part of Scorsese's George Harrison documentary.
At one point the Maharishi is discussing what a mantra does for you as you meditate. I can't recall exactly how he put it but essentially he seemed to say the tone of it helped focus your meditation by covering over extrania. That made me ask, is this the function of earworms? Music that occurs in your mind unwillingly, often very annoyingly. Are the earworms an evolutionary function to help focus conscious thought?
And this brought me back to thinking about what music was in the first place and my view that it evolved from listening to the background sounds of the forest and unconsciously paying attention to changes in the character and tone of it to be aware of when danger may be approaching.
I know that since becoming a birder I'm far more attuned to the alarm calls of birds, but in a semi-conscious, almost instinctual way. I'll be sitting at the kitchen table when a Tufted Titmouse will call and without thinking I'll look up just in time to see a Sharp-shinned Hawk strafe the feeders.
Did you know that there are also people who, when you say something like "orange", they cannot mentally picture an orange in their mind? I forget what it's called, but it is fairly common, I think. As for myself, I have multiple conversations going on inside my mind at any given moment. I think that some folks attribute their internal monologue or dialogue to "God."
Yeah, I don't. Definitely think in abstract not monologue.
I think in pictures and sounds. There is definitely a gap as I translate what I'm thinking into words. When writing, the gap is insignificant, but in conversations, I am sometimes interrupted because the delay is long enough that people think I've finished the sentence.
With effort, I can think in sentences, but it requires me to focus and slow down.
Kevin, when you photograph, do you think with words or logical constructs about what you are photographing?
There are those sad people who use grid lines in their framing, but seriously, ANY creative effort begins below the threshold of words and logic, for all that it can be "explained" using them afterwards That's what's sad about art historians: they cannot create, cannot be in the creation....so they explain someone else's art as the anointed high-priest who explains the art.
I am very verbal in my thinking, and very uncreative. Stripped of the insults, you are probably right, With insults thrown in, it would be "artists are incapable of understanding what they have created, so other people have to explain to them what they have done.
I can recall that just before I technically learned to read I resisted it because written language seemed to limit the information I was understanding from things I was seeing, usually almost eliminating the interest.
I say technically because I seemed to understand written English almost instantly upon focusing on it, age 4 or 5.
@galanx
Upvote for "stripping the insults."
I'm pretty sure that all my thoughts originate below the threshold of words and logic. Translating them into words is a way of getting them into a form where I can examine them, but there are thoughts that can't readily be translated into words, and shooting a photograph is an example of that. When I shoot a photo, I probably have an internal dialogue about some aspects of the photo, but when I'm doing that I'm ignoring everything I haven't translated into words. So to make a considered decision to press the shutter button, I have to stop the internal dialogue.
This is even more obvious if I'm improvising at the piano. When I decide what chord to play next, that's not a decision I can consciously evaluate until I play the chord. Then I've got a thought translated into a form I can process mentally (in this case a sound rather than a series of words), and can form a judgment about whether it was the right chord to play.
So your photography question is a good one. While I “think in words” much of the time, I wouldn't know how to shoot a photograph while doing that.
Kevin, I think you would really enjoy this article on a closely related topic of human perception by Blake Ross, who among other things created the browser FireFox.
https://www.facebook.com/notes/blake-ross/aphantasia-how-it-feels-to-be-blind-in-your-mind/10156834777480504/
My mother used to say ad nauseam to me growing up: Think before you speak.
🤔🤭
Mine is more or less active 24/7 and practically every substantial action I take is the result of some kind of internal debate with myself. If I didn't have that going, how would I even think?
Kevin: I feel the same way but I bet you actually do think without internal verbalization plenty of the time. We all do. If you're walking down the street and you see a very mean-looking Rottweiler blocking your way on the sidewalk -- and you decide to cross the street to avoid it -- you very likely didn't need to use mental words. Or, when a few minutes later, it starts to sprinkle and you pick up the pace to get to your destination sooner (so as to avoid getting soaked) you likewise, I'd bet, didn't need words.
I think people do this kind of thinking constantly.
Inner monologue, imaginary dialogs, earworms, all of these are things one learns view as distractions when one practices mindfulness. They function as ways that the mind distracts itself from present reality. Getting the mind to stop editorializing about experience is a major stumbling block for many beginning meditators. Experienced teachers report that some people fear that they will cease to exist in some important way if the chatter ever quiets.
As for myself, some of my earliest memories consist of me monologuing to myself about the (not very interesting) things I was doing moment to moment as i walked around outdoors. I remember a stream of seemingly nonstop 3rd-person narration of my actions as i did them, up to about the age of 20. Which was when i started practicing what would now be called mindfulness meditation.
I would be interested to see some research into externally-visible differences in the lives of people who naturally monologue v. those who don't. Is there evidence that one group is more impulsive than the other? Are there differences in how they interact with other people?