Well, that helps explain my mother-in-law…
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And apparently the people talking about it on the Internet don’t agree on what they are talking about, either.
The Today I Learned That Not Everyone Has An Internal Monologue blog post claims that 83% of respondents in a (probably not scientifically rigorous) poll claim they “have an innner monologue”. The author sometimes makes it sound like a constant inner monologue, a running commentary on life, sometimes like a dialogue, a debate with distinct parts/manifestations of the self, and sometimes the author seems to be talking about the ability to verbalize a thought in your head.
The author seems to fail to distinguish any deviation from his own thought habits from complete inability to use that mode of thought.
The post referenced by @lizard-of-oz, Not Everyone Conducts Inner Speech, seems more scientific in its approach and has inner speech ocurring in about a quarter of the samples, with some subjects using it 75% of the time and a few even never, the median being at 20%. Which sounds much more reasonable and in line with my experiences.
Personally, I use inner verbalization some of the time, but I never have a dialogue with myself, I don’t use complete sentences unless I’m thinking about what to say or write (or what I could say or write in a hypothetical situation, etc.). I agree with @bobtato that it is logically impossible for anyone to think in words only, as you need to understand something to be able to form a coherent sentence about it. Running through some failed attempts at verbalization can be helpful for reaching that understanding, though.
Of course, when I’m writing a computer program, it’s much more useful to run through a few failed attempts at expressing my non-verbal thoughts as C++ in my head before I type it directly into my computer. And I am fairly positive that none of my colleagues don’t run a complete-sentence inner monologue about their programming work, either, or they’d be able to write perfect documentation long before they write down the code. They can’t, so I can conclude that if they experience inner monologue while programming, it does not contain all the thoughts necessary to create a working program.
And I wonder how individual habits on inner speech impact intellectual performance in various fields. Are you as likely to be a good writer if you don’t rehearse the sentences you write in your mind? Does hearing yourself speak in your native language while you are trying to form a simple sentence in a foreign language negatively affect your ability to learn foreign languages?
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You’re asuming your experience is universal. Some of us jump staight to voiced thoughts. Some of us never have voiced thoughts. Check out the link to psychologytoday by @zathras - especially the quotes by Bernard Baars and John McWhorter.
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She absolutely can’t visualise a 3d thing and make it. Lego is just the quickest example of that. Yet she paints and draws very lovely pictures which actually, you know, sell. I just thought it was an interesting parallel.
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Probably “The Weekly World News”. It’s unclear what percentage of its readers really took it seriously – everyone I knew who read it did so “ironically” in the 1990s when enjoying works one looked down upon was a thing.
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It certainly is. But somehow I have the feeling it’s the other way around. There’s “visualize” on the one hand, and being able to “imagine” how you’d construct something on the other. To me, these seem to be different “skills” (for the lack of a better word, not meant to be offensive or anything).
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They are the lucky ones
Exactly the kind of annoying pedantic shit I love and my wife hates.
Here’s one: New Years Eve 1999 was not the turn of the century, party people, it was a year later! All these Best of the Decade lists always come out a year early too. Idiots!
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I think you need to re-read @bobtato’s argument, it’s an argument from terminology and logic, not an argument from personal experience. When you say you jump straight to voiced thoughts, you are saying that you are not aware of any thoughts that come before the actual sentence in your head.
But to form a grammatically correct sentence, you have to have at least a vague idea of where the sentence is going. If you start a sentence in your mind with “I do not”, you haven’t only decided that you want to negate a concept. Some part of your brain must already be aware that the concept you want to negate is best expressed in English by a verb in present tense - otherwise you would have started with “I did not”, “I will not”, “I am not” or any number of other things. Some part of your brain is way ahead of your voiced thought.
That’s just logic. There must be some brain process going on. But is that brain process a non-verbal “thought” in its own right? Now that’s a question of terminology. Or should we use the word “thought” only for a mental process that we can consciously observe in detail?
I also wonder what the speed limit for voiced thoughts is. My own “voiced” thoughts are at most slightly faster than I speak, but I’ve got many examples of where I can leap to a logical conclusion far quicker. I’m not talking about intuitive leaps, I can explain the steps of my thinking immediately afterwards in these cases, but that takes longer than the original thought itself. Is that different for other people? Are there people who have an inner monologue on the pros and cons of a move in a lightning chess game? Or would people consider a game of lightning chess to be something that is done without thinking?
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I say 'Tenser, said the tensor! To myself once a week.
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TIL that this has a name and apparently isn’t very well understood?
In general, I don’t know what people or things look like when they’re not here. Familiarity without attention doesn’t help me recall it. Probably because I had severely bad eyesight that wasn’t corrected until age 7. Now with strong corrective lenses I can see things just fine when they’re right in front of me, and I might be able to recall what something/someone looked like later IF the picture is either very simple (e.g. a plain circle) or (rarely) IF while it/they were present, I was extra motivated to pay extra attention to that visual input for a very long time (my daughter’s new haircut). But remembering what a person was wearing, what color is my rental car, the cover of the book I’m reading right now, not going to happen. Navigating with a map on my phone is torture because whatever is outside the small window of the screen, even if I JUST saw it a second ago, poof it’s gone now.
From purely an amateur non-neuropsychologist standpoint it seems related to what people tend to call “tone deafness”, except for visual input. Neglect / underuse of certain neural pathways during the developmental window makes them stunted.
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This is exactly what cost me a perfect score on my driver’s ed final exam. Couldn’t remember how east-west and north-south mapped to odd and even, and so recalled the path of the numbered highway I was most familiar with. Unfortunately that was I-94, at the specific stretch where it runs north-south because of Lake Michigan.
Stuck with that road numbering factoid in my head forever, after that.
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I’m really not. I think of words all the time. But when I mentally audition the sentence “I can smell burning toast”, regardless of how I subsequently recall the experience, I know that I was aware of smelling burning toast before I thought of the words, because it cannot be otherwise.
If you tell people to push a button when they see a blue triangle, some will say afterwards that they pushed the button without thinking of words, and some might say they thought “there is a blue triangle, time to push the button”. But the latter group, before they thought of the words, must have already experienced the equivalent of the former group’s thought process. Why else would they have thought that sentence, rather than “chickens are funny” or “good evening ma’am”?
There is no reason to suppose that if someone experiences an inner monologue, their mind works differently to that of someone who doesn’t. They just describe it differently, and/or they have an additional mental habit.
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But an awareness or an experience or a feeling is not the same as a thought.
ETA: I too would be aware of the smell of burning before any conscious thought, but I’m not sure I would identify it specifically as burning toast before the words “burning toast” popped into my head. It seems to me that the internal articulation of those words are an integral part of the process by which I classify smells (and other experiences).
But I speak only for myself, not anyone else.
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That’ll never catch on… 
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That Psych Today blogger mentions inner speech, inner seeing, & feelings (I guess this covers both sensation & emotion?), & invites us to speculate about the other two inner inner experiences that people reported. I’m going to guess judgment & memory, I said to myself.
GilbertWhamBBS Lieutenant Commander
delightfultree
She absolutely can’t visualise a 3d thing and make it.
I have that same condition…I just don’t/can’t think in 3D, that is visualise an object & turn it around in my mind. Makes it very difficult to read instructions for sewing or building things…I have to actually do it (or watch a well-made video, or look at copious illustrations) to see how it will work. I love to draw & paint, but never learned the “laws” of perspective.
Immutable_Mike
TIL that this has a name and apparently isn’t very well understood?
In general, I don’t know what people or things look like when they’re not here.
I have that too! Also was a nearsighted kid with no specs till age 11 when I said “Wow, look at the leaves on the trees!!!”
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I hadn’t heard of it until I heard this podcast:
They did a follow-up a few months later because they received a large number of people writing in having identified it in themselves but who had never been able to verbalise it. Worth a listen if you have an hour.
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