470
TIL that some people do not have an inner voice and think in different nonverbal ways.
(humanities.ku.dk)
this post was submitted on 15 May 2024
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I'm one of the 5-10%. I always sucked at verbal memory tasks. Didn't know some people have an real, interpretable internal monologue until a few years ago. I thought thinking nonverbally was the default. I even specifically remember watching shows and movies where you listen to a character's internal internal monologue and thinking "this is dumb, that's not how thinking works". Turns out it is, and I'm just in the minority! Now I make an effort to manually start an internal monologue when I'm doing anything that requires a lot of verbal processing, like listening to instructions at work. It helps, but I can still tell that I have a deficit compared to most people when it comes to those things.
Your anecdote seems to support that it's a learned behavior/skill, which tracks for me. I have a very active internal dialogue that's difficult to turn off. I say dialogue instead of monologue because I often make up "other voices" that bounce ideas off each other, and this generally happens without my conscious effort. I think I developed this because as I was growing up I was encouraged to pray regularly, and I was very fanatically religious as a kid so I did so as often as I could. I prayed silently so often in fact that my thoughts were basically a constant one-sided monologue directed to god. Whenever I would daydream or let my imagination wander I would imagine god responding, and eventually the constant monologue became a dialogue. I would work out problems or make decisions by having conversations with an imaginary god. When I stopped believing in god the second voice never went away, I just started recognizing it as my own.
I am trying to wrap my head around this. So if you are just walking down the street alone, watching cars go by, not reading, there a voice? What would it even be saying?
Yes, multiple voices, probably debating what I'm going to cook for dinner later. At this point I might be going a bit too far anthropomorphizing the voices, it's not like actual separate personalities, they're all me. It's more like perspective taking. I'm engaging in a conversation with myself and the different voices will take different stances. For example I might have a "lazy voice" that just wants to eat leftovers and a "craving voice" that wants to cook tacos. I decide what to do by having the voices hash it out.
As I'm describing this it all sounds very intentional and like I'm playing pretend, but it really is just automatic.
I guess I have something similar, but it's all just nonverbal feelings. I don't argue with myself about getting up in the morning, I just feel comfortable, lazy, frustrated, determined, and rarely tell myself "get up" but that's the only voice part.