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My day was completely ruined yesterday when I stumbled upon a fun fact that absolutely obliterated my mind. I saw this tweet yesterday that said that not everyone has an internal monologue in their head. All my life, I could hear my voice in my head and speak in full sentences as if I was talking out loud. I thought everyone experienced this, so I did not believe that it could be true at that time.
Literally the first person I asked was a classmate of mine who said that she can not “hear” her voice in her mind. I asked her if she could have a conversation with herself in her head and she looked at me funny like I was the weird one in this situation. So I began to become more intrigued. Most people I asked said that they have this internal monologue that is running rampant throughout the day. However, every once in a while, someone would say that they don’t experience this.
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My life began to slowly spiral out of control with millions of questions. How do they get through the day? How do they read? How do they make decisions between choice A and choice B? My friend described it as “concept maps” that she sees in her brain. Another friend says that she literally sees the words in her head if she is trying to think about something. I was taking ibuprofen at this point in the day because my brain was literally unable to comprehend this revelation. How have I made it 25 years in life without realizing that people don’t think like me?
I posted a poll on instagram to get a more accurate assessment of the situation. Currently 91 people have responded that they have an internal monologue and 18 people reported that they do not have this. I began asking those people questions about the things that they experience and it is quite different from the majority.
I would tell them that I could look at myself in the mirror and have a full blown telepathic conversation with myself without opening my mouth and they responded as if I had schizophrenia. One person even mentioned that when they do voice overs in movies of people’s thoughts, they “wished that it was real.”
And to their surprise, they did not know that the majority of people do in fact experience that echoey voice in their head that is portrayed in TV and film. Another person said that if they tried to have a conversation with themselves in the mirror, they would have to speak out loud because they can’t physically do it inside of their mind.
I started posting screenshots of these conversations on my instagram and my inbox started
to flood with people responding to my “investigation.” Many people were reassuring me that I was not crazy for having an internal monologue, while others were as absolutely mind blown as I was. People were telling me that I ruined their day and that they now do not understand anything about life. Maybe you are all just a figment of my imagination, but regardless, yesterday made reality seem even more skewed.
How do they think? How does this affect their relationships, jobs, experiences, education? How has this not been mentioned to me before? All of these questions started flooding my mind. Can those people without the internal monologue even formulate these questions in their mind? If they can, how does it happen if they don’t “hear” their voice? I mentioned earlier that I was spiraling out of control. Well, as I write this and as I hear my own voice in my head, I am continuing to fall down the rabbit hole.
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Whether people just have different definitions of their thoughts, or if people literally don’t have an internal monologue, there is one thing that we do know… you will definitely get a headache if you keep thinking about this. Just trying to wrap my head around it is causing irreversible brain damage. I suggest asking people around you what they experience. If you are one of the few that do not have this internal monologue, please enlighten me, because I still do not understand life anymore. Send help.
@RyanLangdon_
I have an inner monologue, as does my son. My wife, daughter, and both parents don’t think in words. I discovered all this last night in a discussion we all had together, and it blew my mind! It’s also strange to me that I could know people intimately for decades and not know about this seemingly fundamental difference in thought.
This difference doesn’t seem to have any baring on anxiety levels, reading or writing ability, ability or disability with learning a new language, or memory recall based on my small sample of family members. So I suspect it is not some fundamental difference in humanity, like one is more evolved than the other, and maybe there’s nothing really different other than awareness of underlying consciousness.
I mean, most of what our mind does to allow us to function in the world happens unconsciously. Perhaps those who don’t have the inner voice simply have that communication going on under the hood of awareness, while those of us who “hear” the voice simply have it above the hood, like a noisy hot rod with chunks of the engine exposed, and sometimes it’s too noisy!
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I struggle with this. My mind can have an inner monologue a lot of the time but it also happens pretty often that there are blank spaces in between where I am thinking but with pictures and a few scattered words, not fully formed sentences. It becomes hard to explain exactly what I’m thinking afterwards or how I got to the conclusion I got to. I thought this was normal. This is very interesting how differently everyone’s brain functions. Thank you for sharing!
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I have the inner monologue thing, but I don’t have to either. I think equally well either way. Sometimes the monologue seems to slow the thought process down, but on the other hand it allows a logical progression that is easier to explain to other people. It never occurred to me before that it could be one or the other but not both for some people.
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This makes me wonder if it’s a Type A personality type compared to Type B… just odd to me because I never shut up internally! And the shower comment… ROFL…… ALL THE TIME!!!
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I’m confused for a different reason I thought everyone did both of these things and people switched between them depending on what world make their life easier at the time now I feel like it’s just me and maybe a few others, so i’m requesting that someone else who can switch between them comment that they can because that would be great thanks.
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I think in words when I’m thinking about talking or writing, using the spoken of written language, but when I’m thinking about doing something, in my mind are pictures, sounds, smells, … More the whole concept. Like a recipe video rather than a card or a page in a book.
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Just shared this with friends and family looking for more responses. Wondering what you think about “how” you think about or visualize time.
Here’s what I shared in my post as an example:
Wow. What? How? How do YOU “think”? Attempt to be descriptive below 👇🏾👇🏽👇🏼
Next question: How do you think about or view “time” in your mind? (When I think of the year, it begins with this one and works backward. Visual is something abstract; sort of like a big wheel/circle with January at the bottom; what would be like the 5 or 6 o’clock mark, and then February to the left, moving clockwise with summertime at the top, or 12 o’clock mark, and the end of the year November/December at maybe the 3/4 o’clock mark.)
#honestlyalwayswondered
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That would be synesthesia. I see months in a grid in colours, but that ‘wheel’ thing is how I see the days of the week (also with their own colour).
I didn’t know this was a rare thing until I told a friend when I was almost 30. I went my whole life thinking everyone did this.
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There has GOT to be a study in psychology about this. Does anyone know?
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Check this out! https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/pristine-inner-experience/201111/thinking-without-words
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I don’t just hear an internal voice when I’m thinking, I can also SEE what I’m thinking in faint images that are clearer the more focused I am. So if I’m super focused on something, I might as well be in a completely different world. That’s one of the reasons I love reading fiction books so much.
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Yes, this is totally me! I really can get completely caught up in my thoughts as if they are reality for this exact reason. And I don’t have any clue what is going on around me when that happens
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Abstract thinker here.
A neurologist help to point it out to me when I was working for him.
Like when you say horse I picture an orange streak.
Numbers are weird. The #1 makes me picture a black background with green dots of various sized scattered throughout.
Before I actually go to talk about something its pictured and played out in my head before and while talking about it.
Full sentences usually make a bunch of seemingly random images pull together and makes a sort of video of what I or someone else is talking about.
Pretty sure it’s made math harder but science way easier for me.
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I’m quite surprised that people are one or the other. Don’t they realise you can move between layers and zoom out to connectors? When I want to order things for the world around me the inner monologue is constant, albeit 2 at a time, one the regular monologue, the other whatever song is underscoring it. When I’m trying to wrap my head around a concept I switch up to a visual layer where I see the things I’m thinking. When problem solving I zoom right out to see concepts their connections, and next steps to an outcome, like a web.
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There’s an interesting article about this that you should read. I think it will help with understanding this concept and put it in perspective. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/pristine-inner-experience/201111/thinking-without-words
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I don’t just hear my own voice in my head, but I can hear the words in whatever voice I choose, including voices I am not physically capable of reproducing out loud. If I want to self narrate in the voice of movie trailer guy or Mickey Mouse or my mom or whoever, I can do that.
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I guess to add to that – I can also visualize images as well. This brought up an interesting question in my mind once which I haven’t fully answered: Can I only visualize things which I have actually seen? I found that I can visualize things which are new arrangements of things I have previously seen – for example a school bus with giant black crow wings or a panda made out of lightsabers – but still less certain on my capability to visualize something I have truly never seen before. Even if I try to invent weird creatures in my head, they tend to be made up of parts of other things I’ve seen, and I’ve killed enough video game monsters over the years that it’s hard to come up with anything truly original.
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To add one other fact for consideration which just occurred to me might likewise be something that not everyone can do: I can also play back songs in my head. Not just the vocals, but all the instruments. I can also modify the song or create new songs, imagine how it would sound in different instruments, which is a little sad because outside of my head I have no capability to play any sort of instrument or bring the songs into reality other than to hum them.
Basically I have a complete audio-visual playback/editing/VFX creation suite in my head, which I always just assumed is what people call “imagination” but now I’m starting to wonder if people who say “I don’t have much of an imagination” are literally telling the truth.
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I’d be interested to know if there’s a correlation between people who don’t have internal monologues and MBTI. Any chance they know what their MBTI type is?
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Some people on my enneagram server were actually discussing this article the other day! It sounded like the two ENTJs (Ni/Se) didn’t have an internal monologue/ lacked a verbal component to their thoughts, which was why they have to discuss/brainstorm out loud. (Which could be Te, but the visualization aspect they mentioned does relate to what I have heard about Ni, as it is sometimes referred to as ‘thinking in symbols’.)
An ISFJ (Si/Ne) and a few INPs (Ne/Si) all had the monologues, and a SFP (Se/Ni) was somewhere in the middle… So er super-small-sample-size but the Ni/Se axis does seem like a good place to start looking!
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Ok this is off topic but similar, i DO have an internal Monologue, but i do NOT have a “minds eye” i have no images in my brain its just a black void. I can dream, but i cannot voluntarily visualize, and i felt so lost when i found out people can
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This is my experience too
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So here is my post from Facebook and I’m interested if anyone has any feedback:
“Hello to all!! This a very long read..but I think it will be an interesting one to anyone who will take the time to get all the way through.
***How do you process thought? I have an internal monologue that never shuts off, just like a voice-over in a movie.
I ran across this article and I haven’t been able to shake this NEW awareness of how we as people process thought. Over a matter of days, this has turned into many in-depth conversations with family, friends, and strangers. A particular discussion has brought about questions in the correlation between the thought process, genetics, and ancestry.
Here a theory someone of early nomadic (Scandinavian/Viking) European descent has proposed to me: ***They absolutely have no inner monologue***
”My theory is related specifically to the time our influencing cultures transitioned from tribal/nomadic to homesteads/villages. I think heritages that remained nomadic/migratory for extended periods of time, will lean toward inner monologues without “voices” and those that come from regions that settled somewhere earlier on historically will have more auditory sensation with their inner monologue aka “the thoughts actually speak”.
So not so Europeans; just the chilling descent (of my ancestry) and maybe some Celts. I think my Welsh family will have more auditory sensation.
So not all europeans descent or other culture descent. I just know Vikings are some of the closest timestamp wise to the nomadic culture and we know they didn’t worry about focusing homesteads and such until like the 12th/13th centuries. So they were late in being “still” so the populations would’ve been smaller versus say a thriving Egyptian metropolis. They would be heavily populated and not roaming.
We know england was already settled down. I don’t think they think in ”images” as much as norwegians.
I think the ability to hear your own thoughts is something our brains allowed for later in the evolution of our species. I think it stands to reason those of us that can have utter mental silence are able to in order to process and evaluate external sounds (aka threats) for survival. Whereas a culture that settled into one place and gathered a larger populous would rely more on actual dialogue with one another when a threat is present. So that would mean developing linguistics FOR dialogue would have been very important. I theorize that those that “hear” in their minds can utilize foreign language more easily in conversation where I can quickly pick up foreign languages visually, by symbols characters etc, but I probably cannot hear the words as easily when spoken to me.
I don’t think language became dominant over hearing external sounds, I believe as we all settled and populations grew in a given area, the need to isolate external sounds for survival lessened – so that part of our brains would need a new task. I think that’s where inner auditory strength filled in the new space.
ie, I’d kick-ass with a french penpal, but a phone call would be much harder because of the dialogue versus visual process of the foreign language.”
I am curious to get feedback on this topic.”
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