For me there’s two separate participants, a ‘talker’ and a ‘listener’. My mind identifies more with the talker, because that’s the one that has agency. Since there are two participants, both of which are me, I talk in 1st person plural (‘we’ve got to do …’, 'we thought about this earlier’). I stopped being afraid of being alone after I started having an internal dialogue around the age of 11, since having a second participant in the conversation meant I was always in company.
Edit: Wow, looks like there’s a lot more diversity in this than I was expecting
No monologue, no images, no sound. Just… concepts. It’s a bit weird.
Even weirder is that I can actually conjure images while asleep (or about to sleep, or barely just woke up).
I loved books as a kid, but never understood why people preferred them to movies where you could actually picture what is happening on the page. It took me until my mid 20s to figure out my experience was different to other people’s.
I can get lost in my imagination, it’s just not visual or auditory
I have the same. I believe it’s aphantasia, but I am self-diagnosed so I could be wrong.
I found out about this a couple years ago when my wife started a conversation with me like “do you know some people can’t picture things?”. I had several follow up questions because I thought it was just a figure of speech for the first ~30 years of my life.
My internal voice is exactly like me speaking out loud. If I don’t “speak” in my mind there’s nothing, just like if I don’t speak I’m not saying anything out loud.
My internal monologue is constant. Unless I’m using my language processing capacity for something else (e.g. listening to a podcast or reading text) then my brain is full of verbal diarrhoea. I’ll count each step on my way up a staircase just to fill the dead air in my head.
This is pretty close to my experience, including the counting.
I was surprised to learn that not everyone counts things like stairs automatically.
For me the internal monologue is exactly the same as my ‘external’ monologue when I tell people about myself or do something together with someone and explain my actions. So it’s always first person singular, for example: “I’ve reflected on this multiple times but still don’t quite understand it”, “Okay, I need to turn right now” or “God I’m so freaking tired of this shit! I’m done. Fuck them all”. There’s no internal split and if I was saying what I’m thinking out loud in front of someone, it’d sound completely normal.
This is what I experience, and consider normal.
I’m surprised at the range of responses.
I think this is the closest to my experience. Maybe it has to do with the fact that I’ve been writing and expressing my opinions online for so long that I can “stream of consciousness” whatever I’m currently thinking into text
Insults, low humor and slurs are screeched at full volume in the cadence and rhyme scheme of a one hit wonder song from thirty years ago and I just smartly choose to not externalize any of it.
Woah, you just listen to a lot of music
Hey, that’s really similar to how mine is! Minus the slurs, thankfully, lol. But I get it.
Right now, in my head, it’s a mix of Rump Shaker by Wreckx-N-Effect and Smells Like Teen Spirit by Nirvana except that the lyrics are re-written to be horrible and mean to me, about hating myself, telling me to kill myself, I should be hit by a car, I should be stabbed in the face, etc. I am not a healthy person. :D There’s usually plenty of dark/low humor and fucked up jokes I’d never say thrown in there, too. There’s also often a voice that goes “hey, that’s not helpful, be nice to yourself! You wouldn’t treat anyone else this way!” 'cause I really am trying to be better. That and like a shotgun blast of a million other different trains of thought mixed in. It’s chaotic in there.
Blackpink zip hoodie with the plastic choker, baditz maru lunchbox purse: aww, you’re sweet
2xl indecipherable metal tee, greasy hair, visible cutting scars: hello, hr?
What are you thinking of, sweetheart?
Rewriting the lyrics of in the end to be about holding open doors for ppl at the grocery store and then carrying a heavy bag for someone.
No monologue for me. Just image and sound. For example, when thinking about a situation, I’ll just imagine it as a moving picture, but there’s no internal narration to it. I don’t think in sentences. I just think about the image or feeling and then process it somehow.
I’ve discussed this topic with others before, and they don’t really get it lol. Well it’s equally weird for me to think about it their way, constantly having an internal monologue.
Mine is similar. Visual scenes, 3d, process like progressions. Woesa are only there if I need to prep dialog or present or discuss with somebody. Otherwisea it is concepts with no need for language
I don’t get sound or image (pretty bad aphantasia), but i do have a monologue. Can you believe there are people out there who have NOTHING going on up stairs? Yup, people who have no pictures, no sounds, no monologue, no anything.
I have nothing going on upstairs.
Same for me, I can see, hear, feel and even smell memories or fictional situations. For other people this is not possible, they do it differently.
My base thoughts are non-verbal. Sometimes I describe it like shapes in a hyperdimensional vector space.
My internal monologue is basically just practicing translating these base thoughts into language, to explain concepts to others.
This analogy started to feel particularly accurate for my own experience when I started learning a second language. I realised that I wasn’t learning what one word meant in another language, but instead, attaching the two words to a deeper idea/concept. It means that I’d often understand what I was hearing, but even when I was listening in my new language, I didn’t automatically have the translation to my native language (English).
And my thoughts/internal experience is like that. I can pull the words out to describe the thing, but the actual thought itself, the concept that I’m using the word to describe is where I would say my thoughts naturally sit
This describes my mind pretty accurately. Except for one thing: the hyperdimensional vector space thoughts are usually accompanied by a soundtrack of some stupid song I got stuck in my head for the last 3 days.
Songs get churned into the vector space. When there’s a song stuck in my head, I’m thinking about songs with similar timbre, similar time signature, similar chord progressions. I’m remixing hooks and adding parody lyrics. The stupider the song, the more intricate the fugues and variations.
And everything draws me to cusps, inflection points, local extrema, global extrema. There are “pure” or “right” configurations of thought that scratch an internal itch for elegance. Maybe that elegance is revelatory, bringing me closer to a more profound understanding of the universe around me. Maybe every line of It’s Still Rock and Roll to Me ends with the words “a bright orange pair of pants”. I trust the process.
I don’t have one…
I think plenty of people are like that too. Would you say you spend most of your time while conscious in the present? Because for me, this internal dialogue causes me to ignore my surroundings and consequentially I end up spending a large part of my waking hours ignoring my actual surroundings.
I’d say that’s a pretty reasonable summary. I mean, I can think about the future and the past of course, and I can stress about them both too, but none of that takes the form of a dialogue, nor does it have any sense of participants. There’s just my thoughts, in the moment, about the future and what might happen.
Now I’m curious, have you studied/speak any other language? If you learned later, what would you say was the comparative difficulty? I ask since it seems the dominance english in my internal monologue clouds what I intend to say some times
I learned (am learning) Spanish later in life and it has actually been quite interesting because of this. I have aphantasia, so no mental images either, and I’ve always described my thinking and thoughts as being about the concepts and ideas of words, with the words something that I can summon if I need to.
And learning Spanish via translation and memorisation was really painful, and honestly, not enjoyable. I eventually stumbled across the comprehensible input method, which doesn’t try and translate your target language to another language. It just builds up from scratch, you learn from simple words and sentences, with strong visual support and repetition etc, getting more complex the more exposure to the language you get. And this method clicked with me. I’m only at B1 or so with Spanish, but I can listen to a native speaker and understand them, but if you asked me what they said, I would have to then convert what I heard to English after the fact.
I’ve often said that it worked because both English and Spanish attach words to the behind the scenes concepts, and I’m mapping to that.
This sounds psycho or sociopathic.
Yep, you got me! That must be exactly what it means!
Having or not having an internal monologue has nothing to do with being sociopathic, and it’s extremely rude to suggest it is. You now have a great opportunity to learn about how a large swath of other people experience consciousness.
Are you familiar with Aphantasia by any chance? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia
Edit: In case anyone finds out through this comment, remember that discovering this does not change anything about your life or who you are. It’s just that most others work differently to what you used to think.
Yep, very familiar :)
I have aphantasia!
Stream of consciousness, very much like Ulysses but even less readable.
When I’m not thinking about anything, it just plays music, all the time.
When I’m thinking, it’s kinda like the reasoning of an LLM, it talks about possible ways to solve something, how things could end, and says things like “oh right, if I do X, I need to do Y”.
The strangest thing is that despite me being italian, most of my inner monologue is in english, especially when I’m playing games or programming; and it’s not in my voice, it’s a generic male voice that kinda sounds like Morgan Freeman.
Same with the music thing. I’m trying actually listening to the song to see what effect that has, at least at bedtime when too high a tempo can be a problem.
I have a voice that declares something as fact. Then I have a voice that is skeptical. Then I have another voice that is skeptical of the skeptic. Finally I have a voice that wants more info/evidence. I do not make it through all four voices with every thought, and the first voice fucking hates me
I don’t have one. No sound and no detailed images.
Mine is just constant words. Constant narration of everything. With occasional music breaks, because there’s always pop music going through my head too.
Me too. In fact my stream before this was “Jesus this is taking so long to load wtf. I should take this as a sign to go to bed. Oh… My meds wore off. I’m thinking ALL the words again. Man I’m glad people can’t hear my thoughts. Well, it probably would’ve made the ADHD diagnosis easier. Oh hey, it finally loaded!”
Anyone else having hella load times on Lemmy lately or is it just my app or instance? Lol
Same lol
My internal monologue is usually just like a commentary of my own voice, or at random times I just talk it out loud cause I find it nice to just speak, but I can mimic others people voices in my internal monologue if I felt like it; sometimes, my mind never talks at all and uses visual to think which what I do most of the time, it’s quite peaceful to have a break from the noise.
It’s layered.
At the base level it’s just a mix of a kind of old tv static and what sounds like a creek bubbling. It’s the pre-verbalization soup- textured with sub-thoughts, half-impulses, emotional currents. It’s noticeable background noise but not particularly loud.
Above that is another layer of multiple streams of wordage. Just kind of nonsensical whispers that flow around non-stop. Sometimes there are also impressions of images but nothing definitive. Emotional tones are strongest here.
Above that is the focused wordage, or the internal monologue. Usually it’s proposed point or observation by one “me” and counter-point or add-on by another “me”. There’s no set number of "me"s. Occasionally it’s a construct of some other people I know. Just tangential rambling in incomplete sentences mostly unless I am really trying to sort something out, then it’s more structured. There’s a part of my mind that seems to calculate the conclusion to what I am mentally verbalizing that is one step ahead of the words so often there isn’t a need to complete a thought. This is also where the music and images play.
There is one more layer above all that, the working space, when I really focus, all the other layers fade from consciousness, words are clear, sharp, and coherent and the back-and-forth feels more like a unified “me”, it’s also where I deliberately create and manipulate mental images, movies, concoct scenarios and music plays the clearest.
I probably shouldn’t answer this tbh.
I have three main “voices”, plus a couple of situational ones. As you say, a talker that’s mostly “me”, my conscious self. A listener that isn’t just a listener that’s essentially my subconscious throwing up images and memory in response to my conscious self. Then there’s the other self, the third thoughts, the meta mind, whatever you want to call it.
That third voice is observing the “conversation”, and making commentary and corrections as needed. Like “that’s not how that really happened” when images flash up that are nebulous. Or “no, that’s not who you want to be, stop being a dick” when my conscious self is under stress. Or “go fuck yourself” when thoughts triggered by mental health issues come up.
Plus, and this isn’t some kind of bullshit DID¹ thing, I have fictional characters in my head. There’s this thing I do when I write or DM where I kinda spool up a virtual machine in my head where a character “lives”. These aren’t real entities, they aren’t split off from me, they’re just a construct that’s useful. They can be “deleted”, they don’t take over, nothing like that.
I can, however, have conversations with them if I do a bit of mental prep work to sort of fake forget that it’s just my imagination playing a game with itself. I used to participate in some Mastodon writing prompt hashtags and I’d sort of interview my characters with them sometimes surprising me with what they said. Alas, the instance I used shut down without warning, and I didn’t have a recent backup, so I lost most of it.
While I was writing that paragraph, one of my characters got switched on for a second and grumped at me. I know it’s not a person, it’s all imagination. But it is a fucking trip anyway.
Yeeeears ago, I was running a game. It included a deity coming back to life. During the process, I had been wrapping my head around what they’d be like, and one of the players had communed with the deity a good bit. During a session, the player had their character call on the god to manifest. My ass just started talking as the deity. Full on zero conscious control over what came out. It felt creepy but cool. This imaginary part of myself took over, my voice changed, I stood up and moved around, but none of it was “me”. My conscious mind was starting to freak the fuck out a little because it felt like the imaginary thing was taking over.
That wasn’t the last time it happened, but I’ve never been able to make it happen. Well, not to that degree anyway.
I guess what I’m saying is that my internal monologue isn’t a monologue. Shit gets loud up in here.
Edit: ¹
My bullshit DID thing, I don’t mean that did isn’t real. I mean that it isn’t me pretending to have DID or some other dissociative disorder. People do that, and it’s fucking weird
Hey same!
My thoughts are a constant flood of characters or quips in different voices and tones.
DM ing for me was work but also a true flow state because it gave all this general chaos individual purpose. I’d like to think it lead to good sessions!
And when long running or important characters would eventually meet in game, I’d sometimes get carried away having conversations in multiple characters with myself. One time it went on for several minutes before the table just started laughing.
Wow, that’s really sophisticated. I don’t think my mind would have the capacity/bandwidth to play a totally independent, second active participant
In fairness, I have a weird capacity that’s the opposite of aphantasia. Some people can’t picture things in their minds, the same way some people don’t have an inner voice. I call my thing hyperphantasia.
When I’m reading a book (or writing something), I can see and hear things as they’re described to the extent that I stop perceiving the real world fully. If the author describes smells, I sometimes get those. It’s a very immersive experience beyond what I’ve seen other people describe as their inner imagery. I’ve even gotten hints of feelings on skin if I’m deep enough and the descriptions are right.
I know I’m not the only person that experiences things that way, but it does seem to be rare based on responses when I talk about it online.
can relate to some degree kinda.
The amount I relate to this is… A lot lol. Down to that deiety thing. Not exactly that but I have a knack for just letting IDK what take over sometimes. Friend in a crisis and I have no idea how to help? Sit back and jet it happen.
The human brain is wild!
Truth!
