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
For me it’s like there’s a council in my head, but they’re all me. One takes the center and the rest are all around, in the “room” in my head. Each one is a specialist at a different thing, which includes one of them who is always putting on a performance of a song.
So far I’ve identified:
- A singer
- A problem-solving orchestrator (gets all the others to collaborate)
- A lover (occasionally pines for affection, loves being cutesy)
- A joker (shouts jokes over the rest of the voices)
- 3-5 non specialists that just deliberate about things
- A writer (functions as my inner monologue when I’m writing something)
My wife will poke fun at me because sometimes I’ll end up narrating my own thought processes with “we” and she’s like “Got a mouse in your purse?”
Hmm interesting, that’s similar to me with those multiple characters being you. Plus the talking in 1st person plural
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.
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.
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.
Mine is just constant words. Constant narration of everything. With occasional music breaks, because there’s always pop music going through my head too.
Same lol
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
I hadn’t thought about it much, but mine is just first person, same as the way I type or talk. In fact I think much of my internal monologue is actually pretend or planning conversations.
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 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.
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
Sometimes the monologue is so loud I end up accidentally vocalising (whispering) it. I think it might be partially caused by the fact I have ADHD and a monologue like this is a way to keep my brain stimulated (thought wise, but also socially) when there’s no input from the outside.
Verbal internal dialogue where the talker refers to me as separate from itself.
Explain
The monologue is talking in third/second person seems to he what they’re saying.
I don’t have one…
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
This is what I experience, and consider normal.
I’m surprised at the range of responses.
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.
If I’m awake late at night, thinking of an uncomfortable conversation I need to have with someone I can have an entire conversation with them in my head knowing mostly how they’ll reply and the best response to it.
I guess it’s like I’m two people talking 1 is me the other is me with that other person’s personality.
Other times it’s like my anxiety is giving me a hidden vision to scare me slightly at the look of my phone on the edge of the table falling over, and I instantly decide to move it. I guess that part is why I’m afraid of heights, cause my Anxiety tells me I’m going to fall. Also why I can’t watch Horror movies, my anxiety latches onto those gruesome deaths and spends decades reminding me of it when I’m in a similar looking area.
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.
80% song lyrics, 10% how I would respond if I wanted to invite conflict, 5% random shit, 5% schemes/ideas.
Just me, internally wording things i want to say/write.
Wow, looks like there’s a lot more diversity in this than I was expecting
Yeah, different brains work surprisingly different.
