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I think it's because enjoying fiction involves being in a trance, and analyzing the fiction breaks the trance. I suspect that analysis is also a trance, but it's a different sort of trance.
The term for that is suspension of disbelief.
Any chance you could expand on "analysis is also a trance"?
I don't know about anyone else, but if I'm analyzing, my internal monologue is the main thing in my consciousness.
Your what?
No, I'm not letting it go this time. I've heard people talking about internal monologues before, but I've never been quite sure what those are - I'm pretty sure I don't have one. Could you try to define the term?
Gosh. New item added to my list of "Not everyone does that."
...I have difficulty imagining what it would be to be like someone who isn't the little voice in their own head, though. Seriously, who's posting that comment?
I may be in a somewhat unique position to address this question, as one of the many many many weird transient neurological things that happened to me after my stroke was a period I can best describe as my internal monologue going away.
So I know what it's like to be the voice in my head, and what it's like not to be.
And it's still godawful difficult to describe the difference in words.
One way I can try is this: have you ever experienced the difference between "I know what I'm going to say, and here I am saying it" and "words are coming out of my mouth, and I'm kind of surprised by what I'm hearing myself say"?
If so, I think I can say that losing my "little voice" is similar to that difference.
If not, I suspect the explanation will be just as inaccessible as the phenomenon it purported to explain, but I can try again.
I wasn't to add another data point, but I'm not sure the one I got can even be called that: I have no consistent memory on this subject. I am notoriously horrible at luminosity and introspection. When I do try to ask my brain, I receive a model/metaphor based of what I already know for neuroscience which may or may not contain data I couldn't access otherwise, and which is presented as a machine I can manipulate in the hopes of trying to manipulate the states of distant brains. The machine is clearly based on whatever concepts happen to be primed and the results would probably be completely different in every way if I tried this an hour later. Note that the usage of the word "I" here is inconsistent and ill-defined. This might be related to the fact this brain is self-diagnosed with posible ego-death (in the good way).
Edit: it is also noticed that like seemingly the case with most attempts to introspection, the act of observation strongly and aversely influence the functioning of the relevant circuity, in this case heavily altering my speech-patterns.
Huh. They way you describe attempting introspection is exactly the way our brain behaves when we try to access any personal memories outside of working memory. This doesn't seem to be as effective as whatever the typical way is, as our personal memory's notoriously atrocious compared with others.
I don't seem to have any sort of ego death. Vigil might have something similar, though.
Hmm, this seems related to another datapoint: reportedly, when I'm asked about my current mood and distracts, I answer "I can't remember".
A more tenuously related datapoint is that in fiction, I try to design BMIs around emulating having memorized GLUTs.
And some other thing come to think of it: I do have abnormal memory function in a bunch of various ways.
Basically; maybe a much larger chunk of my cognition passes through memory machinery for some reason?
...no, I haven't. I'm always in the state of "I know what I'm going to say, and here I am saying it" (sometimes modified very soon afterwards by "on second thoughts, that was a very poor way to phrase it and I've probably been misunderstood").
...what? Wow!
I'm dying to know whether we're stumbling on a difference in the way we think or the way we describe what we think, here. To me, the first state sounds like rehearsing what I'm going to say in my head before I say it, which I only do when I'm racking my brains on eg how to put something tactfully, where the latter sounds like what I do in conversation all the time, which is simply to let the words fall out of my mouth and find out what I've said.
My experience is that I generally have some kind of fuzzy idea of what I'm going to say before I say it. When I actually speak, sometimes it comes out as a coherent and streamlined sentence whose contents I figure out as a I speak it. At other times - particularly if I'm feeling nervous, or trying to communicate a complicated concept that I haven't expressed in speech before - my fuzzy idea seems to disintegrate at the moment I start talking, and even if I had carefully rehearsed a line many times in my mind, I forget most of it. Out comes either what feels to me like an incoherent jumble, or a lot of "umm, no, wait".
Writing feels a lot easier, possibly because I have the stuff-that-I've-already-written right in front of me and I only need to keep the stuff that I'm about to say in memory, instead of also needing to constantly remind myself about what I've said so far.
ETA: Here's an earlier explanation of how writing sometimes feels like to me.
My internal monologue is a lot faster than the words can get out of my mouth (when I was younger, I tried to speak as fast as I think, with the result that no-one could understand me; of course, to speak that fast, I needed to drop significant parts of most of the words, which didn't help). I don't always plan out every sentence in advance; but thinking about it, I think I do plan out every phrase in advance, relying on the speed of my internal monologue to produce the next phrase before or at worst very shortly after I complete the current phrase. (It often helps to include a brief pause at the end of a phrase in any case). It's very much a just-in-time thing.
If I'm making a special effort to be tactful, then I'll produce and consider a full sentence inside my head before saying it out loud.
Incidentally, I'm also a member of Toastmasters, and one thing that Toastmasters has is impromptu speaking, when a person is asked to give a one-to-two minute speech and is told the topic just before stepping up to give the speech. The topic could be anything (I've had "common sense", "stick", and "nail", among others). Most people seem to be scared of this, apparently seeing it as an opportunity to stand up and be embarrassed; I find that I enjoy it. I often start an impromptu speech with very little idea of how it's going to end; I usually make some sort of pun about the topic (I changed 'common sense' into a very snooty, upper-crust type of person complaining about commoners with money - 'common cents'), and often talk more-or-less total nonsense.
But, through the whole speech, I always know what I am saying. I am not surprised by my own words (no matter how surprised other people may be by the idea of 'common cents'). I don't think I know how to be surprised at what I am saying. (Of course, my words are not always well-considered, in hindsight; and sometimes I will be surprised at someone else's interpretation of my words, and be forced to explain that that's not what I meant)
The parts of your brain that generate speech and the part that generate your internal sense-of-self are less integrated than CCC's. An interesting experiment might be to stop ascribing ownership to your words when you find yourself surprised by them - i.e., instead of framing the phenomenon as "I said that", frame it as "my brain generated those words".
Learn to recognize that the parts of your brain that handle text generation and output are no more "you" than the parts of your brain that handle motor reflex control.
EDIT: Is there a problem with this post?
(nods) Yeah, OK. Take 2.
It's also broadly similar to the difference between explicit and implicit knowledge. Have you ever practiced a skill enough that it goes from being something where you hold the "outline" of the skill in explicit memory as you perform it, to being something where you simply perform it without that "outline"? For example, driving to an unfamiliar location and thinking "ok, turn right here, turn left here" vs. just turning in the correct direction at each intersection, or something similar to that?
Yes, I have. Driving is such a skill; when I was first learning to drive, I had to think about driving ("...need to change gear, which was the clutch again? Ordered CBA, so on the left..."). Now that I am more practiced, I can just think about changing gear and change gear, without having to examine my actions in so much detail. Which allows my internal monologue to wonder into other directions.
On a couple of occasions, as a result of this thread, I've tried just quietening down my internal monologue - just saying nothing for a bit - and observing my own thought processes. I find that the result is that I pay a lot more attention to audio cues - if I hear a bird in the distance, I picture a bird. There's associations going on inside my head that I'd never paid much attention to before.
Is this still true under significant influence of alcohol?
I wouldn't know, I don't drink alcohol.
BTW, my internal monologue usually sounds quite different from what I actually say in most casual situations: for example, it uses less dialectal/non-standard language and more technical terms. (IOW, it resembles the way I write more than the way I speak. So, "I know what I'm going to say, and here I am saying it" is my default state when writing, and "words are coming out of my mouth, and I'm kind of surprised by what I'm hearing myself say" is the state I'm most often in when speaking.) Anyone else finds the same?
That's pretty close to how I operate, except the words are more like the skeletons of the thoughts than the thoughts themselves, stripped of all the internal connotation and imagery that provided 99% of the internal meaning.
Well, which one do you prefer?
Oh, that's hard. The latter was awful, but of course most of that was due to all the other crap that was going on at the time. If I take my best shot at adjusting for that... well, I am most comfortable being the voice in my head. But not-being the voice in my head has an uncomfortable gloriousness associated with it. I doubt the latter is sustainable, though.
When you're playing a sport... wait, maybe you don't... okay, when you're playing an instrum—hm. Surely there is a kinesthetic skill you occasionally perform, during which your locus of identity is not in your articulatory loop? (If not, fixing that might be high value?) And you can imagine being in states similar to that much of the time? I would imagine intense computer programming sessions would be more kinesthetic than verbal. Comment linked to hints at what my default thinking process is like.
When I'm playing music or martial arts, and I'm doing it well, I'm usually in a state of flow--not exactly self-aware in the way I usually think of it.
When I'm working inside a computer or motorcycle, I think I'm less self-aware, and what I'm aware of is my manipulating actuators, and the objects than I need to manipulate, and what I need to do to them.
When I'm sitting in my armchair, thinking "who am I?" this is almost entirely symbolic, and I feel more self-aware than at the other times.
So, I think having my locus of identity in my articulatory loop is correlated with having a strong sense of identity.
I'm not sure whether my sense of identity would be weaker there, and stronger in a state of kinesthetic flow, if I spent more time sparring than sitting.
I wouldn't want to identify with the voice in my head. It can only think one thought at a time; it's slow.
How many things can you think of at once? I'm curious now.
I'm not sure how to answer that question. But when I think verbally I often lose track of the bigger picture of what I'm doing and get bogged down on details or tangents.
I play other people's voices through my head as I imagine what they would say (or are saying, when I interpret text,) but I don't have my own voice in my head as an internal monologue, and I think of "myself" as the conductor, which directs all the voices.
What happens when you are not thinking about what anyone else is saying or would say?
I think in terms of ideas and impulses, not voices. I can describe an impulse as if it had been expressed in words, but when it's going through my head, it's not.
I'd be kind of surprised if people who have internal monologues need an inner voice telling them "I'm so angry, I feel like throwing something!" in order to recognize that they feel angry and have an urge to throw something. I just recognize urges directly, including ones which are more subtle and don't need to be expressed externally, without needing to mediate them through language.
It definitely hasn't been my experience that not thinking in terms of a distinct inner "voice" makes it hard for me to pin down my thoughts; I have a much easier time following my own thought processes than most people I know.
In our case at least, you are correct that we don't need to vocalize impulses. Emotions and urges seem to run on a different, concurrent modality.
Do ideas and impulses both use the same modality for you?
Not quite the same thing, but I've discovered that "I feel ragged around the edges" is my internal code for "I need B12".
One part of therapy for some people is giving them a vocabulary for their emotions.
I can recognise that I'm angry without the voice. When I'm angry, the inner voice will often be saying unflattering things about the object of my anger; something along the lines of "Aaaaaargh, this is so frustrating! I wish it would just work like it's supposed to!" Wordless internal angry growls may also happen.
It's something like watching a movie. You can see hands typing and words appearing on the screen, but you aren't precisely thinking them. You can feel lips moving and hear words forming in the air, but you aren't precisely thinking them. They're just things your body is doing, like walking. When you walk, you don't consciously think of each muscle to move, do you? most of the time you don't even think about putting one foot in front of the other; you just think about where you're going (if that) and your motor control does the rest.
For some people, verbal articulation works the same way. Words get formed, maybe even in response to other peoples' words, but it's not something you're consciously acting on; those processes are running on their own without conscious input.
I find this very strange.
When I walk, yes, I don't consciously think of every muscle; but I do decide to walk. I decide my destination, I decide my route. (I may, if distracted, fall by force of habit into a default route; on noticing this, I can immediately override).
So... for someone without the internal monologue... how much do you decide about what you say? Do you just decide what subject to speak about, what opinions to express, and leave the exact phrasing up to the autopilot? Or do you not even decide that - do you sit there and enjoy the taste of icecream while letting the conversation run entirely by itself?
Didn't think this was going to be my first contribution to LessWrong, but here goes (hi, everybody, I'm Phil!)
I came to what I like to think was a realisation useful to my psychological health a few months ago when I was invited to realise that there is more to me than my inner monologue. That is, I came to understand that identifying myself as only the little voice in my head was not good for me in any sense. For one thing, my body is not part of my inner monologue, ergo I was a fat guy, because I didn't identify with it and therefore didn't care what I fed it on. For another, one of the things I explicitly excluded from my identity was the subprocess that talks to people. I had (and still have) an internal monologue, but it was at best only advisory to the talking process, so you can count me as one of the people for whom conversation is not something I'm consciously acting on. Result: I didn't consider the person people meet and talk to to be "me", but (as I came to understand), nevertheless I am held responsible for everything he says and does.
My approach to this was somewhat luminous avant (ma lecture de) la lettre: I now construe my identity as consisting of at least two sub-personalities. There is one for my inner monologue, and one for the version of me that people get to meet and talk to. I call them Al and Greg, respectively, so that by giving them names I hopefully remember that neither alone is Phil. So, to answer CCC's question: Al is Greg's lawyer, and Greg is Al's PR man. When I'm alone, I'm mostly Al, cogitating and opining and whatnot to the wall, with the occasional burst of non-verbal input from Greg that amounts to "That's not going to play in (Peoria|the office|LessWrong comment threads)". On the other hand, when other people are around, I'm mostly Greg, conversating in ways that Al would never have thought of, and getting closer and closer to an impersonation of Robin Williams depending on prettiness and proximity of the ladies in the room. Al could in theory sit back and let Greg do his thing, but he's usually too busy facepalming or yelling "SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP" in a way that I can't hear until I get alone again.
The problem I used to have was that I was all on Al's side. I'd berate myself (that is, I'd identify with Al berating Greg) incessantly for paranoid interpretations of the way people reacted to what I said, without ever noticing that, y'know what, people do generally seem to like Greg, and Greg is also me.
Single data point but: I can alternate between inner monologue (heard [in somebody else's voice not mine(!)]) and no monologue (mainly social activity - say stuff then catch myself saying it and keep going) - stuff just happens. When inner monologue is present it seems I'm in real time constructing what I imagine the future to be and then adapt to that. I can feel as if my body moved without moving it, but don't use it for thinking (mainly kinesthethic imagination or whatever). I can force myself to see images, and, at the fringe, close to sleep, can make up symphonies in my mind, but don't use them to think.
A collective of neural hardware collectively calling itself "Baughn". Everyone gets some input.
Who's speaking the voice in your head? Seems like another layer of abstraction.
Obviously the speaker is the homunculus that makes Eliezer conscious rather than a p-zombie.
I have an internal monologue. It's a bit like a narrator in my head, narrating my thoughts.
I think - and this is highly speculative on my part - that it's a sign of thinking mainly with the part of the brain that handles language. Whenever I take one of those questionnaires designed to tell whether I use mainly the left or right side of my brain, I land very heavily on the left side - analytical, linguistic, mathematical. I can use the other side if I want to; but I find it surprisingly easy to become almost a caricature of a left-brain thinker.
My internal monologue quite probably restricts me to (mainly) ideas that are easily expressed in English. Up until now, I could see this as a weakness, but I couldn't see any easy way around it. (One advantage of the internal monologue, on the other hand, is that I usually find it easy to speak my thoughts out loud; because they're already in word form)
But now, you tell me that you don't seem to have an internal monologue. Does this mean that you can easily think of things that are not easily expressed in English?
Well.. I can easily think of things I subsequently have seriously trouble expressing in any language, sure. Occasionally through reflection via visuals (or kinesthetics, or..), but more often not using such modalities at all.
(See sibling post)
Richard Feynman tells the story of how he learned that thinking isn't only internal monologue.
Okay, visual I can understand. I don't use it often, but I do use it on occasion. Kinesthetic, I use even less often, but again I can more-or-less imagine how that works. (Incidentally, I also have a lot of trouble catching a thrown object. This may be related.)
But this 'no modalities at all'... this intrigues me. How does it work?
All I know is some ways in which it doesn't work.
I can't speak for Baughn but as for myself, sometimes It feels like I know ahead of time what I'm going to say as my inner voice, and sometimes this results in me not actually bothering to say it.
I went on vacation during this discussion, and completely lost track of it in the process - oops. It's an interesting question, though. Let me try to answer.
First off, using a sensory modality for the purpose of thinking. That's something I do, sure enough; for instance, right now I'm "hearing" what I'm saying at the same time as I'm writing it. Occasionally, if I'm unsure of how to phrase something, I'll quickly loop through a few options; more often, I'll do that without bothering with the "hearing" part.
When thinking about physical objects, sometimes I'll imagine them visually. Sometimes I won't bother.
For planning, etc. I never bother - there's no modality that seems useful.
That's not to say I don't have an experience of thinking. I'm going to explain this in terms of a model of thought[1] that's been handy for me (because it seems to fit me internally, and also because it's handy for models in fiction-writing where I'm modifying human minds), but keep in mind that there is a very good chance it's completely wrong. You might still be able to translate it to something that makes sense to you.
..basically, the workspace model of consciousness combined with a semi-modular brain architecture. That is to say, where the human mind consists of a large number of semi-independent modules, and consciousness is what happens when those modules are all talking to each other using a central workspace. They can also go off and do their own thing, in which case they're subconscious.
Now, some of the major modules here are sensory. For good reason; being aware of your environment is important. It's not terribly surprising, then, that the ability to loop information back - feeding internal data into the sensory modules, using their (massive) computational power to massage it - is useful, though it also involves what would be hallucinations if I wasn't fully aware it's not real. It's sufficiently useful that, well, it seems like a lot of people don't notice there's anything else going on.
Non-sensory modes of thought, now... sensory modes are frequently useful, but not always. When they aren't, they're noise. In that case - and I didn't quite realise that was going on until now - I'm not just not hallucinating an internal monologue, but in fact entirely disconnecting my senses from my conscious experience. It's a bit hard to tell, since they're naturally right there if I check, but I can be extremely easy to surprise at times.
Instead, I have an experience of... everything else. All the modules normally involved with thinking, except the sensory ones. Well, probably not all of them at once, but missing the sensory modules appears to be a sufficiently large outlier that the normal churn becomes insignificant...
Did that help? Hm. Maybe if you think about said "churn"; it's not like you always use every possible method of thought you're capable of, at the same time. I'm just including sensory modalities in the list of hot-swappable ones?
...
This is hard.
One more example, I suppose. I mentioned that, while I was writing this, I hallucinated my voice reading it; this appears to be necessary to actually writing. Not for deciding on the meaning I'm trying to get across, but in order to serialise it as English. Not quite sure what's going on there, since I don't seem to be doing it ahead of time - I'm doing it word by word.
1: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1yArXzSQUqkSr_eBd6JhIECdUKQoWyUaPHh_qz7S9n54/edit#heading=h.ug167zx6z472 may or may not be useful in figuring out what I'm talking about; it's a somewhat more long-winded use of the model. It also has enormous macroplot spoilers for the Death Game SAO fanfic, which.. you probably don't care about.
Okay, let me summarise your statement so as to ensure that I understand it correctly.
In short, you have a number of internal functional modules in the brain; each module has a speciality. There will be, for example, a module for sight; a module for hearing; a module for language, and so on. Your thoughts consist - almost entirely - of these modules exchanging information in some sort of central space.
The modules are, in effect, having a chat.
Now, you can swap these modules out quite a bit. When you're planning what to type, for example, it seems you run that through your 'hearing' module, in order to check that the word choice is correct; you know that this is not something which you are actually hearing, and thus are in no danger of treating it as a hallucination, but as a side effect of this your hearing module isn't running through the actual input from your ears, and you may be missing something that someone else is saying to you. (I imagine that sufficiently loud or out-of-place noises are still wired directly to your survival subsystem, though, and will get your attention as normal).
But you don't have to use your hearing module to think with. Or your sight module. You have other modules which can do the thinking, even when those modules have nothing to do. When your sensory modules have nothing to add, you can and do shut them out of the main circuit, ignoring any non-urgent input from those modules.
Your modules communicate by some means which are somehow independent of language, and your thoughts must be translated through your hearing module (which seems to have your language module buried inside it) in order to be described in English.
This is very different to how I think. I have one major module - the language module (not the hearing module, there's no audio component to this, just a direct language model) which does almost all my thinking. Other modules can be used, but it's like an occasional illustration in a book - very much not the main medium. (And also like an illustration in that it's usually visual, though not necessarily limited to two dimensions).
When it comes to my internal thoughts, all modules that are not my language model are unimportant in comparison. I suspect that some modules may be so neglected as to be near nonexistent, and I wonder what those modules could be.
My sensory modules appear to be input-only. I can ignore them, but I can't seem to consciously run other information into them. (I still dream, which I imagine indicates that I can subconsciously run other information through my sensory modules)
This leaves me with three questions:
I imagine these will be difficult to translate to language, but I am very curious as to what your answers will be.
A very high proportion of what I call thinking is me talking to myself. I have some ability to imagine sounds and images, but it's pretty limited. I'm better with kinesthesia, but that's mostly for thinking about movement.
What's your internal experience composed of?
That varies.. quite a lot.
While I'm writing fiction there'll be dialogue, the characters' emotions and feelings, visuals of the scenery, point-of-view visuals (often multiple angles at the same time), motor actions, etc. It's a lot like lucid dreaming, only without the dreaming. Occasionally monologues, yes, but those don't really count; they're not mine.
While I'm writing this there is, yes, a monologue. One that's just-in-time, however; I don't normally bother to listen to a speech in my head before writing it down. Not for this kind of thing; more often for said fiction, where I'll do that to better understand how it reads.
Mostly I'm not writing anything, though.
Most of the time, I don't seem to have any particular internal experience at all. I just do whatever it is I'm doing, and experience that, but unless it's relatively complex there doesn't seem to be much call for pre-action reflections. (Well, of course I still feel emotions and such, but.. nothing monologue-like, in any modality. Hope that makes sense.)
A lot of the time I have (am conscious of) thoughts that don't correspond to any sensor modality whatsoever. I have no idea how I'd explain those.
If I'm working on a computer program.. anything goes, but I'll typically borrow visual capacity to model graph structures and such. A lot of the modalities I'd use there, I don't really have words for, and it doesn't seem worthwhile to try inventing them; doing so usefully would turn this into a novel.
That's the internal monologue. Mine is also often just-in-time (not always, of course). I can listen to it in my head a whole lot faster than I can talk, type, or write, so sometimes I'll start out just-in-time at the start of the sentence and then my internal monologue has to regularly wait for the typing/writing/speaking to catch up before I can continue.
For example, in this post, when I clicked the 'reply' button I had already planned out the first two sentences of the above post (before the first bracket). The contents of the first bracket were added when I got to the end of the second sentence, and then edited to add the 'of course'. The next sentence was added in sections, built up and then put down and occasionally re-edited as I went along (things like replacing 'on occasion' with 'sometimes').
Hmmm. Living in the moment. I'm curious; how would you go about (say) planning for a camping trip? Not so much 'what would you do', but 'how would you think about it'?
Can't speak for Nancy, but I think I know what she refers to.
Different people have different thought... processes, I guess is the word. My brother's thought process is, by his description, functional; he assigns parts of his mind tasks, and gets the results back in a stack. (He's pretty good at multi-tasking, as a result.) My own thought process is, as Nancy specifies, an internal monologue; I'm literally talking to myself. (Although the conversation is only partially English. It's kind of like... 4Chan. Each "line" of dialogue is associated with an "image" (in some cases each word, depending on the complexity of the concept encoded in it), which is an abstract conceptualization. If you've ever read a flow-of-consciousness book, that's kind of like a low-resolution version of what's going on in my brain, and, I presume, hers.
I've actually discovered at least one other "mode" I can switch my brain into - I call it Visual Mode. Whereas normally my attention is very tunnel vision-ish (I can track only one object reliably), I can expand my consciousness (at the cost of eliminating the flow-of-consciousness that is usually my mind) and be capable of tracking multiple objects in my field of vision. (I cannot, for some reason, actually move my eyes while in this state; it breaks my concentration and returns me to a "normal" mode of thought.) I'm capable of thinking in this state, but oddly, incapable of tracking or remembering what those thoughts are; I can sustain a full conversation which I will not remember, at all, later.
Hm, the obvious question there is: "How do you know you can sustain a full conversation, if you don't remember it at all later?" (..edit: With other people? Er, right. Somehow I was assuming it was an internal conversation.)
I've got some idea what you're talking about, though - focusing my consciousness entirely on sensory input. More useful outside of cities, and I don't have any kind of associated amnesia, but it seems similar to how I'd describe the state otherwise.
Neither your brother's nor your own thought processes otherwise seem to be any kind of match for mine. It's interesting that there's this much variation, really.
Otherwise.. see sibling post for more details.
I can do a weaker version of this - basically, by telling my brain to "focus on the entire field of your perception" as if it was a single object. As far as I am aware, it doesn't do any of the mental effects you describe for me. It's very relaxing though.
Add one to the sample size. My thought process is also mostly lacking in sensory modality. My thoughts do have a large verbal component, but they are almost exclusively for planning things that I could potentially say or write.
Rather than trying to justify how this works to the others, I will instead ask my own questions: How can words help in creating thoughts? In order to generate a sentence in your head, surely you must already know what you want to say. And if you already know what you have to say, what's the point of saying it? I presume you cannot jump to the next thought without saying the previous one in full. With my own ability to generate sentences, that would be a crippling handicap.
My thoughts are largely made up of words. Although some internal experimentation has shown that my brain can still work when the internal monologue is silent, I still associate 'thoughts' very, very strongly with 'internal monologue'.
I think that, while thoughts can exist without words, the word make the thoughts easier to remember; thus, the internal monologue is used as part of a 'write-to-long-term-storage' function. (I can write images and feelings as well; but words seem to be my default write-mode).
Also, the words - how shall I put this - the words solidify the thought. They turn the thought into something that I can then take and inspect for internal integrity. Something that I can check for errors; something that I can think about, instead of something that I can just think. Images can do the same, but take more working-memory space to hold and are thus harder to inspect as a whole.
I don't think I've ever tried. I can generate sentences fast enough that it's not a significant delay, though. I suspect that this is simply due to long practice in sentence construction. (Also, if I'm not going to actually say it out loud, I don't generally bother to correct it if it's not grammatically correct).
Personally, I can do this to degrees. I can skip verbalizing a concept completely, but it feels like inserting a hiccup into my train of thought (pardon the mixed analogy). I can usually safely skip verbalizing all of it; that is, it feels like I have a mental monologue but upon reflection it went by too fast to actually be spoken language so I assume it was actually some precursor that did not require full auditory representation. I usually only use full monologues when planning conversations in advance or thinking about a hard problem.
As far as I can tell, the process helps me ensure consistency in my thoughts by making my train of thought easier to hold on to and recall, and also enables coherence checking by explicitly feeding my brain's output back into itself.
Now I'm worrying that I might have been exaggerating. Although you are implicitly describing your thoughts as being verbal, they seem to work in a way similar to mine.
ETA: More information: I still believe I am less verbal than you. In particular, I believe my thoughts become less verbal when thinking about hard problems are than becoming more so as in your case. However, my statement about my verbal thoughts being "almost exclusively for planning things that I could potentially say or write" is a half-truth; A lot of it is more along the lines that sometimes when I have an interesting thought I imagine explaining it to someone else. Some confounding factors:
There is a continuum here from completely nonverbal to having connotations of various words and grammatical structures to being completely verbal. I'm not sure when it should count as having an internal monologue.
Asking myself weather a thought was verbal naturally leads to create a verbalization of it, while not asking myself this creates a danger of not noticing a verbal thought.
I basing this a lot on introspection done while I am thinking about this discussion, which would make my thoughts more verbal.
Wikipedia article. I'm really curious how you would describe your thoughts if you don't describe them as an internal monologue. Are you more of a visual thinker?
When I think about stuff, often I imagine a voice speaking some of the thoughts. This seems to me to be a common, if not nearly universal, experience.
I only really think using voices. Whenever I read, if I'm not 'hearing' the words in my head, nothing stays in.
Do you actually hear the voice? I often have words in my head when I think about things, but there isn't really an auditory component. It's just words in a more abstract form.
I wouldn't say I literally hear the voice; I can easily distinguish it from sounds I'm actually hearing. But the experience is definitely auditory, at least some of the time; I could tell you whether the voice is male or female, what accent they're speaking in (usually my own), how high or low the voice is, and so on.
I definitely also have non-auditory thoughts as well. Sometimes they're visual, sometimes they're spatial, and sometimes they don't seem to have any sensory-like component at all. (For what it's worth, visual and spatial thoughts are essential to the way I think about math.)
If you want to poke at this a bit, one way could be to test what sort of interferences disrupt different activities for you, compared to a friend.
I'm thinking of the bit in "Surely you're joking" where Feynman finds that he can't talk and maintain a mental counter at the same time, while a friend of his can -- because his friend's mental counter is visual.
Neat. I can do it both ways... actually, I can name at least four different ways of counting:
"Raw" counting, without any sensory component; really just a sense of magnitude. Seems to be a floating-point, with a really small number of bits; I usually lose track of the exact number by, oh, six.
Verbally. Interferes with talking, as you'd expect.
Visually, using actual 2/3D models of whatever I'm counting. No interference, but a strict upper limit, and interferes with seeing - well, usually the other way around. The upper limit still seems to be five-six picture elements, but I can arrange them in various ways to count higher; binary, for starters, but also geometrically or.. various ways.
Visually, using pictures of decimal numbers. That interferes with speaking when updating the number, but otherwise sticks around without any active maintenance, at least so long as I have my eyes closed. I'm still limited to five-six digits, though... either decimal or hexadecimal works. I could probably figure out a more efficient encoding if I worked at it.
I, for one, actually hear the voice. It's quite clear. Not loud like an actual voice but a "so loud I can't hear myself think" moment has never literally happened to me since the voice seems more like its on its own track, parallel to my actual hearing. I would never get it confused with actual sounds, though I can't really separate the hearing it to the making it to be sure of that.
That's interesting! Because I have definitely had "so loud I can't hear myself think" moments (even though I don't literally hear thoughts) - just two days ago, I had to ask somebody to stop talking for a while so that I could focus.
Being distracted is one thing - I mean literally not being able to hear my thoughts in the manner that I might not be able to hear what you said if a jet was taking off nearby. This was to emphasize that even though I perceive them as sounds there is 'something' different about them than sounds-from-ears that seems to prevent them from audibly mingling. Loud noises can still make me lose track of what I was thinking and break focus.
I added more detail in a sibling post, but it can't be that universal; I practically never do that at all, basically only for thoughts that are destined to actually be spoken. (Or written, etc.)
Actually, I believe I used to do so most of the time (..about twenty years ago, before the age of ten), but then made a concerted effort to stop doing so on the basis that pretending to speak aloud takes more time. Those memories may be inaccurate, though.
Obligatory link to Yvain's article on the topic.
Hijacking this thread to ask if anybody else experiences this - when I watch a movie told from the perspective of a single character or with a strong narrator, my internal monologue/narrative will be in that character's/narrator's tone of voice and expression for the next hour or two. Anybody else?
http://fc02.deviantart.net/fs71/i/2010/110/9/8/Good_News_Everyone_by_martynasx.jpg
Did it work for you?
I find that sometimes, after reading for a long time, the verbal components of my thoughts resemble the writing style of what I read.
Sometimes, after reading something with a strong narrative voice, I'll want to think in the same style, but realize I can't match it.
Not exactly what you are asking for, but I've found that if I spend an extended period of time (usually around a week) heavily interacting with a single person or group of people, I'll start mentally reading things in their voice(s).
While reading books. Always particular voices for every character. So much so, I can barely sit through adaptations of books I've read. And my opinion of a writer always drops a little bit when I meet hjm/her, and the voice in my head just makes more sense for that style.
Sure. Or after listening to a charismatic person for some time.
Ah, David Wong. A few movies in the post-9/11 era begin using terrorism and asymmetric warfare as a plot point? Proof that Hollywood no longer favors the underdog. Meanwhile he ignores... Daredevil, Elektra, V for Vendetta, X-Men, Kickass, Punisher, and Captain America, just to name the superhero movies I've seen which buck the trend he references, and within the movies he himself mentions, he intentionally glosses over 90% of the plots in order to make his point "stick." In some cases (James Bond, Sherlock Holmes) he treats the fact that the protagonists win as the proof that they weren't the underdog at all (something which would hold in reality but not in fiction, and a standard which he -doesn't- apply when it suits his purpose, a la his comments about the first three Die Hard movies being about an underdog whereas the most recent movie isn't).
Yeah. Not all that impressed with David Wong. His articles always come across as propaganda, carefully and deliberately choosing what evidence to showcase. And in this case he's deliberately treating the MST3K Mantra as some kind of propaganda-hiding tool? Really?
These movies don't get made because Hollywood billionaires don't want to make movies about underdogs, as he implies - Google "underdog movie", this trope is still a mainstay of movies. They get made because they sell. To the same people consuming movies like The Chronicles of Riddick or The Matrix Trilogy. Movies which revolve around badass underdogs.
(Not that this directly relates to your quote, but I find David Wong to be consistently so deliberate about producing propaganda out of nothing that I cannot take him seriously as a champion of rationality.)
It is worth pointing out that this page is about quotes, not people, or even articles. I thought the quote was worth upvoting for:
Maybe the social signaling sensitive unconsciously translate it into "I thought up this unobvious thing about this thing because I am smarter than you", and then file it off as being an asshole about stuff that's supposed to be communal fun?
It is not healthy to believe that every curtain hides an Evil Genius (I speak here as a person who lived in the USSR). Given the high failure rate of EVERY human work, I'd say that most secrets in the movie industry have to do with saving bad writing and poor execution with clever marketing and setting up other conflicts people could watch besides the pretty explosions. It's not about selling Imperialism and Decadance to a country that's been accused of both practically since its formation(sorry if you're American and noticed these accusations exist only now in the 21st century), or trying to force people into some new world order-style government where a dictator takes care of every need. Though, I must admit that I wonder about Michael Bay's agenda sometimes...
Tony Stark isn't JUST a rich guy with a WMD. He messes up. He fails his friends and loved ones. He is in some way the lowest point in each of our lives, given some nobility. In spite of all those troubles, the fellow stands up and goes on with his life, gets better and tries to improve the world. David Wong seems to have missed the POINT of a couple of movies (how about the message of empowerment-through-determination in Captain America? The fellow must still earn his power as a "runt"), and even worse tries to raise conspiracy theory thinking up as rationality.
So, maybe, the knee-jerk reaction is wise, because overanalizing something made to entertain tends to be somewhat similar to seeing shapes in the clouds. Sometimes, Iron Man is just Iron Man.
You don't need to believe in intent to spread negative values to analyse that spreading negative values is bad.
Hopefully, the positive values are greater in number than the negative ones, if one is not certain which ones are which--and I see quite a few positive values in recent superhero movies.
Seems to me that the problem is, well, precisely as stated: overthinking. It's the same problem as with close reading: look too close at a sample of one and you'll start getting noise, things the author didn't intend and were ultimately caused by, oh, what he had for breakfast on a Tuesday ten months ago and not some ominous plan.
On the other hand, where do you draw the line between reasonable analysis and overthinking? I mean, you can read into a text things which only your own biases put there in the first place, but on the other hand, the director of Birth of a Nation allegedly didn't intend to produce a racist film. I've argued plenty of times myself that you can clearly go too far, and critics often do, but on the other hand, while the creator determines everything that goes into their work, their intent, as far as they can describe it, is just the rider on the elephant, and the elephant leaves tracks where it pleases.
Well, this is hardly unique to literary critique. If/When we solve the general problem of finding signal in noise we'll have a rigorous answer; until then we get to guess.
If someone intends to draw an object with three sides, but they don't know that an object with three sides is a triangle, have they intended to draw a triangle? Whether the answer is yes or no is purely a matter of semantics.
Yes, but the question "should we censure this movie/book because it causes harm to (demographic)" is not a question of semantics.
Well, I really enjoy music, but I made the deliberate choice to not learn about music (in terms of notes, chords, etc.). The reason being that what I get from music is a profound experience, and I was worried that knowledge of music in terms of reductionist structure might change the way I experience hearing music. (Of course some knowledge inevitably seeps in.)