It wasn't until I was ~25 years old when I realized that some people really do have a "voice in their head" and it's not just a movie thing that they use for lazy storytelling. My own train of thought is more like a graph of concepts/shapes/colors that does not necessarily have words attached. I can consciously "talk to myself in my mind", but there is not anything like a subconscious voice.
I had this realization in the last couple of weeks slowly, starting from a discussion about who thinks in which language in my friend group. I've tried to convince them how thoughts aren't in any language, but nobody agreed, which made me think. I found these threads later when trying to research it.
For me, thinking in words and sentences sounds like thoughs being weighed and slowed down. Seems very unnecessary. On the other hand, I did and always had the the issue of putting my thoughts into words properly. Like the translator is pretty bad and I always struggle and feel like most of the information is lost.
I think there might be some correlation between this and being introverted, socializing is exhausting for me because the translator is not well trained as I don't use it while thinking, and it has to run at 100%. I've talked with my better half about this and she said it's easy for her because the sentences are already there and it takes zero effort to say them, which aligns with my theory.
I do have a terrible "mind chatter" though, I'd rather describe it as white noise. Way too many thoughts going through at once, which makes it very hard to concentrate on anything. So even though not everyone is thinking in words and sentences, this issue can effect all of us.
>For me, thinking in words and sentences sounds like thoughs being weighed and slowed down.
I'm a very 'verbal' thinker, but not all thoughts and mental processes are verbalised by a long shot. In fact it's probably a small minority, but a very noticeable one so it sometimes seems like a dominant mode when on reflection it really isn't. Much of the time it's more like a post-hoc commentary.
I often think things through verbally when I'm working through a tricky problem or issue, but even then I'm not sure to what extent the verbalising is post-hoc construction. I suspect there's a kind of feedback loop in those cases where the mental model is essentially unconscious, it's output is processed to generate a verbalisation, that process imposes a kind of structure and grammatical formalisation of the idea or thought, and that informs further modification of the model.
I've often said, and head it said, that if you have a tricky problem it helps to find someone and explain the problem to them. Often by the time you've explained it, you've figured out the solution. Having to structure the problem in such a way that you can explain it is a kind of analytical discipline that helps think it through. For me verbalising internally is helpful in that way, but it's not the only way I think. If it were playing reaction sports that require some strategising and analysis of your opponent's moves would be impossible because it would be too slow.
That’s interesting, I basically always have a clearly English monologue going on, even while visually thinking about things or thinking about sounds or music at the same time. The monologue becomes more sparse and simple the harder I’m thinking in another way (sometimes just reducing to words of agreement or disagreement to the visualisation of something I’m designing or a route I’m planning). But then as soon as I stop doing that I just revert back to monologuing.
I know a little Spanish and a tiny bit of German and I can purposely think in those languages, but I’m way too limited in what I can express that it takes a lot of conscious effort. The really fun thing that I’m not sure is normal is that I can very easily switch my monologue to different accents which sound (as I perceive it in my mind) identical to real ones I’ve heard for long enough to replicate. I’m quite good at doing different accents in real life so I expect that’s linked.
The part about accents sounds interesting to me. I always believed I can't do accents because I absolutely can't fake/hear them in my head. I can even only speak my own accent with close family and switch to regular German with everyone else. I also can't hear/recall music from memory, so it's near impossible for me to sing freely, while singing along works fine.
I can imitate different voices in my head when reading a novel and I can't even comprehend how one would read and comprehend without hearing everything spoken in ones head. It's just impossible for me.
I do have a constant monologue though that is impossible to shut up. Even if I try to calm it or meditate I would think out loud "calm/meditate/don't think", so that doesn't work at all xD
I did start thinking in English at some point. Before that I would translate all English to German, think about it and translate my German thoughts to English, if I needed to say something. By now I just think in English when I'm in an English context. It feels entirely natural.
> I can't even comprehend how one would read and comprehend without hearing everything spoken in ones head
For me it’s the inverse actually. I don’t normally hear what I’m reading in my head, I can consciously do so if I want, but more often than not that distracts me because I’m thinking about the words rather than the concepts.
The only time it’s helpful is when I need to focus on a particular word for some reason; for example, if I’m struggling to recall what it means, or if I’m programming and trying to trace where a specific variable is referenced. Keeping the sound in my mind can help in those cases.
> I ... always have an (...) English monologue going on (..) The monologue becomes more sparse and simple the harder I’m thinking.
This! I feel like I’ve been talking to myself (internally) my entire life, but some in this thread described their thoughts as relationships of topics and concepts, which I also experience.
> thinking in words and sentences sounds like thoughts being weighed and slowed down
This has been my experience as I've learned to stop thinking in words. I realized at one point that words are learned; which means that there was a point where you were thinking without them, before you learned language.
I've done a lot of work on myself with therapy and meditation and learned to think without words. And what I've noticed is that when I think with words, they occur AFTER what I'd call sensational thinking; thinking without words is a full-body sensational experience for me and not something that only occurs in a slice of the mind like a vapid calculation.
>mind chatter
A few times I've experienced acting without any chatter. A pure quietness. It's wonderful.
I've been working on myself to make this a permanent thing.
Have you ever spent a decent period of time (>3 months) being immersed in another language? When you do it becomes clear that there is a language component to your thoughts, even if you don’t think in words.
My personal experience is similar to GP. My thoughts are very non-linear a jumble of images, emotions, sensations, sounds, colors, and intuitions. Organization into anything resembling a coherent sentence takes conscious effort.
But there are words mixed into that jumble somewhere, and I experienced a tipping point during language immersion / acquisition where I realized those words were no longer in my native tongue. It was around the time I started dreaming in the other language.
> For me, thinking in words and sentences sounds like thoughs being weighed and slowed down. Seems very unnecessary. On the other hand, I did and always had the the issue of putting my thoughts into words properly. Like the translator is pretty bad and I always struggle and feel like most of the information is lost.
Fwiw, while i do imagine thinking in words is slower than non-words, i myself have an inner monologue and it is far from... structured when typically active while i'm thinking. It sounds much more like the mutterings of an insane person. Ie while i'm chewing on a problem the majority of my thoughts are without form - but sprinkled in between them are voiced words. Sometimes a run of words, sometimes a single word, often nothing at all.
Similarly while i think best when i talk out loud to myself, what i verbally express are structured quite similar to my inner voice ramblings. They are trains of thought weaving back and forth almost without meaning. Large gaps of jumps, usually cutting myself off mid sentence.
> I think there might be some correlation between this and being introverted, socializing is exhausting for me because the translator is not well trained as I don't use it while thinking, and it has to run at 100%. I've talked with my better half about this and she said it's easy for her because the sentences are already there and it takes zero effort to say them, which aligns with my theory.
I struggle immensely with socializing as well. Unsure if it's related, but i tend to talk _too_ much. It's like i always push the conversation, and i have to fight not to talk. That or i forget my points/etc. Despite talking heavily, i dislike most socialization. I often leave conversations wishing i had said nothing.
I find that I'm able to deliberately structure my thoughts in what feels like a string of real English words without much difficulty, yet I have a very similar feeling of being slowed down when I attempt to speak those thoughts out loud in real time.
The extra effort required is strange, considering the research showing that internally vocalized thoughts are reflexively subvocalized by the associated muscles. The only difference between thinking and speaking should thus be the increase in amplitude and precision of muscle movement required to make the vocalization intelligible. Is that alone enough to so greatly impact the ability to think? Or could the brain be deceiving itself in whether its vocalized thoughts are in fact complete English words?
Perhaps there's something to be seen from the fact that I find myself automatically inserting filler words even when trying to dictate these raw thoughts to a recording. I'm fairly sure I don't use them in my internal thoughts, and whenever I use one when dictating those thoughts, it feels like my train of thought comes to a halt. Perhaps, when I need to take time to consider something abstract that cannot be vocalized, my internal vocalization is able to pause without me noticing, but audible speaking reflexively fills in the silence in a manner disruptive to thinking?
This all contrasts with my writing of this comment, where my typing is far slower and more measured than my thinking, such that I'm jumping between sentences to insert new thoughts related to something I've already written and delete what now feels unimportant. And the process of handwriting is again different, being even slower and very limited in the ability to modify what's already written. I gather, then, that these are all distinct "modes" of the brain putting thoughts into language, each with different levels of perceived difficulty, actual words per minute, and resulting quality/linguistic register.
It seems to me like most "intrapersonal communication" is not fully formed, but latent. Because everything is filled in as you go there, it seems like sentences are formed at a crazy speed and with superb proficiency. Minor errors don't matter because nothing is vocalized and the underlying processes "know what is meant" regardless. A little bit as-if internal speech is just a handle to move thoughts around, and not the actual thought itself.
Yeah, when I speak or write out my thoughts I often find they weren't as fully formed as they seemed while they were just in my head, and maybe shouldn't have counted as thoughts in the first place. This is one reason it's beneficial in a work context to keep a project journal or regularly discuss work with other people.
> yet I have a very similar feeling of being slowed down when I attempt to speak those thoughts out loud in real time
Yeah I sound like an idiot when I start talking because my brain will process thoughts much faster than I can speak them and it ends up with odd extended pauses while I catch up and such.
I don’t write particularly well either, often because I’m on a phone and my phone loves to make radical new words via autocorrect but at least I can read over a few times before posting.
I think most people experiencing that. And like anything, you can improve it with practice. One of the best training classes I took at work was a class on using a mind map to structure a presentation, then practice by recording myself giving it. Playing back the recording and watching it was eye opening. I always thought I was a bad public speaker because it felt like I a was inserting lots of pauses, “Um..” and other stuff like that. After watching the recording it turns out a lot of that filler stuff was in my head - I never really said it!
Our brains are amazing; still learning how to live with mine after 50 years!
> I do have a terrible "mind chatter" though, I'd rather describe it as white noise. Way too many thoughts going through at once, which makes it very hard to concentrate on anything.
It could be related to your dopamine regulation or to anything traumatizing which happened to you in the past that you haven't fully integrated yet. Out of curiosity does this seem like a possibility?
Suppose as you were growing up you and your feelings were always invalidated. You may have learned to try to repress them. But I hear that when we try to quiet our feelings they only get louder. The limbic system is said to want emotions. If you trained yourself to push down your feelings instead of e.g. inviting them with curiosity then they don't just disappear.. you may need to relate to them in an emotionally welcoming/safe state in order to resolve them. But it can be scary if you never felt safe feeling your own feelings, e.g. due to what may have been modeled for you by a parent.
It has just been a few weeks ago that apparently it is unusual that i actively have to fight my thoughts to be able to talk or think thoroughly.
Most times i am so busy fighting thoughts that i can only hear words. I „try to focus“ on what people want from me and i it even feels like that is what my mind is focused on. But at the same time i can feel how my brainpower is actively used…
It is like white-noise to me, too, but much louder and by now i am used to it so i don‘t really hear anything.
I don‘t know why i wrote this, but your „mind-chatter“ and „white noise“ made me think here is a good place to jump in and see if anyone has anything to say to this… don‘t know… i am just exhausted…
> I did and always had the the issue of putting my thoughts into words properly
I’m the same in that respect, but I grew up bilangually, so I always wondered if that has caused my brain to think more independently of language than other people. On the other hand, I spend a lot of time mulling in my head what I will say/write to other people, which results in a lot of internal monologue.
FWIW, I'm pretty introverted too, but my internal monologue is pretty active. So that's one data point that's the opposite of the correlation you suggest.
Not only that, my internal voice has become much quieter with age. And I have learned more and more extroverted behaviors during the same time.
The only time I ever think in words is when I’m specifically thinking about how I would say or write something, and when holding Socratic dialogues with myself. Otherwise it’s all pictures, usually 3D, and usually moving.
Oh, unless it’s musical. Then it’s music. But I can visualize that too.
Interesting. What picture do you have for something like "I promised to meet my nephew I never met before next Tuesday at 3 Av/E 117 St I never visited before."?
When I shut down my internal monologue I have trouble thinking about things beyond routine procedures and memories.
> I promised to meet my nephew I never met before next Tuesday at 3 Av/E 117 St I never visited before.
You don't work with that as a single packet, it is just many tidbits of information. I learned you have a nephew, that you haven't seen this nephew before, that you never visited that place, that you promised to meet them at a specific location. So you add all of those things to your brain, that is equivalent to the sentence.
Storing that as a single sentence instead of breaking it up and storing the chunks seems inefficient, how is your brain supposed to find information like "when was the first time X visited 3Av/E117 st?" when you haven't filed it properly? And if your brain files the information properly, why do you need that sentence?
The recent cache can find those sentences, but your long term memories wont find it without proper indexing, you will forget a lot of things if you try remembering everything like that.
It seems like when I read something like that, my imagination converts it into a movie scene. So I have a little live-action scene of meeting a person on a street. Its the same as when I read fiction.
The "3 Av/E 117 St" part is a fact I have to memorize with some mnemonic. I think when I was young I would have been able to see it on the street sign, but my eidetic memory gets worse each year, and I'm pretty old.
It's like many/most of us have a little CLIP module running all the time to produce NLP interpretations of our internal experience, but some don't, or some require conscious effort to run.
Yeah, I remember being annoyed by comic books as a kid when I’d see a person thinking in full sentences. I’m still not convinced verbalization is the default mode: how slow would a person’s thought processes have to be if they had to spell everything out in internal monologues?
Definitely the default for me. I often do think in other ways - I have very vivid auditory imaging, especially with music training, but think visually for a especially anything spatial, navigation, etc., but often even narrate that to some extent (for example thinking through a route before driving and just narrating something in my mind like “yes, yes, yep, yeah, nope, no, ok, uh huh, yep” while I visualise each turn).
>how slow would a person’s thought processes have to be if they had to spell everything out in internal monologues?
The verbalized "thoughts" come after the fact. They thought already exists and then you put it into words to yourself. The verbalization can be confused for thinking.
This is a good point. I bet a lot of people who assume that since they process their thoughts verbally in their head that all of their thoughts are word based, but there had to be some function under that stringing the words together to express the thoughts verbally.
It would be like your Operating System thinking that it performed the computations it needed to show this web browser on your screen without the help of the CPU.
Well, I guess we all verbalize internally in certain situations (I definitely do when I’m writing comments or deliberately organizing my thoughts). In that case, it seems the original Reddit thread is based on a misunderstanding of the definition and scope of “internal monologue”. It’s certainly nothing like aphantasia, which seems like a genuine condition.
It's easy to prove, you can think about some graph or some physical object. If you can manipulate it in your mind and can answer questions about it, then you're probably not thinking verbally.
Say, how to go from place A to place B, if you've never travelled that route. But you know how things are laid out. Some people really struggle with this by the way.
Surely there’s a lower time limit at which verbalization is even possible. Split-second decisions cannot involve any words, let alone sentences, regardless of the speed at which they’re produced.
I've seen this "inner voice" thing on the internet a couple of times and I'm yet to find a source that convinces me there's a real difference between people in this respect.
I can definitely relate more to the way you described your mind than to the usual "inner voice". But I suspect it's the same for all people, they just subconsciously abstract it in another way.
I suspect a similar confusion happens when people talk about aphantasia. But I haven't really put in the work to discover how serious the research around these things is.
I can do both. Getting rid of the inner voice took a lot of therapy and meditation and I still struggle; I had it for most of my life.
The "inner voice" is absolutely a real voice, as real as my own; and it's not necessarily the only voice. The voices are not auditory hallucinations—they are very distinctly discernible from sounds I'd hear with my ears.
I have learned how to think without this voice and I prefer doing so immensely, as the voice is akin to vapid calculation, while thinking without it is a sensational experience with feelings and is a much more enjoyable experience, extending beyond the location of where I hear the inner voice and goes as far experiencing sensation throughout my entire body; this sensation can be as vivid as physical touch.
In fact the voice is slower than sensational thinking. It occurs after the sensational thinking and the sensational thinking rarely can occur at the same time as the voice; they very easily become mutually exclusive and the inner voice tends to be the one that dominates.
I hope to reverse this relationship with continued work. Thinking without an inner voice is a much more enjoyable life for me.
I do agree that just because people describe their experience as different, that is not a convincing argument that it is very different. Sometimes people don't understand what other people are describing or assume too much. In my opinion, I think if we were to live inside someone else's mind for a day, depending on who that other person is, we may not recognize the world as the same world. I believe people are more different than many people know. Some people may be similar inside, but some people may be extremely different inside. Like you, I would also like to know more about this.
There's a voice for me, but it makes no sound. It directly activates the speech centres in my brain. Like my aphantasia, that I can imagine things without seeing them.
I also deduced that my inner monologue isn't making any sound even though I 'hear' the words. For each word it's like the average of every time you have heard that word. But it's easy to mistake that into hearing the sounds, which is probably what is happening when most people claim to hear their inner monologue.
My inner monologue can be visualized as phantasmal gray words floating in a blank black space. When I imagine what that monologue sounds like it is mostly has my own voice but occasionally has no definable voice, or it takes on the lilt of some unknown reader as if it were telling me a bedtime story or reading a poem that it knows by heart.
My thoughts work much like this. For example, if I'm discussing some kind of design or graph relationship, I actually see what I'm talking about vividly. The problem is it's really hard to make eye contact while doing this. It's not that I find eye contact uncomfortable in conversation. It's just that discussing many topics, especially technical ones, it's not possible to see my ideas while looking directly at someone.
I find this most frustrating in work that is interrupted and explanation is sought. So for example, if I'm thinking through the most efficient way to accomplish X, taking into accounty Y and Z, and someone walks into my office and asks me what I'm working on it's frustrating stating my thought process on the spot because none of that reasoning was assembled using language.
>when I realized that some people really do have a "voice in their head" and it's not just a movie thing that they use for lazy storytelling.
For some of us it's quite literal, and goes by the term subvocalization.
I know that I, for one, when speaking to myself, sometimes am doing it through little breathy throat quasi-vocalizations, like I'm beginning to say a word that I'm mentally saying.
I wonder at my ability to carry on an internal mental monolog without it.
I've been told that it's likely that most people who could read still read out loud in the not-so-distant past. For instance, I've heard it said that the Apostle Paul knew what the Ethopian eunuch was reading in his chariot as he went along the road because the eunuch was almost certainly reading aloud to himself.
We still teach children to read aloud, and it takes a bit of effort for them to switch over to reading silently, often with an intermediate phase of silently moving the lips.
I have that too (minus colors, if you actually see colors in your mind, colors in my mind is only an conceptual attribute attached to a thing).
How do you articulate speech? With me, the concepts in my mind just turn into vocalized words. It's note even an effort, it just happens when I want to speak. Like my thoughts move the muscles in my arms. I don't know how and I am surprised that my line of thought rarely stumbles and doesn't produce the correct words. I think it should be some kind of effort to turn that wordless cloud of abstract thoughts and concepts into words but it just isn't.
I do have vocalization when I'm reading or when I'm preparing a text (like this one I'm just writing). But this is just to get the phrases and wordings the way I like them to be with the right effect.
I'm the same, re not having internally-vocalised thought. Can you read without vocalising though? That was an idea I discovered on HN, in the context of speed reading.
Seems we go from reading out loud, to reading in our heads (internally-vocalising), but you can continue and read without the internal-vocalisation. I can do it a bit, but under test conditions I only picked up about half of what I would do when I read to myself in my head.
I also encountered the vocalising/non-vocalising thing when going into speedreading.
I can supress the vocalising with a bit of conscious effort but it's not the vocalising that limits my reading speed. It's all the rest that goes on in my mind that processes the information I just read. If I'm looking for some specific words, not vocalising is helpful but if I need to remember and understand the text I'm reading, I do vocalising as that doesn't impact the rest that goes on in my mind.
So I'm not a speedreader but it did help me to improve my glancing skills and if I need to I can count really fast now by visualizing the numbers turning into each other.
I think it's called 'chunking'. So 'Could you explain' (concept #1: explain -> describe / analyze) 'what happens' (concept #2: happens -> series of events, a process) 'when you read text' (concept #3: reading -> interpreting symbols).
For me it's all visual / mechanical, kind of like playing with Legos. No 'inner voices' are involved; though sometimes I will sort of internally mutter to myself, 'okay, let's get to work' at the start. For example if I read the word 'seventy-two' I visualize the decimal numbers '72' as an image.
I read a lot of scientific and technical literature, and I've found that trying to verbalize it isn't of much use and just leads to confusion. In contrast, I will 'hear voices' when reading a work of fiction but only when it's dialogue.
Interesting! Gauging from the original Reddit post, it seems that people exist on a spectrum regarding this for whatever reason.
This could explain a lot about why some people learn certain stuff faster than others. For example, maths encoded into language is just a set of meaningless rules you have to memorize, but when you process it in concept-space the ideas behind maths make so much more sense. So, if you have someone who processes stuff mainly through language, their speed of learning math is significantly slower than someone who processes them in concept-space.
When I'm on a high state of concentration, my internal voice shuts up. I like this because I feel that "the internal voice" eats processing resources from my brain to translate thoughts to language and vice-versa. When my internal voice shuts up, I feel like my brain is running compiled programs instead of interpreted languages.
I definitely have an issue where composing English sentences takes a little bit of working memory, and if I'm concentrating on a task that can't spare that one or two items of working memory, and someone insists on talking to me, I end up speaking a jumble of English words (and sometimes non-word English sounds) back to them and waving my hands to indicate I can't be distracted, and I'm aware that I'm not making sense. It's the only way I have come up with to try and convey that I'm not ignoring them to try and be rude, but composing a meaningful utterance will force me to throw away a lot of mental work.
In college, I was once concentrating on some Mechanical Engineering homework in the fraternity library late at night. One of my fraternity brothers asked me "What did you just say?". Me: "nothing. I'm working". Him: "No, you said 'Noun?' and you said it like a question.". I'd apparently had a language center missfire while co-opting some language working memory to work on a 3d spatial reasoning problem.
Haha really? Because a good friend of mine has spent a large amount of his life seeking an internal experience that he feels he so desperately needs in order to have lived a complete life.
It's called complete aphantasia* and it's not too incredibly rare. I've met at least two people who would sit down and have a conversation with me about it.
By the way, my aphantasic friend is a talented composer and an INCREDIBLY powerful writer. He's described composition as "sitting down at the piano and letting his hands do the work." He's never heard music in his mind because he's never had any internal experience whatsoever.
* No dreams
* No internal chatter
* No internal recollection at all
When asked to recall his life, he is able to tell a basic story, but it's not because he internally experiences remembering anything. Instead, he opens his mouth, and the story flows from him, as he has learned to say it.
He's sought out psychedelic experiences just to feel something that is not there, and even then on the most powerful psychedelics he sees nothing (though he does feel things from them).
The range of internal experience is far vaster than many of us ever thought possible. Sometimes I wonder if what is cartoon to me, is the lived experience of some other human being out there.
I don't know if split-brain studies are familiar. In short, some people had the connections between their lobes cut off to combat epilepsy. As a result they had two separate brains, and if, for example, a funny image was shown to their left eye, they began to laugh, but when prompted why they were laughing, they couldn't answer.
My point is, it is conceivable that your friend has some odd wiring to the parts of his brain which process language. It'd be interesting to get him to an fMRI and see whether the language is processed somewhere completely different to normal people - why not even in the cerebellum.
I know with absolute certainty that others don't see colors the way I do. The reason is my left and right eyes see color slightly but observably differently. If my two eyes don't even agree with each other, they can't possibly agree with the eyes of others.
Yes if fucking everyone started saying they can hear colors. Suddenly, half the population lacks a voice in their head or claims not to be able to imagine images.
Not being "neurotypical" whatever the fuck that means, has become SUPER trendy. Out of nowhere, suddenly everyone has a mental disorder.
It's not a mental disorder. The brain is a very complex machine. It would be quite surprising if every brain would work exactly the same.
It's possible what people have talked about here is a pretty normal spectrum between the extremes of hyperphantasia and aphantasia. Especially aphantasia is not well researched yet.
In some cases it might be bs, and I think there could be a test for that. The idea is from Feynman, of all people, who once discovered that his colleague counts in "visual" numbers while he counted in "auditory", or maybe I mixed them up.
The idea is to simultaneously do two tasks that would interfere with each other if they were of the same kind, and would be performed successfully if they are different. So, give a person a text to read out loud and make them perform a cognitive task that requires, in your opinion, verbal reasoning. If they can read and still solve the task in the same time as "normal" people, they could probably reason in non-verbal terms.
Is an inner monologue supposed to be completely intelligible, or at the same speed as spoken conversation, or in complete sentences, or always on by default? Because I can, e.g. look at the painting on my wall and summon a voice and think "ok what do I think of this painting?", and then I start getting random ideas like "blue sky" and "leaf, leaf, leaf" and "that's a weird curve" and "I'm getting hungry". But it's not like a fully formatted paragraph with coherant thoughts, in fact the voices are almost always overlapping, like someone is speaking 3 or 4 things at once and I can sort of hone in on one or two of them at a time.
Then when I stop thinking about it, my mind fades back into whatever it was on before, usually some music that's stuck in my head (which interestingly is always in the correct key and tempo even if it repeats the catchy bit more than it should if I'm not paying attention). The weirdest part is that when I'm actually listening to or playing music the narrative DOES actually collapse into a single spoken-conversation-speed track.
>i dont know how you can formulate concrete thoughts using abstract or symbolic things. //
What are you saying here, thoughts are abstract, but to me seem purer and more varied than the (both abstract and symbolic) constraints of language. There are lots of things that come to mind that are almost impossible to describe fully and clearly -- thoughts would seem very constrained if you could only have them in a language you knew.
Children often described things they don't really have the language for. I think that constraining thought to use language is only an appearance and must necessarily arrive with language learning.
Side note: I suffer intrusive thoughts which are in the form of images and compulsions, they are never word based and I never choose to describe them to myself (perhaps I should?).
> how would you write a piece of code? using images in your head? are those images of code?
You think about what you want to write, then you write it. No, not images, thoughts doesn't need to be images, its just thoughts. No, they aren't code, the thoughts are just representations of programming concepts and abstractions that I can't name or visualize. It is like, when you think about a person and their personality, how does those thoughts work? Do you get words that represents everything about that persons personality? No, of course not, you can't fully capture a person in words or images. Yet you can still think and reason about their personality. That is the pure way your thoughts works. You can think about everything using abstract thoughts like that, including math, programming etc.
The fact that some people can't think about math or programming without translating that to language is very fascinating to me.
When I code, I simply sit in front of the computer and it happens.
It's similar to tying knots or driving a car, except applied to my entire life.
Once people master tying their shoes they don't think "alright friend, let's have this rabbit run around the tree". They just do it and it happens.
When you drive as an experienced driver, you do not think "red means stop, red means stop, look in the mirror, look at the road". You just automatically compute what is going around you.
Simply apply that to everything and that's how my mind, and the mind of a lot of people, works.
I once tried to learn how to speed read. One of the core concept is "do not vocalize the words, just think through them". At first this had me confused as to why people would actually focus for long enough to generate an internal noise for each sound. This sounded like a way to slow down your reading on purpose. Then I learned that some people have an automatic voice that reads everything and the effort is flipped, it's a conscious effort to quiet it while for me it's a conscious effort to generate it.
In my eyes, since people are able to unlearn that, it's not impossible for you to empathize about it. It's simply hard to put yourself in someone else's shoes when the concepts are very alien to how you experience life. Take the aphantasic community as an example, at first many people "call bs" about the fact that other people could see images.
again, i think people are just being naive or faux-confused about what images in your head should look like. they think it should maybe clear and lucid as opposed to something much more ephemeral and difficult to grasp.
There is a body of research on the topic already, so if you're truly skeptical it might be worth reading into it some more. I think you're being a bit unempathetic, in that you're unable to consider that anyone thinks any differently to you. If you really must in order to accept it, consider it a defect, just like some people can't remember faces, some people have no long-term memory, some people can't recognize letters or numbers, so on and so forth. It shouldn't be so hard to believe that our brains, as complex and unknown as they are, might perform differently. There are billions of brains, some of them are probably going to be wired weirdly.
Able to summon? Sure, but it feels unnatural. It sometimes happens when I gather all of my focus on a single task, eg. a debugging session. But then it's closer to talking to myself.
My mind defaults to such a jumbled mess of simultanelous trains of thought that attempting to linearize them into a single voice is impossible.
This is weird...I do have a "mental voice" - which is reading out as I'm typing this sentence. But i never had an actual conversation going on with myself that I can think of... Is that a thing?
Sometimes, I can think of a series of logical steps needed to get something done. Like, okay: so, to build this feature, we'd need this and that and next something else.
But it's always a rational thinking process, not a "conversation"...
I don’t think it’s a conversation as in a dialogue, it’s rather a monologue. But since you “hear” the monologue, you think about what you hear, and that thinking doesn’t necessarily become part of the monologue (not immediately and directly), so the thinking and the monologue tend to bounce of each other to some degree.
Can you emulate personalities? Can you, for example, ask Elon Musk for an opinion on something you're currently working on? If you can, a routine discussion with internal monologue is most likely more of a habit than a neurological feature.
IMO, this is a skill that can be practiced (I feel the same way about Aphantasia).
i.e. I believe that even people who don't have it could learn it.
However I do concede that some some will barely feel like doing it and they'd be doing it well already. While others will really really have to work for it before they can achieve it.
As a person with Aphantasia, I never knew that picturing something in your mind was literal. I dream in interactive images/video/whatever you want to call it, but when asked to picture something (the common example is a green apple), I do not "see" it, but instead have a database of words that describe it from the shape to the color to the waxy sheen of the skin. I also have a very hard time with faces if anything changes too (like a haircut or glasses or even basic aging), I watch a LOT of movies, a LOT a LOT, and I cannot remember what I know actors or actresses from even if I literally watched a movie with them that SAME day (with some major exceptions like Robert Downy Jr. or Brad Pitt).
For me the “pictures” in my mind are very diffuse and can’t hold much complexity. It’s certainly very different from clear actual seeing with your eyes. I also have a hard time remembering faces if I don’t see them frequently. But I wouldn’t ever say that I can’t/don’t picture things in my mind. While there’s probably a spectrum in how clear people’s mind’s eyes are, I wonder if there’s also a difference in how people conceptualize their internal perceptions. I.e., I could conceivably imagine that someone with the same internal picturing capabilities as myself would deny that it constitutes “seeing” something in their mind.
In my own experience, having become more adept at using it, may I suggest you just need more practice?
Personally, learning to "turn it off" (or giving a rest) and even moreso learning about the limitations of such language-centric mindsets; being able to "put the language down" and pick it back up when needed (so to say) has allowed me to cancel out the negative aspects.
No perceived benefit, and now there's chatter in my head. It's not exactly counterproductive, but I don't see how it's helpful.
> In my own experience, having become more adept at using it, may I suggest you just need more practice?
I'm coming up on 40 and again, it's not really that big a deal, so, heh, a little late. I don't even know what I'd "use it" for—I was great at language use, written composition, totally fine at speaking, creative play, all the things one might think it'd help with, before it, so it just seems like a tag-along that's not doing much good, or a little annoying at times, but nothing helpful. I can "use it" for things but I was fine at those before.
> Personally, learning to "turn it off" (or giving a rest) and even moreso learning about the limitations of such language-centric mindsets; being able to "put the language down" and pick it back up when needed (so to say) has allowed me to cancel out the negative aspects.
Yeah, the negatives aren't that bad, I just don't see any benefit, either.
I find that I have a lot more monologues if I’m talking with people a lot during work. Or if there’s some unresolved thing I want to discuss with someone. When I spend long times without speaking with anyone then I find the chatter goes away
Totally blew my mind a few years ago when a coworker revealed he didn’t have one and had no idea what we were talking about. I always found him to be a little narcissistic and pretty unemphatic; always wondered if they were connected to the lack of an inner voice.
I’ve always thought this is just some people being incapable of processing what’s happening in their own head. They have an “inner monologue” of some sort, they just don’t understand what is being referred to.
I quiet my mind chatter by taking my dexamphetamine for ADHD. It's like there's so much space to think now, and it's lessened the ever present musical earworms that were infesting my mind.
I recently had a fever, and the constant rumination reminded me of my worst ADHD days when there's never a moment of silence.
So I’m 42, and my 4 year-old son has recently received an ADHD diagnosis. We have a process in place and are working to ensure he gets support. But it has also made me look back over the particular challenges I faced - especially in my studies and my career - with fresh eyes. Would you be willing to share a bit about how you got to a diagnosis? Did you suspect beforehand?
Not the person you asked but here’s an attempt from a 48yo diagnosed with adult adhd about six years ago.
- imagine watching tv at a bar where everyone had a remote control. That’s the attention model in my head, i can start to form ideas and concepts then suddenly realize I’m thinking about something else
- add 3-4 more tvs. That’s the distraction model, external stimuli drag my attention
- the ‘hyperfocus’ you hear about would be similar to the bar handing you a pair of noise canceling headphones and dedicating the tv directly in front of you to binging on an amazing new series. It’s not just focus as much as it’s a temporary obsession.
Some ways it seems to manifest in my life:
- i never ever ever finish a discretionary project, 80% at best. i completely lose interest and have zero drive. Projects for work require me to procrastinate to the point where my attention is fueled by adrenaline.
- i can’t read anything that requires more than one sitting. I’ll read for three hours but the next time i have an opportunity to read i find i have no interest
- i constantly lose shit
- i constantly pack more and more activity into the period before i need to get ready for something, causing me to always be lateish and running in the airport
- i think of great gifts for people but always end up last-minute scrambling for garbage
- i can be a bit of an airhead at times
- at work I’m a generalist. I’ve been at this a long time but i don’t know anyone in my personal sphere that knows a bit about more domains than i do. On the other hand there isn’t a single domain that i don’t know someone that knows more than i do.
The first time i had a ‘quiet mind’ was probably a week after i was prescribed Adderall. It was like a flashing cursor in my head and I became so overpowered with emotion that i just started crying. Like those videos where someone with color blindness tries on those glasses. It was incredible.
43, diagnosed one year ago. Let me add some items of my own to your very relatable list.
- Growing up, it took me longer than the average to pick up social rules and customs "by mere contact". As a result I didn't make any friends at all during school, and only 3 at highschool. I only started "growing out of it" when I reached University. I still struggle with some social norms. I am a bit of a people pleaser, and I avoid conflict too much.
- Keeping in touch with those few friends and even my own family is something I struggle with a lot - "Out of sight, out of mind" is more literal. I have to "plan" keeping in contact with people, including my mum.
- I have "Time blindness". Time has an immaterial quality for everyone, but in my case it is quite literal. I was often late, and never can tell how much time things take. I need to use a physical object, like an agenda, to transform daily planning into "a puzzle", something I can "solve" with spatial skills. I must have my agenda open in front of me all the time.
> - Keeping in touch with those few friends and even my own family is something I struggle with a lot - "Out of sight, out of mind" is more literal. I have to "plan" keeping in contact with people, including my mum.
I don't know if the first one is strictly ADHD, sounds a bit more autism. Personally, I'm excellent at social cues and body language, far too much even. I'm really good at empathy, but sadly I'm very much an introvert.
Everything else is the same as me. I have unconsciously learned to use anxiety to be on time. Any time I have something major planned the next day, I can't sleep. I am anxious all day until the moment comes, and then I ease up.
First of all, I am not a mental health professional, so I might be wrong here. My understanding is that ADHD manifests itself with a collection of symptoms and degrees. You get diagnosed when you reach a certain threshold of all the possible ones.
The inattentive aspect, which is the one I predominantly have, seems to have "missing social cues" on its list of symptoms.
There's also the indirect problem of children avoiding ADHD children and them getting less social practice as a result.
I hate that Facebook removed their personal API because I can no longer use it to remind me to message people if I haven't messaged them in x amount of months.
I have diagnosed ADD and most of your list is very familiar.
The way I things I usually end up binging through the entire book (or series) over several days. If, however, my reading spree is interrupted for whatever reason, I can just forget about what I was reading to the point where I return to it a year or two later to realize that I don't remember anything about it and have to restart.
The same effect tends to happen with any other project or habit I have. Painstakingly form a swimming habit and stick to it religiously for half a year? Doable, though extremely vexing. Then skip swimming for a week for some reason and the routine is just gone. I've had the opposite happen too though, where I just started doing workouts one day and consistently stuck to it for over 2 months with 0 effort (by which I mean I didn't have to struggle with choosing to do it. The actual physical exercise itself is a minor hurdle in comparison). Unfortunately, this habit also evaporated at some point.
> i never ever ever finish a discretionary project
This is the exact thing I said that had my therapist wonder whether I have ADHD.
I am a brilliant software engineer, my employers have always been pleased with my performance, yet my hard disk is full of hundreds of great ideas I have started and never finished. I have never in my life been able to stay on the same idea for more than 3 coding session. The last side project I worked on that I am proud of has been written 19 years ago, as a teenager, while pumped full of alcohol, cigarettes and weed.
I have started medication, and I am slowly starting to pick up the pieces, writing some code in my spare time (I just finished writing my first Emacs config) but unlearning that I am a failure at motivation will not be easy.
38, recently diagnosed with ADHD. Everything in here is absolutely true. Even the analogy about the TV: I used something very similar with my doctor when describing how my brain works...
I was in a deep dark pit of depression, mostly life long that got worse in the past few years. Sought help, found a therapist, and after 2 years she asked me if I ever considered I might have ADHD. I looked into it in December, every fucking thing made sense, got diagnosed in January and started my medication in March.
I'm still learning to live with it, but I've managed to understand how my brain ticks, why I'm in a constant search for pleasure, and now I have a theory why my life got so bad lately: I've quit my marijuana habit 8 years ago, I quit my smoking habit 2 years ago, and I've quit coffee because it doesn't play very nice with my anxiety and heart, and the more stimulants I've removed from my life, the less functional I've become, and even at my peak "drug" usage my motivation and focus was always outside my control, anyway. But at least I had the mental energy to do _things_. I was self medicating without knowing it.
I did suspect, when I started using Reddit 15 years ago the ADHD thing was a meme everybody said "yeah, I have that." It remained a meme for me, until, guess what, I actually have a problem and I shouldn't be struggling that much. The medication doesn't turn me into that Limitless movie, it gives me the chemicals needed to pick up trash off the floor, make boring phone calls and be a productive member of society. What's ordinary for most people, for me is absolutely mind blowing.
I got diagnosed with 20+. I had the suspicion and went to a specialist. He diagnosed based on my history (e.g. teacher reports from elementary school describing hyperactivity), my explanations and an EEG. When that lined up we started with medical treatment with a slowly increasing dose and just observed how it affected me. My understanding was if there were no apparent negative effects, but the meds helped against the unwanted symptoms it was seen as proving the diagnosis correct by successful treatment. Some subconscious things that I never thought of as symptoms like rapidly moving my foot when otherwise sitting still just to "do something" completely went away while medicated.
Personally I mostly do better without the drugs even though my mind is also in an always on state. But I do have them here and rarely (last time over a year ago) take them, if my very easily distracted mind collides with some very important and immovable deadline.
I also feel though that my brain sometimes kicks me in a hyperproductive mode (like being in the zone on steroids) and I just get a shitton of difficult work done and I felt the meds prevented that too.
While I'm of the opinion that "curing" ADHD at a young age might be a bad idea [1], ADHD is a genetic difference in the brain that is present from birth. It's not a personality thing. It's not something that happens to you later in life.
1: as someone that got diagnosed in adult age, I am now aware of my talents and shortcomings, and all the things I have struggled with. I keep reading of kids on Ritalin that grow to hate their parents for having put them on medication, quit it, and find themselves completely lost in life. They have no idea how dysfunctional they are. They've never had a chance to experience how debilitating it can be.
Give or take a few years. There are a number of subtle developmental differences between individuals. Not saying the doc is correct on diagnosing a 4 year old with ADHD, as some docs still like to jump the gun on that. However, so long as the diagnosis results in evidence-based treatments that do not involve drugs, it may still be beneficial. I say this as a 44 year old who was not diagnosed until 41, and that was after almost 10 years of trying to explain to docs what was happening to me, and the hell that it made my life. From my perspective, it becomes a question of which is worse; diagnosing and treating too early (sans drugs) or trying to fix a broken adult set in their ways?
FWIW, 4 does sound a tad young to me. ADHD is supposed to be a diagnosis of last resort after all other possible explanations have been eliminated.
Sometimes bright children are mistaken for having "attention" issues because they are underchallenged and bored.
Unidentified health issues can look like "ants in the pants" and be mistaken for attention issues.
Sadly, drugs are all too often advocated for as a convenience for adults dealing with the child. This can cause permanent impairment because they impact the still developing brain.
The CDC collects statistics on ADHD diagnosis starting at 2 years[1], breaking out the 2-5y subgroup, presumably because that is before 1st grade. The condition is definitely recognizable at that age and behavioral therapy might be indicated.
Having recently been diagnosed with ADHD too I must say that the book "ADHD doesn't exist" helped me as it provides great tools to understand what it is but also how to live with it and where to look for its source as it's almost always a symptom in itself and thus can be cured.
The idea that "ADHD can be cured" is misguided and borne out of the fact that there are plenty dopamine dysfunction syndromes that _present_ like ADHD, but it's not ADHD proper.
For example, long term (drug) addiction presents itself as ADHD. To make confusion worse, plenty ADHD sufferers tend to abuse and get addicted to pleasurable activities (drugs, food, porn, etc.), worsening their condition. [1] It feels a bit like a chicken and egg situation but the point is: ADHD is a measurable difference in the pre frontal cortex that _needs_ to have been present since birth. There is no such thing as adult onset ADHD.
The point of this book is to emphathize how many conditions result in ADHD-like symptoms and how easily ADHD is diagnosed nowadays, often wrongly, resulting in heavy non-required treatments easily prescribed to people in need for something else.
Thanks to everyone for the responses. I won’t be jumping to any conclusions without involving professionals, of course, but it’s certainly interesting for me to see such detailed first-hand anecdotes from people with similar backgrounds. Much appreciated.
The best thing that stills my mind is concentrating on work (which could be linked to Csíkszentmihályi's flow state) or doing meditation. There are many different states of mind meditation can help induce and maintain. I think the basic categorisation splits meditation into two types: (a) concentrative/active and (b) receptive/passive. The fastest and most efficient technique I found is the Wim Hof breathing technique: https://youtu.be/tybOi4hjZFQ
The things I'd do to stop processing certain stuff. The worst of all is sound tbh. As much as I love music, I think I'd give up hearing for some silence.
Oh man, have you heard of misophonia? I didn’t learn about it until my mid-30s but the knowledge helped me re-frame a lot of previously very puzzling bullshit.
It seems to be hyperacusis as the sounds are mostly environmental. Afaik I know it relates to difficulty modulating stimuli which checks out with my other experiences.
I don’t have any mind chatter, but I have strong phantasia.
To emulate an inner voice, I actually have to talk out loud, to myself. I’ve quite enjoyed this ever since I was a kid. Anyone else do anything similar?
Talking out loud or writing significantly potentiate my otherwise weak inner voice.
The question is: yes talking out loud is a very potent increase in inner voice quality of the thought and velocity. But how universal is that?
Does everyone actually has a weak inner voice that has a hard time forming rich thought associations and rich sentences?
Because it makes sense that talking out loud or writing leverage more neurons and therefore has more bandwidth.
It even has some proof of universality for neurotypicals, see e.g rubber duck debugging.
I think it has reasonably high bandwidth, but it depends on the mode. A lot of the time I’m speaking to an acquaintance who is not present, and it’s a little like rubber duck debugging what I am going to say when I next meet them. Sometimes I sound completely over the top, or too fantastical, so it’s a good way for me to check my state of mind. The bandwidth starts to roll off once topics become circular, or there are too many repeats. Then I either just shut up or move onto another topic.
Man I’m making myself sound insane. I hope I don’t accidentally dox myself one day.
I liked your mention of rubber duck debugging, I think it’s the closest way to describe it :)
Same in terms of not having a strong inner voice and using Otter.AI or writing down on paper to emulate an inner voice; phantasia doesn't seem to show much in Google so maybe there is a different term
>> The goal is not to stop talking to ourselves. That would be a bad thing.
This... has not been my experience at all. When the mind is able to be quiet, this is when inspiration and insight is most likely to occur. I have best been able to cultivate the environment for a quiet mind (still a daily practice...) by focusing all attention on one spot in the body, over and over again, as much as possible through the day during any activity.
I found that quote strange, as well. Considering that so many of our problems can be traced directly to the constant inner dialogue (in one form or another), and considering how difficult it is to reach a state where you lose the habit, let alone the ability, I also think it was unnecessary. The most habitual meditators still have to work at quieting their minds. If you find yourself in the midst of a rainy storm and are looking for shelter, it'd be strange to first acknowledge the usefulness of water.
I have been increasingly tormented by repetitive music, whether it's something I heard recently or something my mind made up. it's got to the stage where it's practically incessant at every moment of every day. I also grind my teeth to the beat which dentists have commented on. on one hand I feel blessed that it's not voices but on the other I wish there was a pause button
A musician buddy told me it’s because your mind craves the pattern and to see the song through to the end to find out how the tonics and keys play out. Also, modern pop songs are designed to be catchy. It’s not common to be able to hear music in your head, just like some people can’t visualize. So be happy you got a talent most don’t have.
Thinking of these two ideas really mellowed songs playing in my head.
> It’s not common to be able to hear music in your head
I did not know this, do you have any sources for somewhere to read about it? Not that I don't believe you, I'm just curious about just how unlikely it is to be able to do that.
In music we call the above ability "audiation", and people who can't audiate are often not good at improvisation. It's more intuitive for people who can audiate, and more systematic for people who can't (ie instead of imagining new music, they are generating it from rules).
I can recall and recite full pieces that I've only heard one or two times. I really struggle with remembering lyrics, but I will remember the full suite of instruments and what they played. I can also synthesize/imagine new songs in my head with those same instruments and voices, with totally new melodies and chords, I can do that for voices to. I can make anyone say anything in my head.
I figured everyone could do some variant of that. Though remembering every note is probably a bit extra-curricular I wouldn't have expected it to be that unique.
It's also possible that I don't remember as perfectly as I think I do, but because I can synthesize so well and have a fairly large musical exposure, I fill in the background instruments closely enough that it's the same vibe.
I don’t have any hard data to point you towards but quite a few people self report that they cannot visualize images at all. Most people do but like all things related to the mind there is a spectrum where in the extreme you can find people who can fly by a city in a helicopter once who can reproduce the cityscape, remember the correct silhouettes of hundreds of buildings, with pencils or ink with extreme accuracy.
It’s not a stretch to suppose a similar spectrum exists with audiation (didn’t know this word before BTW!) in the general public with most people can more or less hear some sound in their mind but having multiple channels of music playing in time.. probably not most. I suppose people who get songs stuck in their heads are more able than most in that regard for sure.
I've noticed that whenever I find a bit music particularly enjoyable on the first listen, my enjoyment at listening to it declines sharply within a couple days and will never again as high. I guess it's like the idea of ruining a song for yourself by playing it too many times in rapid succession, but with this I find that regardless of whether I play the track only once or on repeat for hours (I've tried), every listen on that day is equally enjoyable, but a night or two of sleep and it loses its magic.
Perhaps this is actually a more general phenomenon—you often hear people wishing they could experience some song/show/book/film 'for the first time again'. Regardless, it seems to fall into a category of topics about memory I see discussed frequently online: maybe there's some book out there with a grand theory relating the enjoyability of music to the brain's constant search for novel things to pattern match on, and how boredom evolved to spur on everything that we do. It'd probably also incorporate spaced repetition and the role of sleep in learning—wasn't there recently an HN thread about unexpectedly good performance when coming back to a skill that's languished for some time, and how you can temporarily perform worse during nonstop practice?
PROTIP: If you open a song in Audacity and tweak it slightly (I usually slow it down by 5%), you can trick your brain into processing it as a "new" song again. The returns are still diminishing, but I find I can eke a few more days out of a good song this way.
Another trick is to listen to your favorite songs at a very low volume -- loud enough so you can still hear them, but quiet enough so that you can't quite make out the lyrics or the melody. After a while of this kind of listening, your mind will fill in the gaps in a creative way.
This is great for getting inspiration for music making, as what you hear will have a strong resemblance to what you already like, but will be different in subtle and interesting ways.
Huh that happens to me too, tooth grinding and all. I never thought it might not be normal. In periods it's so bad I have to completely avoid music or I won't be able to sleep. I'll just lie in bed jamming for hours. It's incredibly annoying, and a bit scary to observe my mind going in circles like that.
It's definitely stress/anxiety related for me, or at least coincident.
I don't play an instrument, do you? Maybe it could "get it out of the system" somehow?
it's slightly relieving to hear you experience similar and find it normal
yes to it getting in the way of sleep and yes to probably anxiety related
I used to listen to a lot of music and play a few instruments as a hobby, but have had no time to in recent years. I consider myself an incredibly musical person and wonder if recording the main offenders would expel them. I would love to find the time to turn this affliction into a creative process, both as a hobby and possible therapy
This likely won’t help you, but I found that I can use the Star Wars Cantina Band piece, which used to be an earworm for me many years ago, to “cleanse” my mind from a new earworm. That is, whenever I have an annoying earworm, I can kill it by playing Cantina Band in my mind.
I've found that when the constant music starts to get grating, that feeling of annoyance is actually just the onset of a headache disguising itself differently.
Easy: do some exhaustive sports. Go running as far as you can. Or do some push-ups or pull-ups until exhaustion and beyond. Do burpees. Or simply do a hand stand as long as you can.
Because "if your body is in pain, it simply stops your brain".
This... doesn't really work for me. I do enjoy long bike rides, but unless I specifically take steps to focus my thoughts, I will have just as chatty of a mind during exercise as I will at any other time. Probably more so, if my mind is not otherwise needed to make choices. (And, "keep going" isn't really an active choice that bothers my mind.)
I’m getting back into mountain biking after my surgery, and after an hour or two into my latest ride, if found myself spacing out a lot and letting that chatter take over. Not paying attention during a slow, straight ride I caught my wheel on a root and fell forward over the bike, not fun. I found it much easier to slip into that state while I was exhausted though.
I feel exactly the same as you describe, unless im trying to stay focused, taking in something new every once in a while or making choices, I tend to space out completely.
Maybe bike riding isn't really exhausting for you anymore?
I used to cycle to work in the pre-2020 era, but during the first few months I remember how everything in my mind was about the bicycle and the road and forcing myself not to stop. After this first period the body adapted and the usual train of thoughts returned. When I noticed I was thinking of mundane things during the ride was when I considered that my body had adapted
Apologies for the slow response. It isn't the hard or the easy parts, to me. Seems it is more the repetitive versus quickly done parts. A long climb up a hill? I'll be chatting in my head rather quickly. A series of up and down? A hill that varies? I could see those keeping me occupied.
I can still lose my train of thought while mid maximum effort deadlift, or pinned on a chunky downhill MTB section. I think it's less about the effort and more about the familiarity. I tend to have a clear mind when I am taking in new information, like during a ride in new place.
1. Avoid excessive multi-tasking
2. Minimize activities that bring immediate reward signals to your brain like opening social networks 100s time/day. Taken to the extreme do a "dopamine detox" period
3. Try to set a routine for yourself in small steps
Motorcycling is also my go to activity to disconnect my brain from almost all "chatter". It's just the road, the bike and you. As soon as you are an somewhat experienced driver and you can drive "fairly" safe in sailing/flow/cruise mode it's pretty incredible. It's just engaging enough that it feeds the brain with mental work, but does not leave any more room for unimportant "garbage". Took me around three years (around 30.000km) to get to this point.
Works for me. So far rock climbing and fly fishing require 100% of my concentration and voice chatter disappears completely. For me they are my meditation.
Whenever I'm anxious it is not just one voice but almost an internal cacophony. I found that if I shout "STOOOP" at myself (internally), while clenching my fists, it almost always quietens the whole chorus down.
I used to do "proper" mindfulness sitting practice in a Buddhist tradition (I'm no longer a Buddhist). What I found striking about that kind of practice was that it doesn't stop the internal chatter; it's not supposed to. It renders it visible (and the speed of the stream of thoughts is startling).
Commercial "mindfulness" training is sold as a way of calming the mind. I think it's unwise to approach mindfulness with that expectation. It can have the opposite effect; things can get stirred up, especially if you do longish sessions. Commercial mindfulness is also pitched as being completely safe for everyone. It's not, it can cause trouble, and it's advisable to have a good instructor on hand.
To give a better context for my comment to OP, I began (again) practicing meditation early January this year by following the book The Mind Illuminated. I am now mostly working on stages 3 and 4 of the book. I noticed, in my mind, when I was using the technique Follow the Breath my mind chattering would mostly cease, not that I intentionally tried to suppress it. I still experience a kind of narration of what is happening in the moment.
The interviewee suggests referring to oneself in the internal monologue as 'you' or by name, but to this it turns out that I am, as they say, Pagliacci.
(Alcohol and benzos can sometimes quiet things, but of course that's not sustainable)
> In Chatter you talk about how you halted a particularly bad spiral by calling yourself by name. That’s fascinating to me, the idea that what we call ourselves in the privacy of our own head has real discernible effects.
I've found that it's very effective when trying to break negative self talk, for example when I'm getting anxious. Hearing my name always makes me stop for a small instant, and this also stops my thoughts. So when I'm starting to think that everything is terrible and things won't go well, just calling myself by my name stops that for a small moment, and I can try to get back to normal self talk.
My mind chatter is almost all symbols and images, and any time 'inner voices' pop up I just deliberately silence them. There are some useful little tricks for people who are always beating themselves up, though. For example, rather than saying to yourself "you really screwed that up, you idiot" just say "well, let's not do that again", or "next time, let's do a better job of it." Even so, schizophrenia is characterized by out-of-control inner voices, it's really not very healthy to wallow in that kind of thing.
I read a little about schizophrenia; it seems rather like a case where you have a kind of mental fragmentation, like a bunch of people (i.e. divergent egos) in a maze (i.e. a single mind) who can only communicate with each other by shouting over the walls of the maze. In my area there it's not all that uncommon to encounter homeless people with this condition, they're often doing things like screaming 'shut the f*ck up' to noone in particular but I assume they're responding to the out-of-control voices in their head.
It's too bad there aren't more tools available to help people with these conditions. I assume a lot of it is due to things like childhood trauma - people end up with very fragmented minds. Some kind of re-integration process seems necessary. Maybe psychedelic therapy? Feeding people tranquilizers just seems to mask the condition, and when they 'go off their meds' nothing has changed.
I wonder how "mind chatters" manifest in different people.
There seem to be some who really experience an inner voice talking in full-fledged sentences and others with no inner monologue at all.
My "mind chatter" as I am writing this down resides somewhere in the middle and mostly fragmented: I kind of "autocomplete" on various levels (grammar, semamtics, form ...) and writing/talking just initiates the process to tie up those loose ends into a (forced) linear fashion. So, when I'm finished with a sentence I see/hear it also for the first time; sometimes in amazement (good and bad).
I find the evolution of human consciousness quite fascinating and the residues of that process still can be seen and infered from individual differences which can differ quite significantly/unexpectedly e.g. ranging from aphantasia to hyperphantasia.
The famous/controversial concept of Jayens' bicameral mentality[0] in which "hearing voices"/"hearing commands" is meant quite literally and only later gets consolidated (through e.g. reinfored cultural practices) to an own inner voice. In a similar vein it is conceivable that there exists a common (not pathological) spectrum between forms of clearly heard (inner) voices to faint unstructured (inner) monologue to no voice/monologue at all.
[Of course to a degree open to modulation through different states of consciousness.]
I recently went through an upsetting few days in my life and noticed that my mental chatter could be broken down into four distinct voices, all talking about and questioning my situation in unique ways. I even started to label them to keep track. It was completely overwhelming at first, I could really feel like different parts of my brain were talking and arguing with each other, and that the "me" in my head was like a dinghy in a violent storm of other voices.
After a day or two, when I started to relax and calm down, the voices re-coalesced back into one normal inner monologue. It was the first time I had experienced something like that, I've always had an inner monologue that would engage in chatter in times of trauma as the article describes (and maybe I've also had multiple voices arguing before) but I've never noticed to the point of creating labels for them before.
Apparently there are some people who do not think at all using language which is extremely bizarre to me. Also makes me wonder what mind chatter for a dog looks like.
In terms of personal introspection I find it really interesting how ones "mind chatter" shifts when one is super tired or out of it or similar.
It would be very high overhead if different brain regions used an encoded form of spoken language as the communication protocol. For most of us, most of the time, the introspective portions of the brain responsible for consciousness may be re-interpreting the messages they observe as something language-like, but these portions of the brain almost certainly don't duplicate all of the language processing wiring necessary for the language centers of the brain to produce and interpret language.
In short, I suspect that the "language" of thought is likely mostly a post-hoc rationalization/interpretation performed by some parts of the brain.
Learning to read Chinese, I've many times had the experience of recognizing and understanding a character, but momentarily being unable to remember either the corresponding English or Mandarin words. (This usually happens when studying written Chinese tired after a long day of work.)
I'm biased, but I think even more interesting than the inner voice of dogs would be the inner voice of infants and toddlers. My young son is too young to speak or walk, or even appear to understand even one word. (Though, it's hard to tell; maybe he understands a handful of words.) Yet, he's clearly very curious about the world and seems to understand social interactions.
"Apparently there are some people who do not think at all using language"
Oliver Sacks wrote a great book about this: Seeing Voices[1]
In it he writes about all sorts of people who either never learned language or learned it late in life, and about what that transformation from a non-linguistic world to a linguistic world is like.
Sometimes I get stuck in loops of thought about "what I need to do", such as "I need to buy X, pick up Y, return Z". Writing this list down breaks the loop. I think that counts as mind chatter :-).
I don’t have an inner voice, and it’s a bit puzzling to me to read about journalists and/or scientists who seem not to be aware of that. It’s not that uncommon either: just ask ten people at a party or at work, and you’ll probably find at least one person who doesn’t have an inner voice…
PS: I speak a couple of languages fluently (e.g. English is not my native tongue) and have never experienced any effects between being immersed in one language and “thinking”, except of course when I’m trying to formulate language consciously, for example when writing.
There are a lot of people doing "Carnivore Diets" right now, that is, to eat only meat and just meat all throughout the day. I think this is a very important idea, it's not that these people can only eat meat, but in other diets there's a particular food that is triggering an auto-immune response in their bodies and they just cannot pinpoint exactly which one is it.
So if some food triggers an autoimmune response -- the solution is just to stop eating (well kind-of.) This idea is augmented and explored much more in oligoantigenic diets where you go about removing different specific food (e.g. bananas one week, eggs in another) from your diet each week until you can tell which one was causing side-effects.
There is a mental health analogue for this: meditation. You remove everything, you sit completely still and you focus on nothing. This would be the carnivore diet, but you can also go the oligoantogenic route, go about removing bad habits that are causing side-effects maybe video-games, Tiktok, instagram, or what-have-you that is just too much too fast.
elimination diets are productive and useful, if you do them with a dietician or other licensed doctor (though ones with a diet specialty tend to be better).
eliminating everything but meat is a genuinely dumb tik tok trend.
A gastroenterologist recently told me that I may not see improvements until I've eliminated all gluten for 4 months, I wish one week was enough (recently diagnosed celiac).
I think that it's always a net positive to try different diets and see how different you perform with each one. (make sure to keep your macros at the same level.)
I wish that you can stick with it through that period & that it brings you positive benefits.
No, we don't, as Reddit famously made clear.
https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/exan65/t...