I process thoughts visually, as typed text. It’s like a fucking ticker tape when I get going having random thoughts and I definitely experience shower thoughts.
… Are you suggesting we are incapable of thought? My mind wanders just like anyone else’s.
Wait am I confused on what an inner monologue is? Is it different from a train of thought? Do I just think I have one? Do people have a non metaphorical inner monologue where they physically hear thoughts? What percent are they in control of the thoughts?
If your mind wanders, isn’t that the inner monologue?
The inner monologue is thinking by ‘hearing’ your own voice ‘speaking’ in your mind. It’s the mental equivalent of literally talking to yourself.
Do people have a non metaphorical inner monologue where they physically hear thoughts?
Yes, in the sense that they hear themselves ‘voicing’ out their own thoughts. If you have the ability to form images in your mind, it’s like that, but with sound.
I don’t believe it
You don’t have to. It’s a thoroughly researched study, your belief in its existence is irrelevant.
I think you are completely misrepresenting the literature in the field. There has been decades of research on inner monologues, but whether anyone truly has no inner monologue is still a matter of debate, and suggesting that it could be as much as 50% is absolutely wild.
One recent example is Nedergaard and Lupyan (2024), who used questionnaires on 1,037 participants and found no one who reported a complete lack of inner speech. They did show a link between lower frequency of internal speech and lower performance on sole verbal cognitive tasks.
But this was frequently misreported in popular science news, which may be where you got the idea. For example, Science Daily’s headline “People without an inner voice have poorer verbal memory” and subheading “Between 5-10 per cent of the population do not experience an inner voice” certainly make some bold claims (although still well below your “up to 50%” statistic). But just a few lines into the article it’s been rephrase as “between 5-10 per cent of the population do not have the same experience of an inner voice”. This is more accurate, as all studies agree that there is a variety of experiences of inner voices / monologues, but a different experience is not the same as an absence.
In another comment you make reference to the experience sampling study (where a buzzer would sound and participants would record whether they were experiencing an inner monologue) which I assume is the work of Heavey and Hurlburt. It’s true that they claim that 5 of their 30 participants recorded no instances of inner voice, but let’s be clear about what the experimental procedure was: the participant would turn on the buzzer, which would buzz at a random time (an average of every 30 minutes) and the study was based on two periods of five samples. So, ten data points collected over approx five hours.
Even people with strong inner monologues report different frequencies of inner speech depending on their activities. Many people do not experience inner speech when actively engaging in other verbal activity - talking with friends, watching a video; while quiet focused activities such as golf show much higher reporting of inner speech. So the absence for five individuals of any inner speech during those ten particular samples is in no sense equievlant to “16% of peole have no inner monologue”. Indeed even the study’s authors acknowledge “it is possible that these participants may all have actually had quite similar inner experiences; it is merely the reports of those experiences that differed.”
Tldr: I think you’re making some very wild claims about this subject, without posting sources. No significant study I know of claims that any sizable percentage of the population have no inner voice, (although there certainly is an interesting variety in how frequent and clearly it is experienced.)
Internal monologue is entirely a subjective experience, and I don’t think there’s any other way to study it than by asking people. Just because someone isn’t consciously aware of it doesn’t mean it’s not there. Just like if we asked people whether they have a blind spot in their visual field, everyone would say no - and everyone would be wrong.
Just because you don’t have an inner monologue doesn’t mean you are incapable of thought, or showerthoughts if we’re getting specific
Correct, a lack of inner speech isn’t the same as an absence of thought
It just seems like a true shower thought requires a narration to get so incredibly off tangent that it amounts to more than a simple epiphany
Like Mitch Hedberg, he is a great example of someone who let their inner speech run free
https://mander.xyz/post/20289088
I’d still argue against that. I’ve had one true showerthought and it didn’t manifest as monologue, even though I do have an internal monologue. I had a concept and images for it. I spent some time trying to put it into words.
I still don’t see how a showerthought (or any thought) has to have a verbal origin in the thinker’s mind; I would argue any internal monologue is but a secondary step after a thought has occurred. I’ve never heard of anyone being unable to predict what their own internal monologue is saying, and I’ve never heard of anyone being unable to make quick decisions because they had to first hear a command in their minds.
I distinctly recall thinking inner monologues were a “neat idea” after seeing them on TV as a child and thinking it would be a useful skill to learn. I never did though
I can’t tell whether I’m envious or scared
Conservatives explained.
Is it just quiet all the time?
Nah, I get background music because I don’t need “sound” for my thoughts. Generally it’s nice, sometimes it’s baby shark
Sometimes it’s only baby shark D:
Yes, but if it’s too loud in the real world I stop thinking oddly enough, and in many cases I am not able to speak clearly. That might be an autistic trait though.
In my case, in the sense of “hearing” then yes. I still have thoughts and my mind wanders and whatnot; it just doesn’t need something else overtop of that
I remember as a kid, hearing the phrase “Don’t think about elephants” and elephants being the only thing I could possibly think of.
I don’t know when exactly, but by 40, I had learned to shut off my inner monologue. I realized it when I came across that phrase again, and realized that I could, indeed, consciously stop thinking about elephants.
That’s what’s confusing me, unless I’m specifically trying to create an image, hearing me talk to myself is all I got going on in there. What am I missing out on?
I don’t have a monologue. For me, it’s images, concepts, ideas, and feelings all combined to make realistic depictions of the world and my ideas in my head. I don’t actually know how fast inner monologues go, if they’re as fast as normal talking or what, but my thoughts happen in an instant. I can picture myself going to the grocery store, what I need, where I park, where to walk, all in like a millisecond. It’s more like one single thought than several individual thoughts. And I can see and feel it and sometimes even “do” it in my head. Nothing is described with words.
Buddy you can just think out loud in the shower, nobody will stop you. For that matter you can think I got a lot pretty much anywhere, though you do get looks in the grocery store I find.
Do people without an inner monologue “hear” the words they read as they read them?
Many people do not hear as they read. In fact the skill of speed-reading depends on turning the auditory experience off:
There are three types of reading:
- Subvocalization: sounding out each word internally, as reading to oneself. This is the slowest form of reading.
- Auditory reading: hearing out the read words. This is a faster process.
- Visual reading: understanding the meaning of the word, rather than sounding or hearing. This is the fastest process.
Subvocalization readers (Mental readers) generally read at approximately 250 words per minute, auditory readers at approximately 450 words per minute and visual readers at approximately 700 words per minute. Proficient readers are able to read 280–350 wpm without compromising comprehension.
Nice. I’m definitely in the auditory reading category. I tend to just pick out the key words in a sentence when I am trying to read faster.
As a child and into my teens, I had an inner monologue that was switched on all the time. After practising meditation and reading without subvocalisation, I was finally able to ‘shut up’ where stopping the monologue was as easy as stopping talking. Anyway, I’d encourage anyone to give it a try. Now being able to think without distracting chatter is well worth it for me.
I do in monotonous “voice”, yeah. Unless I know what voice somebody could have, then I use that voice instead. Usually happens when character that appears in the book also is portrayed by some actor in a movie or a video game.
Tangentially related, but the fox game show “1% club” is, perhaps unintentionally, a fascinating demonstration of how vastly different people think through logic problems.
The premise is the contestants go through a series of questions already asked to a sample of Americans and progress in order of how “difficult” they are based on how many got them wrong.
The interesting part comes when there can be a significant gap in what I perceive the difficulty to be between questions. Sometimes I may have trouble with an “easy” one but get a significantly “tougher” one no problem.
It seems like lunacy to me, but all it really means most times is the format or mechanics of the logic needed for the answer is just more natural to me than the majority of the sample.
Up to as much as more than half of all people.
Yeah, my bottom half also doesn’t have an inner monologue.
Google gave me mostly AI slop and pop psychology, but this article is an in-depth summary of the literature on the topic of inner speech, for anyone interested (and dedicated - it’s long and very technical).
It doesn’t seem to justify dichotomizing people into those who “have it” and those who don’t. Research looks mostly focused on what cognitive or developmental purpose it serves.
Inner speech can be defined as the subjective experience of language in the absence of overt and audible articulation. This definition is necessarily simplistic: as the following will demonstrate, experiences of this kind vary widely in their phenomenology, their addressivity to others, their relation to the self, and their similarity to external speech.
So, it’s on a spectrum, highly subjective, and difficult to talk about with precision.
I personally do not normally think in words, but I certainly rehearse/relive conversations. I also complain to myself with words when I am really miserable, I think it’s comforting to “say it out loud” (inside). Do I have an inner monologue?
You just described how you monologue like a villian in your head, so yeah you’re monologueing xD
A spectrum is what I’m thinking. Some people can turn it on or off at will. Complete silence or make it yap yap yap. At least that’s my case.
I have an inner monologue but it’s on like a half-second delay behind the actual thought. Like, I can picture a pineapple without thinking of the word pineapple first. Sometimes an entire sentence worth of meaning will form in an instant but the words don’t come until I’m trying to speak or type the thought out. Sometimes I can’t access a word at all, even though the concept is clear in my head and I know there is a specific word for this specific flavor of the concept.
Also, I can’t rotate a cube in my mind’s eye, but I can rotate a chicken.
Brains are weird.
Lack of inner monologue doesn’t mean lack of thoughts. People without an inner monologue just don’t think in words. They can still think up concepts and ideas like everyone else.
As someone with an inner monologue, how do they think?
There was a thread on r/SamHarris (maybe 2 years ago) where some people without inner monologue answered questions. It was interesting to read.
With imagery, or in abstracts. I have an internal monologue but not everything is a monologue. If I’m working on a project of some kind I’ll usually keep a mental model of the current piece I’m working on in my head. There’s no monologue attached, it’s just a “working copy” of my current task.
Or for example if I’m reaching somewhere I can’t see to plug in a usb port or something I’m visualizing in my head what my hand is doing, but I’m not talking myself through it.
I don’t really have an inner monologue unless I very intentionally think in words. Otherwise I just think in thoughts. 🤷♀️
What everyone else here said but also keep in mind it’s not binary.
If you ask me to picture an Apple on a windowsill I can kind of do that. And then if you ask me to make it polka dot, I could kind of do that. In my mind’s eye though it’s like it’s severely myopic. It’s not fuzzy but the details are not there.
When I’m drawing things, the act of me putting the marks on the paper is where the object is formed. I generally don’t have a solid concept in my head that’s coming out on paper. I could definitely do the 2D outline of an apple, But if you want me to perspective skew it there’s no way. I might be able to draw the 2D outline and then slowly modify that to make it look more 3D, But I’ve got to be making changes to something already on paper rather than having something come out that’s just kind of the right direction.
I just think in concepts/abstractions, I don’t know how to explain it, lol.
I definitely don’t think in pictures, like other person said. My mind can’t create pictures out of thin air. That might be more like artists think I guess.
I am very very much not an artist, and yet also cannot imagine not being able to conjure up images of whatever.
It is fascinating how the brain works! Even if we barely understand it!
In pictures, for one example
This is the best example, thank you.
