You say “apple” to me and I’m #1, glossy skin, insides, all that
And how in the hell does one navigate life, or enjoy a book, if they’re not a #1?! Reading a book is like watching a movie. I subconsciously assign actor’s faces to characters and watch as the book rolls on.
Yet #5’s are not handicapped in the slightest. They’re so “normal” that mankind is just now figuring out we’re far apart on this thing. Fucking weird.
EDIT: Showed this to my wife and she was somewhat mystified as to what I was asking. Pretty sure she’s a 5. I get frustrated as hell when I ask her to describe a thing and she’s clueless. “Did the radiator hose pop off, or is it torn and cracked?” “I don’t know!”
EDIT2: The first Star Wars book after the movie came out was Splinter in the Mind’s Eye. I feel like I got that title. What’s it mean to you?
You guys are gonna lose your shit when you find out some people don’t have an inner monologue.
What the fuck do you mean some people don’t have an inner monologue. How do they… Think thoughts? I literally cannot comprehend how they work through thoughts.
I’m a word-er, but I think hank green explained it pretty well in a video. Language is just an I/O bus, thoughts occur as a set of abstractions with associations.
Yeah I’m calling bullshit on this one haha, op is implying some people cannot process word if not spoken or written. That would be so unbelievably disabling you probably couldn’t function in society.
It’s not that they don’t process words, it’s that those without internal monologues may think in concepts, images, or visualized actions rather than using the words those concepts are attached to. As an example, some deaf people if they have an internalized monologue have reported their monologue being visualized sign language, instead of audible speech spoken in their head. There’s quite a lot of variability in how someone processes their internal thoughts.
Some without internal monologues have mentioned that they can vocalize text in their head, but only if done consciously, and they usually find that it would make reading agonizingly slow to do so for them.
Simon Roper does a couple really excellent videos on this subject, if you’d like to hear a very eloquent first hand experience of someone else’s non-monologue internal thoughts.
Also @[email protected]
I’m convinced lots of people actually don’t think
The proper way humans are supposed to think is with Critical Thinking Skills. It used to be taught in schools, often in English classes. Remember being taught how to write an essay from the General concept to down to the specific point? That was teaching Critical Thinking Skills, learning how to craft a coherent argument.
Today, many states actively discourage the teaching of Critical Thinking Skills. Republicans in particular hate it. About a decade ago, the Texas Republican Party even included opposition to Critical Thinking Skills in their state platform, claiming that it taught children to defy authority figures. No it doesn’t, it just teaches them when those authority figures are trying to exploit them. They actually tried to position Critical Thinking Skills as detrimental to childhood education.
If you don’t develop Critical Thinking Skills, you will substitute orderly thinking with a sort of ad hoc, improvisatory, chaotic thinking, which is easy for someone with a nefarious agenda to tap into and manipulate. Those with good Critical Thinking Skills learn to recognize and resist things like propaganda.
Literally everyone does this tho. It only feels like everyone else because you can’t be aware of when you’re not thinking.
No, having kids now I am sometimes super tired only being able to function for the daily activities without much planning and thinking about others. This made me realize this state (or even worse) is probably normal for a lot of people.
Easily we just do. It’s like breathing. We just do it.
Can you explain how you breath? Or beat your heart? Or create blood?
That’s how we do.
Is there anyone who can’t (partially) control their breath?
Probably different for everyone, but I have neither and sometimes feel almost compelled to speak my thoughts out loud. If I don’t speak them they’re just kind of abstract feelings or impressions.
My mom had a stroke that was caught early, and she was this way in the first couple years afterwards. I had to ask her to stop talking to me so I could read a menu, and she was self-aware about it. She was like “I’m sorry. Just tell me. I just have to speak my thoughts into existence these days.”
It’s interesting to hear about someone having a similar experience due to a brain injury. I have always wondered if my inability to internalize thoughts was some kind of developmental thing; if I don’t speak them or write them down then they’re really scattered and sorta incoherent.
Vibes or visuals
Vibe thinking?
How the fuck would you function without an inner monologue AND aphantasia…
I don’t know, that’s hard to imagine
Guards, send this peasant to the dungeons.
Yes, guard here, just give me a brief description of the culprit.
The culprit looks like this.
Doesn’t look like anything to me
That’s me. Best way I can describe it is like a word cloud but no text or dialog. A bunch of concepts with varying importance and strength of connections.
It’s like breathing, it’s just automatic. If someone points it out and I over think it then suddenly I go brain stupid for a second double guessing everything.
Me too. I think in the connections between ideas. Almost like thinking in metaphor. Also OP said they were surprised aphantasia is not a disability, but thinking without senses is way faster, you don’t need to think in a straight line, but can just think a clump of thoughts at once.
Non-linear thought is super helpful! But yeah, I have to actively translate to words.
My best guess: sometimes, one idea flows to the next in my head without the words. Usually I “feel” sentences falling into place at least a few words ahead of what I’m saying, at least kind of. But sometimes I just sort of talk, without the inner mo ologue, and it’s mildly confusing. Like, who the hell is building the sentences if it’s not me? And why does what’s coming out of my mouth totally agree with what I would be saying if I could build the words right now?
Basically, sometimes the place that ACTUALLY assembles the words bypasses the self-awareness layer, and the words just come out.
I imagine this is somewhat analogous to the people with no inner monologue; there are still thoughts, they just don’t take the form of words. Pictures, concepts, or even other things that make less intuitive sense to those of us with inner monologues.
This one I find difficult to comprehend.
My inner monologue is petty much my entire thought process. How does one think and rationalise without one?
I’m a
5 on this scale (maybe a 41 on this scale (maybe a 2 if I’m distracted, processing other stuff) and I have a big component of kinesthetic sense and some emotional tone comes into play. It actually often takes work for me to turn ideas into words. This gets harder if I’m tired or sick or something.Edits: I forgot the actual anchors.
I am a 5 on this scale, and for all other senses. No smell, sound, touch or taste either.
So yea; it when I say my inner monologue is pretty much my whole thought process.
It totally blew my mind; when I realized others could see actual images in their heads.
The no inner monologue thing still boggles me. Considering my point of view; where it is all of my inner self.
“Picture in your mind”…
Me, a 5 on the scale, young: Weird turn of phrase, but okay. I have the… idea of an apple.
Me, still a 5 on the scale but now an adult, in about 2023, learning about aphantasia and that other people were being literal about mind’s eye: WHAT.
Yep…me for 40 years; that is just a metaphor to help think about things. Then one day reading about aphantasia…WTF!!!people can actually see, it’s not just a metaphor.
But then I had a conversation with my partner; she can combine flavors in her mind and know, pretty accurately, what stuff will taste like; it is one reason she loves cooking.
People can actually get a song stuck in their heads…again, not a metaphor.
Mind blown!!!
My 7yo can project images from his mind into the world; what the hell. He can “watch” movie when looking at the wall when he is in bed going to sleep; with the sounds and everything.
I have some level of auditory imagination; I can play back something I’ve heard a few times, but it’s more like a ghost of the thing than feeling like it’s hitting my ears somehow.
The main non-verbal sense I use in my head is spatial. There is a 3d space that I can imagine objects within, rotate around, kind of analyze things about it. There is no visual component to this, yet it feels like it shares the space that the mind’s eye could see into.
I’ve described the closest thing I have to visual imagination as like many of the things that happen in the brain’s processing of images after the eyes: resolving patterns of light into shapes and lines, processing shapes into the sense of a particular recognized object. If I think about a tree, I definitely don’t see a tree in any sense. But I do sort of feel like I did just see a tree, just… without any sense of light or feeling like I actually did any seeing, metaphorical or otherwise. All the analysis, none of the pixels.
I have a little more of the seeing, but I also want to reach for your ghost metaphor. Imagining a tree for me is a little like seeing a tree, but quite a bit more like having just seen a tree.
I call this the curtain; when I imagine something, like a tree, I can’t see the tree. But it is still there; just like it is behind a black curtain, no images from the tree can be seen.
That should be my next post! 😂 My inner monologue is like words on a page. And again, I can’t see how one could enjoy a novel with the monologue and mind’s eye.
My inner monologue even reacted to your comment when I read it 😅