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> I've never really had a strong internal monologue when thinking I'm curious, what is it like when you read something? Is it just not meditated by a monologue

> I've never really had a strong internal monologue when thinking I'm curious, what is it like when you read something? Is it just not meditated by a monologue at all?

Aspos 2y ago
Thanks for your comment. It just occurred to me that I have an inner voice narrating the text when I am reading in English. This does not happen when I read in my first two languages. This explains why I read slower when I read in English.
benrutter 2y ago
I definitely have an inner monologue im some situations, reading is a good example. I can speed read in which case I don't really have a perception of the sounds, but if I'm closely reasing something then I do have a sense of the sounds if words as I'm reading. The idea of thinking independtly like that though seems unbearably slow to me (although lots of very clever people report doing it, so obviously it isn't for them!)
- mewpmewp2 2y ago
  That is thinking slow for you?? How do you reach conclusions or how do you know the reasons why you reached the conclusion?
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    Linguistic thinker: I reach conclusions by feel, pretty much jumping to them, and then sniffing out the "warp trail" from that jump and putting that into words. It doesn't feel like inventing post facto rationalizations, but rather retracing the reasoning that happened in the background. And I do need to do that step - the conclusion doesn't seem "stable" unless I trace it back like this.
    - grugagag 2y ago
      >I reach conclusions by feel That sounds like intuition to me
      - Jensson 2y ago
        Words are also based on the same intuition, you just verbalize it and restrict yourself to what you have words for instead of all concepts and thoughts. For example I do math entirely without any words in my process, and I easily got a master in math that way, barely had to study. No problem, you just translate it at the end. Limiting myself to words just makes it harder to think freely.
        mewpmewp2 2y ago
        That just sounds so different to how I solve math problems. I was naturally good at maths, but it was always from monologue kind of bruteforcing different solutions until one of them seemed to work. I guess it might be a reason also why I find LLMs really exciting since I feel like if I can do it, LLM should be able to do it. I don't feel like I am doing anything special. I always had problem with trusting my intuition or gut so I was worse in a lot of other real life things however. But math seemed abstract and solvable by words and brute force. I wish things just magically came to me, but I think I always have to go through things with my inner monologue. Like if I was to do multiplication in my head e.g. with same numbers, for example 62 x 62. I would have to go through it as a monologue. I first remind myself of the strategy to do it, which is first I will do 60 x 60. Then it is 3600, then I add 2 x 60, 3720, and then there is 2 x 62 left, but I have to keep reminding myself occasionally what the last numbers were, that initial multiplication was 62 x 62, then I got 3720, and now I have to add 124... okay lets go 3820, 24 left, now 3844. Of course it is easier to remember as I am typing this, but in my head I have to keep reminding myself. And now I am not sure if I did a mistake so I go verify that on the calculator.
        Jensson 2y ago
        > I first remind myself of the strategy to do it, which is first I will do 60 x 60. Then it is 3600, then I add 2 x 60, 3720, and then there is 2 x 62 left, but I have to keep reminding myself occasionally what the last numbers were, that initial multiplication was 62 x 62, then I got 3720, and now I have to add 124... okay lets go 3820, 24 left, now 3844. Of course it is easier to remember as I am typing this, but in my head I have to keep reminding myself. And now I am not sure if I did a mistake so I go verify that on the calculator. I do multiplication in my head similarly, just strip out the words, the numbers just flickers through and operations happens by themselves and I'm done in a second or two when I'm not rusty. Now that I'm rusty I do it more like (60x60=3600, 2x2=4, 60x2=120, 3600 + 4 + 120 + 120 = 3844), without doing any words, I just did that in my head right now and I am 100% sure not a single word, just the steps, I do sometimes verbalize the numbers so what I wrote in those parentheses is the most verbal my process for mathing that out gets. Edit: Looking at that, I think it might be easier for someone to correct your thinking if you think in words, but thinking without words is way faster and way more creative since it removes the restriction of only thinking about concepts you have words for. Edit2: I think your verbalization there is a ritual for the concepts to get to you. For me all I need to do is see 62x62 and imagine I want to solve it and all those thoughts flow to me automatically, basically a shortcut instead of having a large verbal ritual to piece together the concepts. I never did math verbally the way it is taught, so I am not sure how people think that way, to me this was always automatically this way.
  - RaftPeople 2y ago
    > That is thinking slow for you?? How do you reach conclusions or how do you know the reasons why you reached the conclusion? Are you thinking that using words during thinking helps with reaching conclusions and knowing why you reached the conclusion? For me it's just there, the thoughts, the facts, the logic, the sequence, the connections, etc. Expressing all of that in words happens afterward (if it happens).
    - mewpmewp2 2y ago
      I don't even know how to think without words. I thought thinking literally means using words in sequence to problem solve. At least I used to think so. If someone says they are going to think about something I have always thought that they were going to focus on their inner monologue of sequence of words.
- leto_ii 2y ago
  > The idea of thinking independtly like that though seems unbearably slow to me So, as a person who definitely has an inner monologue, I absolutely agree. It's not like I'm literally sounding out words in my mind all the time. The vast majority of things I do I do without explicit use of language. I think my understanding (mostly coming from Chomsky and in disagreement when OP) is that language is a mechanism for thinking that is mostly not accessible through conscious introspection.
  - RaftPeople 2y ago
    > mostly coming from Chomsky and in disagreement when OP Is Chomsky's idea that language is not necessarily the same as spoken language, it is an alternate brain mechanism that provides structure to thought as opposed to being the wild west of fluid/analog non-discrete/non-symbolic type of information processing?
    - leto_ii 2y ago
      The idea would be that language first evolved as a mechanism for thought and only later became used for communication. Spoken language would still be connected to the underlying mechanism though.
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  > The idea of thinking independtly like that though seems unbearably slow to me While I seem to be a fast reader relative to people I know, I very much feel my reading speed is limited by sounding the words in my mind, so I agree - it's near-unbearably slow.
- bhk 2y ago
  It seems obvious to me that thinking critically about what you read or hear takes effort and time. I wouldn't call it unbearable, though, because the alternative is polluting your mind with unvetted notions.
- SamPatt 2y ago
  My conscious thoughts are verbalized in my head, and it is somewhat slow, but I also have a sense of intuition, which is very fast, though works best in silence. I can pull things from intuition into conscious thought, but explaining why I feel something is the same slower process. So thinking about something isn't a one speed operation, but being able to communicate those thoughts is.
- importantbrian 2y ago
  I think almost exclusively through inner monologue, and I find I can't speed read at all. If I'm not vocalizing I'm not thinking, so when I try to not vocalize in order to speed read I don't retain anything. It's like my brain is incapable of processing the words if they aren't being vocalized.
globular-toast 2y ago
Not OP but I also don't think with an internal monologue most of the time. For me it's often more like mentally manipulating abstract shapes or quantities and trying to make them fit together. When I'm writing software I'm literally thinking about pointers and bytes etc, not thinking about the words "pointer" and "byte". This is highlighted by the fact that after intense programming sessions I have dreamed about code, like I am computer memory and I'm being allocated by a memory manager or something. Sometimes I do explicitly think with an internal monologue, though. Like if I'm debugging something I'll sometimes narrate what the program is doing in words. Also if I'm trying to figure out how some event happened I'll try to tell a story in my mind. It helps then as it forces me to serialise things. When I read there is sometimes an internal monologue. When I write, there isn't. I don't talk like this. I think it's quite clear sometimes when people write with an internal monologue as their text reads like speech (which can be a good or bad thing, depending on its purpose).
4ad 2y ago
I don't have an internal monologue at all (I am able to speak to myself in my head if I want to, but I seldom have a reason to). When I read, the information just gets uploaded to my brain. I don't vocalize words in any way, silently or otherwise. I don't read one word at a time either. When I read something quickly I can "feel" that my understanding of the material is lagging "the cursor", sometimes by even a paragraph at a time.
davedx 2y ago
I read much faster when I can focus on reading instead of vocalizing; in this case I am no longer internally vocalizing the text. If I do vocalize what I read it goes a lot slower, but then it helps me to synthesize conplex concepts in a text.
geor9e 2y ago
The reading version of internal monologue is called "subvocalization" and this paragraph describes it well https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subvocalization#Comparison_to_speed_reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subvocalization#Comparison_to_... Reading your comment, I don't subvocalize at all. In order to get through my college degree, I taught myself speed reading. Now, I just naturally do it. My eye flicks to the middle of every 5-10 word chunk and flies though the text. If you did speech synthesis at that speed, it'd be a incomprehensible chipmunk. So I don't subvocalize at all. It'd be way too slow. To suppress subvocalization I used to hum (in my mind) instead, but I don't need to anymore. If something is hard to understand I will slow way down, then the subvocalization might kick in. When typing, I do subvocalize everything, since I can't write that fast. I think this post/paper was more about your personal thought process rather than reading though. I very rarely have any internal monologue. In fact, the rare times I do have one are usually very awkward social situations where I wanted to say something but don't. Otherwise never. My whole life has been that way. An internal monologue sounds like a nightmare to be honest. Constant talking that nobody else can hear? No thank you.

> I've never really had a strong internal monologue when thinking I'm curious, what is it like when you read something? Is it just not meditated by a monologue at all?

Aspos 2y ago

Thanks for your comment. It just occurred to me that I have an inner voice narrating the text when I am reading in English. This does not happen when I read in my first two languages. This explains why I read slower when I read in English.

benrutter 2y ago

I definitely have an inner monologue im some situations, reading is a good example. I can speed read in which case I don't really have a perception of the sounds, but if I'm closely reasing something then I do have a sense of the sounds if words as I'm reading. The idea of thinking independtly like that though seems unbearably slow to me (although lots of very clever people report doing it, so obviously it isn't for them!)

mewpmewp2 2y ago
That is thinking slow for you?? How do you reach conclusions or how do you know the reasons why you reached the conclusion?
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  Linguistic thinker: I reach conclusions by feel, pretty much jumping to them, and then sniffing out the "warp trail" from that jump and putting that into words. It doesn't feel like inventing post facto rationalizations, but rather retracing the reasoning that happened in the background. And I do need to do that step - the conclusion doesn't seem "stable" unless I trace it back like this.
  - grugagag 2y ago
    >I reach conclusions by feel That sounds like intuition to me
    - Jensson 2y ago
      Words are also based on the same intuition, you just verbalize it and restrict yourself to what you have words for instead of all concepts and thoughts. For example I do math entirely without any words in my process, and I easily got a master in math that way, barely had to study. No problem, you just translate it at the end. Limiting myself to words just makes it harder to think freely.
      - mewpmewp2 2y ago
        That just sounds so different to how I solve math problems. I was naturally good at maths, but it was always from monologue kind of bruteforcing different solutions until one of them seemed to work. I guess it might be a reason also why I find LLMs really exciting since I feel like if I can do it, LLM should be able to do it. I don't feel like I am doing anything special. I always had problem with trusting my intuition or gut so I was worse in a lot of other real life things however. But math seemed abstract and solvable by words and brute force. I wish things just magically came to me, but I think I always have to go through things with my inner monologue. Like if I was to do multiplication in my head e.g. with same numbers, for example 62 x 62. I would have to go through it as a monologue. I first remind myself of the strategy to do it, which is first I will do 60 x 60. Then it is 3600, then I add 2 x 60, 3720, and then there is 2 x 62 left, but I have to keep reminding myself occasionally what the last numbers were, that initial multiplication was 62 x 62, then I got 3720, and now I have to add 124... okay lets go 3820, 24 left, now 3844. Of course it is easier to remember as I am typing this, but in my head I have to keep reminding myself. And now I am not sure if I did a mistake so I go verify that on the calculator.
        Jensson 2y ago
        > I first remind myself of the strategy to do it, which is first I will do 60 x 60. Then it is 3600, then I add 2 x 60, 3720, and then there is 2 x 62 left, but I have to keep reminding myself occasionally what the last numbers were, that initial multiplication was 62 x 62, then I got 3720, and now I have to add 124... okay lets go 3820, 24 left, now 3844. Of course it is easier to remember as I am typing this, but in my head I have to keep reminding myself. And now I am not sure if I did a mistake so I go verify that on the calculator. I do multiplication in my head similarly, just strip out the words, the numbers just flickers through and operations happens by themselves and I'm done in a second or two when I'm not rusty. Now that I'm rusty I do it more like (60x60=3600, 2x2=4, 60x2=120, 3600 + 4 + 120 + 120 = 3844), without doing any words, I just did that in my head right now and I am 100% sure not a single word, just the steps, I do sometimes verbalize the numbers so what I wrote in those parentheses is the most verbal my process for mathing that out gets. Edit: Looking at that, I think it might be easier for someone to correct your thinking if you think in words, but thinking without words is way faster and way more creative since it removes the restriction of only thinking about concepts you have words for. Edit2: I think your verbalization there is a ritual for the concepts to get to you. For me all I need to do is see 62x62 and imagine I want to solve it and all those thoughts flow to me automatically, basically a shortcut instead of having a large verbal ritual to piece together the concepts. I never did math verbally the way it is taught, so I am not sure how people think that way, to me this was always automatically this way.
- RaftPeople 2y ago
  > That is thinking slow for you?? How do you reach conclusions or how do you know the reasons why you reached the conclusion? Are you thinking that using words during thinking helps with reaching conclusions and knowing why you reached the conclusion? For me it's just there, the thoughts, the facts, the logic, the sequence, the connections, etc. Expressing all of that in words happens afterward (if it happens).
  - mewpmewp2 2y ago
    I don't even know how to think without words. I thought thinking literally means using words in sequence to problem solve. At least I used to think so. If someone says they are going to think about something I have always thought that they were going to focus on their inner monologue of sequence of words.
leto_ii 2y ago
> The idea of thinking independtly like that though seems unbearably slow to me So, as a person who definitely has an inner monologue, I absolutely agree. It's not like I'm literally sounding out words in my mind all the time. The vast majority of things I do I do without explicit use of language. I think my understanding (mostly coming from Chomsky and in disagreement when OP) is that language is a mechanism for thinking that is mostly not accessible through conscious introspection.
- RaftPeople 2y ago
  > mostly coming from Chomsky and in disagreement when OP Is Chomsky's idea that language is not necessarily the same as spoken language, it is an alternate brain mechanism that provides structure to thought as opposed to being the wild west of fluid/analog non-discrete/non-symbolic type of information processing?
  - leto_ii 2y ago
    The idea would be that language first evolved as a mechanism for thought and only later became used for communication. Spoken language would still be connected to the underlying mechanism though.
TeMPOraL 2y ago
> The idea of thinking independtly like that though seems unbearably slow to me While I seem to be a fast reader relative to people I know, I very much feel my reading speed is limited by sounding the words in my mind, so I agree - it's near-unbearably slow.
bhk 2y ago
It seems obvious to me that thinking critically about what you read or hear takes effort and time. I wouldn't call it unbearable, though, because the alternative is polluting your mind with unvetted notions.
SamPatt 2y ago
My conscious thoughts are verbalized in my head, and it is somewhat slow, but I also have a sense of intuition, which is very fast, though works best in silence. I can pull things from intuition into conscious thought, but explaining why I feel something is the same slower process. So thinking about something isn't a one speed operation, but being able to communicate those thoughts is.
importantbrian 2y ago
I think almost exclusively through inner monologue, and I find I can't speed read at all. If I'm not vocalizing I'm not thinking, so when I try to not vocalize in order to speed read I don't retain anything. It's like my brain is incapable of processing the words if they aren't being vocalized.

globular-toast 2y ago

Not OP but I also don't think with an internal monologue most of the time. For me it's often more like mentally manipulating abstract shapes or quantities and trying to make them fit together. When I'm writing software I'm literally thinking about pointers and bytes etc, not thinking about the words "pointer" and "byte". This is highlighted by the fact that after intense programming sessions I have dreamed about code, like I am computer memory and I'm being allocated by a memory manager or something. Sometimes I do explicitly think with an internal monologue, though. Like if I'm debugging something I'll sometimes narrate what the program is doing in words. Also if I'm trying to figure out how some event happened I'll try to tell a story in my mind. It helps then as it forces me to serialise things. When I read there is sometimes an internal monologue. When I write, there isn't. I don't talk like this. I think it's quite clear sometimes when people write with an internal monologue as their text reads like speech (which can be a good or bad thing, depending on its purpose).

4ad 2y ago

I don't have an internal monologue at all (I am able to speak to myself in my head if I want to, but I seldom have a reason to). When I read, the information just gets uploaded to my brain. I don't vocalize words in any way, silently or otherwise. I don't read one word at a time either. When I read something quickly I can "feel" that my understanding of the material is lagging "the cursor", sometimes by even a paragraph at a time.

davedx 2y ago

I read much faster when I can focus on reading instead of vocalizing; in this case I am no longer internally vocalizing the text. If I do vocalize what I read it goes a lot slower, but then it helps me to synthesize conplex concepts in a text.

geor9e 2y ago

The reading version of internal monologue is called "subvocalization" and this paragraph describes it well https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subvocalization#Comparison_to_speed_reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subvocalization#Comparison_to_... Reading your comment, I don't subvocalize at all. In order to get through my college degree, I taught myself speed reading. Now, I just naturally do it. My eye flicks to the middle of every 5-10 word chunk and flies though the text. If you did speech synthesis at that speed, it'd be a incomprehensible chipmunk. So I don't subvocalize at all. It'd be way too slow. To suppress subvocalization I used to hum (in my mind) instead, but I don't need to anymore. If something is hard to understand I will slow way down, then the subvocalization might kick in. When typing, I do subvocalize everything, since I can't write that fast. I think this post/paper was more about your personal thought process rather than reading though. I very rarely have any internal monologue. In fact, the rare times I do have one are usually very awkward social situations where I wanted to say something but don't. Otherwise never. My whole life has been that way. An internal monologue sounds like a nightmare to be honest. Constant talking that nobody else can hear? No thank you.