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this post was submitted on 15 May 2024
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Today I Learned
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I’ve seen this conversation come up so many times and I’m never not fascinated by it. I have a nonstop internal monologue, it can be exhausting really. But I can’t fully wrap my head around thinking without it
I have ADHD, it's like having talk radio permanently on in my head. Often times I'll have an internal monologue playing on top of internal background music.
I have ADHD too but in my case I don't actually "hear" any of the thoughts. But they exist similar to how you describe. At any given time I can feel multiple different thoughts kind of floating around. When music gets stuck in my head I don't so much hear it in there as I feel the presence of a song. So I have to talk out loud in order to keep from losing the thread of what I was thinking about.
I’m the same way, if I don’t talk out loud or write my ideas down I can’t think straight. Without an inner monologue my thoughts just feel like a jumbled abstract soup I have to manually untangle by speaking. I also get songs stuck in my head, but I’ve always explained it as feeling a particular part of the rhythm, or almost feeling the lyrics in my mouth like I’m speaking them.
My inner monologue can easily turn into me talking to myself.
Me too. People like you are fascinating to me. When I first found out that everyone thinks differently I went around interrogating everyone I knew about how they think.
I don't have an interior monologue unless Im typing, but I sometimes use my internal "sound system" to play music.
My mental radio is rarely off, but I don't have an internal monologue.
Me too!! I had my nephew and his wife arguing at dinner about whether the inner voice was real or god. 🤣
i dont have one at all, i think, i don't even have one when typing, which i think leads to a lot of weird mistakes, sometimes i'll just interject a completely random word, or pickup halfway through a sentence with a completely different sentence, it's weird sometimes.
I can see that could have that effect! I pretty much need it for typing, it's like an act of translation. I have to write a lot for work or I probably wouldn't have started doing it that way.
If someone is talking or the radio is on when I type I will accidentally include some of the words from those sources.
usually im pretty good with typing, ironically. The problem is that if i start to multi focus on things, it gets really messy, just having music in the background isn't enough to cause me problems though, neither having youtube videos, though it's impossible for me to focus enough on the video to understand whats happening, while being able to type legibly.
if i'm rapidly jumping between things, like reading something, and talking to people on discord, while listening to music, i can absolutely throw random words in places they shouldnt be, it's weird.
That's really fascinating and similar to how I think, I think. Like, typing, reading, or thinking about things that are by nature verbal get internally verbalized but in an atonal "narrator voice", though it's still not "quiet" otherwise. I also have what I call my "internal walkman" for playing music in a recording/playback manner (sometimes with some "skips"), rather than any voice of my own.
I too have an internal monologue. I was high on mushrooms and I thought to myself "What would it be like not have an inner monologue?" Then I had an existential crisis on top of an already emotional workout trip.
What happens to your monologue when you're not thinking about it though?
When your senses provide information about tastes or sounds, isn't that a kind of thinking without the monologue?
You're able to turn yours off??
I’ve battled insomnia for my whole life and not being able to shut off the monologue is the main reason
Try playing tv or radio in s different language. There's still the sound but you don't get sucked in.
i've found "space music ambience" to work very well, it's stimulating but not too engaging. Voices don't work for me no matter what language it's in, because i'll try to interpret it.
i've had similar issues with sleeping myself, and i've found oftentimes having something playing in the background will help. Literally anything for my brain to focus on without expending so much energy i'm focusing directly on it. White noise might help, i've found rain and thunderstorms particularly good for that itch. I used to watch yt to fall asleep, and still do on occasion, but that doesn't seem to work as well anymore.
Lately i've been pulling up a yt video and trying to doze off about when it ends, and that seems to work pretty well.
when i'm not doing a variant of that i'm usually doing some sort of pseudo meditation where i actively focus on nothing. That works if i can keep at it. That or not sleeping at all, because my shits fucked up lol.
I struggled with insomnia a lot.
Podcasts and audiobooks helped me immensely. I have wireless headphones but I don't "wear" them, I just rest them on top of whichever ear. I turn the volume down to a level where I need to concentrate to hear the words. It's exceedingly rare that it takes me more than 15 minutes to fall asleep these days. Staying asleep is another story though.
Oh that’s interesting, I’ll try that
keep your eyes open in the dark; do all the things that trigger your master and tissue specific circadian rhythm like cooler temp, no food before bed, no blue light for hours before bed; blah blah blah
I wouldn't describe it that way, no.
I'd like to preface this by saying that I'm not some kind of mindfulness / meditation guru and have no business trying to explain such things to anyone else given I have such a poor understanding myself.
I think really I'm just talking about feeling feelings. The monologue might be reporting on sensory inputs "that spoonful of peanut butter has a very sticky mouthfeel!" but there's an underlying feeling. You can kind of feel the feeling and disregard the chatter.
For me, my inner voice is muted when I am focused on something, like working on a task or playing a video game.
The second I stop focusing, the inner voice starts.
If I do nothing, it's usually a song that is stuck in my head.
As for other senses, for me, it is the same as focusing on a task. When my senses are activated, the inner voice stops.
If I am reading something and I know thr voice of the person that wrote that, I automatically read in their voice and it is extremely hard to read in my voice.
Does you inner monologue have a voice? Mine is just... Voiceless? Like, pure translation. I never think in "My Voice".
My inner monologue has my voice, like I hear myself talk.
Mine is constantly whatever song my brain has decided is that days hit. Most of the time im able to tune it out but that doesn't mean that 100% that songs playing over and over audibly in my head, it just varies how loud it is at that moment
It doesn’t shut off, I think visually and through the experiences of the senses in part too but the words always accompany the images/senses
Same, sometimes I even move my mouth when I talk to myself if I am too engaged in my internal dialogue. Freaks my wife out sometimes.
I think that's pretty normal to some extent, I remember reading that you can kinda see people's inner monologue on a head MRI based on tiny movements of speech organs. Take this with a massive grain of salt, no idea where I read that and too lazy to find it right now lol.
Personally I definitely notice every now and then that when I activate my inner voice I also slightly move my tongue etc. as if I was saying what it says.
It's fascinating to me, too.
I have seen everything by now: People who think that only sociopaths have an inner monologue. People who think an inner monologue would be useful, but can't quite lean in on the concept. People who are confused that some people don't have an inner monologue. People getting angry at me for even "questioning" the inner monologue, as if it was holy.
It’s an interesting exercise in trying to understand the experience of others while removing our own biases. Doesn’t always go so well I guess! So how do you think?? I really can’t tell from your comment
The brain structures develop to help us navigate through the environment. So of course, at times where an inner monologue is helpful, we will probably have one.
Can you 'replay' music in your head?
This is a really interesting question. If I were a researcher, I'd try to go chase this topic, since it seems to be fairly quantifiable.
Like Mudskipper, I can replay music in my head but it has a few caveats: I don't really process the instruments.... I remember the pitch/volume/etc but primarily of vocals. I also replay with the original singer's voice and not my own. Replaying a few songs in my head now and I can't even focus on the instruments if there were vocals unless they are critical to how the song works, like a bass drop. If I try to replay music that is instrumental, I get verbal recreations, like someone performing the song acapella. If i focus hard, I can hear instruments instead, but that requires thinking about it. This matches how I 'sing along' with instrumental pieces in otherwise verbal songs. It might just be that the backing music isn't retained, so I can remember the melody, but not, say, a bass line unless the bass is being highlighted.
Are there people who CAN'T replay music in their heads? Are they immune to 'ear-worms' or do they just perceive it differently?
Yes…but it has my voice singing on top of the song’s original singer