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No monologue, no images, no sound. Just... concepts. It's a bit weird.
Even weirder is that I can actually conjure images while asleep (or about to sleep, or barely just woke up).
I loved books as a kid, but never understood why people preferred them to movies where you could actually picture what is happening on the page. It took me until my mid 20s to figure out my experience was different to other people's.
I can get lost in my imagination, it's just not visual or auditory
I have the same. I believe it's aphantasia, but I am self-diagnosed so I could be wrong.
I found out about this a couple years ago when my wife started a conversation with me like "do you know some people can't picture things?". I had several follow up questions because I thought it was just a figure of speech for the first ~30 years of my life.
My internal voice is exactly like me speaking out loud. If I don't "speak" in my mind there's nothing, just like if I don't speak I'm not saying anything out loud.
Layers of depth in a fluid is the best metaphor I have.
The 'top' 'layer' is the 'loudest.' It has the word-thoughts. If I want to solidify ideas and plans into an expressible form, it happens here. Almost everything that comes out of my mouth is formed into word-thoughts first, and then repeated aloud. If I want to 'rubber duck' a problem, I do it here. Sometimes 'bubbles' come from below and disrupt the structure of these thoughts.
The next 'lower' 'layer' is the image space. Things I am actively imagining are here. Images, 3D forms, music, conceptual mapping, etc.
The next 'lower' is the semi-conscious. Thoughts I haven't established fully into expressible thoughts or images are here in half-graspable form. Sometimes it feels like something lower pushes elements up into this space as 'important.' Sometimes those things are pushed up strongly enough they press into the layer above.
I can sometimes sense things happening deeper down, parts that are processing inputs in ways my metacognition can't perceive.
Across the whole space is a certain turbidity representing emotional disruptions and physical mental hindrances like lack of sleep, etc.
I have a voice that declares something as fact. Then I have a voice that is skeptical. Then I have another voice that is skeptical of the skeptic. Finally I have a voice that wants more info/evidence. I do not make it through all four voices with every thought, and the first voice fucking hates me
For me the internal monologue is exactly the same as my 'external' monologue when I tell people about myself or do something together with someone and explain my actions. So it's always first person singular, for example: "I've reflected on this multiple times but still don't quite understand it", "Okay, I need to turn right now" or "God I'm so freaking tired of this shit! I'm done. Fuck them all". There's no internal split and if I was saying what I'm thinking out loud in front of someone, it'd sound completely normal.
This is what I experience, and consider normal.
I'm surprised at the range of responses.
I think this is the closest to my experience. Maybe it has to do with the fact that I've been writing and expressing my opinions online for so long that I can "stream of consciousness" whatever I'm currently thinking into text
Stream of consciousness, very much like Ulysses but even less readable.
My internal monologue is constant. Unless I'm using my language processing capacity for something else (e.g. listening to a podcast or reading text) then my brain is full of verbal diarrhoea. I'll count each step on my way up a staircase just to fill the dead air in my head.
This is pretty close to my experience, including the counting.
I was surprised to learn that not everyone counts things like stairs automatically.
Insults, low humor and slurs are screeched at full volume in the cadence and rhyme scheme of a one hit wonder song from thirty years ago and I just smartly choose to not externalize any of it.
Woah, you just listen to a lot of music
Hey, that's really similar to how mine is! Minus the slurs, thankfully, lol. But I get it.
Right now, in my head, it's a mix of Rump Shaker by Wreckx-N-Effect and Smells Like Teen Spirit by Nirvana except that the lyrics are re-written to be horrible and mean to me, about hating myself, telling me to kill myself, I should be hit by a car, I should be stabbed in the face, etc. I am not a healthy person. :D There's usually plenty of dark/low humor and fucked up jokes I'd never say thrown in there, too. There's also often a voice that goes "hey, that's not helpful, be nice to yourself! You wouldn't treat anyone else this way!" 'cause I really am trying to be better. That and like a shotgun blast of a million other different trains of thought mixed in. It's chaotic in there.
Blackpink zip hoodie with the plastic choker, baditz maru lunchbox purse: aww, youβre sweet
2xl indecipherable metal tee, greasy hair, visible cutting scars: hello, hr?
What are you thinking of, sweetheart?
Rewriting the lyrics of in the end to be about holding open doors for ppl at the grocery store and then carrying a heavy bag for someone.
When I forget what I'm doing my brain makes a sound like an engaged phoneline from the 1990s
No monologue for me. Just image and sound. For example, when thinking about a situation, Iβll just imagine it as a moving picture, but thereβs no internal narration to it. I donβt think in sentences. I just think about the image or feeling and then process it somehow.
Iβve discussed this topic with others before, and they donβt really get it lol. Well itβs equally weird for me to think about it their way, constantly having an internal monologue.
I don't get sound or image (pretty bad aphantasia), but i do have a monologue. Can you believe there are people out there who have NOTHING going on up stairs? Yup, people who have no pictures, no sounds, no monologue, no anything.
I have nothing going on upstairs.
Mine is similar. Visual scenes, 3d, process like progressions. Woesa are only there if I need to prep dialog or present or discuss with somebody. Otherwisea it is concepts with no need for language
Same for me, I can see, hear, feel and even smell memories or fictional situations. For other people this is not possible, they do it differently.
If it's not music lyrics/no lyrics music, some other thing I have on my mind that isn't something I came up with, a remix of something I have seen, or a memory and/or dream, I usually end up having fantasy conversations where it's me but using someone else's voice. Specifically because I don't currently like my voice and think I sound like a gremlin.
My base thoughts are non-verbal. Sometimes I describe it like shapes in a hyperdimensional vector space.
My internal monologue is basically just practicing translating these base thoughts into language, to explain concepts to others.
This describes my mind pretty accurately. Except for one thing: the hyperdimensional vector space thoughts are usually accompanied by a soundtrack of some stupid song I got stuck in my head for the last 3 days.
Songs get churned into the vector space. When there's a song stuck in my head, I'm thinking about songs with similar timbre, similar time signature, similar chord progressions. I'm remixing hooks and adding parody lyrics. The stupider the song, the more intricate the fugues and variations.
And everything draws me to cusps, inflection points, local extrema, global extrema. There are "pure" or "right" configurations of thought that scratch an internal itch for elegance. Maybe that elegance is revelatory, bringing me closer to a more profound understanding of the universe around me. Maybe every line of It's Still Rock and Roll to Me ends with the words "a bright orange pair of pants". I trust the process.
When I'm not thinking about anything, it just plays music, all the time.
When I'm thinking, it's kinda like the reasoning of an LLM, it talks about possible ways to solve something, how things could end, and says things like "oh right, if I do X, I need to do Y".
The strangest thing is that despite me being italian, most of my inner monologue is in english, especially when I'm playing games or programming; and it's not in my voice, it's a generic male voice that kinda sounds like Morgan Freeman.
Same with the music thing. Iβm trying actually listening to the song to see what effect that has, at least at bedtime when too high a tempo can be a problem.
I don't have one. No sound and no detailed images.
My internal monologue is usually just like a commentary of my own voice, or at random times I just talk it out loud cause I find it nice to just speak, but I can mimic others people voices in my internal monologue if I felt like it; sometimes, my mind never talks at all and uses visual to think which what I do most of the time, it's quite peaceful to have a break from the noise.
It's layered.
At the base level it's just a mix of a kind of old tv static and what sounds like a creek bubbling. It's the pre-verbalization soup- textured with sub-thoughts, half-impulses, emotional currents. It's noticeable background noise but not particularly loud.
Above that is another layer of multiple streams of wordage. Just kind of nonsensical whispers that flow around non-stop. Sometimes there are also impressions of images but nothing definitive. Emotional tones are strongest here.
Above that is the focused wordage, or the internal monologue. Usually it's proposed point or observation by one "me" and counter-point or add-on by another "me". There's no set number of "me"s. Occasionally it's a construct of some other people I know. Just tangential rambling in incomplete sentences mostly unless I am really trying to sort something out, then it's more structured. There's a part of my mind that seems to calculate the conclusion to what I am mentally verbalizing that is one step ahead of the words so often there isn't a need to complete a thought. This is also where the music and images play.
There is one more layer above all that, the working space, when I really focus, all the other layers fade from consciousness, words are clear, sharp, and coherent and the back-and-forth feels more like a unified "me", it's also where I deliberately create and manipulate mental images, movies, concoct scenarios and music plays the clearest.
Mine is just constant words. Constant narration of everything. With occasional music breaks, because there's always pop music going through my head too.
Sometimes the monologue is so loud I end up accidentally vocalising (whispering) it. I think it might be partially caused by the fact I have ADHD and a monologue like this is a way to keep my brain stimulated (thought wise, but also socially) when there's no input from the outside.
Sometimes I just talk to myself.
Sometimes I talk with a random character. I can feel agency (or illusion of Independent agency) from anyome at this point, whether I want an anime waifu to "talk back" or to play out a dialogue I'm supposed to have with an IRL person soon.
And sometimes I talk with my inner companions. There are a few characters I have built stable, genuine relationships with over years.
Btw. at some point I started seeing my mind as a process rather than an entity (or set of entities). And like in other complex processes, it would be strange if we couldn't observe any internal contradictions in it.
Just me, internally wording things i want to say/write.
Wow, looks like there's a lot more diversity in this than I was expecting
Yeah, different brains work surprisingly different.
My mind is mostly pretty quiet. My internal monologue is used for figuring stuff out and making observations/giving myself a warning (ie: that person is lying). It doesnβt narrate anything. I only speak first person with myself. I have difficulty remembering my internal monologue so Iβve made it a habit to write down my observations and then synthesize them. Also my internal monologue is quiet and any kind of noise interrupts it.
For me it's like there's a council in my head, but they're all me. One takes the center and the rest are all around, in the "room" in my head. Each one is a specialist at a different thing, which includes one of them who is always putting on a performance of a song.
So far I've identified:
My wife will poke fun at me because sometimes I'll end up narrating my own thought processes with "we" and she's like "Got a mouse in your purse?"
I probably shouldn't answer this tbh.
I have three main "voices", plus a couple of situational ones. As you say, a talker that's mostly "me", my conscious self. A listener that isn't just a listener that's essentially my subconscious throwing up images and memory in response to my conscious self. Then there's the other self, the third thoughts, the meta mind, whatever you want to call it.
That third voice is observing the "conversation", and making commentary and corrections as needed. Like "that's not how that really happened" when images flash up that are nebulous. Or "no, that's not who you want to be, stop being a dick" when my conscious self is under stress. Or "go fuck yourself" when thoughts triggered by mental health issues come up.
Plus, and this isn't some kind of bullshit DIDΒΉ thing, I have fictional characters in my head. There's this thing I do when I write or DM where I kinda spool up a virtual machine in my head where a character "lives". These aren't real entities, they aren't split off from me, they're just a construct that's useful. They can be "deleted", they don't take over, nothing like that.
I can, however, have conversations with them if I do a bit of mental prep work to sort of fake forget that it's just my imagination playing a game with itself. I used to participate in some Mastodon writing prompt hashtags and I'd sort of interview my characters with them sometimes surprising me with what they said. Alas, the instance I used shut down without warning, and I didn't have a recent backup, so I lost most of it.
While I was writing that paragraph, one of my characters got switched on for a second and grumped at me. I know it's not a person, it's all imagination. But it is a fucking trip anyway.
Yeeeears ago, I was running a game. It included a deity coming back to life. During the process, I had been wrapping my head around what they'd be like, and one of the players had communed with the deity a good bit. During a session, the player had their character call on the god to manifest. My ass just started talking as the deity. Full on zero conscious control over what came out. It felt creepy but cool. This imaginary part of myself took over, my voice changed, I stood up and moved around, but none of it was "me". My conscious mind was starting to freak the fuck out a little because it felt like the imaginary thing was taking over.
That wasn't the last time it happened, but I've never been able to make it happen. Well, not to that degree anyway.
I guess what I'm saying is that my internal monologue isn't a monologue. Shit gets loud up in here.
Edit: ΒΉ
My bullshit DID thing, I don't mean that did isn't real. I mean that it isn't me pretending to have DID or some other dissociative disorder. People do that, and it's fucking weird
Hey same!
My thoughts are a constant flood of characters or quips in different voices and tones.
DM ing for me was work but also a true flow state because it gave all this general chaos individual purpose. I'd like to think it lead to good sessions!
And when long running or important characters would eventually meet in game, I'd sometimes get carried away having conversations in multiple characters with myself. One time it went on for several minutes before the table just started laughing.
80% song lyrics, 10% how I would respond if I wanted to invite conflict, 5% random shit, 5% schemes/ideas.
I have an internal mindscape. It's closer to a layered interactive data stream than anything else.
One of the 'nodes' on that is my speech center. Unless I block it, it tries to turn the data stream into a word stream. They then loops into the auditory 'node'. That then tries to process it the same as someone else talking to me. It lets me use all the filters and processing tools I built up as a child. It is excellent at finding holes in my ideas, the same way I would mentally pull apart what I was being told by someone else. It also lets me crystallise ideas into a form that can be passed to someone else.
I can suppress my inner monologue (unless I actively require it, e.g. for writing this message) but generally I don't. It's useful when I need to deep dive a problem. My brain can outrun my word stream, and dropping it can let me attack problems without the limitations of language caging me.
Just one monologue. The voice is completely different from my RL voice.
I hadn't thought about it much, but mine is just first person, same as the way I type or talk. In fact I think much of my internal monologue is actually pretend or planning conversations.