In truth I would have to say 'I don't know' because the phenomenological experience I am referencing when I use the term is not only something I have never experienced myself but also something I inherently lack the tools to even contemplate.
When I say 'Internal Monologue', I am using it as I find it in the literature I have read on Aphantasia. (Alan Kendle's book 'Aphantasia : Experiences, Insights and Perceptions' and the work of Professor Adam Zeman)
People have used the term in these sources and in real life conversations with me ad nauseum. Many say they are 'talking all the time' in their minds. One friend of mine blamed it for his insomnia; 'I never shut up in my head. It keeps my up every night'.
When I ask them 'Is it like JD in the show 'Scrubs'. Your just walking around, going about your business and narrating everything that's going on to yourself in your head"? An unbelievable amount of people have told me 'Yes! Exactly!' to that question.
From my persepective, its like any other aspect of this condition: I struggle to believe it is real. That most people are going around talking to themselves 24/7 or watching little movies in their heads. I still can't help but feel I am being 'Punk'd': like it's all an elaborate practical joke.
If you lack an internal monologue, and this is an extremely broad question, what goes on in your head on a daily basis? How do you organize your day? How do you get stuff done?
I'm sure you hear this a lot, but I cannot imagine not "seeing" things in my mind (I'm probably a 2 on the scale). That's how I write: I visualize the place, the action, the whatever, and describe what I'm seeing.
When reading other books, I create an image with the basic descriptions that are given and once it gets beyond the basics, I start to ignore/forget it. Clothes are easily forgotten (whoops!) and unless there's been an adaptation and I can pop the actor in my mind, I can't create new faces. Instead, I let their personality "shape" a face, so if the character is bland or shallow, I will say that the book has poor characterization.
What about audiobooks? Does a good narrator change your experience?
Yeah I do hear that all the time. I been running experiments on my partner, trying to find something that she can't create imagery for. I'm hoping to find something that is inconceivable visually so I can use it to demonstrate how I think of everything. The closest I've come is the question 'What can you see out of your elbow?'. It didn't work, because she visualised an elbow. The next best is 'what do you see when I say the words "Numerical Subtraction". She saw the equation '2-1=1' in writing.
Audiobooks don't change my experience at all and I can't think of any good reason why they would.
I listen to them all the time, but I have to make sure I keep concentrating on the words or else I'll zone out and miss the story, lose my place. But that's equally true of reading. I often have to go back because I was reading the words but not focussing on what they meant contextually.
I'm very curious - what are your dreams like? Do you mostly not remember dreaming since you can't visualize events and places?
Though I'm actually an extremely vivid dreamer, I'm much less visual in my conscious state. When I read visual descriptions, I enjoy the beauty of the way the words sound almost as much, sometimes more, than the pictures they paint. I pay special attention to rhythm and the flow created by the word choices. I love paragraphs that sound like songs. The descriptions that bring me the most joy, to read and write, are ones about sensations or emotions.
I resonate with your experience of lyric like prose being aesthetically pleasing and enjoyable to read. That's what I look for the most in anything I read. So glad you mentioned it.
As for the dream thing, I'm working on a post that addresses that but I'll lay out the broad strokes here...
I remember my dreams, that is to say, I am aware that I had been experiencing a dream, approximately twice a year by my estimation. So the answer to your second question is BINGO, RIGHT ON THE MONEY!
It's always been that way. 363 mornings or so a year I wake up and have no idea if I had dreamt or not. On the rare occasions I am aware I have dreamt, it is the same as any waking experience. I know it happened and remember facts and data-based descriptions of the events ('I was in a room with 3 windows' or 'I was running through a forest'), but i can 'see' or 'hear' any of it after the fact. I'm just aware that that was what happened.
On these biannual occasions, I do always seem to remember that in the dream, I had no idea it was a facsimile or simulation of reality, and for all intents and purposes was absolutely convinced I was in the real world, no matter how strange it was. I wake up and without fail think 'Of course it was a dream! Fried eggs don't talk in the real world. How could I have possibly believed such nonsense so vehemently?'
It always blows my mind.
Occasionally (every two or three years), I'll have a nightmare and wake up in the middle of it. I remember those in the same data based way for a few minutes but they fade rapidly.
That is all very interesting. I can't imagine only remembering parts of a couple dreams per year. I wonder how dreams or lack of them affect sleep quality. I've never looked into it.
If I may suggest: do not despair, this is not a scale 1-5. It’s at best a measure of some default state that can be changed, although some people naturally are much more visual, and don’t require training.
In my case I’m a 1-2 most of the time. Except when flow states arrive. When music, book or event make a strong impact, when sex or awe block the thinking strata of the mind, it changes.
Imagery comes.
When I was young I found that certain illness, when temperature is high, pushes this into 3-4.
Then later in life I’ve experienced THC (edibles, I do not recommend smoking for health reasons). It was pretty much a cure. The amount of visual thinking that started to happen was so high.
Anyway, I wish you find your own set of tools and practices that work for you, but please do not put yourself in the simplistic categories from the internet charts, our mind is much more complex that than, and we have more leeway that we think.
Thank you for the comment but I must disagree. If there was a -5 on the scale I would be there. In the 5 years or so I’ve been researching this, it is clear that some patients appear to completely lack even the slightest capacity for mental imagery.
I have also been reading DMT research of Aphants consuming ayahuasca. A subset of them get no imagery from even DMT.
Obviously I could be wrong, but I have seen no evidence that I am. Some things, it seems, are definitively scaled at ZERO. Like my imagery.
Finally someone said it! I don’t get why people always compare books to movies. Even with Game of Thrones, which I’ve read, there are things the show did well, like how they made Cersei more human. Both are just different versions, and each gets creative freedom. That said, I do think the last three seasons of the show were pretty bad, but that’s another topic! What’s your favorite book?
Very engaging read! I can't visualize what it would be like to not visualize stuff. I'm a strong 1 on that scale. I'm one of those who was so impressed by how well Jackson brought the Middle Earth of my imagination to life. Do you have a compensating superpower?
You said no inner monologue, either? How do you write? And write so well? I'm hearing as I type (and paying attention to it now just made it noticeable and weird).
I hear from a lot of people that they have no way of comprehending a complete absence of mental imagery. A thought experiment I did hear to demonstrate it to a 'visualiser' is 'Imagine something that you cannot perceive with the material senses, like emotional states or the concept of nothingness. What does loneliness look like? What can you see out of your elbow?' Try to envisage the answer to a question that can't be answered because it has no answer. That's what happens when I try to visualise anything. I think in concepts, soundless, colourless, lightless concepts. The idea of a horse is the same in my mind as that of the concept of numerical subtraction.
The superpower question is funny. There is a lot of research that suggests we might be innoculated against post traumatic stress in some way, but it is heavily contested. I don't really suffer from stagefright when I perform. All lot of performers I know say bad performances play on their minds and restrict them but I just brush them off. There's the grief thing. which is linked to the PTSD research. Aphants are very present in the moment as they can do nothing else but live firmly in it. In my experience, we a disproportionately atheistic, (philosophical) materialists and realists who rarely engage in magical thinking at all. A lot of us can't even comprehend believing in something that isn't materially demonstrable in the here and now, at least that's what I've found.
I have never had an internal monologue and was astonished to find out that people walk around talking to themselves in their head all the time like JD from SCRUBS. No wonder people get caught up in 'Main Character Syndrome' if that's what they're doing all the time.
I can't hear music in my head either, something that broke every brain at the university where I studied music. Solfege, intonation and finding the right pitch in the mind before a cue are impossible for me and one of my professors said he couldn't understand how I was able to write or play music at all without the capacity to audiate (think in music), let along improvise. I can't explain it either.
The odd thing is I can visualize those things you listed. Or at least visual metaphors for them — a sad old person for loneliness, for instance (it seeming to me more poignant to be both old and lonely). We're on opposite ends of that spectrum, which I find fascinating (that there is such a wide spectrum).
The stage fright thing makes sense. You don't visualize totally imaginary (and improbable) failure scenarios, so why worry? I can see some advantages to not visualizing negative predictions, especially the unlikely ones that can plague some of us. Those can be paralyzing for those who have them vividly.
Heh. You probably know that people with an inner monologue find it just as astonishing to discover people who don't. You've no doubt encountered the common reaction of disbelief. I think it opens some very interesting doors about what it means to be conscious -- what's really required... or not.
How do you determine the melody and chord structure of your tunes? Purely conceptually? Do you write like Bach, with interplays of patterns?
Writing music is exclusively a ‘Trial and Error’ process. Try something and see what I like the sound of. Muscle memory is a big part. My fingers know the scales so well that they find the notes fine when I’m improvising and experimenting.
The opposite end of the spectrum is called Hyperphantasia. I know a few of them and their accounts of their imagery always reads as undiscernible from DMT experiences to me.
I like to read the book first because I invariably like it better.
Then I see what some director came up with, lol.
Compare and contrast the two. Nice. I’d give my right arm to experience that…
How would you define "internal monologue"?
Wow! What a great question.
In truth I would have to say 'I don't know' because the phenomenological experience I am referencing when I use the term is not only something I have never experienced myself but also something I inherently lack the tools to even contemplate.
When I say 'Internal Monologue', I am using it as I find it in the literature I have read on Aphantasia. (Alan Kendle's book 'Aphantasia : Experiences, Insights and Perceptions' and the work of Professor Adam Zeman)
People have used the term in these sources and in real life conversations with me ad nauseum. Many say they are 'talking all the time' in their minds. One friend of mine blamed it for his insomnia; 'I never shut up in my head. It keeps my up every night'.
When I ask them 'Is it like JD in the show 'Scrubs'. Your just walking around, going about your business and narrating everything that's going on to yourself in your head"? An unbelievable amount of people have told me 'Yes! Exactly!' to that question.
From my persepective, its like any other aspect of this condition: I struggle to believe it is real. That most people are going around talking to themselves 24/7 or watching little movies in their heads. I still can't help but feel I am being 'Punk'd': like it's all an elaborate practical joke.
Thanks for commenting...
Thanks for the response.
If you lack an internal monologue, and this is an extremely broad question, what goes on in your head on a daily basis? How do you organize your day? How do you get stuff done?
Just curious.
I'm sure you hear this a lot, but I cannot imagine not "seeing" things in my mind (I'm probably a 2 on the scale). That's how I write: I visualize the place, the action, the whatever, and describe what I'm seeing.
When reading other books, I create an image with the basic descriptions that are given and once it gets beyond the basics, I start to ignore/forget it. Clothes are easily forgotten (whoops!) and unless there's been an adaptation and I can pop the actor in my mind, I can't create new faces. Instead, I let their personality "shape" a face, so if the character is bland or shallow, I will say that the book has poor characterization.
What about audiobooks? Does a good narrator change your experience?
Yeah I do hear that all the time. I been running experiments on my partner, trying to find something that she can't create imagery for. I'm hoping to find something that is inconceivable visually so I can use it to demonstrate how I think of everything. The closest I've come is the question 'What can you see out of your elbow?'. It didn't work, because she visualised an elbow. The next best is 'what do you see when I say the words "Numerical Subtraction". She saw the equation '2-1=1' in writing.
Audiobooks don't change my experience at all and I can't think of any good reason why they would.
I listen to them all the time, but I have to make sure I keep concentrating on the words or else I'll zone out and miss the story, lose my place. But that's equally true of reading. I often have to go back because I was reading the words but not focussing on what they meant contextually.
Thanks for commenting...
I'm very curious - what are your dreams like? Do you mostly not remember dreaming since you can't visualize events and places?
Though I'm actually an extremely vivid dreamer, I'm much less visual in my conscious state. When I read visual descriptions, I enjoy the beauty of the way the words sound almost as much, sometimes more, than the pictures they paint. I pay special attention to rhythm and the flow created by the word choices. I love paragraphs that sound like songs. The descriptions that bring me the most joy, to read and write, are ones about sensations or emotions.
I resonate with your experience of lyric like prose being aesthetically pleasing and enjoyable to read. That's what I look for the most in anything I read. So glad you mentioned it.
As for the dream thing, I'm working on a post that addresses that but I'll lay out the broad strokes here...
I remember my dreams, that is to say, I am aware that I had been experiencing a dream, approximately twice a year by my estimation. So the answer to your second question is BINGO, RIGHT ON THE MONEY!
It's always been that way. 363 mornings or so a year I wake up and have no idea if I had dreamt or not. On the rare occasions I am aware I have dreamt, it is the same as any waking experience. I know it happened and remember facts and data-based descriptions of the events ('I was in a room with 3 windows' or 'I was running through a forest'), but i can 'see' or 'hear' any of it after the fact. I'm just aware that that was what happened.
On these biannual occasions, I do always seem to remember that in the dream, I had no idea it was a facsimile or simulation of reality, and for all intents and purposes was absolutely convinced I was in the real world, no matter how strange it was. I wake up and without fail think 'Of course it was a dream! Fried eggs don't talk in the real world. How could I have possibly believed such nonsense so vehemently?'
It always blows my mind.
Occasionally (every two or three years), I'll have a nightmare and wake up in the middle of it. I remember those in the same data based way for a few minutes but they fade rapidly.
Thanks for commenting...
That is all very interesting. I can't imagine only remembering parts of a couple dreams per year. I wonder how dreams or lack of them affect sleep quality. I've never looked into it.
If I may suggest: do not despair, this is not a scale 1-5. It’s at best a measure of some default state that can be changed, although some people naturally are much more visual, and don’t require training.
In my case I’m a 1-2 most of the time. Except when flow states arrive. When music, book or event make a strong impact, when sex or awe block the thinking strata of the mind, it changes.
Imagery comes.
When I was young I found that certain illness, when temperature is high, pushes this into 3-4.
Then later in life I’ve experienced THC (edibles, I do not recommend smoking for health reasons). It was pretty much a cure. The amount of visual thinking that started to happen was so high.
Anyway, I wish you find your own set of tools and practices that work for you, but please do not put yourself in the simplistic categories from the internet charts, our mind is much more complex that than, and we have more leeway that we think.
Thank you for the comment but I must disagree. If there was a -5 on the scale I would be there. In the 5 years or so I’ve been researching this, it is clear that some patients appear to completely lack even the slightest capacity for mental imagery.
I have also been reading DMT research of Aphants consuming ayahuasca. A subset of them get no imagery from even DMT.
Obviously I could be wrong, but I have seen no evidence that I am. Some things, it seems, are definitively scaled at ZERO. Like my imagery.
This is so interesting and well explained.
Thank you.
Finally someone said it! I don’t get why people always compare books to movies. Even with Game of Thrones, which I’ve read, there are things the show did well, like how they made Cersei more human. Both are just different versions, and each gets creative freedom. That said, I do think the last three seasons of the show were pretty bad, but that’s another topic! What’s your favorite book?
Fiction - Douglas Adams - The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy
Non-Fiction - Christopher Hitchens gOD IS NOT GREAT
Very engaging read! I can't visualize what it would be like to not visualize stuff. I'm a strong 1 on that scale. I'm one of those who was so impressed by how well Jackson brought the Middle Earth of my imagination to life. Do you have a compensating superpower?
You said no inner monologue, either? How do you write? And write so well? I'm hearing as I type (and paying attention to it now just made it noticeable and weird).
Thank you for your kind words, good sir.
I hear from a lot of people that they have no way of comprehending a complete absence of mental imagery. A thought experiment I did hear to demonstrate it to a 'visualiser' is 'Imagine something that you cannot perceive with the material senses, like emotional states or the concept of nothingness. What does loneliness look like? What can you see out of your elbow?' Try to envisage the answer to a question that can't be answered because it has no answer. That's what happens when I try to visualise anything. I think in concepts, soundless, colourless, lightless concepts. The idea of a horse is the same in my mind as that of the concept of numerical subtraction.
The superpower question is funny. There is a lot of research that suggests we might be innoculated against post traumatic stress in some way, but it is heavily contested. I don't really suffer from stagefright when I perform. All lot of performers I know say bad performances play on their minds and restrict them but I just brush them off. There's the grief thing. which is linked to the PTSD research. Aphants are very present in the moment as they can do nothing else but live firmly in it. In my experience, we a disproportionately atheistic, (philosophical) materialists and realists who rarely engage in magical thinking at all. A lot of us can't even comprehend believing in something that isn't materially demonstrable in the here and now, at least that's what I've found.
I have never had an internal monologue and was astonished to find out that people walk around talking to themselves in their head all the time like JD from SCRUBS. No wonder people get caught up in 'Main Character Syndrome' if that's what they're doing all the time.
I can't hear music in my head either, something that broke every brain at the university where I studied music. Solfege, intonation and finding the right pitch in the mind before a cue are impossible for me and one of my professors said he couldn't understand how I was able to write or play music at all without the capacity to audiate (think in music), let along improvise. I can't explain it either.
Sorry, long reply. Thanks again
The odd thing is I can visualize those things you listed. Or at least visual metaphors for them — a sad old person for loneliness, for instance (it seeming to me more poignant to be both old and lonely). We're on opposite ends of that spectrum, which I find fascinating (that there is such a wide spectrum).
The stage fright thing makes sense. You don't visualize totally imaginary (and improbable) failure scenarios, so why worry? I can see some advantages to not visualizing negative predictions, especially the unlikely ones that can plague some of us. Those can be paralyzing for those who have them vividly.
Heh. You probably know that people with an inner monologue find it just as astonishing to discover people who don't. You've no doubt encountered the common reaction of disbelief. I think it opens some very interesting doors about what it means to be conscious -- what's really required... or not.
How do you determine the melody and chord structure of your tunes? Purely conceptually? Do you write like Bach, with interplays of patterns?
Writing music is exclusively a ‘Trial and Error’ process. Try something and see what I like the sound of. Muscle memory is a big part. My fingers know the scales so well that they find the notes fine when I’m improvising and experimenting.
The opposite end of the spectrum is called Hyperphantasia. I know a few of them and their accounts of their imagery always reads as undiscernible from DMT experiences to me.