Do you have an internal monologue? Do you have a mind's eye?

[reinaert]

Learned a new word. Interesting article about it here.

Aphantasia: Thinking That’s Out of Sight

Aphantasia is a characteristic where you can’t form mental images to “see” things in your head. Learn more about this trait.

my.clevelandclinic.org

I have nearly complete aphantasia. My wife can smell cut grass and 'hear' her mother's voice and 'see' her mother's face.

I, on the other hand, spent much of life with the understanding that picturing something was metaphor. This became really clear before our youngest was born; my wife and I took a hypnobirthing class, and while everyone else was visualizing (a concept I only comprehend as an absence) a golden light flowing down their bodies and falling into meditative or hypnotic states, I was just lying on the floor in a dark room listening to people breathing.

 

[reinaert]

That is so wild to me that there are people who have no inner monologue. Just silence?

Silence. When I close my eyes, I just see the back of my eyelids. I dream so rarely as to be surprised if I 'recall' a dream. I cannot picture my wife's face, hear an inner 'voice' or recall any event with sensory symbolism. I don't 'think' in words, which perhaps paradoxically, means I pick up languages quickly.

 

[craig]

Silence. When I close my eyes, I just see the back of my eyelids. I dream so rarely as to be surprised if I 'recall' a dream. I cannot picture my wife's face, hear an inner 'voice' or recall any event with sensory symbolism. I don't 'think' in words, which perhaps paradoxically, means I pick up languages quickly.

So no introspection?

 

[Allan]

Silence. When I close my eyes, I just see the back of my eyelids. I dream so rarely as to be surprised if I 'recall' a dream. I cannot picture my wife's face, hear an inner 'voice' or recall any event with sensory symbolism. I don't 'think' in words, which perhaps paradoxically, means I pick up languages quickly.

If you can't visualize a face you know does that impact your ability to recognize people you don't see frequently?

 

[reinaert]

So no introspection?

That is common misconception. The former boss of Pixar and Disney Animation had a form of aphantasia similar to mine. We just don't think symbolically. I know my own mind quite well because it is immediate, and never requires symbo-logical translation.

Best available imaging studies suggest strong aphantasiacs (because it's a spectrum) navigate the absence of a mind's eye by using the executive functions and the default mode network as recall and contemplation agencies.

 

[reinaert]

If you can't visualize a face you know does that impact your ability to recognize people you don't see frequently?

None. Most aphantasiacs don't have face blindness. It isn't an absence of recall or recognition. It's an incapacity towards phantasy. I have a very good sequential or serial memory, and can describe traits and behaviors in good to excellent detail. I am just silent to myself. Utterly silent. I'm certain understand cats qua cats.

 

[craig]

That is common misconception. The former boss of Pixar and Disney Animation had a form of aphantasia similar to mine. We just don't think symbolically. I know my own mind quite well because it is immediate, and never requires symbo-logical teanslation.

Best available imaging studies suggest strong aphantasiacs (because it's a spectrum) navigate the absence of a mind's eye by using the executive functions and the default mode network as recall and contemplation agencies.

Don't know what that means. Don't you consider your actions before you do them.

 

[Allan]

None. Most aphantasiacs don't have face blindness. It isn't an absence of recall or recognition. It's an incapacity towards phantasy. I have a very good sequential or serial memory, and can describe traits and behaviors in good to excellent detail. I am just silent to myself. Utterly silent. I'm certain understand cats qua cats.

You understand yourself very well.

But to be honest to me you're like an alien being (haha, no offence). I can't even remotely comprehend not having a voice yapping away in my mind.

 

[reinaert]

Don't know what that means. Don't you consider your actions before you do them.

You seem to be suggesting, by way if the ellipsis, that you have to 'internally narrate' the validity of choices before you can u dertake them.

Is this a fair assessment?

 

[craig]

You seem to be suggesting, by way if the ellipsis, that you have to 'internally narrate' the validity of choices before you can u dertake them.

Is this a fair assessment?

Yes. Unless you consider choices before acting you are monomaniacal.

 

[Allan]

@reinaert do you ever replay real conversations internally?

 

[reinaert]

You understand yourself very well.

But to be honest to me you're like an alien being (haha, no offence). I can't even remotely comprehend not having a voice yapping away in my mind.

My wife and I are aliens to each other. She is somewhat hyperphantasiac. She can experience whole 'inner worlds and landscapes', including those peopled with her regrets and shouldacouldawouldas, and a host of impossible pasts and improbable futures, and I don't know what I look like and now that my grandmother is dead, I will never hear her voice again. She holds on to a lot of stuff, and I let go very easily. Like, I genuinely had a difficult time understanding grudges, or how she could reexperience and literally 're-live' an insult, or praise, or a mistake she thought she made at work, over and over again.

We developed a shared lexicon, because our dialogue is decades in the making. Like, I will ask her, 'Are you narrating?' Or 'Exposition?' if the patterns of her posture, tone, facial flushing and word choice suggest she is info-dumping her day; or maybe if she is thinking, talking and deciding how she feels all at the same time. This way I know, if she says 'yes' that she is speaking with me because I can be trusted, but not yet really to me. And she will sometimes tap me on the knee when we're out because I am 'doing that thing' where I am reading the person, asking very direct questions, and failing to mask that the overlay and array of signals that the person is broadcasting don't align or add up. Or she'll say, if it's just between us, 'you're reading me'. Mostly because, in a room with other people, I never 'hear, see, feel' myself as a signal or noise.

 

[Checkerboard Strangler]

One of my favorite mini-lessons in my classroom is reading a descriptive segment from a story and teaching the kids to visualize the words they are hearing. I also do a lot of metacognition modeling to help them think about their own thinking.

Then you're an excellent teacher.

 

[reinaert]

Yes. Unless you consider choices before acting you are monomaniacal.

Nah. You're just assuming a neurotypicality not in evidence.

As a child, and as an older man, I was always and am still drawn to William Blake. Like, more than any other poet. Blake was a known hyperphantasiac. As in, I have no doubt Blake really saw the fantastical amidst the real. It is utterly foreign to me, but I understood Blake anyways, because my self-experience is fundamentally relational. I think without symbols, but rather in terms of 'helices' of information, and flows. I am silent to myself, but I am not a solipsist.

People are very, very real to me. First, I was an abused and sexually assaulted child, and I had no world to escape to. I didn't know people could 'escape' into an inner world until years later, in a support group discussion. I just had to be there, feeling, accepting, knowing what was happening. I had to make my peace with reality in real time. Second, since I am naturally silent and blind to myself, most of the human signals (short of physical pain, joy, dizziness, balance) are other people. Others are what my senses involve, and that is not fertile ground for solipsism.

 

[LadyCaptain]

That is so wild to me that there are people who have no inner monologue. Just silence?

My daughter has no inner monologue and it is silent. She has thoughts but she can't describe what she means by thoughts - just that they aren't words. She has a degree in English with a minor in literature and a Masters in higher education administration and is employed at a major university so it obviously hasn't held back her language development. She says that it must get chaotic with all those words in our heads and I agree that it can be at times.

 

[reinaert]

My daughter has no inner monologue and it is silent. She has thoughts but she can't describe what she means by thoughts - just that they aren't words. She has a degree in English with a minor in literature and a Masters in higher education administration and is employed at a major university so it obviously hasn't held back her language development. She says that it must get chaotic with all those words in our heads and I agree that it can be at times.

Do you know if she ever felt her way of thinking as a kind of perceiving of probability - a knowing the heft of an idea, event, or situation's likelihood?

Has she found that she feels herself to be less labile and emotionally febrile than most other people?

And, while I am being shamelessly intrusive, does she read very fast and comprehensively and know her own responses and mind about what she reads very quickly?

 

[craig]

My daughter has no inner monologue and it is silent. She has thoughts but she can't describe what she means by thoughts - just that they aren't words. She has a degree in English with a minor in literature and a Masters in higher education administration and is employed at a major university so it obviously hasn't held back her language development. She says that it must get chaotic with all those words in our heads and I agree that it can be at times.

Has she described her experience of reading? Does she grasp the meaning without thinking through the words?

 

[PirateMk1]

Some people have an internal monologue (i.e. they think in words). Some people have a mind's eye (i.e. they can visually "see" objects by imagining them). Others do not have these mental experiences. It's amazing that our subjective mental experiences are so different...I can't even comprehend not being able to think in words or images.

Do you have an internal monologue? Do you have a mind's eye?

I must be a weird one then. I couldn't visualize anything in my head to save my life, yet for some reason I can put it to a medium like paper as well as I can use the particular medium. I can draw ok then I can translate "visualizations" ok. The better I know a medium the better the "visualization". The really weird part is I have really vivid dreams. I can remember faces very well. I cant remember a name to save my life. I can talk and analyze the conversation in real time. I can have a full conversation with myself and am known to verbalize it frequently which freaks people out. They walk in on me talking to myself, usually when I am concentrating on something. In times of extreme stress I split into an observer, actor dual mindset. That's a really really weird one where you become a third person in the first person, kind of like the Downey Sherlock Holmes movies but not. More like a surveillance system if you will where you are keeping track of your surroundings while reacting, anticipating, planning and executing in a semi active way where you are watching choices being made even though you are the one making them, with a funky time dilation effect which is slow and fast at the same time. What sucks is it only works in extreme stress situations. Its very hard to accurately describe let alone repeat. The really disturbing one is where you "wake up" for lack of a better term, and have no idea what you what you were doing, how you got to where you were, and a significant amount of time has passed. Imagine having an autopilot feature you have no recollection ever turning on or even having.

 

[reinaert]

I must be a weird one then. I couldn't visualize anything in my head to save my life, yet for some reason I can put it to a medium like paper as well as I can use the particular medium. I can draw ok then I can translate "visualizations" ok. The better I know a medium the better the "visualization". The really weird part is I have really vivid dreams. I can remember faces very well. I cant remember a name to save my life. I can talk and analyze the conversation in real time. I can have a full conversation with myself and am known to verbalize it frequently which freaks people out. They walk in on me talking to myself, usually when I am concentrating on something. In times of extreme stress I split into an observer, actor dual mindset. That's a really really weird one where you become a third person in the first person, kind of like the Downey Sherlock Holmes movies but not. More like a surveillance system if you will where you are keeping track of your surroundings while reacting, anticipating, planning and executing in a semi active way where you are watching choices being made even though you are the one making them, with a funky time dilation effect which is slow and fast at the same time. What sucks is it only works in extreme stress situations. Its very hard to accurately describe let alone repeat. The really disturbing one is where you "wake up" for lack of a better term, and have no idea what you what you were doing, how you got to where you were, and a significant amount of time has passed. Imagine having an autopilot feature you have no recollection ever turning on or even having.

This may seem like an odd, out of the blue question, but are you prone to sleep paralysis or other parasomnias(in addition to the time loss/lapse)?

 

[PirateMk1]

This may seem like an odd, out of the blue question, but are you prone to sleep paralysis or other parasomnias(in addition to the time loss/lapse)?

Not that I am aware of. That autopilot thing occurs very rarely, but when it does, it is very disjointing. I think it has to do with when I am heavily concentrating on something to the exclusion of other things and I am at it good while. Its almost like I was asleep, but I wasn't, a least I don't think.

 

[LadyCaptain]

Do you know if she ever felt her way of thinking as a kind of perceiving of probability - a knowing the heft of an idea, event, or situation's likelihood?

Has she found that she feels herself to be less labile and emotionally febrile than most other people?

And, while I am being shamelessly intrusive, does she read very fast and comprehensively and know her own responses and mind about what she reads very quickly?

those are some questions I can ask her. She also has bipolar disorder so her emotions are probably more on the surface than the norm.

She is obviously a very good reader. I can get more info from her the next time we talk

 

[brianpatrick]

Yes. Unless you consider choices before acting you are monomaniacal.

I don’t think this is true. I very rarely consider choices before acting. I’m not mind blind either. I can think in words and pictures. It’s not that I wouldn’t choose between pizza and burritos for lunch, I might if someone offered a choice, but most things don’t require what seems like an extra layer of “consideration.” At one time I did, but it caused constant anxiety and stress, and one day it just stopped. No idea why.

 

[Lord Tammerlain]

I must be a weird one then. I couldn't visualize anything in my head to save my life, yet for some reason I can put it to a medium like paper as well as I can use the particular medium. I can draw ok then I can translate "visualizations" ok. The better I know a medium the better the "visualization". The really weird part is I have really vivid dreams. I can remember faces very well. I cant remember a name to save my life. I can talk and analyze the conversation in real time. I can have a full conversation with myself and am known to verbalize it frequently which freaks people out. They walk in on me talking to myself, usually when I am concentrating on something. In times of extreme stress I split into an observer, actor dual mindset. That's a really really weird one where you become a third person in the first person, kind of like the Downey Sherlock Holmes movies but not. More like a surveillance system if you will where you are keeping track of your surroundings while reacting, anticipating, planning and executing in a semi active way where you are watching choices being made even though you are the one making them, with a funky time dilation effect which is slow and fast at the same time. What sucks is it only works in extreme stress situations. Its very hard to accurately describe let alone repeat. The really disturbing one is where you "wake up" for lack of a better term, and have no idea what you what you were doing, how you got to where you were, and a significant amount of time has passed. Imagine having an autopilot feature you have no recollection ever turning on or even having.

There is the one underpass on my drive to work, for whatever reason most days I pass under it and don't recall doing when I am driving. I will often say to myself when did I pass under it. Each and every other road feature I recall very well, and consider myself to a very good memory, except for names and spelling

 

[Mycroft]

Shukra.

No. That's not it.

For one, that word is not Buddhist. It's Hindu. And second, it is commonly associated with Yoga.

No, the word I'm looking for is Samatha.

 

[Grizzly Adams]

Do you have a dialog with yourself? That is different than an inner monologue.

Both.