Lack of inner monologue doesn’t mean lack of thoughts. People without an inner monologue just don’t think in words. They can still think up concepts and ideas like everyone else.
As someone with an inner monologue, how do they think?
I just think in concepts/abstractions, I don’t know how to explain it, lol.
I definitely don’t think in pictures, like other person said. My mind can’t create pictures out of thin air. That might be more like artists think I guess.
I am very very much not an artist, and yet also cannot imagine not being able to conjure up images of whatever.
It is fascinating how the brain works! Even if we barely understand it!
There was a thread on r/SamHarris (maybe 2 years ago) where some people without inner monologue answered questions. It was interesting to read.
Conservatives explained.
I process thoughts visually, as typed text. It’s like a fucking ticker tape when I get going having random thoughts and I definitely experience shower thoughts.
I distinctly recall thinking inner monologues were a “neat idea” after seeing them on TV as a child and thinking it would be a useful skill to learn. I never did though
Do people without an inner monologue “hear” the words they read as they read them?
Many people do not hear as they read. In fact the skill of speed-reading depends on turning the auditory experience off:
There are three types of reading:
- Subvocalization: sounding out each word internally, as reading to oneself. This is the slowest form of reading.
- Auditory reading: hearing out the read words. This is a faster process.
- Visual reading: understanding the meaning of the word, rather than sounding or hearing. This is the fastest process.
Subvocalization readers (Mental readers) generally read at approximately 250 words per minute, auditory readers at approximately 450 words per minute and visual readers at approximately 700 words per minute. Proficient readers are able to read 280–350 wpm without compromising comprehension.
Nice. I’m definitely in the auditory reading category. I tend to just pick out the key words in a sentence when I am trying to read faster.
I do in monotonous “voice”, yeah. Unless I know what voice somebody could have, then I use that voice instead. Usually happens when character that appears in the book also is portrayed by some actor in a movie or a video game.
Is it just quiet all the time?
Nah, I get background music because I don’t need “sound” for my thoughts. Generally it’s nice, sometimes it’s baby shark
Sometimes it’s only baby shark D:
Yes, but if it’s too loud in the real world I stop thinking oddly enough, and in many cases I am not able to speak clearly. That might be an autistic trait though.
I can’t tell whether I’m envious or scared
Buddy you can just think out loud in the shower, nobody will stop you. For that matter you can think I got a lot pretty much anywhere, though you do get looks in the grocery store I find.
I don’t believe it
You don’t have to. It’s a thoroughly researched study, your belief in its existence is irrelevant.
I think you are completely misrepresenting the literature in the field. There has been decades of research on inner monologues, but whether anyone truly has no inner monologue is still a matter of debate, and suggesting that it could be as much as 50% is absolutely wild.
One recent example is Nedergaard and Lupyan (2024), who used questionnaires on 1,037 participants and found no one who reported a complete lack of inner speech. They did show a link between lower frequency of internal speech and lower performance on sole verbal cognitive tasks.
But this was frequently misreported in popular science news, which may be where you got the idea. For example, Science Daily’s headline “People without an inner voice have poorer verbal memory” and subheading “Between 5-10 per cent of the population do not experience an inner voice” certainly make some bold claims (although still well below your “up to 50%” statistic). But just a few lines into the article it’s been rephrase as “between 5-10 per cent of the population do not have the same experience of an inner voice”. This is more accurate, as all studies agree that there is a variety of experiences of inner voices / monologues, but a different experience is not the same as an absence.
In another comment you make reference to the experience sampling study (where a buzzer would sound and participants would record whether they were experiencing an inner monologue) which I assume is the work of Heavey and Hurlburt. It’s true that they claim that 5 of their 30 participants recorded no instances of inner voice, but let’s be clear about what the experimental procedure was: the participant would turn on the buzzer, which would buzz at a random time (an average of every 30 minutes) and the study was based on two periods of five samples. So, ten data points collected over approx five hours.
Even people with strong inner monologues report different frequencies of inner speech depending on their activities. Many people do not experience inner speech when actively engaging in other verbal activity - talking with friends, watching a video; while quiet focused activities such as golf show much higher reporting of inner speech. So the absence for five individuals of any inner speech during those ten particular samples is in no sense equievlant to “16% of peole have no inner monologue”. Indeed even the study’s authors acknowledge “it is possible that these participants may all have actually had quite similar inner experiences; it is merely the reports of those experiences that differed.”
Tldr: I think you’re making some very wild claims about this subject, without posting sources. No significant study I know of claims that any sizable percentage of the population have no inner voice, (although there certainly is an interesting variety in how frequent and clearly it is experienced.)
Up to as much as more than half of all people.
Yeah, my bottom half also doesn’t have an inner monologue.
