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Comment by thinkingemote | Hacker News Reader

I would imagine the answer would be; the same way you would talk about the concepts out loud to someone else.

> the same way you would talk about the concepts out loud to someone else.

But isn't this extremely exhausting and time-consuming? And if it indeed works this way, then where do you think the idea you are trying to formulate in your inner monologue comes from?

I suspect the author is exaggerating a bit when he says it's the only way he thinks. I also have the "narrative voice" but I absolutely can think about things without the voice, it just doesn't feel as much like "thinking", if that makes sense.

There are some things that are explicitly visualized, like an object I'm thinking about, where I wouldn't say in my head "I am imagining the sun. It is bright. Etc. etc.". I'd just picture the sun, and my "narrative" would probably be about why I was thinking about the sun, not describing it.

Same applies for more abstract concepts, just without the visualization.

This is how it seems for me, too. When I pay attention to what I am doing, it seems as if I am thinking in complete sentences, but if I then try to write down the idea that I have just been thinking about, I find that it takes a lot of editing to turn it into coherent language. Furthermore, I cannot really say anything about what it is like to think when I am not paying attention to doing so, so maybe it is just how I explain my experience of thinking to myself.

Perhaps experiments using techniques such as PET scans might reveal if there is something more characteristically linguistic going on in those of us who feel we have an internal monologue.

So how do you think about something that you can't describe to someone else? There are many things I can deeply understand, but turning that understanding into natural language takes considerable effort.

Are people with internal monologues incapable of understanding things they can't verbalize? Or is it that their brain just instantly verbalizes thoughts after the thoughts have already been formed? The latter seems a bit more likely to me, but I imagine it must be very lossy at times. (That is, the verbal monologue is merely a summary of the thought.) I often have thoughts that take only an instant, but would take many sentences to verbalize.

At least for me, part of the internal monologue is internal visualization too. Those things you don't understand but you "see" how it should work.

> The latter seems a bit more likely to me, but I imagine it must be very lossy at times.

I would say that my internal monologue is kinda a summary, and is a bit lossy.

> I often have thoughts that take only an instant, but would take many sentences to verbalize.

I would not say that my internal monologue happens at speech-speed either, it can be much faster, and the actual idea or thought is still instantaneous. The monologue is more about rationalizing or understanding your thought.

Neither; having an internal monologue doesn't necessarily mean you're constantly using it for everything, much like having speech. Though I would say it's harder to prevent oneself from "monologuizing" too much (particularly in situation of anxiety, and such) than from speaking too much, hence the meditation techniques designed to help with that. But no, at least for me there's no automatic verbalization of all thoughts.

This is good question. Personally I have a hard time imagining what it's like to have a deep understanding of something non-trivial without having arrived at that understanding through language.

Let me ask you this though: how do you know you understand it? If you've never rendered your idea into language, or seen/heard it put that way, then it has never been criticized or vetted by anyone else.

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