Not Everybody Has an Inner Voice: Behavioral Consequences of Anendophasia - https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976241243004
Anyone with anendophasia care to opine on their experience?
But it’s more than that. I don’t have any conscious notions of thought at all. It’s much more like these guys in the tv show Severance who stare at numbers until “it feels right”.
The end result just pops into my head, often just as a feeling, not even as anything graspable, and only takes semantic shape when I say it out loud or write it. And even when I write it, it continues — it’s like a constant irking feeling of calibration that never feels quite right until it does.
There is one exception: demi-sleep is the only state where I can ruminate (e.g. stress-related), but then it's also non-verbal -- more like a combination of images and sensations. It's hard for me to put into words (no pun intended)...
Would you say you're a visual thinker, or is there no imagery either? I'm trying to imagine (ha) how someone can think without words or images. The closest I can relate to is when I'm playing music, like the piano, there is a thinking process - even problem solving - without any concrete concepts internally, no words, colors or forms, not even sounds. Now that I think about it, I get into that mode of non-verbal (and non-visual) thinking sometimes when I'm doing math or writing software. It's like thinking by doing, often through an external medium - shaping code, numbers and operations, music or art as it's happening.
> stare at numbers until “it feels right”
I think most people do this sometimes, consciously or not, but just not as their dominant mode of thinking. How interesting.
Perhaps it was more common in the past, or in some subcultures like a Buddhist monastery. Or among animals and plants, their "thinking process", problem-solving without words.
I lack conscious visual imagery. I can't recall faces of loved ones or really "see" scenes from memory in a way that feels visually coherent. Even though I have practiced drawing and painting at times, I cannot render people, animals, nor landscapes from memory. I would need a live model or reference photo. I could draw or paint fictional scenes or more basic forms, but would struggle with anything life-like without a reference. I can recognize it is flawed, but cannot summon the missing bits.
I also lack any inner monologue. My thinking is not verbal. It is extra work I have to do to cast ideas into words after I've already thought them up. I can think about words as a task, but I don't think in words. This interviewing strategy also sounds like a nightmare to me. I could talk at length about "how I think" in some philosophical or psychological mode, but I cannot recite a real thought process as if it is a sequence of verbalizable intermediate steps. That's just absurdly ill-fitting to me.
By contrast, I have a pretty strong inner stage for proprioception and a sense of spatial relationships or topology for both real 3D and 4D (space-time) structures. If I focus, I can nearly invoke physical sensation by imagining falls, spins, impact, flight, etc. This can also involuntarily engage my inner audio stage, where I might imagine corresponding sound effects.
There is a first-person and third-person version of my spatial stage. I can sometimes think about a dynamic stage, i.e. the 3D stuff moving, but more often this turns into a more static sense of a stage that includes motion vector information. (Alas, this hasn't made me a dancer nor given me appreciation for choreography...) I don't know how to describe this to people though. I don't "see" it. I feel or know it. It may have a perspective-like projection to it, favoring or enlarging the near space, but it doesn't have occlusion, lighting, or other visual qualia.
Sometimes, but not always, I cast more abstract thinking onto topological structures that map into this spatial stage. Then I can "feel" the shape of a problem, problem space, or search process over that.
As I mentioned above, I do have an inner audio stage. I can think about arbitrary sound and it has an experience like a faint version of real-time hearing on a secondary channel. There are intensity and frequency qualia, timing and rhythm, etc. It can convey harmony, noise, sharp attacks, etc. At the extremes, I can nearly induce accompanying physical senses like a deep bass thumping my chest or a high-hat sizzling in my ear. But it's always sort of off in the corner as an apparatus I can access, without being mistaken for real hearing. This and real hearing can operate in parallel, though it is harder to attend to the inner stage if real hearing is overwhelmingly loud or full of semantic content.
When I think about words, it is sometimes in this audio stage. To some degree, I can remember people talking or run through hypothetical speech with intonation etc. It's a bit thinner on the audio qualia than other audio thinking, as I focus more on the semantic and emotional content and less on the sounds qualities. I know whose voice I am imagining, but it's not necessarily a rich or faithful synthesis of the sound qualia. Musical thoughts bring more of that richness.
But, I have another linguistic stage that is more symbolic. It's more like feeling the topology of the words, a bit like a parse tree, and less a real-time stream. It would be a mistake to say it is a visual process, as it morphs into semantic units in my spatial/topological stage. It can also abstract, thinking about the sequenced structure of sections, chapters, etc. rather than all the words.
Finally, all of the above-mentioned things feel like tools I can apply. They don't seem like "me" or my core thoughts. It is very difficult to describe my thoughts that happen behind the scenes in all this. There is a version of the above senses that represents my real, anchored, position in the world. And there are the extra, "imagining" versions that I can operate. My real self is some amorphous attention that flits among these.
(Probably) due to trauma effects, I have very high situational awareness. So, it's very rare that my attention can completely separate from the real-world monitoring. But I can deprioritize it a bit when I really focus on other problem solving, recall, or rumination. It's a bit like a mixing board that cuts from one blend to another with different levels of abruptness versus smooth blending or transition...