• Ibaudia@lemmy.worldEnglish
    13·
    7 months ago

    I’m one of the 5-10%. I always sucked at verbal memory tasks. Didn’t know some people have an real, interpretable internal monologue until a few years ago. I thought thinking nonverbally was the default. I even specifically remember watching shows and movies where you listen to a character’s internal internal monologue and thinking “this is dumb, that’s not how thinking works”. Turns out it is, and I’m just in the minority! Now I make an effort to manually start an internal monologue when I’m doing anything that requires a lot of verbal processing, like listening to instructions at work. It helps, but I can still tell that I have a deficit compared to most people when it comes to those things.

    • Schmoo@slrpnk.netEnglish
      8·
      7 months ago

      Your anecdote seems to support that it’s a learned behavior/skill, which tracks for me. I have a very active internal dialogue that’s difficult to turn off. I say dialogue instead of monologue because I often make up “other voices” that bounce ideas off each other, and this generally happens without my conscious effort. I think I developed this because as I was growing up I was encouraged to pray regularly, and I was very fanatically religious as a kid so I did so as often as I could. I prayed silently so often in fact that my thoughts were basically a constant one-sided monologue directed to god. Whenever I would daydream or let my imagination wander I would imagine god responding, and eventually the constant monologue became a dialogue. I would work out problems or make decisions by having conversations with an imaginary god. When I stopped believing in god the second voice never went away, I just started recognizing it as my own.

      • Ibaudia@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        7 months ago

        Okay, now I have to know if religious individuals are more likely to have an inner voice. That just makes sense!!!

    • Elextra@literature.cafeEnglish
      1·
      7 months ago

      TIL. I’m one of the 5-10% as well!! I have not noticed a deficit in verbal memory… I’m more interested reading the comments and learning today that people have inner voices?!?

      • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        7 months ago

        Basically if I know you well I hear your voice in my head argue for a pov I know you hold. If you are say a safety-first kinda guy I will hear you lecture me when I am not being safe. I got a committee arguing all the time and I admit it sometimes becomes hard to remember if I mentioned X to my mental version of someone or the real someone.

        Yes I am aware that the voices I hear are not real. It is just the way my brain is presenting information to itself. Like writing down notes in different colored inks. It is all the same letters and words but with an added change.

    • troglodytis@lemmy.worldEnglish
      1·
      7 months ago

      You get to think in ways that other people can’t. You actually have a super power. Don’t sleep on that! You rock