I’d want to look at what kinds of tasks / what kinds of thinking they are doing.
I don’t have specific examples in the literature of people without internal monologue but here’s a case of a person that apparently can do music without doing something very bound up with auditory imagination.
A case study of subject WD (male, 55) with sensory agnosia (auditory and visual) is reported. He describes his experiences with playing music to be similar to the experiences of people suffering from blindsight, maneuvering blindly in the auditory space, without the ability to imagine results of next move (hitting piano key). Yet after a long period of learning WD is able to improvise, surprising himself with correct cadencies, with no conscious influence on what he is playing. For him the only way to know what goes on in his brain is to act it out.
Anecdotal case: I worked with a person who claimed to have absolutely no inner monologue and “thinking in one’s head” seemed very weird to her. She’s one of the most elaborate arguers I know. A large part of her job at the time was argument mapping.
All I’ve read about dath ilan is the thing about moving houses around on wires. Where is it described what they do with language?
Mostly smeared across ProjectLawful (at least that’s where I read about all of it). Usually, it’s brought up when Keltham (the protagonist from dath ilan) gets irritated that Taldane (the language of the D&D world he was magically transported into) doesn’t have a short word (or doesn’t have a word at all) for an important concept that obviously should have a short word. Some excerpts (not necessarily very representative ones, just what I was able to find with quick search):
Occasionally Keltham thinks single-syllable or two-syllable words in Baseline that refer to mathematical concepts built on top of much larger bases, fluidly integrated into his everyday experience. link
The Baseline phrase for this trope is a polysyllabic monstrosity that would literally translate as Intrinsic-Characteristic Boundary-Edge. A translation that literal would be misleading; the second word-pair of Boundary-Edge is glued together in the particular way that indicates a tuple of words has taken on a meaning that isn’t a direct sum of the original components. A slight lilt or click of spoken Baseline; a common punctuation-marker in written Baseline. link
“We’ve pretty much got a proverb in nearly those exact words, yeah.” He utters it in Baseline: an eight-syllable couplet, which rhymes and scans because Baseline was designed in part to make that proverb be a rhyming couplet. link
I don’t have specific examples in the literature of people without internal monologue but here’s a case of a person that apparently can do music without doing something very bound up with auditory imagination.
Anecdotal case: I worked with a person who claimed to have absolutely no inner monologue and “thinking in one’s head” seemed very weird to her. She’s one of the most elaborate arguers I know. A large part of her job at the time was argument mapping.
Mostly smeared across ProjectLawful (at least that’s where I read about all of it). Usually, it’s brought up when Keltham (the protagonist from dath ilan) gets irritated that Taldane (the language of the D&D world he was magically transported into) doesn’t have a short word (or doesn’t have a word at all) for an important concept that obviously should have a short word. Some excerpts (not necessarily very representative ones, just what I was able to find with quick search):