What do other people subjectively experience when they are thinking? To me its like talking to myself (in verbal english sentences) but I’m told that isn’t universal.
I’m definitely an internal-monologue thinker. I’ve tried breaking myself from it and going into pure thought(which feels like it ought to be an option, because I know how the sentence I’m thinking will end when I’m halfway through, and I’ve successfully tested breaking monologue and still proceeding with the mental understanding of what I was going to think), but I spend more time thinking “No! Stop monologuing!” than I save by not monologuing.
The most common for me are verbal (if I think while taking a walk, I basically talk to myself), spatial/kinesthetic (which key on my ring goes to this door again?), and visual/symbolic (integrate Sin(Ln(x))/x dx). But there’s plenty more stuff I’d call thinking.
Verbal and symbolic thinking are often just expressions of conceptual problem-solving, where my brain can actually fit concepts together rather than just talking. Like in the integral above—I pattern-match it to the general concept “change of variables,” without using words or symbols, and then after a second or so of brewing I can examine the idea in terms of symbols and words.
Most idle thought comes across as a mental conversation.
Math (Calculus, Numeric Methods, structural design stuff, not actually numbers) is visualized as shapes, patterns, trends.
And decision making is more felt than anything else, where the attractiveness, consequences, and uncertainty of opposing ideas are weighted side my side.
I experience a thought all at once, usually without words or images. I sometimes reflexively start verbalizing thoughts internally at a spoken-conversation rate. I tend not to think of this inner monologue as the content of my thought but some incidental surface activity. It trails off after a couple words, since I already knew the entire verbalization before I even started inner-monologuing it.
Visualization and imagined conversations both feel very different from this and from each other.
Folks who are more verbal: do you talk to yourself in real time? How does reading feel in comparison? When you recall a conversation, do you re-verbalize the content? Can you speak without knowing what you’re about to say beforehand? (I’m pretty sure I can’t.)
Slightly faster. (Also, my inner monologue is usually in standard, formal language, whereas when I actually talk to people I tend to use many more regional colloquialisms.)
How does reading feel in comparison?
Usually faster, because I’m processing existing content rather than generating it from scratch. But when I’m reading stuff by people whose voice I’m familiar with, or poetry, I tend to subvocalize much more vividly, and pretty much in real time.
When you recall a conversation, do you re-verbalize the content?
Sometimes I do; other times, I can’t even remember what language it was in.
Can you speak without knowing what you’re about to say beforehand?
I usually do in small talk, but not in technical conversations. (And in the former, I sometimes stop myself mid-sentence because I don’t like what I’ve said or I come up with something better to say, and immediately start an entirely new sentence.)
Can you speak without knowing what you’re about to say beforehand? (I’m pretty sure I can’t.)
I can, though when I do, it’s often consists of regurgitating bits and peices from long mental monlogues that I had in the past, with a bit of new content thrown in to make things flow better (specifically, the one where I articulated my experience with pre-thinking what I’m going to say years in advance occured nearly four years ago, in my senior year of high school, while sitting in a Spanish Class).
Can you speak without knowing what you’re about to say beforehand? (I’m pretty sure I can’t.)
One way to get there is to just spend an hour to say every thought that pop into your mind. After some time you stop filtering and the thoughts that flow out.
Often times it doesn’t feel like anything. I just tell my mind to think about something, pause and wait while it’s thinking, and then ask for the best answer.
Mostly like that, with things mentioned in the other replies occasionally interspersed, their admixture varying depending on what kind of topic I’m thinking of, and my mental state (whether I’m fatigued, whether I’ve been reading a lot in the past couple days, whether I’ve been drinking, etc.)
I also think primarily verbally, but I have a friend who thinks (in their own words) “in raw abstract thoughts interspersed with occasional dialogue and imagery.”
I call it thought qualia, because it is something I clearly experience but it is a sensory qualia. (Interestingly, this is the first time I’m using the term in public). It can have sensory conotations, though, and I sometimes have thoughts which are clearly verbal or visual.
When I’m not in the mood to talk to people- not out of anger, I’m just not feeling a desire to share my thoughts- I think in pictures and feelings with a reticent, sarcastic monologue. When I’m alone but feeling social, my monologue is wordy and sometimes witty. When I’m in a conversation, I often have to stop talking for a moment to think through what I’m going to say before I can say it.
Bottom line, I almost always have some kind of monologue; sometimes it’s talkative, sometimes nearly silent.
I construct (vague) imagery of dynamic simulation/tangible flavor (similar to remembered perception of simplified/idealized physical systems and of interaction with them, sometimes without relevant spatial component, as a collection of a few related objects). This gives more explicitly accessible mental models of ideas (such as examples of standard mathematical structures, situations arising in specific problems, designs of pieces of software, etc.) that can be inspected/developed/debugged in a directed fashion (constructing a novel model together with actions that allow manipulating it can take hours, mostly because enough details/skills have to be committed to long term memory for the whole thing to work, attention is too small; more familiar things can be reconstructed in the focus of attention in about a minute or so).
Sometimes repeating a word or two a few times in a loop helps to force focus on a topic/construction. I never use internal monologue (it doesn’t seem to do anything helpful), but writing down half-formed thoughts can help with organizing them (I guess mostly by lifting short term memory limitations).
I feel a narrative that goes along with my thinking but does not seem to me to be the thinking itself. I do a lot of my work visually, when I am on a roll I will generate 100s of matlab plots a day as part of my sorting through stuff. Certainly as I look at the plots I narrate what I think I’m seeing, but it seems that what I think I’m seeing comes before my pushing that into narration comes. So I think I actually do some of my thinking visually, but it is hard to put how that feels in to words. Maybe as a movie script?
It makes sense that your thinking could be both wordy and picturey, and even audio (non-words). And even body feel. From my reading (suggest Jeff Hawkins book on the brain) thinking activity shows up as activity in verbal and visual areas of the brain.
What do other people subjectively experience when they are thinking? To me its like talking to myself (in verbal english sentences) but I’m told that isn’t universal.
A combination of that and brief flashes of visual imagery.
I’m definitely an internal-monologue thinker. I’ve tried breaking myself from it and going into pure thought(which feels like it ought to be an option, because I know how the sentence I’m thinking will end when I’m halfway through, and I’ve successfully tested breaking monologue and still proceeding with the mental understanding of what I was going to think), but I spend more time thinking “No! Stop monologuing!” than I save by not monologuing.
The most common for me are verbal (if I think while taking a walk, I basically talk to myself), spatial/kinesthetic (which key on my ring goes to this door again?), and visual/symbolic (integrate Sin(Ln(x))/x dx). But there’s plenty more stuff I’d call thinking.
Verbal and symbolic thinking are often just expressions of conceptual problem-solving, where my brain can actually fit concepts together rather than just talking. Like in the integral above—I pattern-match it to the general concept “change of variables,” without using words or symbols, and then after a second or so of brewing I can examine the idea in terms of symbols and words.
Most idle thought comes across as a mental conversation.
Math (Calculus, Numeric Methods, structural design stuff, not actually numbers) is visualized as shapes, patterns, trends.
And decision making is more felt than anything else, where the attractiveness, consequences, and uncertainty of opposing ideas are weighted side my side.
I experience a thought all at once, usually without words or images. I sometimes reflexively start verbalizing thoughts internally at a spoken-conversation rate. I tend not to think of this inner monologue as the content of my thought but some incidental surface activity. It trails off after a couple words, since I already knew the entire verbalization before I even started inner-monologuing it.
Visualization and imagined conversations both feel very different from this and from each other.
Folks who are more verbal: do you talk to yourself in real time? How does reading feel in comparison? When you recall a conversation, do you re-verbalize the content? Can you speak without knowing what you’re about to say beforehand? (I’m pretty sure I can’t.)
Slightly faster. (Also, my inner monologue is usually in standard, formal language, whereas when I actually talk to people I tend to use many more regional colloquialisms.)
Usually faster, because I’m processing existing content rather than generating it from scratch. But when I’m reading stuff by people whose voice I’m familiar with, or poetry, I tend to subvocalize much more vividly, and pretty much in real time.
Sometimes I do; other times, I can’t even remember what language it was in.
I usually do in small talk, but not in technical conversations. (And in the former, I sometimes stop myself mid-sentence because I don’t like what I’ve said or I come up with something better to say, and immediately start an entirely new sentence.)
I can, though when I do, it’s often consists of regurgitating bits and peices from long mental monlogues that I had in the past, with a bit of new content thrown in to make things flow better (specifically, the one where I articulated my experience with pre-thinking what I’m going to say years in advance occured nearly four years ago, in my senior year of high school, while sitting in a Spanish Class).
One way to get there is to just spend an hour to say every thought that pop into your mind. After some time you stop filtering and the thoughts that flow out.
If you don’t want to talk, writing is also good.
Often times it doesn’t feel like anything. I just tell my mind to think about something, pause and wait while it’s thinking, and then ask for the best answer.
Mostly like that, with things mentioned in the other replies occasionally interspersed, their admixture varying depending on what kind of topic I’m thinking of, and my mental state (whether I’m fatigued, whether I’ve been reading a lot in the past couple days, whether I’ve been drinking, etc.)
I also think primarily verbally, but I have a friend who thinks (in their own words) “in raw abstract thoughts interspersed with occasional dialogue and imagery.”
I wonder what a raw abstract thought is made of.
Mine is more like a congress, where I have multiple “me’s” having a conversation on a topic offering ideas and alternative hypotheses.
I call it thought qualia, because it is something I clearly experience but it is a sensory qualia. (Interestingly, this is the first time I’m using the term in public). It can have sensory conotations, though, and I sometimes have thoughts which are clearly verbal or visual.
When I’m not in the mood to talk to people- not out of anger, I’m just not feeling a desire to share my thoughts- I think in pictures and feelings with a reticent, sarcastic monologue. When I’m alone but feeling social, my monologue is wordy and sometimes witty. When I’m in a conversation, I often have to stop talking for a moment to think through what I’m going to say before I can say it.
Bottom line, I almost always have some kind of monologue; sometimes it’s talkative, sometimes nearly silent.
I construct (vague) imagery of dynamic simulation/tangible flavor (similar to remembered perception of simplified/idealized physical systems and of interaction with them, sometimes without relevant spatial component, as a collection of a few related objects). This gives more explicitly accessible mental models of ideas (such as examples of standard mathematical structures, situations arising in specific problems, designs of pieces of software, etc.) that can be inspected/developed/debugged in a directed fashion (constructing a novel model together with actions that allow manipulating it can take hours, mostly because enough details/skills have to be committed to long term memory for the whole thing to work, attention is too small; more familiar things can be reconstructed in the focus of attention in about a minute or so).
Sometimes repeating a word or two a few times in a loop helps to force focus on a topic/construction. I never use internal monologue (it doesn’t seem to do anything helpful), but writing down half-formed thoughts can help with organizing them (I guess mostly by lifting short term memory limitations).
I feel a narrative that goes along with my thinking but does not seem to me to be the thinking itself. I do a lot of my work visually, when I am on a roll I will generate 100s of matlab plots a day as part of my sorting through stuff. Certainly as I look at the plots I narrate what I think I’m seeing, but it seems that what I think I’m seeing comes before my pushing that into narration comes. So I think I actually do some of my thinking visually, but it is hard to put how that feels in to words. Maybe as a movie script?
It makes sense that your thinking could be both wordy and picturey, and even audio (non-words). And even body feel. From my reading (suggest Jeff Hawkins book on the brain) thinking activity shows up as activity in verbal and visual areas of the brain.
Some mixture of verbal thinking, and what I can only really describe as ‘thinking in rules’.