Add one to the sample size. My thought process is also mostly lacking in sensory modality. My thoughts do have a large verbal component, but they are almost exclusively for planning things that I could potentially say or write.
Rather than trying to justify how this works to the others, I will instead ask my own questions: How can words help in creating thoughts? In order to generate a sentence in your head, surely you must already know what you want to say. And if you already know what you have to say, what’s the point of saying it? I presume you cannot jump to the next thought without saying the previous one in full. With my own ability to generate sentences, that would be a crippling handicap.
My thoughts are largely made up of words. Although some internal experimentation has shown that my brain can still work when the internal monologue is silent, I still associate ‘thoughts’ very, very strongly with ‘internal monologue’.
I think that, while thoughts can exist without words, the word make the thoughts easier to remember; thus, the internal monologue is used as part of a ‘write-to-long-term-storage’ function. (I can write images and feelings as well; but words seem to be my default write-mode).
Also, the words—how shall I put this—the words solidify the thought. They turn the thought into something that I can then take and inspect for internal integrity. Something that I can check for errors; something that I can think about, instead of something that I can just think. Images can do the same, but take more working-memory space to hold and are thus harder to inspect as a whole.
I presume you cannot jump to the next thought without saying the previous one in full.
I don’t think I’ve ever tried. I can generate sentences fast enough that it’s not a significant delay, though. I suspect that this is simply due to long practice in sentence construction. (Also, if I’m not going to actually say it out loud, I don’t generally bother to correct it if it’s not grammatically correct).
I presume you cannot jump to the next thought without saying the previous one in full.
Personally, I can do this to degrees. I can skip verbalizing a concept completely, but it feels like inserting a hiccup into my train of thought (pardon the mixed analogy). I can usually safely skip verbalizing all of it; that is, it feels like I have a mental monologue but upon reflection it went by too fast to actually be spoken language so I assume it was actually some precursor that did not require full auditory representation. I usually only use full monologues when planning conversations in advance or thinking about a hard problem.
As far as I can tell, the process helps me ensure consistency in my thoughts by making my train of thought easier to hold on to and recall, and also enables coherence checking by explicitly feeding my brain’s output back into itself.
Now I’m worrying that I might have been exaggerating. Although you are implicitly describing your thoughts as being verbal, they seem to work in a way similar to mine.
ETA: More information: I still believe I am less verbal than you. In particular, I believe my thoughts become less verbal when thinking about hard problems are than becoming more so as in your case. However, my statement about my verbal thoughts being “almost exclusively for planning things that I could potentially say or write” is a half-truth; A lot of it is more along the lines that sometimes when I have an interesting thought I imagine explaining it to someone else. Some confounding factors:
There is a continuum here from completely nonverbal to having connotations of various words and grammatical structures to being completely verbal. I’m not sure when it should count as having an internal monologue.
Asking myself weather a thought was verbal naturally leads to create a verbalization of it, while not asking myself this creates a danger of not noticing a verbal thought.
I basing this a lot on introspection done while I am thinking about this discussion, which would make my thoughts more verbal.
Add one to the sample size. My thought process is also mostly lacking in sensory modality. My thoughts do have a large verbal component, but they are almost exclusively for planning things that I could potentially say or write.
Rather than trying to justify how this works to the others, I will instead ask my own questions: How can words help in creating thoughts? In order to generate a sentence in your head, surely you must already know what you want to say. And if you already know what you have to say, what’s the point of saying it? I presume you cannot jump to the next thought without saying the previous one in full. With my own ability to generate sentences, that would be a crippling handicap.
My thoughts are largely made up of words. Although some internal experimentation has shown that my brain can still work when the internal monologue is silent, I still associate ‘thoughts’ very, very strongly with ‘internal monologue’.
I think that, while thoughts can exist without words, the word make the thoughts easier to remember; thus, the internal monologue is used as part of a ‘write-to-long-term-storage’ function. (I can write images and feelings as well; but words seem to be my default write-mode).
Also, the words—how shall I put this—the words solidify the thought. They turn the thought into something that I can then take and inspect for internal integrity. Something that I can check for errors; something that I can think about, instead of something that I can just think. Images can do the same, but take more working-memory space to hold and are thus harder to inspect as a whole.
I don’t think I’ve ever tried. I can generate sentences fast enough that it’s not a significant delay, though. I suspect that this is simply due to long practice in sentence construction. (Also, if I’m not going to actually say it out loud, I don’t generally bother to correct it if it’s not grammatically correct).
Personally, I can do this to degrees. I can skip verbalizing a concept completely, but it feels like inserting a hiccup into my train of thought (pardon the mixed analogy). I can usually safely skip verbalizing all of it; that is, it feels like I have a mental monologue but upon reflection it went by too fast to actually be spoken language so I assume it was actually some precursor that did not require full auditory representation. I usually only use full monologues when planning conversations in advance or thinking about a hard problem.
As far as I can tell, the process helps me ensure consistency in my thoughts by making my train of thought easier to hold on to and recall, and also enables coherence checking by explicitly feeding my brain’s output back into itself.
Now I’m worrying that I might have been exaggerating. Although you are implicitly describing your thoughts as being verbal, they seem to work in a way similar to mine.
ETA: More information: I still believe I am less verbal than you. In particular, I believe my thoughts become less verbal when thinking about hard problems are than becoming more so as in your case. However, my statement about my verbal thoughts being “almost exclusively for planning things that I could potentially say or write” is a half-truth; A lot of it is more along the lines that sometimes when I have an interesting thought I imagine explaining it to someone else. Some confounding factors:
There is a continuum here from completely nonverbal to having connotations of various words and grammatical structures to being completely verbal. I’m not sure when it should count as having an internal monologue.
Asking myself weather a thought was verbal naturally leads to create a verbalization of it, while not asking myself this creates a danger of not noticing a verbal thought.
I basing this a lot on introspection done while I am thinking about this discussion, which would make my thoughts more verbal.