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How does your internal monologue work? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) by SubArcticTundra@lemmy.ml to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

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For me there's two separate participants, a 'talker' and a 'listener'. My mind identifies more with the talker, because that's the one that has agency. Since there are two participants, both of which are me, I talk in 1st person plural ('we've got to do ...', 'we thought about this earlier'). I stopped being afraid of being alone after I started having an internal dialogue around the age of 11, since having a second participant in the conversation meant I was always in company.

Edit: Wow, looks like there's a lot more diversity in this than I was expecting

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[–] agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.works 11 points 2 days ago (2 children)

My base thoughts are non-verbal. Sometimes I describe it like shapes in a hyperdimensional vector space.

My internal monologue is basically just practicing translating these base thoughts into language, to explain concepts to others.

[–] amelia@feddit.org 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

This describes my mind pretty accurately. Except for one thing: the hyperdimensional vector space thoughts are usually accompanied by a soundtrack of some stupid song I got stuck in my head for the last 3 days.

[–] agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 day ago

Songs get churned into the vector space. When there's a song stuck in my head, I'm thinking about songs with similar timbre, similar time signature, similar chord progressions. I'm remixing hooks and adding parody lyrics. The stupider the song, the more intricate the fugues and variations.

And everything draws me to cusps, inflection points, local extrema, global extrema. There are "pure" or "right" configurations of thought that scratch an internal itch for elegance. Maybe that elegance is revelatory, bringing me closer to a more profound understanding of the universe around me. Maybe every line of It's Still Rock and Roll to Me ends with the words "a bright orange pair of pants". I trust the process.

[–] ada@piefed.blahaj.zone 3 points 2 days ago

This analogy started to feel particularly accurate for my own experience when I started learning a second language. I realised that I wasn't learning what one word meant in another language, but instead, attaching the two words to a deeper idea/concept. It means that I'd often understand what I was hearing, but even when I was listening in my new language, I didn't automatically have the translation to my native language (English).

And my thoughts/internal experience is like that. I can pull the words out to describe the thing, but the actual thought itself, the concept that I'm using the word to describe is where I would say my thoughts naturally sit