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
My internal monologue is constant. Unless I’m using my language processing capacity for something else (e.g. listening to a podcast or reading text) then my brain is full of verbal diarrhoea. I’ll count each step on my way up a staircase just to fill the dead air in my head.
This is pretty close to my experience, including the counting.
I was surprised to learn that not everyone counts things like stairs automatically.
Sometimes the monologue is so loud I end up accidentally vocalising (whispering) it. I think it might be partially caused by the fact I have ADHD and a monologue like this is a way to keep my brain stimulated (thought wise, but also socially) when there’s no input from the outside.
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.
My mind is mostly pretty quiet. My internal monologue is used for figuring stuff out and making observations/giving myself a warning (ie: that person is lying). It doesn’t narrate anything. I only speak first person with myself. I have difficulty remembering my internal monologue so I’ve made it a habit to write down my observations and then synthesize them. Also my internal monologue is quiet and any kind of noise interrupts it.
Insults, low humor and slurs are screeched at full volume in the cadence and rhyme scheme of a one hit wonder song from thirty years ago and I just smartly choose to not externalize any of it.
Hey, that’s really similar to how mine is! Minus the slurs, thankfully, lol. But I get it.
Right now, in my head, it’s a mix of Rump Shaker by Wreckx-N-Effect and Smells Like Teen Spirit by Nirvana except that the lyrics are re-written to be horrible and mean to me, about hating myself, telling me to kill myself, I should be hit by a car, I should be stabbed in the face, etc. I am not a healthy person. :D There’s usually plenty of dark/low humor and fucked up jokes I’d never say thrown in there, too. There’s also often a voice that goes “hey, that’s not helpful, be nice to yourself! You wouldn’t treat anyone else this way!” 'cause I really am trying to be better. That and like a shotgun blast of a million other different trains of thought mixed in. It’s chaotic in there.
What are you thinking of, sweetheart?
Rewriting the lyrics of in the end to be about holding open doors for ppl at the grocery store and then carrying a heavy bag for someone.
Blackpink zip hoodie with the plastic choker, baditz maru lunchbox purse: aww, you’re sweet
2xl indecipherable metal tee, greasy hair, visible cutting scars: hello, hr?
Woah, you just listen to a lot of music
For me the internal monologue is exactly the same as my ‘external’ monologue when I tell people about myself or do something together with someone and explain my actions. So it’s always first person singular, for example: “I’ve reflected on this multiple times but still don’t quite understand it”, “Okay, I need to turn right now” or “God I’m so freaking tired of this shit! I’m done. Fuck them all”. There’s no internal split and if I was saying what I’m thinking out loud in front of someone, it’d sound completely normal.
I think this is the closest to my experience. Maybe it has to do with the fact that I’ve been writing and expressing my opinions online for so long that I can “stream of consciousness” whatever I’m currently thinking into text
This is what I experience, and consider normal.
I’m surprised at the range of responses.
Mine is just constant words. Constant narration of everything. With occasional music breaks, because there’s always pop music going through my head too.
Me too. In fact my stream before this was “Jesus this is taking so long to load wtf. I should take this as a sign to go to bed. Oh… My meds wore off. I’m thinking ALL the words again. Man I’m glad people can’t hear my thoughts. Well, it probably would’ve made the ADHD diagnosis easier. Oh hey, it finally loaded!”
Anyone else having hella load times on Lemmy lately or is it just my app or instance? Lol
Same lol
I don’t have one. No sound and no detailed images.
No monologue, no images, no sound. Just… concepts. It’s a bit weird.
Even weirder is that I can actually conjure images while asleep (or about to sleep, or barely just woke up).
I loved books as a kid, but never understood why people preferred them to movies where you could actually picture what is happening on the page. It took me until my mid 20s to figure out my experience was different to other people’s.
I can get lost in my imagination, it’s just not visual or auditory
I have the same. I believe it’s aphantasia, but I am self-diagnosed so I could be wrong.
I found out about this a couple years ago when my wife started a conversation with me like “do you know some people can’t picture things?”. I had several follow up questions because I thought it was just a figure of speech for the first ~30 years of my life.
My internal voice is exactly like me speaking out loud. If I don’t “speak” in my mind there’s nothing, just like if I don’t speak I’m not saying anything out loud.
It’s layered.
At the base level it’s just a mix of a kind of old tv static and what sounds like a creek bubbling. It’s the pre-verbalization soup- textured with sub-thoughts, half-impulses, emotional currents. It’s noticeable background noise but not particularly loud.
Above that is another layer of multiple streams of wordage. Just kind of nonsensical whispers that flow around non-stop. Sometimes there are also impressions of images but nothing definitive. Emotional tones are strongest here.
Above that is the focused wordage, or the internal monologue. Usually it’s proposed point or observation by one “me” and counter-point or add-on by another “me”. There’s no set number of "me"s. Occasionally it’s a construct of some other people I know. Just tangential rambling in incomplete sentences mostly unless I am really trying to sort something out, then it’s more structured. There’s a part of my mind that seems to calculate the conclusion to what I am mentally verbalizing that is one step ahead of the words so often there isn’t a need to complete a thought. This is also where the music and images play.
There is one more layer above all that, the working space, when I really focus, all the other layers fade from consciousness, words are clear, sharp, and coherent and the back-and-forth feels more like a unified “me”, it’s also where I deliberately create and manipulate mental images, movies, concoct scenarios and music plays the clearest.
Stream of consciousness, very much like Ulysses but even less readable.
I probably shouldn’t answer this tbh.
I have three main “voices”, plus a couple of situational ones. As you say, a talker that’s mostly “me”, my conscious self. A listener that isn’t just a listener that’s essentially my subconscious throwing up images and memory in response to my conscious self. Then there’s the other self, the third thoughts, the meta mind, whatever you want to call it.
That third voice is observing the “conversation”, and making commentary and corrections as needed. Like “that’s not how that really happened” when images flash up that are nebulous. Or “no, that’s not who you want to be, stop being a dick” when my conscious self is under stress. Or “go fuck yourself” when thoughts triggered by mental health issues come up.
Plus, and this isn’t some kind of bullshit DID¹ thing, I have fictional characters in my head. There’s this thing I do when I write or DM where I kinda spool up a virtual machine in my head where a character “lives”. These aren’t real entities, they aren’t split off from me, they’re just a construct that’s useful. They can be “deleted”, they don’t take over, nothing like that.
I can, however, have conversations with them if I do a bit of mental prep work to sort of fake forget that it’s just my imagination playing a game with itself. I used to participate in some Mastodon writing prompt hashtags and I’d sort of interview my characters with them sometimes surprising me with what they said. Alas, the instance I used shut down without warning, and I didn’t have a recent backup, so I lost most of it.
While I was writing that paragraph, one of my characters got switched on for a second and grumped at me. I know it’s not a person, it’s all imagination. But it is a fucking trip anyway.
Yeeeears ago, I was running a game. It included a deity coming back to life. During the process, I had been wrapping my head around what they’d be like, and one of the players had communed with the deity a good bit. During a session, the player had their character call on the god to manifest. My ass just started talking as the deity. Full on zero conscious control over what came out. It felt creepy but cool. This imaginary part of myself took over, my voice changed, I stood up and moved around, but none of it was “me”. My conscious mind was starting to freak the fuck out a little because it felt like the imaginary thing was taking over.
That wasn’t the last time it happened, but I’ve never been able to make it happen. Well, not to that degree anyway.
I guess what I’m saying is that my internal monologue isn’t a monologue. Shit gets loud up in here.
Edit: ¹
My bullshit DID thing, I don’t mean that did isn’t real. I mean that it isn’t me pretending to have DID or some other dissociative disorder. People do that, and it’s fucking weird
Hey same!
My thoughts are a constant flood of characters or quips in different voices and tones.
DM ing for me was work but also a true flow state because it gave all this general chaos individual purpose. I’d like to think it lead to good sessions!
And when long running or important characters would eventually meet in game, I’d sometimes get carried away having conversations in multiple characters with myself. One time it went on for several minutes before the table just started laughing.
The amount I relate to this is… A lot lol. Down to that deiety thing. Not exactly that but I have a knack for just letting IDK what take over sometimes. Friend in a crisis and I have no idea how to help? Sit back and jet it happen.
The human brain is wild!
Truth!
can relate to some degree kinda.
Wow, that’s really sophisticated. I don’t think my mind would have the capacity/bandwidth to play a totally independent, second active participant
In fairness, I have a weird capacity that’s the opposite of aphantasia. Some people can’t picture things in their minds, the same way some people don’t have an inner voice. I call my thing hyperphantasia.
When I’m reading a book (or writing something), I can see and hear things as they’re described to the extent that I stop perceiving the real world fully. If the author describes smells, I sometimes get those. It’s a very immersive experience beyond what I’ve seen other people describe as their inner imagery. I’ve even gotten hints of feelings on skin if I’m deep enough and the descriptions are right.
I know I’m not the only person that experiences things that way, but it does seem to be rare based on responses when I talk about it online.
I hadn’t thought about it much, but mine is just first person, same as the way I type or talk. In fact I think much of my internal monologue is actually pretend or planning conversations.
For me it’s like there’s a council in my head, but they’re all me. One takes the center and the rest are all around, in the “room” in my head. Each one is a specialist at a different thing, which includes one of them who is always putting on a performance of a song.
So far I’ve identified:
- A singer
- A problem-solving orchestrator (gets all the others to collaborate)
- A lover (occasionally pines for affection, loves being cutesy)
- A joker (shouts jokes over the rest of the voices)
- 3-5 non specialists that just deliberate about things
- A writer (functions as my inner monologue when I’m writing something)
My wife will poke fun at me because sometimes I’ll end up narrating my own thought processes with “we” and she’s like “Got a mouse in your purse?”
Start the coup
Hmm interesting, that’s similar to me with those multiple characters being you. Plus the talking in 1st person plural
For me, well its a pre-verbalization of anything I am about to do or say.
Even typing this out I am speaking each word.
If I am getting into bed, I think “I need to do xyz”.
sometimes its inquisitive, such as when I debate over choices ranking them over each other, or when I am processing what someone says or does.
“Why did they do that? It could be this or that”.
When I was younger I had developed a minor personality split in order to compensate for neglect and bullying. They were nice to talk to, and helped me processs emotions and feel not alone. They merged back into my main personality sometime in highschool.
