No Internal Monologue

Ren said:
Up until two years ago I flirted with the idea that language is always woven into thoughts, but I've distanced myself from that idea since then.

I find it surprising how easy it seems for some people to tell whether they think in words or in patterns. I'm quite familiar with the content of my thinking (and even the pattern of that content, i.e. I have a lot of recurring thoughts content-wise) but the form is less immediately recognisable. If I were to just concentrate on my experiences of thinking I would be at a loss to tell whether I favor thinking in words or in images/patterns.

It's only by looking at the kind of writing I do that I can work my way back by inference to the likely form of my thinking. Based on my writing I would say that it's about 50/50. There is a lot of verbal reasoning but equally a proliferation of images. Often the images are syntheses of different pieces of content connected with one another which it proves very difficult to translate into words when I write about them.
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I've heard people say that their thoughts are like a running dialogue. Like some supernatural narrator detailing the events of a persons life. Is this how you experience your inner monologue.
 
Words can say a lot, but images give an added depth. Words give the listener images and images give the speaker words. Their are limits to both and I think that is where the desire to explain thoughts uses them both. Kept internally they mount in both forms for me. Sorry if that does not make a bit of sense, but I am currently in a forest listening to @ruji generating images just absorbing...its all good. Great topic Wolly.
 
I have both abstract and verbal thinking. Particularly if I'm having a conversation or creating something, even when the creation is writing, I tap into some form of thinking I can't really describe but I guess it would fall under abstract. I just concentrate, my brain does something, and something comes out. Probably right brain stuff going on?

I can do verbal thinking as well, but I'd say it's slower, only at the speed at which one could speak. Both monologues and dialogues. Often the monologues are imagined snippets of conversation with someone, and I have had dialogues with invented characters. But that's rare, it happens only if I've spent several months writing a character.

I wonder how this affects things like language learning. I'm pretty good with languages, and I remember people saying they're happy with their competence when they don't need to translate in their head between their own language and the target language. But if my main form of thinking is non-verbal, I don't have to translate in the first place, so maybe the process is somewhere else, or doesn't go through the same area of the brain.

I'm not a very visual thinker. I recognize the idea so I'm capable of it, but it's weaker. Also, when I improvise music, I consider that a form of thinking as well, processing something.
 
Ren said:
But if you don't think in words at all, don't you experience great difficulty in articulating those thoughts in language?

I'm very curious.
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I can convert my thoughts into words very easily, but I can't do it in a way that other people will understand. Writing sentences that I will understand is easy. Writing sentences that others will understand is an entirely different challenge.

In what sense did you mean "difficulty in articulating those thoughts"? You could have meant something different.
 
wolly.green said:
I can convert my thoughts into words very easily, but I can't do it in a way that other people will understand. Writing sentences that I will understand is easy. Writing sentences that others will understand is an entirely different challenge.

In what sense did you mean "difficulty in articulating those thoughts"? You could have meant something different.
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No, I meant it exactly in the way you interpreted it.

What do you think makes your sentences difficult to understand for others? Is it the syntax of those sentences, the semantics, or both?
 
Ren said:
No, I meant it exactly in the way you interpreted it.

What do you think makes your sentences difficult to understand for others? Is it the syntax of those sentences, the semantics, or both?
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Neither, it has nothing to do with grammar. My writing is difficult to understand because style.

When I write, I usually have a good understanding of where to start. But rarely do I know where to end, or how to get there. This is a Ti/Fi problem rather than a "pattern thinking" problem.

Someone like you is hyper-conscious of what you are communicating and how it comes across. When you talk to others, its often to help them. To guide them towards better life choices. That's why you care so much about whether your information is understood by others. Its also why you are better at writing than I am. You care about helping others, thus you care about whether others understand you. Therefore you spend more time on organizing information in your head so that it can be projected outwards to others.

I, by contrast, do not spend much time helping others. I am very selfish and very self absorbed -- I am working on this by the way. Therefore, I spend very little time thinking about what I am communicating and how it is coming across. As a consequence, I do not know where to end or how to get there. I don't communicate to help people, so I don't spend much time trying to figure out what I'm saying or how to say it. I merely ramble and hope everything makes sense.

Does this make sense to you at all?
 
wolly.green said:
When I write, I usually have a good understanding of where to start. But rarely do I know where to end, or how to get there. This is a Ti/Fi problem rather than a "pattern thinking" problem.
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That's interesting because in contrast, I have an understanding where to go but not how to get there, nor sometimes how to start. And that's perhaps the Ni/Ti problem. Ni knows where to go, but tertiary Ti is needed to organize things to a clear path. And because it's tertiary, it doesn't come as naturally. Then... umm.. Fe knows why to go there, and Se knows why I should dance or have a drink afterwards :P.

I wonder how many Ni users would find it easier to think non-verbally, because after all, intuition need not be verbalized.
 
Luuuucky I have internal dialogues. As in, the obvious 'me' bit gets answers from other bits and sometimes these 'other' thoughts just make comments at times. It's (almost) always silent, just like regular thoughts but coming from...over there somewhere.

Occasionally I'll get a flash of an image and other times I'll get what feels like a download of information/perception which I inevitability start putting into thought-words that don't really capture the essence of the message.

I mostly think in boring old words though.
 
wolly.green said:
Neither, it has nothing to do with grammar. My writing is difficult to understand because style.

When I write, I usually have a good understanding of where to start. But rarely do I know where to end, or how to get there. This is a Ti/Fi problem rather than a "pattern thinking" problem.

Someone like you is hyper-conscious of what you are communicating and how it comes across. When you talk to others, its often to help them. To guide them towards better life choices. That's why you care so much about whether your information is understood by others. Its also why you are better at writing than I am. You care about helping others, thus you care about whether others understand you. Therefore you spend more time on organizing information in your head so that it can be projected outwards to others.

I, by contrast, do not spend much time helping others. I am very selfish and very self absorbed -- I am working on this by the way. Therefore, I spend very little time thinking about what I am communicating and how it is coming across. As a consequence, I do not know where to end or how to get there. I don't communicate to help people, so I don't spend much time trying to figure out what I'm saying or how to say it. I merely ramble and hope everything makes sense.

Does this make sense to you at all?
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Yes, it does make sense. I have a few observations to share.

The first is that, well, I'm pretty self-absorbed too in fairness, and I'm not sure if I would say that I spend a great deal of time helping other people. Sure I enjoy doing that when I do, but I wouldn't say I'm especially altruistic as a person. Rather I would say that in general, I heavily value having an impact on others when I express myself. It doesn't always matter whether this impact is to help them, not in a direct way anyway. But certainly how others react/are impacted by what I say has always been an important measure (whether I like it or not) of how I evaluate the expressions of my thinking. If, by contrast, you tend towards not valuing how others are impacted by your thoughts as much, then it makes sense that making yourself understood should not be as much a natural priority for you. It can become an acquired priority, like you said: you have to work on it, whereas for me it's more natural.

The second observation is I'm not sure how this translates in terms of function stacks. You say it's a Ti problem and you may well be right. I'm not so sure about Fi, for the simple reason that INFPs and ENFPs are often excellent communicators. In fact, ENTPs can often be really good at communicating, too.

I'll tag @philostam here just in case he'd be interested to share his own experience as a Ti dominant.
 
Fidicen said:
That's interesting because in contrast, I have an understanding where to go but not how to get there, nor sometimes how to start. And that's perhaps the Ni/Ti problem. Ni knows where to go, but tertiary Ti is needed to organize things to a clear path. And because it's tertiary, it doesn't come as naturally. Then... umm.. Fe knows why to go there, and Se knows why I should dance or have a drink afterwards :p.
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That makes sense and I relate great deal. Usually the end goal comes before the starting point and the challenge is to trace a path to link the two.

But then, umm... if I'm FiNeSi it might not help much for me to say I relate :D
 
Ren said:
That makes sense and I relate great deal. Usually the end goal comes before the starting point and the challenge is to trace a path to link the two.

But then, umm... if I'm FiNeSi it might not help much for me to say I relate :D
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Hmm I'm trying to imagine what it would be like: with Fi the internal value system would give you a sense of the end goal, Ne would then explore the possibilities, and Si tie them into a system of experiences. And Te would be used to trace the path, once you finally get around to doing it.

But as I explain it like this, I'm just revealing the weakness of MBTI: you can be any type and come up with these kind of ad hoc hypotheses to get past its pseudo-scientific nature. If you had said you're, for example, an INTJ, I could probably explain this method of thinking in that framework just as well.
 
Fidicen said:
But as I explain it like this, I'm just revealing the weakness of MBTI: you can be any type and come up with these kind of ad hoc hypotheses to get past its pseudo-scientific nature. If you had said you're, for example, an INTJ, I could probably explain this method of thinking in that framework just as well.
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Exactly lol.

With ad hoc(ad hoc(ad hoc(ad hoc))) hypotheses you could even explain this method of thinking in for ESTPs :D
 
I will always find it interesting that this will always be news to normies that not everyone is cut from the same block especially those who don't visually think but what gets me is those who are mostly blank as in very little or no visual and auditory thinking. The whole inner mono/dialog meme only brought this to the surface so it will always be interesting to see how people respond to it, from what little I've seen online is that visual thinking tends to be less common especially those that can attribute anything sensory related to their visualizations much less be able to manipulate the experience.
 
I once met a guy with Aphantasia, he quite literally could not imagine anything.
The mind's eye is lacking in any form.
It was quite fascinating listening to his point of view or lack thereof.
Difficult for me to imagine not having a mind's eye!
Cheers!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia
 
Ren said:
I find it surprising how easy it seems for some people to tell whether they think in words or in patterns. I'm quite familiar with the content of my thinking (and even the pattern of that content, i.e. I have a lot of recurring thoughts content-wise) but the form is less immediately recognisable. If I were to just concentrate on my experiences of thinking I would be at a loss to tell whether I favor thinking in words or in images/patterns.
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slant said:
I find my thoughts are incomplete and jumbled in my head. I mostly imagine hypotheticals and have a little movie going on. If I need to actually think I have to talk out loud or journal to get everything "unjumbled". I've talked out loud to myself for as long as I can remember. Sometimes I would pretend to be talking to animals but really I just needed to sort my thoughts out.
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slant said:
My brain is a crazy place yo
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Same

Fidicen said:
I wonder how many Ni users would find it easier to think non-verbally,
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Hmm

I just think. Scenarios, ideas, images, thoughts, visions, conversations, realizations just come to me. I have never put so much thought into thinking about how I think but I have also been once told that I don't think. Now that I think about it, I find that I am almost often lost in thought. Too lost sometimes. A college classmate once hovered his hands above my head and quipped he wanted my brain. Zombie like. He didn't have any bit of my brain but I remember because I never really understood what he meant. I just think sometimes I think my brain moves too fast for me to remember anything. When I need to slow down, I think in words so that I can remember.
 
Roses In The Vineyard said:
I will always find it interesting that this will always be news to normies that not everyone is cut from the same block
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Humans aren't born knowing everything, in fact every human only knows a minuscule amount.
Every human is a normie by your logic.
 
Skarekrow said:
I once met a guy with Aphantasia, he quite literally could not imagine anything.
The mind's eye is lacking in any form.
It was quite fascinating listening to his point of view or lack thereof.
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Wow, that is fascinating indeed. It is possible to have Aphantasia and still be a fully functional human being?

I'm just imagining it being possibly quite a debilitating condition.

mintoots said:
I just think sometimes I think my brain moves too fast for me to remember anything.
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Contender for humblebrag of the month :D
 
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