[renton_wal]

Interesting about how there's different shades of this. I have an inner voice when I'm working through a problem, but I don't rely on it. I can definitely do abstract and complicated thinking without engaging it. It's a combination of a voice and mental arrows about tasks.

I don't have the voice when reading or writing, but I do when I'm planning around what to write. Incidentally, I read at over 800wpm with an extremely high retention rate, which makes me an outlier.

I have an inner voice, but it slows me down, and I choose to engage it when I need to really work something through accurately and with lots and lots of steps.

I've only recently started paying attention to how I think and I think it's really quite a bit different than the binary "has or doesnt have" that these articles portray. I can't imagine I'm the only person like this. I wonder if the question itself misleads people into overthinking their use of it: "do you have an inner voice?" "yes!"

[cecilpl2]

I'm very much like this. I can turn it off and on at will. Meditation is easy for me, I just "turn off" the voice and sit. I run long distances and will sometimes realise that an hour has gone by without any thoughts other than "breathe in, breathe out".

I'm focusing on it right now. It speaks in my head as I'm planning out the next sentence I'm going to type, but then once I'm typing it goes away until I need to stop and plan the next words. I also read very quickly, sometimes multiple lines at a time, reassembling the words in context.

The voice certainly doesn't follow me around chattering in my head the way some people's seems to.