| I strongly suspect that this is not a difference in internal experience so much as it is a difference in expectation, just as with aphantasia (the inability to imagine). Imagine a bicycle. How many sections does it have? Where do the pedals connect? Which bar supports the seat? What color is it? What shape of handles does it have? What kind of tires? Does it have lights? Does it have luggage rack? Some people look at their internal version of a bicycle and say "oh, I must have aphantasia. I think of a bicycle and a photograph of a bicycle doesn't appear in my mind." Other people are perfectly satisfied with the blurry sort-of bicycle that they imagined until you start asking about specifics. I think the inner monologue question is similar. The inner monologue is a ((set of echoes)(set of impressions)(series of words)) that move back and forth ((in time) (in your mind))(((competing for expression) (attempting to be expressed) (expressed only to you (to your internal ear))) in bits and pieces that you can ((experience)(hear)(perceive)(decide to treat) as) a coherent whole. Sometimes it feels like a book unspooling, sometimes it feels like the paragraph I just wrote. When a person compares their internal talk to the internal talk in a movie, sometimes the person feels the movie is accurate, sometimes the person feels the movie is inaccurate, but the actual internal experience is probably very similar in both cases. What differs is the person's expectations of an "internal conversation." If you expect it to sound like a voiceover you will be disappointed and you will think "everybody else must be different from me". That's not (I suspect) the case. I think we mostly just have different ideas of how to process our fictional abstractions of the concept. |