[razerbeans]

I'll answer from my own experience (with no inner voice):

1) I have to be very explicit when reading with an inner voice (which goes to your second point). Generally, it is a kind of recognition that a word has a meaning and I "feel" that meaning, if that makes sense?

2) Yes. It feels unnatural though.

[jancsika]

But then how do you do what I'd consider simple things like sanity checks?

For example, hooking up jumper cables. I suppose I could hook them up without an inner dialog.

But then at any point if I get confused or remember that dangerous things can happen, I can go back and compare against a list in my head of the steps to hook them up. E.g., don't let clamps touch, start with the dead battery, positive first, crank and rev the working car, etc.

How can you get the same type of sanity check without an inner dialog? Do you memorize an ordered sequence of "feels" that correspond to the steps?

[razerbeans]

You know, I've never really thought about it. Yeah, I guess I do just remember the feeling and know that it's a step that I've completed. And when I recall the steps that need to be done, it's not really a cohesive spoken thought. It's like impulses of sensations? My brain is just like "Order's important. Red red, black black." without the words.

For really difficult mental tasks, I'll actually talk to myself or write things down so that they are less chaotic since the feelings/impulses in my brain may not line up. Kind of like a buffer filling up.

Now what really bothers my wife is when we talk about how we have conversations with others. I don't necessarily think about what I'm going to say verbatim when I'm talking to someone. It's impulses like I mention above where things kind of "flash" into my brain the moment before I say it. The best way that I can think of it is that it's similar to playing a sport where you have moments to change your trajectory and movement to accomplish what you want. I know thematically what I want to say, but I don't actually build the sentence in my brain.

Hope that helps!

[jancsika]

> The best way that I can think of it is that it's similar to playing a sport where you have moments to change your trajectory and movement to accomplish what you want.

If I had to speculate I'd say a lot of people have the experience of both this and the inner voice, depending on context.

It doe make me wonder: are people who can't spontaneously "surf" sentences in realtime and instead rely wholly on an inner voice? :)

Edit: I've noticed that reflecting on this kind of stuff can wreak havoc on young musicians. I remember a colleague who learned the Grieg concerto but was having a small number of wrong notes (say, 5% or so) creep into various sections of the piece, seemingly at random. The teacher started to drill down on each section, having the student write down which finger plays what, subdivide tricky rhythms, and so forth.

What was wild was that each time the teacher asked the student to notate the chord at the point where a mistake occurred, this would generate a cascade of more mistakes. She'd essentially been playing mostly by feel without thinking about the harmony at all. The added anxiety about harmony increased her error rate for relying on feel; pretty soon she wasn't able to make it through the piece. They then went back methodically through the entire thing, having her notate each and every harmony and describe how each one relates to the next, which were primary vs. ancillary, and so forth. Only then could she play the entire piece with precision.

So sometimes to get from 95% to 100% you have to go back down to zero!