[pilgrim0]

I pretty much share the same capacities which you’ve described. Regarding the last part, about the inner voice not defaulting to verbal projections, when I reflect about what form such pattern takes, I can only interpret it as sort of “semantic impulses”. Explaining: we know very well the feeling of hunger (impulse to eat), but we can’t emulate it at will, because it’s tied to physiological state. The scope of impulses, however, is much broader than those extreme feelings, such as sadness, happiness, etc. There’s an infinite number of feelings, and new ones are created upon experiencing novel situations, and they’re unique to you. Those finer feelings, differently from the physiologically-bounded ones, you can summon upon recalling mental imagery which are anchored with the feelings and thus able to trigger them. Most people know cringe, nostalgia, etc, which comes when recalling past events; those, again are very crude and broad impulses. If we make an analogy with colors, strong (common) feelings are like primary hues, sitting at the extremes of luminance and saturation. Finer feelings are everything else and all the possible mixtures/overlays. Thus, I can conceive my mind to be a multidimensional canvas, and as the painter I can mix and match whatever colors I have at my disposal to conjure a complex sensation which progresses over time, and that I can make use of to manifest ideas, arguments, scenes, whatever I like. In this context, there’s absolutely no active verbalization (perhaps I need to repeat some phrase mentally to invoke the color I want, but this is just for the lookup process, what I am interested in is the yield, i.e what it will trigger). Then, when I’m satisfied with the general piece, and since it’s so unstable by nature, the finishing process involves piecing together the words which will index it. If it’s something of material use in the physical reality then it becomes a note. Of course I could use any other kind of graphics as the index, it’s just that language provides all these shared, easy to remember, stereo (picture and sound), malleable, composable symbols called the alphabet. It’s the most basic yet the most powerful tool we have at our disposal. The cool thing is that all of the experience of crafting these mental pieces has also increased my repertoire/palette, beyond the final product. Sort like all products can also be ingredients, or phrased differently: ending points become starting points for new explorations.