[saghm]

> It's incredible to imagine there are people out there just thinking in language as they go about their lives.

> I wonder how it must work. Are they literally lining up one word after another in their minds? I guess it has to work that way to feel like some sort of "consistent internal monologue"?

> At scale, though, imagining a roomful of people thinking in single-threaded monologues does explain a lot about why some teams take forever to get anything done.

As someone with a particularly strong inner dialogue (who often struggles to think about things in a fully non-verbal way), I definitely struggle at times with feeling like my brain is not concurrent enough for being good at multitasking, so I don't think you're completely off. To put it in programming terms, I feel less that my brain is "single threaded" as it's read/write locked in the sense that if I'm speaking or typing, I'm much less able to process properly listen to anything being said to me. For example, if I'm typing up an email (or a decently sized comment here) and someone tries to talk to me, I'll often not be able to formulate a response without completely losing my train of thought about what I was writing, which leads me to ask if it's okay for me to finish what I'm writing before responding.

As for "lining up one word after another in their minds", I don't think it's quite as tedious as it sounds like you might be thinking. When speaking out loud, it doesn't take any conscious thought for me to "line up words" as they come out of my mouth; if anything, I talk much more quickly than average. It hadn't occurred to me beforehand, but I wonder if this trait is correlated with having an internal monologue.