I definitely have an inner monologue im some situations, reading is a good example. I can speed read in which case I don't really have a perception of the sounds, but if I'm closely reasing something then I do have a sense of the sounds if words as I'm reading.
The idea of thinking independtly like that though seems unbearably slow to me (although lots of very clever people report doing it, so obviously it isn't for them!)
> The idea of thinking independtly like that though seems unbearably slow to me
So, as a person who definitely has an inner monologue, I absolutely agree. It's not like I'm literally sounding out words in my mind all the time. The vast majority of things I do I do without explicit use of language.
I think my understanding (mostly coming from Chomsky and in disagreement when OP) is that language is a mechanism for thinking that is mostly not accessible through conscious introspection.
> mostly coming from Chomsky and in disagreement when OP
Is Chomsky's idea that language is not necessarily the same as spoken language, it is an alternate brain mechanism that provides structure to thought as opposed to being the wild west of fluid/analog non-discrete/non-symbolic type of information processing?
The idea would be that language first evolved as a mechanism for thought and only later became used for communication. Spoken language would still be connected to the underlying mechanism though.
My conscious thoughts are verbalized in my head, and it is somewhat slow, but I also have a sense of intuition, which is very fast, though works best in silence. I can pull things from intuition into conscious thought, but explaining why I feel something is the same slower process.
So thinking about something isn't a one speed operation, but being able to communicate those thoughts is.
I think almost exclusively through inner monologue, and I find I can't speed read at all. If I'm not vocalizing I'm not thinking, so when I try to not vocalize in order to speed read I don't retain anything. It's like my brain is incapable of processing the words if they aren't being vocalized.
> The idea of thinking independtly like that though seems unbearably slow to me
While I seem to be a fast reader relative to people I know, I very much feel my reading speed is limited by sounding the words in my mind, so I agree - it's near-unbearably slow.
It seems obvious to me that thinking critically about what you read or hear takes effort and time. I wouldn't call it unbearable, though, because the alternative is polluting your mind with unvetted notions.
Linguistic thinker: I reach conclusions by feel, pretty much jumping to them, and then sniffing out the "warp trail" from that jump and putting that into words. It doesn't feel like inventing post facto rationalizations, but rather retracing the reasoning that happened in the background. And I do need to do that step - the conclusion doesn't seem "stable" unless I trace it back like this.
Words are also based on the same intuition, you just verbalize it and restrict yourself to what you have words for instead of all concepts and thoughts.
For example I do math entirely without any words in my process, and I easily got a master in math that way, barely had to study. No problem, you just translate it at the end. Limiting myself to words just makes it harder to think freely.
That just sounds so different to how I solve math problems. I was naturally good at maths, but it was always from monologue kind of bruteforcing different solutions until one of them seemed to work. I guess it might be a reason also why I find LLMs really exciting since I feel like if I can do it, LLM should be able to do it. I don't feel like I am doing anything special.
I always had problem with trusting my intuition or gut so I was worse in a lot of other real life things however. But math seemed abstract and solvable by words and brute force.
I wish things just magically came to me, but I think I always have to go through things with my inner monologue.
Like if I was to do multiplication in my head e.g. with same numbers, for example 62 x 62. I would have to go through it as a monologue.
I first remind myself of the strategy to do it, which is first I will do 60 x 60. Then it is 3600, then I add 2 x 60, 3720, and then there is 2 x 62 left, but I have to keep reminding myself occasionally what the last numbers were, that initial multiplication was 62 x 62, then I got 3720, and now I have to add 124... okay lets go 3820, 24 left, now 3844. Of course it is easier to remember as I am typing this, but in my head I have to keep reminding myself. And now I am not sure if I did a mistake so I go verify that on the calculator.
> That is thinking slow for you?? How do you reach conclusions or how do you know the reasons why you reached the conclusion?
Are you thinking that using words during thinking helps with reaching conclusions and knowing why you reached the conclusion?
For me it's just there, the thoughts, the facts, the logic, the sequence, the connections, etc. Expressing all of that in words happens afterward (if it happens).
I don't even know how to think without words. I thought thinking literally means using words in sequence to problem solve. At least I used to think so. If someone says they are going to think about something I have always thought that they were going to focus on their inner monologue of sequence of words.
Not OP but I also don't think with an internal monologue most of the time. For me it's often more like mentally manipulating abstract shapes or quantities and trying to make them fit together. When I'm writing software I'm literally thinking about pointers and bytes etc, not thinking about the words "pointer" and "byte". This is highlighted by the fact that after intense programming sessions I have dreamed about code, like I am computer memory and I'm being allocated by a memory manager or something.
Sometimes I do explicitly think with an internal monologue, though. Like if I'm debugging something I'll sometimes narrate what the program is doing in words. Also if I'm trying to figure out how some event happened I'll try to tell a story in my mind. It helps then as it forces me to serialise things.
When I read there is sometimes an internal monologue. When I write, there isn't. I don't talk like this. I think it's quite clear sometimes when people write with an internal monologue as their text reads like speech (which can be a good or bad thing, depending on its purpose).
Reading your comment, I don't subvocalize at all. In order to get through my college degree, I taught myself speed reading. Now, I just naturally do it. My eye flicks to the middle of every 5-10 word chunk and flies though the text. If you did speech synthesis at that speed, it'd be a incomprehensible chipmunk. So I don't subvocalize at all. It'd be way too slow. To suppress subvocalization I used to hum (in my mind) instead, but I don't need to anymore. If something is hard to understand I will slow way down, then the subvocalization might kick in. When typing, I do subvocalize everything, since I can't write that fast.
I think this post/paper was more about your personal thought process rather than reading though. I very rarely have any internal monologue. In fact, the rare times I do have one are usually very awkward social situations where I wanted to say something but don't. Otherwise never. My whole life has been that way. An internal monologue sounds like a nightmare to be honest. Constant talking that nobody else can hear? No thank you.
I read much faster when I can focus on reading instead of vocalizing; in this case I am no longer internally vocalizing the text. If I do vocalize what I read it goes a lot slower, but then it helps me to synthesize conplex concepts in a text.
Thanks for your comment. It just occurred to me that I have an inner voice narrating the text when I am reading in English.
This does not happen when I read in my first two languages.
This explains why I read slower when I read in English.
I don't have an internal monologue at all (I am able to speak to myself in my head if I want to, but I seldom have a reason to). When I read, the information just gets uploaded to my brain. I don't vocalize words in any way, silently or otherwise. I don't read one word at a time either. When I read something quickly I can "feel" that my understanding of the material is lagging "the cursor", sometimes by even a paragraph at a time.
The idea of thinking independtly like that though seems unbearably slow to me (although lots of very clever people report doing it, so obviously it isn't for them!)