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by globular-toast 721 days ago
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).