For me there’s two separate participants, a ‘talker’ and a ‘listener’. My mind identifies more with the talker, because that’s the one that has agency. Since there are two participants, both of which are me, I talk in 1st person plural (‘we’ve got to do …’, 'we thought about this earlier’). I stopped being afraid of being alone after I started having an internal dialogue around the age of 11, since having a second participant in the conversation meant I was always in company.
Edit: Wow, looks like there’s a lot more diversity in this than I was expecting
Layers of depth in a fluid is the best metaphor I have.
The ‘top’ ‘layer’ is the ‘loudest.’ It has the word-thoughts. If I want to solidify ideas and plans into an expressible form, it happens here. Almost everything that comes out of my mouth is formed into word-thoughts first, and then repeated aloud. If I want to ‘rubber duck’ a problem, I do it here. Sometimes ‘bubbles’ come from below and disrupt the structure of these thoughts.
The next ‘lower’ ‘layer’ is the image space. Things I am actively imagining are here. Images, 3D forms, music, conceptual mapping, etc.
The next ‘lower’ is the semi-conscious. Thoughts I haven’t established fully into expressible thoughts or images are here in half-graspable form. Sometimes it feels like something lower pushes elements up into this space as ‘important.’ Sometimes those things are pushed up strongly enough they press into the layer above.
I can sometimes sense things happening deeper down, parts that are processing inputs in ways my metacognition can’t perceive.
Across the whole space is a certain turbidity representing emotional disruptions and physical mental hindrances like lack of sleep, etc.
I have a voice that declares something as fact. Then I have a voice that is skeptical. Then I have another voice that is skeptical of the skeptic. Finally I have a voice that wants more info/evidence. I do not make it through all four voices with every thought, and the first voice fucking hates me
No monologue, no images, no sound. Just… concepts. It’s a bit weird.
Even weirder is that I can actually conjure images while asleep (or about to sleep, or barely just woke up).
I loved books as a kid, but never understood why people preferred them to movies where you could actually picture what is happening on the page. It took me until my mid 20s to figure out my experience was different to other people’s.
I can get lost in my imagination, it’s just not visual or auditory
I have the same. I believe it’s aphantasia, but I am self-diagnosed so I could be wrong.
I found out about this a couple years ago when my wife started a conversation with me like “do you know some people can’t picture things?”. I had several follow up questions because I thought it was just a figure of speech for the first ~30 years of my life.
My internal voice is exactly like me speaking out loud. If I don’t “speak” in my mind there’s nothing, just like if I don’t speak I’m not saying anything out loud.
When I forget what I’m doing my brain makes a sound like an engaged phoneline from the 1990s
I usually stop thinking so the voices argue with each other instead of me
Stream of consciousness, very much like Ulysses but even less readable.
For me the internal monologue is exactly the same as my ‘external’ monologue when I tell people about myself or do something together with someone and explain my actions. So it’s always first person singular, for example: “I’ve reflected on this multiple times but still don’t quite understand it”, “Okay, I need to turn right now” or “God I’m so freaking tired of this shit! I’m done. Fuck them all”. There’s no internal split and if I was saying what I’m thinking out loud in front of someone, it’d sound completely normal.
This is what I experience, and consider normal.
I’m surprised at the range of responses.
I think this is the closest to my experience. Maybe it has to do with the fact that I’ve been writing and expressing my opinions online for so long that I can “stream of consciousness” whatever I’m currently thinking into text
If it’s not music lyrics/no lyrics music, some other thing I have on my mind that isn’t something I came up with, a remix of something I have seen, or a memory and/or dream, I usually end up having fantasy conversations where it’s me but using someone else’s voice. Specifically because I don’t currently like my voice and think I sound like a gremlin.
Sometimes I just talk to myself.
Sometimes I talk with a random character. I can feel agency (or illusion of Independent agency) from anyome at this point, whether I want an anime waifu to “talk back” or to play out a dialogue I’m supposed to have with an IRL person soon.
And sometimes I talk with my inner companions. There are a few characters I have built stable, genuine relationships with over years.
Btw. at some point I started seeing my mind as a process rather than an entity (or set of entities). And like in other complex processes, it would be strange if we couldn’t observe any internal contradictions in it.
Insults, low humor and slurs are screeched at full volume in the cadence and rhyme scheme of a one hit wonder song from thirty years ago and I just smartly choose to not externalize any of it.
Woah, you just listen to a lot of music
Hey, that’s really similar to how mine is! Minus the slurs, thankfully, lol. But I get it.
Right now, in my head, it’s a mix of Rump Shaker by Wreckx-N-Effect and Smells Like Teen Spirit by Nirvana except that the lyrics are re-written to be horrible and mean to me, about hating myself, telling me to kill myself, I should be hit by a car, I should be stabbed in the face, etc. I am not a healthy person. :D There’s usually plenty of dark/low humor and fucked up jokes I’d never say thrown in there, too. There’s also often a voice that goes “hey, that’s not helpful, be nice to yourself! You wouldn’t treat anyone else this way!” 'cause I really am trying to be better. That and like a shotgun blast of a million other different trains of thought mixed in. It’s chaotic in there.
Blackpink zip hoodie with the plastic choker, baditz maru lunchbox purse: aww, you’re sweet
2xl indecipherable metal tee, greasy hair, visible cutting scars: hello, hr?
What are you thinking of, sweetheart?
Rewriting the lyrics of in the end to be about holding open doors for ppl at the grocery store and then carrying a heavy bag for someone.
No monologue for me. Just image and sound. For example, when thinking about a situation, I’ll just imagine it as a moving picture, but there’s no internal narration to it. I don’t think in sentences. I just think about the image or feeling and then process it somehow.
I’ve discussed this topic with others before, and they don’t really get it lol. Well it’s equally weird for me to think about it their way, constantly having an internal monologue.
Mine is similar. Visual scenes, 3d, process like progressions. Woesa are only there if I need to prep dialog or present or discuss with somebody. Otherwisea it is concepts with no need for language
I don’t get sound or image (pretty bad aphantasia), but i do have a monologue. Can you believe there are people out there who have NOTHING going on up stairs? Yup, people who have no pictures, no sounds, no monologue, no anything.
I have nothing going on upstairs.
Same for me, I can see, hear, feel and even smell memories or fictional situations. For other people this is not possible, they do it differently.
My internal monologue is constant. Unless I’m using my language processing capacity for something else (e.g. listening to a podcast or reading text) then my brain is full of verbal diarrhoea. I’ll count each step on my way up a staircase just to fill the dead air in my head.
This is pretty close to my experience, including the counting.
I was surprised to learn that not everyone counts things like stairs automatically.
It’s layered.
At the base level it’s just a mix of a kind of old tv static and what sounds like a creek bubbling. It’s the pre-verbalization soup- textured with sub-thoughts, half-impulses, emotional currents. It’s noticeable background noise but not particularly loud.
Above that is another layer of multiple streams of wordage. Just kind of nonsensical whispers that flow around non-stop. Sometimes there are also impressions of images but nothing definitive. Emotional tones are strongest here.
Above that is the focused wordage, or the internal monologue. Usually it’s proposed point or observation by one “me” and counter-point or add-on by another “me”. There’s no set number of "me"s. Occasionally it’s a construct of some other people I know. Just tangential rambling in incomplete sentences mostly unless I am really trying to sort something out, then it’s more structured. There’s a part of my mind that seems to calculate the conclusion to what I am mentally verbalizing that is one step ahead of the words so often there isn’t a need to complete a thought. This is also where the music and images play.
There is one more layer above all that, the working space, when I really focus, all the other layers fade from consciousness, words are clear, sharp, and coherent and the back-and-forth feels more like a unified “me”, it’s also where I deliberately create and manipulate mental images, movies, concoct scenarios and music plays the clearest.
When I’m not thinking about anything, it just plays music, all the time.
When I’m thinking, it’s kinda like the reasoning of an LLM, it talks about possible ways to solve something, how things could end, and says things like “oh right, if I do X, I need to do Y”.
The strangest thing is that despite me being italian, most of my inner monologue is in english, especially when I’m playing games or programming; and it’s not in my voice, it’s a generic male voice that kinda sounds like Morgan Freeman.
Same with the music thing. I’m trying actually listening to the song to see what effect that has, at least at bedtime when too high a tempo can be a problem.
My internal monologue is usually just like a commentary of my own voice, or at random times I just talk it out loud cause I find it nice to just speak, but I can mimic others people voices in my internal monologue if I felt like it; sometimes, my mind never talks at all and uses visual to think which what I do most of the time, it’s quite peaceful to have a break from the noise.
