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.
Its only there if I need to work out something for talking about with somebody or for a written output, but generally my thoughts are visual or concepts without language attached.
Usually pretty normal but I have a problem where I look at something & start relating it to other things & then like 30 seconds later I am thinking about war crimes. It was already bad before 2023. Most vivid images I have ever “seen” & they can happen while driving. It reminds me of how I used to be more imaginative as a child. Except that was fun.
I have been limiting coffee intake which helps but I do kind of enjoy being pissed off & constantly visualizing maps so sometimes I do it on purpose which leads to Deliberate Site Vandalism since I can’t direct that energy at anyone around me.
So I guess I also have two mode. Snide narrator who is very uncharitable to me & The Visions.
My monologue hums… And when there’s some event /work/(or anything like late for a bus or work or something), it starts narrating the environment and condition with counting repetations(like steps, seconds) sometimes counting up and sometimes oscillatiory count(like in evens; 1-2–1-2–1-2–1…)
I don’t have one. No sound and no detailed images.
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.
I probably shouldn’t answer this tbh.
I have three main “voices”, plus a couple of situational ones. As you say, a talker that’s mostly “me”, my conscious self. A listener that isn’t just a listener that’s essentially my subconscious throwing up images and memory in response to my conscious self. Then there’s the other self, the third thoughts, the meta mind, whatever you want to call it.
That third voice is observing the “conversation”, and making commentary and corrections as needed. Like “that’s not how that really happened” when images flash up that are nebulous. Or “no, that’s not who you want to be, stop being a dick” when my conscious self is under stress. Or “go fuck yourself” when thoughts triggered by mental health issues come up.
Plus, and this isn’t some kind of bullshit DID¹ thing, I have fictional characters in my head. There’s this thing I do when I write or DM where I kinda spool up a virtual machine in my head where a character “lives”. These aren’t real entities, they aren’t split off from me, they’re just a construct that’s useful. They can be “deleted”, they don’t take over, nothing like that.
I can, however, have conversations with them if I do a bit of mental prep work to sort of fake forget that it’s just my imagination playing a game with itself. I used to participate in some Mastodon writing prompt hashtags and I’d sort of interview my characters with them sometimes surprising me with what they said. Alas, the instance I used shut down without warning, and I didn’t have a recent backup, so I lost most of it.
While I was writing that paragraph, one of my characters got switched on for a second and grumped at me. I know it’s not a person, it’s all imagination. But it is a fucking trip anyway.
Yeeeears ago, I was running a game. It included a deity coming back to life. During the process, I had been wrapping my head around what they’d be like, and one of the players had communed with the deity a good bit. During a session, the player had their character call on the god to manifest. My ass just started talking as the deity. Full on zero conscious control over what came out. It felt creepy but cool. This imaginary part of myself took over, my voice changed, I stood up and moved around, but none of it was “me”. My conscious mind was starting to freak the fuck out a little because it felt like the imaginary thing was taking over.
That wasn’t the last time it happened, but I’ve never been able to make it happen. Well, not to that degree anyway.
I guess what I’m saying is that my internal monologue isn’t a monologue. Shit gets loud up in here.
Edit: ¹
My bullshit DID thing, I don’t mean that did isn’t real. I mean that it isn’t me pretending to have DID or some other dissociative disorder. People do that, and it’s fucking weird
The amount I relate to this is… A lot lol. Down to that deiety thing. Not exactly that but I have a knack for just letting IDK what take over sometimes. Friend in a crisis and I have no idea how to help? Sit back and jet it happen.
The human brain is wild!
Sometimes the monologue is so loud I end up accidentally vocalising (whispering) it. I think it might be partially caused by the fact I have ADHD and a monologue like this is a way to keep my brain stimulated (thought wise, but also socially) when there’s no input from the outside.
My mind is mostly pretty quiet. My internal monologue is used for figuring stuff out and making observations/giving myself a warning (ie: that person is lying). It doesn’t narrate anything. I only speak first person with myself. I have difficulty remembering my internal monologue so I’ve made it a habit to write down my observations and then synthesize them. Also my internal monologue is quiet and any kind of noise interrupts it.
Mine is just constant words. Constant narration of everything. With occasional music breaks, because there’s always pop music going through my head too.
Me too. In fact my stream before this was “Jesus this is taking so long to load wtf. I should take this as a sign to go to bed. Oh… My meds wore off. I’m thinking ALL the words again. Man I’m glad people can’t hear my thoughts. Well, it probably would’ve made the ADHD diagnosis easier. Oh hey, it finally loaded!”
Anyone else having hella load times on Lemmy lately or is it just my app or instance? Lol
Same lol
I hadn’t thought about it much, but mine is just first person, same as the way I type or talk. In fact I think much of my internal monologue is actually pretend or planning conversations.
I don’t have one…
I think plenty of people are like that too. Would you say you spend most of your time while conscious in the present? Because for me, this internal dialogue causes me to ignore my surroundings and consequentially I end up spending a large part of my waking hours ignoring my actual surroundings.
I’d say that’s a pretty reasonable summary. I mean, I can think about the future and the past of course, and I can stress about them both too, but none of that takes the form of a dialogue, nor does it have any sense of participants. There’s just my thoughts, in the moment, about the future and what might happen.
This sounds psycho or sociopathic.
Yep, you got me! That must be exactly what it means!
Verbal internal dialogue where the talker refers to me as separate from itself.
Explain
My base thoughts are non-verbal. Sometimes I describe it like shapes in a hyperdimensional vector space.
My internal monologue is basically just practicing translating these base thoughts into language, to explain concepts to others.
This analogy started to feel particularly accurate for my own experience when I started learning a second language. I realised that I wasn’t learning what one word meant in another language, but instead, attaching the two words to a deeper idea/concept. It means that I’d often understand what I was hearing, but even when I was listening in my new language, I didn’t automatically have the translation to my native language (English).
And my thoughts/internal experience is like that. I can pull the words out to describe the thing, but the actual thought itself, the concept that I’m using the word to describe is where I would say my thoughts naturally sit
It depends, if it’s a problem I’m trying to solve, if it’s a presentation that I’m going to do, if I need to communicate with someone. Like I thought about responding this, while trying to observe how it works.
Normally there are a lot of monologues happening at the same time and I’m probably listening to music too, so I’m like 30 seconds thinking about something, pass to another something and then the good part of the music comes. I took ADHD meds once and damn, this completely disappeared hahahaha.
But, depending on the thing, if it’s a concept I’m trying to tackle, normally it’s just me alone passing through it, its ramifications, consequences, basis, etc. If I’m trying to talk to someone, I like to imagine them and interact with myself playing as them. Sometimes it’s like yours, two of me separated from me “debating”.
