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Language is just a way of encoding semantic meaning. If your brain already knows that it is time to wake up or that it hates that guy, what's the point of encoding a description of that feeling into spoken language and replay it? That sounds inefficient.

I have an inner monologue, but most of the time (and especially when I want to work fast), I "disable" it.

Then my mind simply works in the "meaning space", where it can leverage other modalities (e.g., visual 3D representations of system behaviors).

When I write or talk in formal environments I "enable" it just to double check and polish what I want to say.

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JohnMakin 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

Language is just a way of encoding semantic meaning - this is a perfect explanation and im going to use it from now on, thanks. yea this is like me too.

curious, did you start reading at a very early age? I started around 3. this is what I personally think it is. It’s not like I dont have the ability to hear a narrative in my head, I just dont do it. I’ve suspected that since I began reading so early, it has something to do with it - and if you’re not capable of reading /comprehending as fast as I can, like if you’re literally sounding out every word in your head you’d never be able to keep up with whatever it is I do. I’d be enormously frustrated by that process. But to me this is what “narrative voice people” must do in their heads.

or maybe it has to do (for me) being on the spectrum (high functioning)

	▲	uniq7 a day ago \| parent [-]
		> curious, did you start reading at a very early age? I started around 3 I did! I also learnt to read at 3. Your observation was really impressive. I've never thought about it being the cause of my weird quirks, I thought it was actually another consequence/symptom of being wired a bit different, but maybe you are right. Have you ever met anyone else who learnt to read early? Do they also behave like that? I don't know if I'm in the spectrum (I suspect I do, but I don't want to know). In any case, if I do, then I'm also a functioning one. > if you’re literally sounding out every word in your head you’d never be able to keep up with whatever it is I do Another possibility is that they overestimate how much they use their inner monologue without realizing. For example, I really doubt they think "time to move the left leg, now the right leg, now the left..." whenever they walk. Maybe they just don't enter into that "mode" as often as us

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the_gipsy a day ago | parent | prev [-]

Language can encode information very densely. There is no point in describing "hate that guy". But it can be very efficient to have an inner monologue of "I hate that guy, but I must greet him friendly, or else I will be in trouble". If you'd just let yourself guide by feelings, you would be angry, or afraid, or genuinely happy to see that guy you hate.

We already know how to encode and decode it language, because we must communicate with others. It could be useful to also use this code internally, to create very complex scenarios fast.

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uniq7 a day ago | parent [-]

My point is that "I hate that guy, but I must greet him friendly, or else I will be in trouble" is already being concluded by the brain at the semantic space way before running the language encoder and playing the inner voice. That voice already knows what is going to say before saying it.

The brain can extract those conclusions in mere milliseconds and act in consequence, and that doesn't mean being guided by feelings.

I'd argue that skipping the language lets you think in more complex scenarios where visualizing something is required, like when playing a sport, painting, or composing a melody.

Removing the noise of language also allows you to think in parallel and solve problems faster. In my case I'd say I can run a couple of "threads" only, but I wouldn't be surprised if top chess players could run a dozen.

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the_gipsy a day ago | parent [-]

Consider the possibility that the brain has not necessarily "concluded" what is being put into words, internally. That the monologue is the conclusion, which we are processing.

So we have two points of view, perspectives, or explanations. Yours is that there is some internal-mind code that is NOT language, which we are able to convert instantly to language to communicate with others. Most people then also have an internal monologue for unknown or orthogonal reasons, while some don't have it, without making any significant difference, because it is something like a side effect.

Mine is that the internal monologue is the thought itself. There is no other, hidden, code that can express the same complexity as the language that we use both to communicate with others and our own mind. That we don't need this internal monologue for a lot of things (consider driving a car), but it's a crucial mechanism for planning long term tasks, solving new problems, and what generally separates us from other intelligent life forms.

	▲	shippage a day ago \| parent [-]
		Not the poster you replied to. But maybe I should quickly define what I mean by inner monologue: thoughts in word form, utilizing language. I defined it this way because this is what most people seem to mean when they talk about an inner monologue. In a sense, I do have an inner monologue (or dialogue, or multilogue), it's just not done in words unless I need to crystalize my thoughts into something I can communicate with others. My internal method of thinking is a language; it's just a non-verbal language that's only "spoken" by one person on Earth: me. I am quite capable of planning long term tasks, solving novel problems, performing abstract thinking, etc., without using words at all. It does, however, mean I need to maintain a huge amount of state in my head. Serializing that state to words is very cumbersome for me, but extremely useful to help reduce the amount of state I need to keep in mind, so it's a tradeoff between spending the annoyingly long amount of time needed to linearize and serialize my thoughts to the outside world, and having more resulting mental bandwidth to deal with the more critical parts of a problem at the moment. Story time... After I lost my language after the stroke, my mind seemed to have been shattered, like an ancient empire falling, breaking up into numerous squabbling kingdoms. I became aware of the different functions of my brain in a new way. In terms of language, to this day when I communicate with others, it feels like I think in my internal non-verbal language, then sort of toss it over the wall to another part of my brain which converts that to words. When I was first re-learning how to communicate with others, I managed to "talk" that other part of my brain into round-tripping the translations. So I'd think a thought, the translator part would convert it to words, then the sister part would convert the words back to my own nascent internal language. My own internal language developed alongside my ability to communicate with others via this feedback loop. I'd never heard of generative adversarial networks at the time, but that's basically what I was doing. Before managing to convince that part of my brain to create the feedback loop, I had barely managed to regain any words at all. Afterward, my vocabulary began recovering rapidly even as it became more feasible to express complex concepts in my new internal way of thinking. One thing this GAN-style behavior made clear to me, was that language was a highly useful error-correction method. Each time the round trip garbled meaning in various ways, it clarified the sloppiness in my new thought style, shining a light on it that made it easier to see just how much further I needed to go to regain my ability to read, write, and speak. Maybe if I'd had help regaining my language, I wouldn't have had to develop a unique internal "language" to be able to express thoughts in, and I'd natively think in words again. Hard to say. All I know is I was desperate to be able to think again, and I wasn't willing to wait until I regained my words, especially given how slow the process was initially. So, only going from my own personal experiences, I wonder if internal language partially "evolved" as a means of thought error-correction, to review what one was about to say or do before saying or doing it. It's also obviously useful for working with others, and our ability to transfer knowledge even across centuries is remarkably useful, but I also wonder if inner monologue has been maintained in so much of the population even for internal thoughts because that error-correction allows easier self-reflection of our thought process? Even I sometimes will say aloud the details of the problem I'm currently trying to solve as a means to double-check that I'm not missing anything obvious. I don't do it often, but it can help when I'm stuck. If the translator part of my brain can't figure out a good way to translate my thoughts into words, it's an excellent sign I'm overthinking the problem and need to refocus on less abstruse details.