A Quiet Mind: On the lack of inner speech

Surfing Concept Clouds in Neuro Skies.

Surfing Concept Clouds / Stable Diffusion

In the paper Not EveryoneHas an Inner Voice: Behavioral Consequences of Anendophasia researchers finally found a name for my mode of thinking.

From the abstract:

It is commonly assumed that inner speech — the experience of thought as occurring in a natural language – is both universal and ubiquitous. Recent evidence, however, suggests that similar to other phenomenal experiences like visual imagery, the experience of inner speech varies between people, ranging from constant to non-existent. We propose a name for a lack of the experience of inner speech – anendophasia – and report four studies examining some of its behavioral consequences.

The researchers compare this mode of thinking to the condition of aphantasia, that is: The absence or inability to have visual thought. Unfortunately for me, the researchers also found that people with anendophasia have “poorer verbal working memory“ and perform lower on language related tasks.

From the conclusion of their paper:

People who experience less inner speech were worse at making rhyme judgments in response to images and remembering a list of words. Task switching performance was not, however, either slower or less accurate. Taken together, our experiments suggest that there are real behavioral consequences of experiencing less or more inner speech, and that these differences may often be masked because people with anendophasia use alternative strategies.

From personal experience however i can tell you, that i am quite fast a grasping new problems and getting to the bottom of them — maybe exactly because language doesn’t stand in the way and i can surf to wherever i see friction within these concepts. This would be compatible with the “alternative strategies“ mentioned above.

I always wondered about people and their inner monologues. Not that i have exactly none inner language, but i wouldn’t call my internal use of language a monologue either.

I do use language occasionally, maybe five times per minute or so, as a guidance to a more fuzzy way of thinking, and it always puzzled me that there are people who say they have a constant ongoing inner voice. What stressful lives they must lead. (Interestingly though, i do use language constantly while reading.)

Then there’s people who say they are visual thinkers, which would describe my thinking style more closely, but still i wouldn’t say that i think visually either. I’m neither a wordcel nor shape rotator.

I describe my thinking as “surfing on concept clouds“, with my occasional inner voice as a guidance, saying to myself stuff like “yes“, “right“ or “haha no“. These clouds are made of, in a lack of a better word: “stuff“, related to whatever i think about. For example, when i think about a cat, i surf on a cloud of stuff related to a cat, and i surf towards whatever direction my thought goes, and i correct and guide that direction with occasional language. Sometimes i also refer to this mental style as my “inner choreography of ideas“, and, following that, i think of consciousness as a choreographer.

This way of thinking is compatible with the Thousand-brains-theory, prominently described in the book of the same name by Jeff Hawkins, who claims that we store models of “stuff“ in cortical columns.

Following that theory, the concept of a cat is made up of the neural correlates stored in many cortial columns that make up of the look and touch of fur, the sound of meowing, the unique staring characteristic of a cats’ eyes, the hurt of scratching, the concept of hunting mice, and so forth. When we think about a cat, we activate those networks of cortial columns and there you have your cloud of “feline stuff“ that makes up the cat in your mind.

It seems to me that inner monologue and language and visual thinking too is downstream from that. Language/visual thinking is built on top of these concepts stored in the cortial columns.

In a sense, you could say that concept thinkers are the assembler coders of the mind, interacting with the cognitive “machine“ in a more direct way in a sort of more abstract machine “language“ that i describe as “guided surfing“, whereas people with inner monologue use a higher order “coding language“ which are built on this neural assembler. This would explain why i’m a fast thinker, but sort of bad at language and when i want to write good, i need dozens of trials and a lot of editing.

It also baffles me somewhat that all of this seems relatively new to neuroscience.

Kate Douglas recently had a piece in the New Scientist about What your thoughts look like and how they compare to others’, the various styles of thinking which are far, far more diverse then verbal/visual/concept. In reality, all of those modes come together with all the idiosyncratic ways that make up our inner world.

We assume we are all talking about the same thing – a conscious mental state – but, in fact, everyone has their own ideas, says Hurlburt. What his method reveals is that our thoughts seem to include five common phenomena: inner speech, inner seeing, feelings or emotions, sensory awareness (such as the sensation of your shoe rubbing) and unsymbolised thinking (explicit thoughts that don’t include the experience of words, images or symbols). (…)

“Many people have multiple things going on [in their mind] at the same time and those multiple things can be unbelievably complex,” says Hurlburt. A single thought might contain five or more separate simultaneous images along with inner speech about something else entirely. (…)

Even something as straightforward as inner speech isn’t just one thing. “It’s a kind of language, and language is incredibly versatile,” says Fernyhough. It can take the form of a monologue, dialogue or debate, it can be articulate or slangy, nagging or rallying, emotional or dispassionate. (…)

The same is true for inner seeing. It varies in amount and clarity, with around 4 per cent of people having no inner eye and an unknown proportion experiencing super-vivid imagery. There also seem to be different forms of inner vision. In her book, Visual Thinking, Temple Grandin at Colorado State University distinguishes between object visualisers and spatial visualisers. “An object visualiser, like me, thinks in photorealistic pictures,” says Grandin. Spatial visualisers think in patterns. The former make good engineers and builders, the latter scientists and strategists, she says. “A lot of people are mixtures.”

I would describe what i call “concept clouds“ as all of this baked together, with an emphasis on “unsymbolised thinking“ as a result, and when i took both the Perception Census questionairy launched a year ago by world renowned neuroscientist Anil Seth and others, and this questionaire from the University Wisconsin-Madison, they confirmed: I’m very very low on verbal thinking, medium high on visual thinking, and very high on what they call “representational manipulation“, that is: I can imagine whatever concept and change details very fast.

Interestingly, roughly ten percent of people describe visualising their inner speech as text, as in typography. You would expect this from me as a trained typographer and medium high on visual thinking, but no.

This is my way of neurosurfing on concept clouds — or as legendary Techno-artist Aphex Twin put it: Surfing on Sine Waves — described in neuroscientific terms.

You can find more highly interesting mental styles in these discussions in the SlateStarCodex-Subreddit here and here.

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