• Schmoo@slrpnk.netEnglish
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    5 months ago

    Your anecdote seems to support that it’s a learned behavior/skill, which tracks for me. I have a very active internal dialogue that’s difficult to turn off. I say dialogue instead of monologue because I often make up “other voices” that bounce ideas off each other, and this generally happens without my conscious effort. I think I developed this because as I was growing up I was encouraged to pray regularly, and I was very fanatically religious as a kid so I did so as often as I could. I prayed silently so often in fact that my thoughts were basically a constant one-sided monologue directed to god. Whenever I would daydream or let my imagination wander I would imagine god responding, and eventually the constant monologue became a dialogue. I would work out problems or make decisions by having conversations with an imaginary god. When I stopped believing in god the second voice never went away, I just started recognizing it as my own.

    • lagomorphlecture@lemm.eeEnglish
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      5 months ago

      There’s actually a theory that back in ye olden times when inner monologues first started, people thought it was God talking to them because it was a new phenomenon and that didn’t have any way to understand that it was some kind of evolution of consciousness, not a god.

        • Zetaphor@zemmy.ccEnglish
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          5 months ago

          I mean the NVIDIA stock price speaks for itself, I think Jensen is onto something

          • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.worldEnglish
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            5 months ago

            Ha! Good one.

            On a serious note here are the issues

            • He can’t explain how the event impacted the rest of the world. Only a fraction of the human race was there. How does he explain China for example?
            • We already know that meta-cognition isn’t limited to humans. A rat that knows where food is vs ones that do not engage in different behaviors.
            • He can’t explain the almost superhuman reflex speeds some people have in modern times under his model.

            I do agree some of it rings true. Just very hard to pin down what exactly.

    • Ibaudia@lemmy.worldEnglish
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      5 months ago

      Okay, now I have to know if religious individuals are more likely to have an inner voice. That just makes sense!!!

      • Schmoo@slrpnk.netEnglish
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        5 months ago

        Perhaps! I also think internal monologues can develop just from learning to read and write silently. Having an inner voice makes it easier to absorb the information in a book or to plan out your writing in advance.

        • Buelldozer@lemmy.todayEnglish
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          5 months ago

          Having an inner voice makes it easier to absorb the information in a book

          I think all of our brains are wired different and the different wiring leads to advantages in one thing but it’s probably a disadvantage for others. For instance I have no inner voice but my reading speed, with comprehension, is well faster than nearly anyone I’ve ever met. I can even sometimes recall precisely where on a page a given word or phrase was located, even years after reading the material. However I’m almost entirely unable to imagine a 3 dimensional object and rotate it in my “minds eye”.

          • Schmoo@slrpnk.netEnglish
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            5 months ago

            That does make me wonder if maybe I use my inner voice as a bit of a crutch when I’m reading, but I think it helps me infer tone and get immersed in what I’m reading. Perhaps I am sacrificing some reading speed but I do believe it helps me with comprehension and memory.

            Though I will add that it’s more the concepts that I remember than the words themselves. Give me a quote and I couldn’t tell you what page and where on the page it was, but I could tell you what was happening in that scene, what happened before and after, what the character was feeling and why they said it, who they said it to and so on.

          • Aceticon@lemmy.worldEnglish
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            5 months ago

            I have an inner voice but I don’t use it when I’m reading, which is maybe why I am a very fast reader.

            I tend to use it when pondering on things. That said I just noticed that when composing and cross-checking this text for posting, I also used it.

            Curiously, nowadays my inner voice is not just in my own mothertongue but can be in just about any of the languages I know enough for basic conversation. It’s probably related to, because my foreign language skills are so advanced (I can speak about 7 languages) that I’ve long stopped translating to my native tongue in my mind and concepts just translate directly from those foreign languages. Also, I’ve lived in a couple of countries and as I would eventually end up mainly speaking the local language, my inner voice would also, eventually, end up also using that language.

            • MeThisGuy@feddit.nlEnglish
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              5 months ago

              very interesting because I moved back to my home country 5 yrs ago after living abroad for 24. still think in my secondary language after being alone with my thoughts long enough