What is it for?
Not everyone does, I’ve had a lot of conversations with a lot of people on this topic.
People’s thought processes range from monologue to dialog to narration to silence to images to raw concepts without form.
I personally do not have a constantly running monologue, but rather have relatively short bursts of thought interspersed with long periods of silence.
I always find this conversation fascinating and it makes me wonder in what other ways people may experience the world differently.
I do have a constant internal monologue. Every word I read is spoken in my mind. My thought process is, to my awareness, me talking things out in my head.
Yeah, I also “hear” the words in my head as I read them, and that goes for everything.
I kinda wish I thought in shapes and colors though. While my imagination is okay, I get the feeling it’s not as… vivid or Shar as others imaginations are.
Truly nobody knows, it’s an open research question. And to complicate matters more we know (as others have mentioned here) that everyone doesn’t think in the same way.
We do actually know quite a bit about the Internal Monologue and other forms of intrapersonal communication.
There isn’t one single use for it or benefit of it (in the same way water has many uses)
Chomsky would say that the original purpose of language is to structure thought, with communication being solely secondary. (Or something like this, I don’t recall it word-by-word.)
If that’s correct, then internal monologues are simply a result of your brain processing your thoughts.
I think one key in the success of our species is the ability to plan ahead and mentally simulate what will happen before actually doing it.
Doing this with language is not very different from imagining what will happen when doing a physical action.
My guess would be it’s a side-effect, kind of like pareidolia. Us being extremely social animals, so much that being cast away from the tribe in our hunter-gatherer days would spell certain death, our brains have become extremely attuned to face/emotion recognition and language. So we have a tendency of using words to express ideas, even to ourselves.
Speak for yourself! I have internal stereologue.
Peasant…Go quadraphonic or go home!!!
To freak us out when we’re a little bit too high…
