How does your internal monologue work? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) by SubArcticTundra@lemmy.ml to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

82 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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.

Edit: Wow, looks like there's a lot more diversity in this than I was expecting

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[-] CommanderCloon@lemmy.ml 5 points 5 days ago

No monologue, no images, no sound. Just... concepts. It's a bit weird.

Even weirder is that I can actually conjure images while asleep (or about to sleep, or barely just woke up).

I loved books as a kid, but never understood why people preferred them to movies where you could actually picture what is happening on the page. It took me until my mid 20s to figure out my experience was different to other people's.

I can get lost in my imagination, it's just not visual or auditory

[-] siftmama@lemmy.world 3 points 5 days ago

I have the same. I believe it's aphantasia, but I am self-diagnosed so I could be wrong.

[-] skankhunt42@lemmy.ca 1 points 5 days ago

I found out about this a couple years ago when my wife started a conversation with me like "do you know some people can't picture things?". I had several follow up questions because I thought it was just a figure of speech for the first ~30 years of my life.

My internal voice is exactly like me speaking out loud. If I don't "speak" in my mind there's nothing, just like if I don't speak I'm not saying anything out loud.

this post was submitted on 04 Jul 2026

75 points (100.0% liked)

Asklemmy

54890 readers

260 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
!lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 7 years ago

MODERATORS