Everything. The words of my internal monologue play out slowly, all of them after the thought has formed. When I hear the first word in my mind, I already know the mental content of the sentence, though sometimes I get stuck along the way trying to pick a word out. Even then, I clearly already am accessing the concept for the word I can’t find. A sentence may take 10 seconds to listen to in my head, but its complete meaning, and some general syntactic structure, seems to take less then one second to form. The words, as far as I can tell, serve no purpose when I’m not speaking to someone else. Yet I habitually wait for them to roll out before moving on to the next thought.
Being able to visualize things would be nice, but I have almost no ability to visualize things. I can’t imagine my mother’s face, or the front of my house; I can only recognize it. I have something like or analogous to visualization for vector spaces. I can often feel out how things move in a low-dimensional phase space via pattern-recognition rather than math, probably because I’ve spent so much time observing data which describes such paths. I have a tactile sense for type matches and mismatches; type mismatches (category errors) in spoken language stick out to me almost like a red dot on a blue field. I think my understanding of logical arguments and algorithms is also pre-verbal; I seem to grasp the logical structure of, say, code I’m writing or reading, before I can put it into words. I suppose this comes from spending tens of thousands of hours writing and debugging code. I don’t know if any of these things are unusual. People don’t seem to talk about them, though; and many people act as if they had no such senses.
Everything. The words of my internal monologue play out slowly, all of them after the thought has formed. When I hear the first word in my mind, I already know the mental content of the sentence, though sometimes I get stuck along the way trying to pick a word out. Even then, I clearly already am accessing the concept for the word I can’t find. A sentence may take 10 seconds to listen to in my head, but its complete meaning, and some general syntactic structure, seems to take less then one second to form. The words, as far as I can tell, serve no purpose when I’m not speaking to someone else. Yet I habitually wait for them to roll out before moving on to the next thought.
Being able to visualize things would be nice, but I have almost no ability to visualize things. I can’t imagine my mother’s face, or the front of my house; I can only recognize it. I have something like or analogous to visualization for vector spaces. I can often feel out how things move in a low-dimensional phase space via pattern-recognition rather than math, probably because I’ve spent so much time observing data which describes such paths. I have a tactile sense for type matches and mismatches; type mismatches (category errors) in spoken language stick out to me almost like a red dot on a blue field. I think my understanding of logical arguments and algorithms is also pre-verbal; I seem to grasp the logical structure of, say, code I’m writing or reading, before I can put it into words. I suppose this comes from spending tens of thousands of hours writing and debugging code. I don’t know if any of these things are unusual. People don’t seem to talk about them, though; and many people act as if they had no such senses.