I don’t understand the concept of “internal monologue”.
I have a hypothesis about this. Most people, most of the time, are automatically preparing to describe, just in case someone asks. You ask them what they’re imagining, doing, or sensing, and they can just tell you. The description was ready to go before you asked the question. Sometimes, these prepared descriptions get rehearsed; people imagine saying things out loud. That’s internal monologue.
There are some people who do not automatically prepare to describe, and hence have less internal monologue, or none. Those people end up having difficulty describing things. They might even get annoyed (frustrated?) if you ask them too many questions, because answering can be hard.
(I wonder how one might test whether or not a person automatically prepares to describe. The ability to describe things quickly is probably measurable, and one could compare that to self-reports about internal monologue. If there were no correlation, that’d be evidence against this hypothesis.)
This tracks for me. I was explicitly taught, as a small child, to be ready to explain what I was doing at all times. Failure to have a ready and satisfactory answer to “what are you doing?” was treated as strong evidence that I was idle (or up to no good!) and should be redirected to do something explicable instead.
(And today, if a friend asks me “how are you?” as a sincere question rather than a casual politeness, it sometimes locks up my cognition for a few seconds as I scramble to introspect enough to come up with a good answer...)
I have a hypothesis about this. Most people, most of the time, are automatically preparing to describe, just in case someone asks. You ask them what they’re imagining, doing, or sensing, and they can just tell you. The description was ready to go before you asked the question. Sometimes, these prepared descriptions get rehearsed; people imagine saying things out loud. That’s internal monologue.
There are some people who do not automatically prepare to describe, and hence have less internal monologue, or none. Those people end up having difficulty describing things. They might even get annoyed (frustrated?) if you ask them too many questions, because answering can be hard.
(I wonder how one might test whether or not a person automatically prepares to describe. The ability to describe things quickly is probably measurable, and one could compare that to self-reports about internal monologue. If there were no correlation, that’d be evidence against this hypothesis.)
This tracks for me. I was explicitly taught, as a small child, to be ready to explain what I was doing at all times. Failure to have a ready and satisfactory answer to “what are you doing?” was treated as strong evidence that I was idle (or up to no good!) and should be redirected to do something explicable instead.
(And today, if a friend asks me “how are you?” as a sincere question rather than a casual politeness, it sometimes locks up my cognition for a few seconds as I scramble to introspect enough to come up with a good answer...)