Do you have an inner monologue?

[autienotnaughty]

And if you do, do you talk to it or is it more like a voice over in your head?

I do - a constant stream of comment and internal dialogue with myself.

DH gets really annoyed with me when we're chatting about something, and then I come out with something completely unconnected (in his mind anyway), when in my head I've moved several stages on in my internal chat.

Yes same! I can’t get why he isn’t caught up

I have the chatter but no visuals at all but I’d get a sense of things rather than a picture

My brain never shuts up, ever.

I do have an ADHD diagnosis though.

DH says is mind is blank until he needs to think about something and when that thought is done with it goes blank again. I honestly can not get my head around that.

It's so fascinating isn't it? We assume others are the same as ourselves in these matters, but apparently not so!

Ooh here's a thought - do people who don't have an internal monologue get off to sleep more easily? No worries or thoughts going round their head?

People seem to have interpreted having no inner monologue as having no thoughts! I think constantly but I don't express that in words unless I'm going to use it as words, so I'm either going to speak or write. For that reason, perhaps, I do often write my thoughts down to work them through when I'm trying to make a hard decision or reason something tricky through - I do this a lot at work. But I am thinking, worrying, etc all the time, but I just can't equate it to anything like conversation or monologue. For me thoughts are like emotions - I don't think 'I'm frightened' I just am frightened and similarly my thoughts aren't in words, they just are. But it's very hard to convey the concept of having thoughts without words in words!

The thing that confuses me is people who say they hear the words as they read - surely that means you can only read as fast as speech? Not many people actually do read that slowly - so are you all hearing it sped up in your head?!

I recommend reading The Untethered Soul by Michael Singer. He writes about noticing the voice but standing back from it as a way of finding peace.

Yes! This is exactly how I experience it too.

It sounds peaceful

There are several different ways to think and some people rely more on one way than another but there's no evidence that it matters (e.g. there are artists who don't have a mind's eye). An internal voice and mind's eye are the most commonly expressed in films and speech, probably because they are the easiest to show. But as well as those two I definitely think abstractly as well and how I think depends on the task in hand, e.g. I don't use my internal voice when doing visual or abstract tasks.

Yes. It needs to shut up tbh