Talk:Internal monologue

message: Yes, I'm the guy who added this section.  Yes, I hate these sections, too.  But when I came across this page it had  on it, for some rather obvious reasons.  I added the section so that non-technical people could have some examples which might help them understand what the article is talking about.
When this thing gets cleaned up, you might want to get rid of the popular culture section.  You would have my blessing. --Superluser 03:34, 20 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Internal monologue in popular culture

message: "The person creating the inner speech is also the sole consumer of the monologue". This sounds obvious to me. Is there something to it that I'm not getting? A.Z. 04:07, 30 August 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: I was thinking that internal monologue is what it's called that children develop as they learn the ability to think without verbalizing their thoughts. This line led me to think that this is not the case. However, if what I believed was true, then that line needs to be expanded - that the person creating the speech is the sole consumer once this develops, but that it takes a while in very small children to develop.4.68.248.130 15:50, 11 October 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Sole consumer 

message: The large Luke 13:22-34 quote seems to have nothing to do with internal monologue. I propose that it be removed on grounds of irrelevancy. Bobber0001 (talk) 14:39, 10 December 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Large biblical quote 

message: Why is it on the article?  A buddhist perspective appears to be irrelevant, or should appear on an article about buddhism.  I propose that it be removed on grounds of irrelevancy, much like the biblical perspective.  Could the "buddhist perspective" then be a heading on every page on wikipedia?  What is the buddhist's perspective on raising bioengineered corn?  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.28.143.3 (talk) 17:51, 6 July 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Buddhist perspective 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: Half of this article is about mental health anyway, so there's certainly a lot of overlap. I'll note that an Inner critic covers a different conceptualisation of a critical inner voice, i.e. as external, not internal, but I don't think it'd be a loss to present those contrasting conceptualisations in the same place. Especially if other ideas of an internal voice as coming from an external source come under the purview of this article, such as the Ancient Greeks supposedly believing said voices could come from the gods. ─ ReconditeRodent « talk · contribs » 11:26, 21 December 2018 (UTC)
replies: text: Seems fair – I'll take down the tag. ─ ReconditeRodent « talk · contribs » 18:04, 21 December 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Proposal to merge [[Inner critic]] into this article 

message: proposed merging Internal discourse into this article. Please discuss. Biogeographist (talk) 17:39, 21 December 2018 (UTC)
replies: text: It might be worth noting that Mikhail Bakhtin wrote extensively on the varieties of discourse, particularly internal dialogue, and always distinguished it conceptually from monologue. However, none of this is covered in the article and I agree with User:ChaseF that it doesn't serve much purpose as it is. Harold the Sheep (talk) 01:28, 16 April 2019 (UTC)
replies: text: I have merged them, but accept that there might be a role for including more of a discussion regarding the varieties of discourse with a view to distinguishing between the concepts on one page.  Klbrain (talk) 12:52, 13 January 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Proposal to merge [[Internal discourse]] into this article 

message: I'm troubled by this line: Not everyone reports experiencing an internal monologue. This statement is strongly worded, and although it's possible that not everyone experiences an internal monologue, it has not been clearly established, and I do not think that most theory in psychology would support it. The reference for the claim is a blog, and the chief source cited in the blog is an article by Heavy and Hurlburt, published in 2007 in the journal, Consciousness and Cognition. This article reports results from a small sample (N=30) of college students who provided data for three days using an experience sampling method. Some of the data was excluded, leaving a total data set of 295 samples of experience. This is not much data from which to draw definitive conclusions, and indeed, the authors say that it represents an "initial foray" into the matter.
If you look at the table in the article, you can see that the inner experience categories of inner speech (monologue), inner seeing (images), unsymbolized thinking, feeling, and sensory awareness are each reported in about a quarter of the samples. Five participants reported ZERO episodes of inner monologue, and that is the statistic that could be summoned in support of the claim that not everyone reports experiencing it. But given the size of the sample and the total number of experiences reported, drawing a universal conclusion is perilous. It seems likely that these 5 college students do actually have inner speech on occasion, but that they just didn't report it the few times their beepers went off. It's also useful to bear in mind that 9 of the 30 participants did not report experiencing any sensory awareness. The idea that not everyone experiences sensory awareness seems nearly beyond belief, but it would actually be slightly more justified than the notion that not everyone has internal speech.
Maybe this is a cheap shot, but when I read the article, I also noticed that the authors mistakenly attributed a claim by the famous behaviorist John B. Watson to a "James" Watson. Mistakes happen, but this does not inspire confidence in the scholarship. I highly recommend a more conservative tone in this article, something along the lines of it is possible that not everyone experiences an internal monologue, or that this is something that is in need of further investigation. It is simply wrong to conclude that the matter is settled, at least on the basis of the evidence that is currently cited. --Jcbutler (talk) 22:52, 21 February 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: . Paradoctor (talk) 01:50, 22 February 2020 (UTC)
replies: text:  Yes, one small study has suggested that not everyone reports having an internal monologue. And this issue has been misinterpreted all over the internet. Some clarity here could be useful. --Jcbutler (talk) 04:23, 22 February 2020 (UTC)
replies: text:  You're missing the point. Stating that people report an experience is not the same as saying people do experience. The former is an observable fact, the latter is a theory. You made that distinction yourself. Yet, this edit of yours removed the qualifier, making the articles less accurate. Paradoctor (talk) 05:04, 22 February 2020 (UTC)
replies: text: No point in arguing about who is missing the point. I like the current language, which I think is much clearer about what the study actually found: "According to one study, there is wide variation in how often people experience internal monologue, and some people report very little or none." --Jcbutler (talk) 05:08, 22 February 2020 (UTC)
replies: text:  "I like the current language" I don't. Are you going to revert if I re-add the qualifier? Paradoctor (talk) 05:14, 22 February 2020 (UTC)
replies: text:  Let's work together. :) I mostly want to make sure it's clear that these are not established results, but rather preliminary conclusions from a single study. Really, that whole section could use some clarification. --Jcbutler (talk) 05:30, 22 February 2020 (UTC)
replies: text:  That's why I asked instead of EWing. Yea or nay, or what else? Paradoctor (talk) 05:41, 22 February 2020 (UTC)
replies: text:  It’s hard for me to judge it while it’s still internal monologue ;) Why don’t you go ahead and write your piece, either here or in the article. We should be able to shape it into a consensus statement. Jcbutler (talk) 14:13, 22 February 2020 (UTC)

text: Added relevant quote. Paradoctor (talk) 17:24, 22 February 2020 (UTC)

text: I didn't bring this up before, because anecdotes are not arguments for the purposes of determining article content. But a few months ago, I participated in Facebook thread on this topic. Several commenters stated that they were visual, rather than verbal thinkers. One of them experienced their thought process as visual manipulation of the content of six different images / "displays". Which I'd interpret as the slots of their working memory. And many of them stated that they were surprised to learn that not everyone does it this way. "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy." ;) Paradoctor (talk) 16:57, 10 March 2020 (UTC)
replies: text:  As Paradoctor says, personal experience isn't really relevant. What is needed are reputable sources and high quality, empirical research. But since we are discussing it... I probably think mostly in inner monologue, but I often have nonverbal "unsymbolized" thinking too, which could be translated into sentences like "get that, do the thing," etc. I also have visual imagery, emotional states, and awareness of sensations. Mossymountain, you say you mostly have nonverbal kinds of thought, but don't you think everyone experiences some ratio of all of these states? I'm curious about how you would memorize something like a phone number, or simply hold it in your head for a few minutes. The mainstream view in cognitive psychology is that people use a phonological loop for this kind of task, repeating the information over and over again in our inner voice (a mechanism known as rehearsal). I suggest that the vast majority of people do it this way. It seems likely that everyone who has language would be capable of doing it this way if they wanted to. Indeed, you say you could choose do it this way too. I could visualize a number in my head, though it would not be a natural way of doing it (for me) and I would have trouble with a large number of digits. I'm sure some people could do better if they have exceptional mental imagery. But the preponderance of evidence suggests that we all visualize and we all use inner language. The blogs and tweets and online claims that some people do not ever think in inner monologue are spreading misinformation, based on an inappropriate generalization from one small study, as I discussed above. --Jcbutler (talk) 17:25, 10 March 2020 (UTC)

text:  P.S. Hamlet apparently used quite a lot of "inner" monologue too. ;) --Jcbutler (talk) 17:32, 10 March 2020 (UTC)
replies: text:  I don't really have another point of reference. For the longest time I thought that most people usually did not think in words, and that the characters' internal monologue in books, comics and movies was just an artistic representation of them thinking. Now that I've found this subject, most things I've found seem to suggest that many people think more in words, but I still wouldn't suppose anyone would linguistically think anything like "There's a car coming my way fast, I need to clear this road before I get run over." while crossing a road on foot, but rather just performing the action needed. To the phone number question, I seem to be worse than average in remembering number sequences. I will try to repeat the spoken digits in my head (either in the voice I heard it as, or my internal, "voiceless" one, probably when it's too long to fit in the Echoic memory in the original voice) in hopes of making it stick, but the sequence can easily get too long for me to repeat (like the first time hearing an eight to ten digit number). Probably related, it would be hard for me to speak out loud a password I use or to write it on paper. I would have to think about the positions my hands would press on the keyboard and then determine what symbols those keypresses would create. As this is slower than doing the typing itself and the rhythm of the movement can't really be slowed down without messing it up, it's difficult to do without missing some characters, given that I still wouldn't remember "the idea I had for the password" any more. It also requires increasing amounts of effort for me to follow spoken sentences when they get slower, to the point I would have to transcribe it to understand by later reading what I wrote if it got extremely slow. Mossymountain (talk) 10:14, 24 March 2020 (UTC)
replies: text:  That's really interesting, thank you for sharing, Mossymountain. --Jcbutler (talk) 19:44, 30 March 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Does everyone experience an internal monologue? 

message: I propose to merge Intrapersonal communication into Internal monologue. I think that the content in the Intrapersonal communication article can easily be explained in the context of Internal monologue, and the Internal monologue article is of a reasonable size that the merging of Intrapersonal communication will not cause any problems as far as article size is concerned. https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-319-72514-7_2 Yonkatz (talk) 13:23, 9 July 2020 (UTC)
thread_title:  Merger proposal 

message: Is it when someone has a voice to go with the words in their head, or is simply having words in your head an internal monologue? If it's the latter, then everyone an internal monologue.--2001:5B0:4DC1:74F8:2802:8404:2F53:95F9 (talk) 19:37, 12 December 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  What exactly is an internal monologue? 

message: I wanted to let anyone active on this page know that I am at student at Texas A&M University working with User:Etherfire on an editing assignment for our Technical Editing class. I have chosen this page because I would like to execute the merger proposed by User:Yonkatz (who doesn't appear to be active anymore?) and supported by User:Jcbutler. I am keeping notes on my Coilebethany page. Let me know if you have any questions or suggestions! Coilebethany (talk) 20:48, 15 February 2022 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm going to begin working on this in my sandbox, if anyone is interested in following the progress. I will implement changes bit by bit.Coilebethany (talk) 19:10, 21 February 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Merger with [[Intrapersonal communication]]