Internal Dialogues

Not everyone has little conversations in their minds.

If you haven’t heard about this, this may come as a shock to you. After all, if you have your own little dialogue inside your brain, it seems like everyone else should too.

This is called internal dialogue, and for most of the history of psychology—the scientific study of the human mind—assumed that everyone had such a thing. You start by posing one side of a debate, perhaps, and then present the other side in your mind.

Or, you tell yourself you’ve got this. You’ve been preparing all night for this test, and you’re going to ace it! All the hard work is done, and all you have to do is go out there and perform (the easy part).

The flip side to this positive form is negative self-talk, where self-sabotage can happen far too easily. This is when you tell yourself you’re not good enough to do this, or you’re not that type of person, or there’s just not hope here.

I’ve had conversations like these in my own mind for as long as I can remember, and I certainly imagined that everyone else did, too. However, Theory of Mind gives you the suggestion that not everyone thinks the same way you do, and even without recent observations, you should already maybe be skeptical that we’re all the same sort of preprogrammed robot.

My friend Brian can’t visualize an apple in his mind the way I can. He just doesn’t see the form in his mind’s eye, but instead does something like a mental summary of the attributes of an apple. In other words, there’s just no mental image that forms. This is called aphantasia, and it offers us an important clue.

If my friend can’t visualize shapes in his mind, is it possible that other folks don’t have internal dialogues like I do? Could it be that summaries of concepts are considered, with no language interfering or clarifying?

Resoundingly, the answer seems to be: yes.

These summaries are being called Unsymbolized Thinking (UT) by its chief proponent, Russell Hurlburt. In his landmark 2008 study, he had participants record their immediate thoughts whenever an electronic device reminded them to record what was on their minds.

Not everyone had these little debates in their mind. Instead, they decide in a different way.

You might be thinking: this is where gut feeling comes into play. Instead of a logically framed debate with rhetoric, you take a measure of how a potential action makes you feel. The gut and emotions can be a useful shortcut if you have to make a quick life-or-death decision in a split second, but it can also help you make more complex decisions.

However, emotions operate at the subconscious level. In a split second, without necessarily understanding completely why, you make a particular decision. By contrast, Unsymbolized Thinking involves your conscious thought processes, but without language or symbols.

The debate surrounding what Hurlburt’s and UT’s findings mean rages on, but it’s clear to me that not everyone thinks the same way. You can see this in the different ways people count, or in the way some people think and talk with their hands.

Brian doesn’t see an apple in his mind, but he can conjure up vivid childhood memories, whereas I cannot. Each of us has our relative superpowers and limitations, and not everyone thinks about things the same way.

I don’t understand how someone can think without symbols or language, but I’m more than willing to give the benefit of the doubt to the unknown here.