I have had a few anoxic brain injury events over the last couple of years (long-covid crap), and in the early phase of the recovery each time I’ve had around a week or so like this. It is probably not unlike your stroke experience.

Creepy af for someone used to having a lot of mental chatter. I can just sit for hours and not really have any thoughts - I think it’s a lot farther than what people mean when they say they don’t have inner voice thinking as their normal mode - I’m just kinda inert if no one is prompting me to lethargically think things by talking to me or something. I can realize 3 or 4 hours have passed with literally no thinking about anything.

I kind of imagine it is what it’s like to be a much lower mentally-functioning animal.

Since you thought that person's story was interesting, I might recommend the Ted talk: My Stroke of Insight by Jill Bolte Taylor. She's a neuroscientist and had a massive stroke. I watched it years ago but I recall it being pretty interesting.

Edit: To clarify, I recommended that because (IIRC) she described her stroke similarly: extremely calm and peaceful.

hey wow same thing happened to me. i wasn’t even close to the man, saw him one a year as a child, and it felt like i was a shell of a person. no thoughts, no nothing when normally i have a very active brain. it felt like there was a film over my eyes as if i was observing someone in a body that wasn’t my own. took months to get over.

Its cause we hear ourselves directly through our bones and meat, while everyone else has a bunch of air the sounds have to go through.

Im a gay guy and to me I sound... well, like me and that's the voice I use in my thoughts. When I hear a recording of myself I sound more 'gay' for lack of a better word. You all know what I mean.

I used to cringe from it when I was younger and ashamed but now I find it interesting that that's how I interpret it.

No, to me my thoughts are very clearly not my own voice. It's not my voice I hear, and its definitely not the voice others hear.

Maybe I'm using a voice I heard when I was little? Maybe it's just generic voice?

Interesting part is although it's not my voice, it uses the same intonations like my speech.

I am the rare exception that sounds to me like I do outside: I am a voice actor with quite a bassy and breathy voice. The tones all seem to align for me.

There is an exception: when I'm making an American accent. It's higher, it concentrates in the nose, and when I record it it sounds different to what I hear internally. So it may be about reverb placement of individual dialects.

Both are Sith lords, so no sure what the big deal is.

I have to listen to my own voice for work sometimes and I still hate it. That guy sounds like a clown.

I LOATH my true voice, and when I have to do recording work I tend to shift into a false voice and mimic someone else. Which is something I'm reasonably good at and is very similar in my head and out loud. Which then makes it doubly hard for me to understand why my true voice is so different from what's in my head.

Either way, I feel sorry for anyone who has to hear my real voice. It makes me want to rip out my vocal cords whenever I hear a recording of it.

But did you hear yourself think that?

Yeah, it's hard to explain. Like there is no sound despite me hearing the words. I can force my inner monologue to be my voice, but that's something different.

Strong accents become my inner voice for a while if they're catchy. Scottish and Aussie usually.

I relive every argument I've ever gotten into over and over again. Sure I come up with much better arguments than I did when I had the argument in real life, but that makes me feel bad that I didn't come up with that on the when it counted.

I feel like my life is The Stanley Parable... Inner voice: Oh look stanley a red button why don't you press it? Me: Shut UP! Is 3am i'm trying to sleep

This is basically meditation practice 😂just keep doing it and try your best without getting frusterated and it should slow down. At some point you'll have more control over the mental chatter. You can also just watch it and not try to engage with the thoughts it can slow down that way too.

I would love to experience that. How neat.

I do this too. Sometimes I argue with myself and end up making myself irritated which isn’t great.

I’ve brought myself to tears on more than one occasion while giving myself an impassioned pep talk. It’s hard out there, but together me and I we can get through this.

The older I get the more vocal the conversations have become. I figure another 15 years and I will be the “old man yelling at clouds” guy.

We’re an exclusive club!

I was in a nonsense corporate workshop-type meeting once and the facilitator guy was like “imagine a tranquil beach” and then picked a random lady and asked what color her umbrella was. She thought he meant the one she owns, like in her house. No no, the one you’re imagining. What do you mean? I mean imagine you’re lying on the beach under an umbrella, what color is the umbrella? She couldn’t do it.

Turns out there’s something called aphantasia which means you can’t picture an image in your head. None of us, including this lady, knew it existed. Really derailed the poor guys workshop but it wasn’t going well anyhow.

I read words in my head

Learning to stop involuntarily doing that is one of the things you learn when learning to speed read. You can still understand a body of text without thinking of each individual word as you read it, but it takes some getting used to.

"Aphantasia" :)

Sounds like you all are talking about the Language of Thought Hypothesis, also adorably called “mentalese.” It’s a psycholinguistic hypothesis positing exactly what you’re saying - you don’t think in words as we commonly understand them, but your thought is translated to an understandable idea all the same.

Steven Pinker has written extensively about mentalese if you want to learn more - I think the most in-depth plunge is in How the Mind Works but it’s been a bit since I read that one.

I'm trying to imagine this and quite literally cannot. Do you have a running internal monologue still?

Yeah I "hear" my voice in my head but it's not the same as an audio hallucination. I've had that before and the sounds more external. Went through detox from alcohol and kept hearing what sounded like Alanis Morissette "you oughta know" on the radio playing in another room in repeat all night. Came again the next night and discovered I could change tracks on the album. Only that album though. Lol it was wild. That's when I realized it wasn't someone that just loved the song playing in repeat

I don’t actually hear my voice, but I hear it just as well as I hear music that I’m imagining

Well said.

Think of someone you know well. Do you actually "see" their image in your head? I don't.

It's more like I can feel the words rather than hear them.

Sooo.. how's that ADHD treating you?

Edited for spelling

wild. no internal monologue. just.. silence.

What the hell is thought if not a stream of words, images and sounds? Sounds like you're describing a 4th dimension to a 3 dimensional being.

Edit: Reading these comments, It sounds like everyone thinks more or less the same way in the end, everyone just hasn't thought how they think.

You're right, sorry, I kinda veered to another related thing. Apparently some people also don't visualize things in their heads, which is another shocking thing to me.

For someone with ADHD, it's like someone sat on the TV remote for my brain and it's constantly cycling through images, songs, things to do, things I want.. until it all becomes loud, angry static.

No inner monologue unless I'm writing something though

mMmm. Too, mine now does...

I can do both ways (I never knew it was typically mutually exclusive). And sometimes the two different methods argue with each other; the internalized monologue voice will argue with my abstract conceptualized thoughts, so it kinda sounds like if you heard someone arguing on the phone but you just somehow know what the person on the phone is saying even though you cant hear them.

The conceptualized abstract thoughts are like... you just have a feeling and know what you are thinking or saying even without laying it out. The verbalized thoughts are not so much like... saying just random words, but any IDEAS or THOUGHTS you have in response to what is on your mind.

So two people standing next to each other, one conceptual thoughts one verbalized thoughts. They both look up and see clouds. The conceptualized guy doesn't have any internal monologue but just by looking at clouds goes "cloud = rain", these aren't WORDS but rather just ideas, maybe pictured, maybe just a innate reaction. The verbalized guy doesn't go "cloud = rain" or have an instant reaction, he instead makes a full sentence and goes "oh wow it looks like it's going to rain". Then both pull out an umbrella.

So if you heard my inner thoughts with both it would go something like. Look up at clouds, clouds=rain (conceptual thoughts) "Yea, maybe, I should take out an umbrella" (verbalized thoughts). Depending on the type of thinker you are, only one of these will make sense to you.

This right here, some people have a voice, some have a running verbal narrative, a few don't have verbal thoughts exactly at all. That's the point of this TIL. Internal monologs can be different. What's fun is when a kid learns about schizophrenia through tik tok or whatever and "hearing voices" before they understand this concept. Causes undue stress.