I have aphantasia and no internal monologue, and a side benefit of that is that intrusive thoughts aren’t really a thing
this post was submitted on 12 Feb 2025
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must be nice and quiet too
Gotta be a bitch if you have tinnitus though.
Oh wow I’ve never heard of that before, how did you discover you had that?
Like most folk with aphantasia, I thought that people talking about “seeing things in their imagination” were just being dramatic and using common language. It never occurred to me that they could genuinely see things in their minds. And the whole thing where people would be upset when a character in a TV show or movie didn’t look like how they’d imagined they would look, never made sense to me. And shows where people could recall the details of peoples faces for police sketch artists…
Basically, moments like that started adding up over my life, and then about 10 years ago, I read an article from someone who had discovered they had aphantasia through a similar path, and it all just fell in to place.
And the lack of internal monologue? How is that experienced? Do you know what you're going to say before you say it, or is it simultaneous? How do you problem-solve, can you ask yourself questions?
I'm sorry if I'm being obnoxious, I'm just terribly curious. I'm always hungry for experiences outside my own.
I can think of words, I just don't think I'm words. And when I think of a word I can run them together in a sentence. But they have no "sound". They don't have volume or pitch, they don't sound like anyone, they're just the idea of words. And because the words are after the fact, they don't exist without me willing them in to existence. So no monologue in the way people describe it, and the idea of a conversation in my head doesn't make sense. It would be more like writing a script for a conversation
That's interesting, I myself can sometimes think without a monologue. I did it just now, and I am not sure if I do not use words, but I do not actually hear them, yet I know the thoughts are there somehow. It often happens on its own when I have a lot of thoughts at the same time or think really fast about something.
But usually I talk to myself in my head, this is either a monologue or a sort of dialogue, and I often tell myself to shut up out loud when no one is around. I also imagine music pretty accurately, and I can enjoy it this way,. I play by ear.
I am sorry for the questions, this is really interesting.
What about maths? How do you do geometry? Do you have to have a drawing or can you manage without it? How do you understand geometry if you can't see it's objects?
i find this entirely fascinating because i'm the opposite. I write shit down because it's too loud in my brain. like, right now left ear wants to listen to Hurricane from Hamilton, right ear wants to listen to Hurricane by Bob Dylan so I'm getting both of them and it's kind of hard to think until that settles down.
I heard someone describe it as "bees in the brain", and I felt so seen!
I have very good spatial awareness, but it's non visual. I can navigate my way mentally through a spaxe and "feel" where the walls are without seeing them. I have a sense of how big something is compared to something else and where they are relative to each other in space, but all non visually.
And I can rotate objects in my mind and change my perspective around them, but all without any visual elements.
I can sense the mental cube, but I can't see it. It has no colour, no texture etc. Imagine a sort of mental bat sonar?
Ok thanks for the reply. When you said you had aphantasia and no inner monologue I thought you were a philosiphical zombie. I guess I was wrong, but there is no way to know I suppose.
No p zombies here!
I'm really struggling to imagine this.
Yeah, that's it in a nutshell :p
Hah! 😂
How does one read books silently? Is that not a form of internal monologue?
The words have no sound. No volume, no pitch. They're word ideas not words. I don't hear anything, I just understand the words.
And what happens when you read a description of something? Do you just have an idea of what it is, because if so, it seems to me that some of the value of literature will be lost. Do you actually feel anything when you read a description of something beautiful, for instance?
No, I don't get a sense of awe or beauty from reading things. I can appreciate when the folks I'm reading about experience those emotions, but I don't feel them, because there is nothing to inspire them in me.
Which is why I tend to prefer books that go in to more depth about what people are thinking and feeling than books that go in to lots of visual detail
Interestingly enough, silent reading was historically uncommon due to the fact that literature was less common than it is now and, most importantly, the lack of separation between words.
The ability to read silently was considered very unusual.
Have both and intrusive thoughts 🥲
Aren't people here conflating intrusive thoughts vs the call of the void? I remember someone explaining it to me a bit like this:
Intrusive thoughts are often violent and more "you need to kill yourself right now, jump in front of that train!" Or "push that person down the stairs now, do it!!!"
Where call of the void is much more passive as in "what if/I could I jumped in front of a train right now" or "if I pushed that person down the stairs right now, they would probably get very hurt" and extends to things like "I could just drop my phone in a sewer grate"
My understanding is that everyone™ gets the second but a lot less people get the first. I also get the second but not the first. I could be wrong because it was a random person that explained it to me.
No, those are different things. Intrusive thoughts are your brain telling you terrible things like you suck at your work or your hobbies, you're worthless, your friends don't actually like you, and hey remember that time you did a cringey thing in front of people? They're not true, and you're not intentionally having these thoughts, but your brain can't easily rationalize them away. It's usually something that builds up over a lifetime so that you don't even realize it's happening. Thats how so many people get stuck believing the intrusive thoughts.
It’s pretty rare for me to think of things I'm not keen on thinking about, redirection is the key. Treat your brain like a toddler trying to touch the stove, saying no doesn't work, you have to give both something interesting to distract them.
I know this doesn't answer your question, but I feel like I would be more concerned if someone told me they never had any intrusive thoughts.
Like yeah it's weird that I always think about what it might be like to drive into oncoming traffic, but I would never actually do it.
Somehow I would be more afraid of the person who's never even thought about it once than the other
It's like people who find I don't believe in hell asking "what's stopping you from murdering people?"
If religion is all that's stopping you, I'm worried.
EXACTLY.
I have lost count of the number of times I have heard someone say some variation of "Without God or the punishment of eternal damnation what's stopping you from raping and murdering???"
It's like... I don't need a magic space man to tell me those things are bad in order for me not to do them. If you DO require a magic space man to keep you from being a disgusting piece of shit maybe you gotta do some soul searching. Or dying.
My intrusive thought frequency and vividness have diminished with significant changes to both diet and exercise. Now I'm at the point where I can stand on the edge of a high building balcony and not have the "jump" monologue kick off.
I have OCD so all day every day. I will smack the next person who says they have OCD because they like to organize. They don't understand the hell I've been through.
I don't think I have intrusive thoughts. I'm happy, generally pretty creative (hobbies, coding, etc.). Sometimes politics and world affairs get me down, but I don't feel like they are "intrusive", more like affecting my mood. I like how /u/0x01@lemmy.ml put it--I kind of let my mind do whatever it does, and I try to be an observer of what unfolds. I think meditation practice has helped with this practice (Vipassana or Insight meditation specifically).
How do you define intrusive in this case?
If your subconscious mind suddenly reminds of that one time you said something stupid and embarrassing… Yeah, that happens to pretty much everyone. Just tell that thought that nobody remembers that day or cares about what anyone said, so carry on as usual. That’s just the human mind doing its thing, making sure we pay attention to social interactions. Humans are social animals after all.
If troublesome thoughts bombard your mind all the time and you’re having trouble living your normal life, consider talking to a mental health professional.
Sometimes puzzles or problems will take root in my head and it becomes nearly impossible to distract myself from them. Often times I mull over them until exhaustion and I just have one phrase or word repeating in my head trying to understand it. Often times accompanied by a migraine and an intense feeling of sorrow
The people who say they don't experience intrusive thoughts are liars. They are too anxious about how the world would react if they told anyone they sometimes think about jumping off a roof, or driving into oncoming traffic.
The people who don't actually have intrusive thoughts are psychopaths. Lacking empathy, they don't even consider how such actions would affect anyone around them. They do, or do not, as they choose.
The healthiest are the people who recognize in themselves behaviors they don't observe in their peers, and they are concerned enough for everyone's safety to risk being seen as abnormal.
There is a difference between "intrusive thought" and "suicidal/homicidal ideation". Experiencing these ideas as irresistible urges to partake in the behaviors might warrant a trip to a pshrink.
Experiencing them as vivid scenes of violence and destruction, without a compulsion to actually act on them, is not unusual or concerning. They're your own private action movies; Enjoy them.
Your problem is you don’t understand what intrusive thoughts actually are.
Everyone has thoughts that creep into their stream of consciousness in response to stressors and are experienced as stressful thoughts that reflect a person’s latent anxieties.
Truly intrusive thoughts are thoughts that are injected into your stream of consciousness much more abruptly and reflect a psychotic problem in your brain. They’re often experienced as thoughts that aren’t your own and feel entirely alien to you in a way that the aforementioned thoughts do not. This can result in them being interpreted by the brain as “the CIA is projecting thoughts into my mind via a chip” to “I have a telepathic connection to God” depending on the mental illness in question.
Do not confuse these two things. The former is a normal phenomenon that is not an indication of serious mental illness; the latter definitely is.
the second one you describe are more delusions of hallucinations. intrusive thoughts are fairly harmless and pretty much every experiences them.