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July 27, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
23:28
What it's Like with no Inner Dialogue?!? Article Review
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Hey everybody, Stefan Molly from Free Domain.
So I put a tweet out a couple of weeks ago that seemed to garner some interest.
I wanted to put some more details behind it of what it's like living without an inner monologue.
And look, it's not a good or bad or plus or minus.
It's just really, really important to embrace the diversity of human thought.
So this is from CBC.
Well, you know, they're taking my tax money.
I might as well get the article out of it.
So the article here starts, hi there, are you hearing this sentence in your head right now?
Well, I guess because I'm narrating it, you are.
Is your inner critic voicing its thoughts on the sentence structure?
Is it saying this is an odd start to a news story?
The concept of an inner monologue, the term now commonly used to describe the voice in your head, recently sparked a flurry of discussion on social media.
A tweet by Kyle Plantemoji, blah, blah, blah, brought the topic into the forefront, informing the internet that not everyone has an inner monologue.
And as when I posted it, and I first learned about this a couple of years ago, when I posted it, there's a certain amount of shock and horror.
You know, for those of us who are ADHD, hyper-Hamlet types, constantly arguing and debating with ourselves and having to deal with a cacophony, a multiplicity of aspects of ourselves, they call alter egos or alters.
I call it the Miko system.
Like I'm not just a me, I'm a me plus influential people I've met.
What would Jesus do?
And so on.
So there's a lot that goes on.
And for people who don't have these sort of inner voice or inner voices, it's a very different kind of life.
Now, most of the people who follow what I do would have that sort of inner debate, inner dialogue, inner voice, because we're into philosophy, we're into self-knowledge, we're into self-criticism and so on.
And I mean, I write plays and novels and I do role plays in call-in shows with listeners.
If there's a particular, say, family member who I need to get a sense of how they think, I'll ask that person to imitate their family member.
I'll pretend to be them.
So you can just sort of adopt these sort of other voices and other characteristics and so on.
And you can't be a good novelist, of course, if you can't figure out how other people speak and think.
So, I mean, there's pluses and minuses for sure.
I mean, the plus is, I think, a more structured and self-critical form of thinking.
The minuses is it's easy to get paralyzed with overthinking.
So again, strengths and weaknesses to both.
All right.
So this woman, sorry, this man, Kyle, wrote, fun fact, some people have an internal narrative and some don't.
As in some people's thoughts are like sentences they hear and some people just have abstract non-verbal thoughts, have to consciously verbalize.
The most people aren't aware of the other type of person.
There's a lot of self-sorting that goes on in society.
And, you know, if you sit down with someone and they say, oh, I woke up yesterday, I was really unmotivated.
I had the stern talk with myself.
I had a conversation with myself.
I'm debating this internally.
I have this inner conflict or whatever it is.
Then you tend to be drawn to each other.
Whereas the people who think in images and colors and instincts and gut sense, and again, I know this sounds like I'm trying to diminish.
I'm not at all, but it's just a different way of thinking.
Olivia Rivera, 22, said she figured out she doesn't have an internal monologue when her co-workers had a Regina.
Regina is a city in Canada.
They had an advertising slogan once, Regina.
Rhymes with fun.
Anyway, Regina Salon started talking about the viral debate.
She said that until then, she didn't know that some people actually have a voice in their head that sounds like their own voice.
She said, when I hear the other people, when I hear that other people have like a constant kind of dialogue and stream in their head, and that they're doing a task, when they're doing a task, they'll just be thinking about things the entire time they're doing a task.
It actually feels a little overwhelming.
How do you deal with that?
What does that feel like?
You may have seen in a monologue portrayed in TV shows where a detective debriefs the situation via narration, or maybe you've seen the movie Women Want, where Mel Gibson's character can read the minds of his female co-workers and romantic interests.
Rivera said she first confronted with...
I think that's a newism.
She first confronted with the concept of an inner voice as a child watching this show Lizzie Maguire, in which a small animated version of the main character shared her thoughts and commentary on what was happening.
Rivera said she never understood the explanatory device was supposed to mimic the voice inside the character's head.
Right, so if you do things and they sort of go outside your comfort zone, you get this view from the outside in, like the cringe factor.
And the view from the outside in is another kind of inner voice where you, it's called a third eye, where you get to observe what it is that you're doing and give yourself feedback.
Now, a lot of this is critical, and the criticism isn't bad.
When I first started doing public speaking, I had an outside voice that looked at me and said, is this kind of ridiculous?
This kind of goofy, the mannerisms are too much, the jokes are falling flat.
And that helped me sort of fine-tune what I do in terms of public speaking to become better.
And now, usually, if I see myself giving a speech on video, I'm usually quite pleased with that.
There's still a few tweaks and so on that are worth doing.
But the outside voice, it's like you think of an orbiting space station that's constantly radioing back to you the weather, which is your pluses and minus in what you're doing.
All right.
So this woman says, I don't have that, like this dialogue, inner dialogue, so there's always been weird to me.
So what does Rivera's mind look like?
She described her inner thoughts as jot notes.
I don't really know that that explains much.
Okay, so she says that if she's running late for work, she would know that she was late, but wouldn't be thinking, I'm late, I need to stop sleeping in, I need to go to bed earlier, etc.
If she's having a panic attack, her anxiety manifests in more of a physical way rather than with compulsive repetitive thoughts.
I'm not telling myself to panic, and I'm not like, oh my gosh, Olivia, she said, I never think like that.
That feels weird to say, I would never address myself.
Other times, Rivera said she thinks in a more visual way.
She does have songs just pop into her head.
In those cases, she will hear it in the singer's voice.
Russell Hurlbert, it's an awk name, a psychology professor at the University of Nevada, has been studying what he calls inner experience for more than 40 years.
He's written six books on it and worked with hundreds of participants.
He gives them each a beeper, and when it goes off at random times throughout the day, they'll have to note what's going on in their minds.
He said, people generally think in five ways.
Some people experience them all.
Five main ways of thinking.
Inner speaking, inner monologue.
Example, talking to yourself, hearing your voice or someone else, or audibly recalling a phone number.
So I'm trying to think.
I don't want to make this about me.
Okay, you know what?
Let's not make it about me.
Let's just make it about the article.
All right.
It's not about me.
Inner seeing.
See, there's an inner dialogue.
I was just like, should I make this about me or should I tell you the ways that I think?
But then I think people are more interested in how other people think.
I guess that could be one of the things.
See, here I am at Dubai and having this argument and debate with myself.
Is it good to share the ways in which I think?
Would that be helpful to you?
Or is that kind of self-involved and oh, me, I, me, me, I?
Anyway, so there's my inner debate live for you to enjoy.
Okay, so inner speaking, inner monologue, talking to yourself, hearing your voice of someone else, or audibly recalling a phone number.
The second is inner seeing slash visual imagery, thoughts with a visual symbol, picturing a memory or a place you wish you lived.
Feelings, a conscious experience of emotional process.
Example, feeling sad after the death of the loved one.
Unsymbolized thinking, no water images associated with your thoughts, pouring your morning coffee cup without telling yourself to.
Sensory awareness, paying attention to a sensory aspect of the environment for an unimportant reason.
For example, hearing someone talk but seeing the light reflecting off their glasses.
According to Hulbert, Hurlbert?
Hurlbert.
Hulbert.
Oh, they're missing an R. Oh, my judgy judgeness is occurring.
All right.
According to Hulbert, not many people have an inner monologue 100% of the time, but most do sometimes.
He estimates that inner monologue is a frequent thing for 30 to 50% of people.
He said there are very big individual differences.
Some people have absolutely none and some people have pretty close to 100%.
So I think if you've ever had dreams where there's no talking, there's no language in particular, you know, maybe you're flying over a landscape or maybe you're swimming or climbing a mountain or something like that, and there's no particular dialogue.
I think that's the closest to understanding how people without inner monologues or dialogues experience thought.
The pros and cons of inner monologues.
People who don't have an active inner monologue can teach themselves too, Hulbert said, but he doesn't think it's necessarily a good or bad thing.
He said, having, I guess it's Hulbert, not Hurlbert.
Okay, that's fine.
It doesn't matter.
Hulbert.
We'll go with Hulbert.
He said, having an inner monologue can make it easier for people to create a sequential plan and solve logical problems, but other ways of thinking have benefits too.
People who see visual imagery very often see imagery that doesn't exist in the real world, he said.
People who are given credit for being imaginative probably don't have much of an inner monologue.
Yeah, see, that's the thing too.
I have to...
I think this will be helpful.
I think I have the two modes.
So for instance, when I am thinking rationally, like creating a logical argument, working through a syllogism or a set of philosophical problems, it's extremely language-based and I'm very invested in it.
I mean, I want a certain outcome.
And of course, I have the self-criticism to say, well, don't fake it to get the certain outcome you want.
Like try to be critical and try to push back against it, right?
But during the time of actually working on those arguments, I'm enthusiastically putting forward the arguments, particularly if they accord with things like the non-aggression principle, property rights, peaceful parenting, and so on, stuff that I'm heavily invested in and have actually proven.
So I'm very invested.
So if somebody makes an argument that says, murder is good, right?
Obviously, I think murder is evil.
So I'm very invested in pushing back on that.
Or somebody says to me, free will is an illusion, I'm very invested in that.
So I push hard on that, and I'm 100% invested in making it work.
And then after I'm done, I look back at it more critically.
On the other hand, when I'm writing fiction, if I'm writing a chapter of my new novel, I have to be egoless.
I have to not try and control the dialogue, not try and control the characters, because that way they're the most vivid and alive when I'm not trying to, in a sense, conscript them into serving a particular philosophical or moral goal, right?
So that to me is the spontaneous form of writing has a lot of liveliness to it, but is often quite chaotic and doesn't often serve a moral goal.
On the other hand, if you take the sort of Ayn Rand route or the Plato route and you, in a sense, conscript the characters to pursue a particular narrative that you want for a moral or epistemological goal, then the characters tend to be kind of lifeless.
They tend to be sort of marionettes.
So I want the liveliness of spontaneity, but I also want to wrestle them into some sort of moral narrative.
Otherwise, really, what's the point of writing the book?
So, yeah, with philosophical arguing, I pour myself into the arguments and criticize them afterwards.
With writing, I just have to be egoless.
I have to be not there.
I have to be like a pane of glass through which you see a view, right?
If you notice the glass, then the glassmaker has done a bad job because it's got ripples and specks and spots and bubbles or something like that.
Like, I need to be as clear a pane as possible.
I need to be as egoless as possible in order to create from a fictionist standpoint.
But when it comes to philosophical arguments, I have to be very ego-invested to get the driving force to push through my own inner resistance and the arguments of others.
So, all right.
Rivera said that not having an inner monologue has been good for her in some ways because she can block out negative memories or thoughts relatively easily.
It also brought some challenges.
She said that when she was growing up, her mother often told her to think before she spoke, but she couldn't.
I can be blunt and I have no filter.
Sometimes I say things I shouldn't say, she said.
People often know what I'm thinking because I will say exactly what I'm thinking.
Do you really have an inner monologue all the time?
Oh, we're back to the R. Hurl Burt said, the recent buzz around inner experience is a good thing if it leads people to explore what's really going on in their minds rather than believing it is one way and not questioning it.
Yeah, I mean, do you ever get this sense?
I mean, I think really on social media, it's quite common.
I get the sense when I'm on social media and I'm debating or arguing with people.
I get a sense that I often encounter a very foreign or alien mind.
And again, foreign or alien doesn't mean bad.
It just means really, really dissimilar from my own mind.
And it's frustrating because they're frustrated with me and I'm frustrated with them, right?
So I say, here are my recent arguments, and they say, I feel that you're wrong.
And that just feels like I'm encountering a really, really different mind.
Or I'll put forward an argument that I believe in very passionately, that I think is important, and other people will get upset and offended.
Now, I can often predict, though not always, what is going to upset or offend people.
But, you know, if it's any consolation out there, in case anyone's curious about this, I think this is true of most, quote, controversial people.
If there's any consolation, the arguments that he put out that offend you offend me first.
And so other people are like, well, how can he be so blunt?
He's got to be, there's got to be something wrong with him.
It's like, well, but bluntness is kind of important.
I was raised with thou shalt not bear false witness and tell the truth till the skies fall.
And so, yeah, I understand it.
I have sympathy.
But for me, it's like, well, I've been able to overcome my own, quote, offense at what this sort of fact is that I'm putting out.
Why can't you?
And other people, they just seem to go with that being offended.
And because they're offended, they think that I'm wrong and they're right, right?
So if you upset me, Steph, you're wrong for upsetting me, which is such a foreign way of thinking that I really have a tough time getting in there.
All right.
The peace thing too, right?
Sassy Sunflower wrote, it's a great name.
I want to know the peace that comes with not having a constant inner monologue, right?
See there, Sassy Sunflower.
I thought it was a great name.
All right.
Hurlbert said, what he calls armchair introspection likely won't teach you much about your own mind because the act of paying attention screws up your everyday inner life.
Right.
So it's hard to read a book if you're noticing what reading a book is like.
Right.
So when you read a book, when I read this, I get the words in my head.
I don't hear them like an audiobook or somebody whispering in my ear.
And they certainly don't form.
The words don't form in my mind like sort of flaming hypertext or something like that.
But there is definitely an internalization of the language.
And for me, there's a lot of sort of thrust and parry just in conversation.
So as you can sort of hear, when I'm just talking about this kind of stuff, I'll say something, I'll have another thought, maybe they'll let that thought interrupt me.
Maybe it's a good thought, maybe it's a bad thought.
Should I talk about myself?
Should I comment on whether sassy sunflower is a cool name, which it is.
And so that inner dialogue to me is really, really important.
I don't know that you can understand abstract ethics without an inner dialogue.
And again, this is not to say that the people who don't have the inner dialogue or monologue are not ethical, but they would be instinctually ethical rather than syllogistically ethical.
And I saw this when I was arguing with the atheists recently.
They all said, well, I tell the truth because I don't like to lie.
It's too complicated and difficult for me.
I have to remember too many stories and I get social benefits from telling the truth.
So that's not syllogistical reasoning.
That's I like the benefits of telling the truth and I don't like the feeling or complication of lying.
But that's hedonistic, right?
Which is I get a reward for telling the truth and I get a punishment from my conscience or uneasiness when I lie.
That's hedonism.
And I don't know how people organize their life morally when they're just doing what they like.
That's kind of like saying, well, my nutritional plan is to eat what tastes good to me and not eat the things that don't taste good to me.
It's like, that's kind of hedonistic.
And maybe you're lucky and everything your tongue likes is also good for your body, but usually the tongue is at war with the body in that the tongue likes fatty, salty, sweety things, and the body doesn't necessarily do so well with all of those things.
So I think that philosophy in essence is really in the dialogue.
You have to argue with yourself.
You have to come up with syllogisms.
And syllogisms are not instinctual.
They can't be resolved instinctually.
And the people who are instinctual usually end up with, this offends my sensibilities, therefore it's bad, which is like crazy conservative in a certain kind of way.
So yeah, I'd love to know what you think.
The other thing too, last thought, and I mentioned this in the conversations about the inner dialogue stuff, is that there are a lot of engineers who are very concrete.
This is what my wife said, actually a mental health professional for many decades.
A lot of engineers, they're very concrete.
And they're very intelligent, but they don't reason with language a lot of times.
They reason with objects.
Like there's lots of people out there in the world.
East Asians are really good at this stuff.
Rotating 3G objects in your mind, right?
I'm not too bad at it, but there's people about it way, way better, right?
Spatial reasoning, my daughter, is absolutely fantastic at spatial reasoning.
And it's not a particular strength of mine.
I tend to focus or cluster more on the language and syllogism side of things.
And so a lot of times engineers are very good at what they do because they're fantastic at manipulating shapes, objects, and so on in their minds, which is not a language-based thing.
If you've got those things, like how many cubes are there in this jumble of cubes together, right?
Because you have to think, oh, the middle and the back, you have to rotate it in your mind and figure out all of that stuff.
So that's a particular type of intelligence that's fantastic for getting bridges built, but not necessarily great for building arguments.
So I definitely debate with myself.
I have, this is a British thing too, right?
Like, am I being embarrassing?
Am I imposing, right?
Am I imposing on someone?
Like, I want something from someone, but am I imposing?
And it can get kind of paralytic, right?
I mean, if you get a, I have this debate every time, every time I'm out someplace and I'll pick up a food or I'll get a coffee or something like that, pick up some food.
And let's say the coffee comes and it's kind of cold.
And I'm like, well, I don't want them to waste it.
It'll be fine.
I'm basically just here for the caffeine.
It doesn't matter the temperature and so on, but it's not ideal.
Or, you know, if you order something and the fries come and fries are like a really delicate thing because they got to be crispy.
They don't want to be soggy and all of that.
And I don't eat a lot of fries.
I don't want to like, oh, I don't eat a lot of fries.
I, you know, but I don't generally.
I had some fries yesterday, I said, fish and chips wrapped in newspaper.
It's very, very old school, very British.
And the fries were kind of soggy.
And I was like, but they're fine.
I don't want them to make again.
But at the same time, I'm aware that if I was running a restaurant and the food that I was producing Was deficient in some manner, I'd really want people to tell me.
I'd want them to say, This is not great, here's the problem.
Because otherwise, people come once or twice, they get food that isn't particularly great, and they just won't come back.
And I'd much rather throw out some fries and keep the customer than sell a couple of extra fries and not keep the customer.
So I have this debate.
I don't want to impose.
And I also, you know, when you grow up poor, you hate throwing out stuff.
And you just know that the food that they're going to give give you, the food they take back, they're just going to throw out.
And I hate throwing out stuff because, you know, when you grow up poor, that's just kind of an instinct that you have.
So, you know, having these kinds of debates.
I don't know how the people who don't think in terms of language in that way, who don't have those inner dialogues, I think they just have a feeling.
I feel it's okay to keep it.
I'd feel bad if I sent it back rather than having this debate.
And I think to get to abstractions and universals, you just got to have that inner dialogue.
I think you can get to the universals about physical matter with shape brilliance, you know, the engineer rotating shapes because the shapes, you know, cube is universal, math is universal, and so on.
But math is a form of language.
So I assume that mathematicians, although they have a great grasp of language, sorry, of numbers instinctually, they still have to verify it with actual, you know, equations and formulas.
But I think you can get to universals in terms of physics without language.
But when it comes to abstract values and virtues, syllogisms, philosophical arguments, which is where the absolute truth of concept formation, the validity of the senses, and the defense of free will and the establishment of universal ethics, that's all language-based.
And I think I face that challenge when I'm talking about these universal ethics.
So when the atheists are coming in and they're saying, I get benefits from telling the truth and I get negatives from lying either emotionally or in terms of complications, they're saying, I'm lying because I'm telling the truth.
There's a little bit of narcissism in that to some degree, because thinking that because you don't like to lie and you prefer to tell the truth, that somehow that becomes a universal is failing to understand that there's many people whose minds are very different from yours.
And this is what I kept saying to the atheists.
It's like, okay, I guess that's fine for you, but what about the people who really like to tell the truth?
Sorry, what about the people who really like to lie?
What about the people who get a kick out of lying?
They get lots of resource out of lying.
Lying is their most efficient way to get resources.
What about them?
How do you get them to not lie?
If you're going to say hedonism is the foundation, and I should tell the truth because it feels good to tell the truth and it feels bad to lie, that is not a universal experience.
Lots of people lie to get resources.
I mean, if you're an atheist, you think that religion is false.
Religion gets a lot more resources than atheism does.
And so if you're an atheist, you know that a lot of people get resources by lying.
And how do you convince them to tell the truth?
Which is why I go with sort of the universal syllogistical ethics and virtues, because that's a way of getting people to change their behavior outside of hedonism, right?
So anyway, I'm curious what you think.
And I mean, does your social circle include different kinds of thinkers?
I don't know that mine does.
I'm sort of reviewing this.
I don't know that mine does.
Certainly in my friends, we tend to be pretty inner dialogue, inner monologue focused, but friend to friends.
And, you know, if I'm friends with families as I am with kids, not all of the kids are language-based.
And yeah, it is a challenge.
It's almost like you just need to get into a completely different mindset in order to have effective communications or just stay on the shallower topics, you know, news and weather and stuff like that.
Because I think once you start to go deep, the thinking styles really diverge to the point where I don't even know that there's a translator that can get across the gap.
All right.
Thanks.
I hope that you find this interesting.
Freedomain.com slash donate to help out the show.
Lots of love, my friends.
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