Talk:Internal monologue

The uni study
Please don't tell me someone added that section because of the idiotic NPC meme. Is a study that has not been peer reviewed, years old, of which we don't have a solid grasp on the methodology used, which had a very small sample in the same place as well and that has been misunderstood as well, don't add fuel to the fire by giving it legitimacy.

Internal monologue in popular culture
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)

Soliloquy Like in a play, when the characters think/talk to themselves which others can't hear. I think in English.

Sole consumer
"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)
 * 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)

Large biblical quote
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)

Removed. 24.113.85.162 (talk) 07:01, 24 December 2009 (UTC)

Buddhist perspective
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) I think a Zen Buddhist perspective on thought is relevant, as Buddhist meditation has been dealing with the "problem of thought" for over 2500 years. So it could be in a "History section," except it is still being practiced by millions of people. One point the article makes is proven by the person asking why it's here. One thought follows another. 96.25.31.89 (talk) 10:46, 8 October 2011 (UTC)

I believe the quote labelled Mark 13:11 got whacked inadvertently with the Luke quote, will return it. I think there is minor mixing here though by including 'inner voice' (a.k.a. conscience, holy spirit) of that which is speaking with the inner monologue or that which is said. And maybe the whole 'inner dialogue' mechanism should be merged into Consiousness ? Markbassett (talk) 00:40, 11 September 2013 (UTC)

OK, have returned the Mark quote, which doesn't do much for the bigger content but hope the little bit helps Markbassett (talk) 00:48, 11 September 2013 (UTC)

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Proposal to merge Inner critic into this article
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)


 * Oppose, for at least several reasons that come to mind at the moment: The term inner critic is widespread enough in the literature that it is notable enough for its own article. Internal monologue is a broader subject that overlaps with other terms such as intrapersonal communication. Google Scholar gives us a rough quantification of the relationship between them: a search for "inner critic" returns about 3,830 results, a search for "internal monologue" OR "inner monologue" returns about 15,100 results, and a search for "inner critic" "internal monologue" OR "inner monologue" returns only about 74 results; this suggests how little overlap there is between the sets of texts that mention these two terms. The inner critic is a personification of an aspect of conscious experience that typically does not seem to be a product of conscious control, whereas internal monologue is a broader subject that can refer to consciously controlled inner speech. From a metaphysically naturalistic perspective, neither internal monologue nor the inner critic are really "external"; what differentiates the subjects is (as I just noted) that the inner critic is a personification of a kind of non-consciously controlled cognition, and internal monologue is private self-talk in general, including that which is consciously controlled. Biogeographist (talk) 17:35, 21 December 2018 (UTC)
 * Seems fair – I'll take down the tag. ─ ReconditeRodent « talk · contribs » 18:04, 21 December 2018 (UTC)

Proposal to merge Internal discourse into this article
proposed merging Internal discourse into this article. Please discuss. Biogeographist (talk) 17:39, 21 December 2018 (UTC)

I just came across these two pages and my first thought was, why are they separate? Internal Discourse is a part of internal monologue, The Internal Discourse page is 1 paragraph with no citations and due to the similarities, I think merging it with Internal Monologue would be the best option. ChaseF (talk) 18:15, 8 March 2019 (UTC)
 * 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)
 * 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)

Does everyone experience an internal monologue?
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)


 * . Paradoctor (talk) 01:50, 22 February 2020 (UTC)


 * 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)


 * 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)


 * 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)


 * "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)


 * 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)


 * That's why I asked instead of EWing. Yea or nay, or what else? Paradoctor (talk) 05:41, 22 February 2020 (UTC)


 * 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)

I think the current version looks really good. It is well written and makes all the points we both want to make. I do have one small question though. It currently says that “young children are less likely to report using inner speech instead of visual thinking” and that bit about visual thinking is new. I have not read the source, but is it true that young children do relatively more visual thinking? Very young children, as in as Piaget’s sensorimotor stage, are likely to be limited in both verbal and visual thinking. It’s likely that they function largely in nonsymbolic thought, sensory awareness, and emotional experiences. Anyway, I will leave this section to other editors who have examined the source and have an interest in working on that section. Thanks. --Jcbutler (talk) 15:58, 22 February 2020 (UTC)


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

(I am trying to &quot;answer/comment to&quot; the original question.) I personally don't usually use an internal monologue for most thoughts. The self discourse example in the article would not apply to me in a similar situation; I would still evaluate the same facts and arrive to the same conclusions, but my thoughts would be non-verbal, nothing that resembles a language. I could choose do it exactly like in the example, but the versatility and speed of my thought process would suffer as I would have to be able to "put it into words" in my head. Mossymountain (talk) 15:30, 10 March 2020 (UTC)


 * 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)


 * 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)


 * P.S. Hamlet apparently used quite a lot of "inner" monologue too. ;) --Jcbutler (talk) 17:32, 10 March 2020 (UTC)


 * 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)


 * That's really interesting, thank you for sharing, Mossymountain. --Jcbutler (talk) 19:44, 30 March 2020 (UTC)

Merger proposal
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)


 * I agree with this proposal. --Jcbutler (talk) 15:22, 19 January 2021 (UTC)

What exactly is an internal monologue?
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)

Merger with Intrapersonal communication
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)


 * 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)