Comment by jawns
13 hours ago
I like this analogy. I have an internal voice, but "hearing" this voice is very different from hearing a voice spoken out loud and registered with my ears. Likewise, when I'm visualizing a pretzel, the way I am "seeing" it is more of an internal, mental process than when I see things by processing the light hitting my eyes.
Yet other people claim to not have an internal monologue (including my wife and brother) and say they don’t hear anything when they think to themselves, and don’t really even “think” in words for that matter. So this comparison is also tricky because not everyone agrees on either of them. I have a weak visualization ability and strong internal monologue, I’m not sure if they’re correlated in some way or not.
No visualization, no monologue or other auditory thinking ability. My thinking process is more like reading and writing than speaking and hearing. The concepts flow at the speed at of thought when active, much faster than I could comprehend spoken language or images, but completely still otherwise. When I have to think in words, I'm quite slow (it took around 20 minutes to write this post).