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Do you have an internal monologue? How do you think?
Inspired by an old topic from 2021 on here: https://tild.es/uti
How do you think?
Have you ever thought about how you think?
Do you have a voice in your head? Is it your own voice? Do you think in visuals? How strong are the visuals?
Let's have a conversation about it. We all think differently!
As an exercise, if I asked you to sit down and solve a cross word in silence, how would you think it through?
Edit: thanks for all the very interesting and very insightful replies! I've been reading them today and I really appreciate everyone's input.
I think almost exclusively in words and intuitive patterns. My very proactive inner monologue memorizes by speaking everything out loud. I have a good sense for music, and can memorize melodies with great (above average) accuracy. I keep lists and schedules in my mind and know they're not going anywhere; I have never forgotten a password. I pick up information without even paying attention.
No visuals, though. None. I likely have prosopagnosia and aphantasia (not formally diagnosed). All visuals are reduced to simple shapes, humanoid figures, blots, intuitive notions of where things are or what they look like (they become patterns, which I'm good at). It takes me weeks of interacting with someone to become capable of recognizing their face (subconsciously; I still can't recall it on command). A couple unexpected changes like aging, haircuts or clothing style might still keep me from recognizing them the next time I see them. If you commit a crime in front of me and I'm staring directly at you I still can't probably pick you out of a lineup half an hour later, or remember how you were dressed very well.
Incongruously, I have a good sense of equivalent volumes which seems like it should be visual thinking related. I suppose I can parse visuals well enough if I'm looking directly at them.
On a few occasions when I was just on the edge of falling asleep I experienced moments of lucid dreaming, or quasi dreaming, in which I recalled very high quality visual memories from my past. Even if those memories were fake, the visuals were still good. So I imagine the capability is still in there somewhere, I just can't access it.
EDIT: Jealous of all of you visuals ;) I've always had the strongest admiration for artists who can whip up a statue or a complex, realistic picture while barely looking at reference material. They're like archwizards to me. Once someone strongly implied that I was being ableist in some sense when I tried to convey that not everyone can become a good artist no matter how much effort some put into it. I'm sorry, but that's not gonna happen for me.
I know for a fact i live with Aphantasia. It's incredibly bizarre to try to explain to people that are visual people. My few experiences with psychedelics have been strange, and i did see fractals when i closed my eyes, but never true images of objects from memory. I've only remember my dreams a handful of times in my life, and have never been able to lucid dream.
Weirdly enough, much like you, i love music, and it latches into my brain easily.
I'm a numbers and evidence person first and foremost. I think part of it is because i need to see the evidence to process it because of Aphantasia.
I would love if you could share your experience more in depth. I suspect I might have issues with visual memories as I sort of manage to imagine the concept and the vague idea of an image in my mind but I cannot conjure it into either my "mind's eye" or my sight. I know what my memories look like, but I don't straight up see them. I'm curious if any of this resonates with you.
It's basically exactly what you describe. a simple exercise I do with people is the following.
"Imagine an apple."
most people will give you some type of affirmation. you then ask "What color is it?" You mostly get answers of "red" and sometimes "green", and rarely do you get the response I would give which is, "What do you mean?" because the concept of an apple to me isn't tied to a specific image.
My wife has a visual memory. She has a mind palace of sorts when it comes to our house. Because she can remember the sight of where she put something, she can rebuild the house from memory, and be able to tell you where objects are by walking it in her "mind's eye"
I'm also a chess player, so the idea of "Visualization" is impossible for me. trying to imagine what a board looks like for normal folks is hard enough because you superimpose your mental image over a real one, but I can't even do that. playing online, it gives me some crutches using arrows and circles to plot moves and pieces.
This topic is always such a mindfuck for me. I know where things are, I know what’s on my desk, which kitchen tools are in which drawers or cabinets, etc, but I cannot visualize it. I just… know. It’s locked into my brain somehow, generally with high accuracy, but I don’t access it visually and I can’t figure out how I actually access those kinds of spatial memories.
Just chiming in, as with plenty of things, it is also a spectrum.
A great exercise I read somewhere is similar to yours, but instead about a story of two balls on a table, colliding in the middle. Someone with aphantasia can easily reason about the situation, what will happen, etc, but in their head the table and balls are just abstract objects. If you mention in the story that they are red, a new "property" is associated to it basically, but it doesn't inherently have that.
I'm also on that spectrum towards having almost no visuals (and I like to think that my musical skills are somewhat better, so maybe there is a correspondence), but very rarely I get to conjure up some colorless pictures (strangely enough hangovers do "improve" this ability of mine, I get more visuals/hallucination-like things then).
Also, I'm terrible with a sequence of things and dates. Melody? No problem. A list of historic events, with years? I will need 10x time than anyone else.
I still don't know most of the "times table". I only know the ones that have obvious repeating patterns, with my crowning achievement being the 9s after I realized that one digit goes up and one goes down. It's one of the reasons why I hated math classes where calculators were not allowed. But I just can't remember sequences of numbers more than 4-6 numbers long, and that's usually only if they are between 0-20.
I always thought everyone could imagine pictures/objects. The first time i heard about aphantasia i was in awe.
The thing is i can remember music pretty well too, i can sing every melody, riff and guitar solos of the metal music i listen. Even if it's been years since i last heard.
And i can imagine words too. Sometimes i take a mental picture of a word or sequence of digits to remember more easily in short time. I don't memorize the word/number, i memorize the image of it.
I have internal monoligues all the time too. And i can imagine people talking with different voices.
I guess i'm lucky to have it all.
Aphantasia feels like everything turns into a list of specifications describing an image, instead of an image itself.
being aware of your own gifts (and shortcomings) is a great thing. nurture your visual memory, and you can even train to improve it.
After reading this way of describing my experience with aphantasia it’s almost no wonder I ended up in DevOps.
I'm much like you in that I'm a very visual person and I remember things-- words, numbers, whatever-- by taking a mental picture of it.
One quirk of mine is that although I'm a musician, I have a horrible auditory memory. I couldn't remember music at all-- that is, until I learned how to read music. Once that happened, I started picturing music as notes on a staff when I listened to music, and I suddenly had the ability to memorize music in a way I never had before. To be clear, I can imagine the sound of music in my head when I'm reading music, so it's just a matter of reading the sheet music in my head to get me to remember what something sounds like.
I imagine I would never be able to remember anything if I couldn't create mental images in my head.
I sometimes wonder if I have something like that. I find it difficult to imagine what things look like in my head, but on the other hand when I have dreams they're really vivid. I don't do a good job of memorizing maps, but do a great job at understanding relative space, so I don't often get lost. I can do the "academic" method of drawing to an extent but if I just try to freehand sketch something it doesn't ever look right.
I think there’s a lot of selection bias going on here because that’s a lot like me too. Any images I have are more like the idea of an image rather than anything I can visualize.
I remember when I was younger reading a book about improving your memory and it was all these visualization tricks and it came off as total quackery to me. That was before I realized other people’s brains don’t necessarily work the same as mine.
On a similar note, the whole concept of a mind palace is nonsensical to me.
That's incredibly interesting! I had this conversation with my freind group recently and among us we had one friend who couldn't visualise at all. He had to do all his thinking descriptively with his internal monologue, or imagine it like words on a page of a book.
Another friend was the complete opposite and had never even heard of the concept of an internal monologue. She was purely a visual thinker.
I think it's fascinating you are able to store information so easily but can't remember faces even by descriptions. I find I remember key features of a person (a scar for example) and use that to ground my memory of the person.
You say you have a good musical sense. How do you parse that in your head? Do you think of the notes and timings or do you play the actual melody by ear?
Sure, if someone has a scar on their face I probably recognize them much more easily than if they are a nondescript person. Subconsciously, I know they're the person with the scar on their face. Maybe I'll internalize some things about the scar as a pattern, for example does the scar intersect with any facial feature or features? Which ones?
But nearly everyone has eyes, a nose and a mouth, so that's harder.
I don't think of the notes. Childhood attempts to learn to read music skillfully/quickly have failed (I know the theory) because I often memorized the song faster than I could read it. I don't have perfect pitch, and surprisingly my sense of rhythm is worse than I would have liked; while I can play rhythm games decently and sync up easily with an ongoing beat, there can be some slippage or inaccuracies over not very long periods of time.
The prerequisite of being able to visualize things in your head in order to be a good artist, isn't really true.
Visualizing definitely helps a lot. But there are a lot of good artists out there who actually can't visualize things in their head either. You depend a lot on practice, knowledge and references. Knowledge things would be like knowing a certain shade of purple and a certain shade of yellow would work because you've seen it work before and you remember it. So you don't see it in your head, but you know it.
It's kind of like knowing 1+1 = 2 without visually imagining 2 apples.
So when it comes to coming up with illustrations and compositions, rather than planning it in your head, you do a lot of sketches on paper. Your planning happens physically. You can do colour thumbnails and try out different combinations and they can all be done physically.
Here's an article that mentions Glen Keane, an Oscar winning artist who worked for Disney.
So you could be a good artist if you wanted to!
I think this is the first analogy that truly helps me understand aphantasia. I’m a very visual thinker I believe and it was impossible for me to understand how you could do any task that requires recognizing visual shapes, colors or patterns, any spatial reasoning, navigation tasks, etc. without picturing what you’re looking for.
But I do know what 1+1 is without visualizing it. I guess if someone gives me directions (“turn left, then right”) I too would probably remember that without trying to visualize it. I’m still baffled about things like… looking at two IKEA pieces and imagining how they would fit into each other. I’d definitely “see” that in my mind and wouldn’t know how to even make sense of the task from a purely descriptive POV.
I have no internal monologue or picture. I was very much of the opinion that portrayals of internal monologues/voiceovers were a narrative device, until I learnt that people actually do have them, and that was completely wild to me.
I don't have aphantasia, because I can picture things in my mind, and I can have voices in my head. It just takes effort; it doesn't come naturally. I think the "whoa" realisation, for me, was that people experience these things without trying.
I don't know how to describe how I think, except in negatives. I can tell you that I don't think in words, unless I'm trying to. I can tell you that I don't think in images, unless I'm trying to.
How do I think? Well, with whatever's left, I guess. "Concepts" is probably the best term for it, although I don't even know whether I know what that means. Often, I don't know what I think until I write it or say it. It's like I need to put it into the physical world first, before it properly exists as something I can, like, take as an actual thing. I dunno.
So what happens when you read silently? Do you "hear" your own voice?
I talk to myself all day in my head, it's wild to me that some people can't.
Nah I don't really hear anything at all. It's more like the words go straight into my brain, I guess. I don't really know how to describe it better than that, I guess it would be like asking you, what goes on for you in between hearing voices when you read (or hearing your own voice, or seeing the image), and arriving at your understanding? Can you describe that interaction?
I imagine, obviously not being able to see into your head, that you might have the same difficulty in describing it? That's where I am with how it works for me, it's just skipping that step of hearing voices/seeing images.
Nothing, usually. The meaning is just there. I don't normally feel like there's a gap between hearing (or reading) and understanding, except when I'm sick or really tired. Then it feels like a computer lagging.
I think mostly in sound. There's an internal monologue that I can turn off, but most of the time it's there. I hear my own voice like it sounds inside my head, and sometimes how it sounds from outside. When I remember something someone else said, I can usually hear it in their voice.
Sometimes music plays in my head. The instruments aren't always clear, but the words and the sound of the singer's voice are always there. The easiest way for me to recognize people is by the sound of their voice. I think visually too. But going by the comments here, not nearly as much as others.
Nice to see someone else whose thoughts are pretty vague unless you're intentional about it. I'm curious to know whether you get easily distracted or have trouble focusing? I'm not sure whether my problems in that area are directly connected to the abstract-ness of my thoughts.
Hm depends on what I'm doing. If I'm doing some thinking work, I can't just sit somewhere and think about it because I'm lost before I begin, but if I'm either mumbling to myself or writing then I don't get distracted easily.
Reading fiction is sometimes difficult to stay focused the whole time, depending on the book. I sometimes find long descriptions a bit of a slog, presumably because I don't really picture anything in my head, so sometimes I glaze over them. But if it's to do with ideas/emotions or things like that, I get really engaged. So it all depends, I guess.
I see a lot of similarities here with how I think and you have a great way of describing some of the nuances
This means you don't talk to yourself on your mind, right?
So it doesn't happen to suddenly you pick yourself talking alone at your car for example?
Sometimes I catch myself or my SO gesticulating. We are talking to ourselves on our minds and it slips into the real world. Sometimes I even move my mouth a little because of a monologue I am having in my mind.
I have that with imagery too. If i imagine myself jumping, sometimes my leg does the movement. It is particularly annoying because this happens when I'm trying to sleep.
Yeah absolutely. Unless I try. Like, right now, I can talk to myself in my mind. I just thought to myself: "This is me, talking to myself. Hello, me!" I needed to do it deliberately, though, it didn't just happen.
I should say that at times, I do do this deliberately. Particularly if I'm inventing scenarios, or anything like that. It takes effort, but it's not painful or anything. It's just always an active decision; it never happens without me consciously intending it to happen.
And for the rest of your comment, yeah never. I said in my first comment that I always thought that internal monologues in film were a narrative device, for the purpose of exposition or to emulate third person subjective in a visual/audio format. I thought exactly the same as the trope "oops did I say that out loud?" It was something that I figured was just used for comedy by writers, and never even considered that people actually experienced that in real life. It still blows my mind tbh, because that's just not how I function.
Edit:
This has actually been a really interesting thing for me as an actor, particularly going more recently into film acting (only short indie/student films so far, but still). I find myself wanting to use these tools of imagining voices/images more, because they tend to bring life to your eyes on screen. I find with theatre, where I have more experience, it's quite different because you've always got people to talk to - often other characters, but if nobody else is on stage you still have the audience (slash whoever the audience represents). Emotionally, although not technically, I find it much easier.
Whereas with film, you often have scenes or B-roll footage (basically, secondary footage like a shot of the eyes, or sipping coffee, or a leg jiggling, etc) which you film without the other characters/actors on set, out of order, etc. One of the primary tools taught to actors is visualising what's going on. Sure, the other actors or characters or settings, which might be added with CGI or just other shots, aren't there, but you just visualise them and pretend like they're present.
To some extent this is imo a necessary thing, because if you're not imagining the scene you're in, your eyes go dead. On the other hand, as someone who needs to put active effort into visualisation, I often worry whether I'm trying too hard, and that will come across in my eyes as well. It's something I'm still struggling with, to be honest, and it's not helped by the fact that I hate watching myself on screen lmao
This is so curious. It's like looking at other forms of human life. It's an entire different "world".
What happens a lot with internal monologues is the tongue doing little movements inside the mouth. It's like the brain just doing the first part of talking (forming the words in your head) and stopping right before signaling the body to do it, but a little signal always slips.
I would guess the closest I ever got to this was a bad habit I had when I was younger, when I'd mouth the words of other actors because I knew the script too well, lol. You can actually see the same phenomenon in action with Emma Watson as a child on the Harry Potter set, from around 7:10 onwards she's mouthing what the others are saying. I remember seeing this at some point in the past and being like 'oh my god I did the same thing', lol.
Don't know how relevant that is to this discussion, because it's more about memory rather than having your own internal monologue that seeps through. But it's one of those weird brain-quirk things, which I felt rather alone about until seeing this video.
Me too! My thoughts are spatial/kinetic and I'm able to vividly recall visuals of what I have seen, but just like you I remember being flabbergasted to learn that interior monologues are actually real.
Me...
One desperate thought at a time. "Mozart doesn't have any problems, he's dead, I need help now!".
This is such a well written post and manages to encapsulate and capture things that I never quite succeeded in putting into words. Though I have an internal monologue (more like a dialogue where it's me internally addressing myself to do stuff) everything else beyond that is very familiar, albeit experienced in a different way (for example, I never found myself personifying those two sides to any extend for some reason).
Hormone therapy has dramatically altered me for the better as a person, and increased my attunement to my emotional side. I also apparently lived with a hormonal imbalance for most likely my entire post-puberty life without knowing about it which made my testosterone stay well above the upper limit and sometimes skyrocket, and a lot of things before HRT are a weird hazy blur. It's hard to explain to other people how I just don't think the same way they do, how the things that are obvious to them aren't obvious to me, that I sometimes respond on impulse without spending a second to think because that's how I learned to communicate in a world that doesn't wait for anyone.
The isolation is crushing, but every now and then when I see a post like this I calm the nagging itch in my mind that I'm just "faking it". Thank you for sharing.
I totally get this. While I don't think of it as a critical aspect of the way I experience the world from minute to minute, it's also super helpful for me to think of myself as a few distinct individual parts, especially when it comes to sorting out my own feelings and wants. So you (both of you) are very much not alone.
Have you looked into Internal Family Systems therapy? I'm not necessarily recommending it, but it sounds like you might either already know about it or be interested to hear. For me, some aspects run counter to coping strategies I'd already developed, but it can be validating to see some recognition for the way your mind naturally works.
Glad to hear you're able to make progress this way. Essentially my whole social circle is people who have PTSD and are autistic or trans or both, so I have some idea of how hard it can be to find (let alone afford) any help that really gets it right. I truly wish you the best of luck in your efforts to work together with yourself/selves. <3
How does it colour other people's perceptions of you? If that's okay to ask. You don't have to answer this bit if you don't want to.
I think what you've said doesn't sound very odd. I'm currently in therapy and we're doing Internal Family Systems.
This has been helpful for me and I've been working through the different parts of myself with my therapist. I feel like it kind of sounds similar to what you're saying.
This has also helped me open up to my therapist more as I have a lot of unusual defenses in my head partly due to childhood trauma. I say partly because I've apparently somewhat neurodivergent so how much of that is just because I'm also wired differently. I don't know.
So I just wanted to say that I don't think whatever you're saying is odd at all. I can kind of relate. I hope that you one day do find people in real life who can understand that too so you can find the support you need and not be isolated.
Edit: Actually, if you need someone to talk to about it, you can message me. We kind of sound similar. Maybe. I'm not sure. I can't promise I'll reply quickly, but I'll try to.
Yeah. I can understand that. These kind of things do tend to confuse people and make them uncomfortable.
I don't really tell people about the parts I have in my head either. I've mentioned it briefly to some close friends but I don't really elaborate.
I'm just lucky my Therapist seems to be entertaining it. Haha.
I've had a few discussions about this with other people. Some say they have a monologue, some say they don't have a monologue and think purely in abstract thoughts. Some say they're mostly visual.
Usually, people with a constant monologue will interrogate the abstract thinking people with no monologue and vice versa. Because they can't imagine what it's like to think the other way.
(All this is anecdotal of course and just based off my friends.)
But for me, I use all of it. I do have a monolgue in my head. I talk to myself internally often and sometimes out loud when I'm alone. I also have other voices in my head that I bounce ideas off of. The voices are imaginary. I deliberately make them. If I need a cynical person to bounce ideas off of, I'll just make one. If I need a more optimistic voice to bounce off of, I'll make a different one. Sometimes they're not just voices, sometimes they're characters with personalities I've kept in my head for a long time. I'd go to whoever I need to to discuss something. It's a mix and match sort of thing.
I am also a very visual person so when I solve something or when I think about doing something, I will see it in my head too.
Sometimes this gets a bit out of hand because I will think I've done something, I'll remember seeing me doing the thing. But I actually didn't do it. I just saw the images in my head as a thought and moved on as if I've done it. It was no longer a hypothetical, it became a memory. I will only realize a few hours later that I didn't do the thing I wanted to.
One other way my visual memory was unreliable was when I was remembering a conversation I had with a colleague. In my head, I saw them in their seat, in the office, speaking to me. And then I remembered that we were all working from home at the time, and our long conversation was through Slack. I then had to amend the visuals to just be the Slack interface.
But, before I realised that it was on Slack, I was pretty convinced we had the conversation in the office because that's what I saw in my brain and it looked and felt real.
But I also think in abstract thoughts. I often have conversations with myself that's just "you know" and "yea I know" because I'm trying to describe or think of a concept. I know the concept but I can't articulate it to myself in words. But because I'm talking to myself, I don't have to explain it. I know what I'm thinking. It's also a faster way to process things since saying things word by word can slow the thought process down sometimes.
And sometimes the ideas and concepts have shapes. Sometimes they're round, or sharp or just some intangible thing that's not helpful in trying to get your thoughts across. There was one time I had a train of thought about something.. I don't remember it anymore. But it was complicated and I wanted to explain it to someone, and in my head, it was a grey mess, but I didn't see the grey mess visually. It just felt like a grey moving mess, and it contained the... concept I was trying to convey. And I did a bad job explaining things afterwards.
So even when I'm speaking to people, sometimes it's just vague ideas and I can't really translate it immediately. Sometimes I move my arms around while trying to explain it. Making minor circular motions with my hands, because in my head, the concept is round. I move my hands a bit hoping that it triggers some way to describe it in words.
So if I were to sit and solve a crossword puzzle, you'd probably see me saying my thoughts out loud a bit. I'd also be going through what word that might look like visually. Going through memories or knowledge based on the hints we get in both visual and abstract thought. You might see me gesture or move around a bit in an attempt to remember something.
The thing is, I've always thought this was kind of normal. Maybe not the character voices thing, but more like splitting it into visual, monolgues, and abstract thinking.
I've always assumed everybody uses a little bit of everything too. Kind of not one or the other.
Sorry I rambled on for too long and I think I've accidentally made myself sound like a mad man.
Beautifully articulated. This is almost exactly what I experience.
This is always so hard to describe. Right now, I have a song playing in my head so perfectly I can almost really hear it (this is almost always the case). It's in the background, but it can get distracting. Despite this, I don't hear a monologue or imagine hearing words; if anything, when I'm thinking something specific, I'll imagine reading words printed on a page.
I'm aware of my intention to create a response to this question, just like I'm aware of the fact that my head kind of hurts and I want to make that thing with the chickpeas for dinner, but these ideas just hang there as a combination of key words and vague images until the second before I type them. Like, I think about dinner and I see a vague visual of opening the freezer (it looks like a blurry photo being waved quickly in front of my face) and I imagine the word "chickpeas" and that's it. If I went to make dinner now, I'd probably have to write down all the steps involved before beginning. If I didn't do that, my thoughts are vague enough that I'd lose focus between steps and space out and overall take a very long time. (It is worth noting that I have not taken my ADHD medication yet today.)
I just had the thought "sneakers" and sort-of envisioned my Converse but like, I don't know why. Maybe because I was thinking about how I went to the post office earlier (not thinking about it in words but imagining the vague shape of the building, lime green because of the color of shirt someone was wearing there, and a few digits of the tracking number for the package I needed help with) and I'd considered walking there, which would have meant I'd have to put on my sneakers. That happens a lot: an irrelevant something will pop up and I can figure out why if I want to waste the time on it. I am distracted right now because I'm thinking of how the little thing on the end of one shoelace fell off ages ago. It's not important. My mind has no idea, on its own, what is supposed to be important.
I guess I do have an internal monologue on occasion when I deliberately think to myself something like "I have to check that tracking number again to see if it's been updated". I sort of heard that spoken in my head. But it's not something that occurs naturally, it's something I do when I catch a vague thought, notice that it's important, and force myself to notice it harder so I won't forget. My brain seems to store much more information than it needs, yet I have no mind for detail at all. Like, if I wanted to copy over something from another browser tab, I'd probably forget it in the time it takes to click back over here. I actually gave the post office guy an incorrect phone number because I blanked on my own, which is not uncommon, even though I know it by heart and have had it for over 10 years.
I'm at my best (or I'm baseline competent, at least) when I can be on autopilot and focus on nothing while the noise in my brain does its thing, but it's hard to reach this state. I can't, for instance, get there while doing simple repetitive mechanical motions, unless I'm only moving my own body—I can zone out while exercising, but not while cooking or folding laundry. It's also easier to zone out while doing something that's totally freeform (like making art) or that provides immediate statistical feedback on how I'm doing (I think health bars/damage counters in video games are the most straightforward example of this).
Okay, I had to finally put on the song that was stuck in my head because it was just getting louder and louder. Link if you're curious.
Anyway, in conclusion, it's a mess! I'm relieved to see other sort of unconventional answers here. I envy those of you who can get a good grasp on information or processes easily, but I'm hoping some of the responses here may help me sort my thoughts out a little.
Ok, I should definitely check myself for ADHD, that’s eerily similar to what I do.
By the way, what’s your profession if you don’t mind answering that? I found that programming is one of the few things I can get into the zone/flow state with, as it has a very “progress-bar” like short test-reward cycles. I made this modification, I run it, it works. At least for hobby projects. (When everything is overcomplicated at some businesses, it can be a chore)
I think both audibly and visually.
The voice inside my head is not "my" voice. It is almost a silent voice. I don't hear it as much as I feel it. It is completely unaccented, but whilst actively thinking about it now, I notice that it does have "pitches" to it (think of a deep "hmm" to something you're reserved about, or a light "welllll" to an idea you've conceded to).
Visually, I am able to fully visualize more or less any concept I can think of. When doing maths I often visualize numbers and when recalling memories I often "rewatch" them. When I think of someone I know I typically visualize their face. When I'm hungry I visualize... even fantasize about my next meal :)
Oh I had this discussion with my friends a few months ago and was surprised that very few think like I do because it's so normal for me.
I talk to myself (in an inner monologue) constantly and I have certain "people" in my head judging my behavior or giving multiple advices for a problem.
Simple example: It's 9 in the mornings and I don't want to get up for work.
I basically have multiple "people" talking to each other. One is the serious person calling me a lazy ass to get up, one is the more lenient one. "You work from home anyway, sleep an hour longer". The more serious character can sometimes become unfriendly if I let things slide too often.
These "people" help me a lot finding good decisions during my work as a developer. A bit like rubberducking (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging) without a duck, about personal life choices?
They often help me in bigger life decisions as well.
The more strict "person" usually rules the more important decisions. Its like my personality is split into certain amplified characteristics and projected as "people". "lazy/lenient" vs "strict/hardworking" / or kind of a "left vs right" side of the brain.
So in the example of solving a cross word, imagine sitting with your friends on a couch, solving it together. Basically a normal conversation with multiple people you know very well.
I usually don't think visually, but I am very good in imagining songs. So basically a whole song with drums, guitar, sound effects and such, as if I'm actually listening to one. I have problems with imagining lyrics though, it's usually non-words/pseudo words then.
I'm the same! With the voices I mean. I have different personalities/voices talking based on what kind of person I need to bounce off at that point of time. I also know I'm making it up and doing it deliberately. But it's a useful tool to use when you need to discuss things.
I have only seen it referenced from this thread, but yoi might also relate to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internal_Family_Systems_Model
Constantly. I even visualize different scenarios and sometimes find myself acting them out, like with slight hand movements or even mouth movements.
My imagination is very vivid, maybe even too much so. I can imagine a box on the floor and "keep" it there til I forget. So if I "walk through" that box, I feel really weird like I did something wrong.
In mornings, when I'm still waking up, my inner monologue is really drunk. I talk and imagine the weirdest things. Then I go wash my face and it ends.
The monologue and visualizing and day dreaming does not require any effort. But if I put effort into it, I can get very weird results.
I do the exact same thing. Sometimes someone will walk in the room while I'm doing it and I have to cover it up because I feel if someone saw they'd think it was weird and I'd get embarrassed .
I'm getting a great feeling of relief from this thread by other people saying they do this sort of thing.
Sometimes I actually use my voice in the acting out part too and if anyone else hears me I am mortified.
I get random phrases stuck in my head all the time. Fortunately they're not normally this vulgar because I do sometimes accidentally say them out loud.
I hear my own voice in my head but my thoughts are extremely visual too. I suppose it's visual with narration. I'm especially visual when other people are speaking, if someone is telling a story I'm drawing it out in my head. I struggle to grasp concepts or even follow a conversation if I can't make a visual work - for example if someone is talking about a place I need to be able to fit it into a mental map and it's like if I have no idea where it is I can't follow on from there because I need to put it on the map first, or if they describe an event but give incompatible details then my mental picture doesn't work I get stuck at that point and can't follow after. I picture a lot of things as flow charts and so it is extremely helpful for me to see a diagram to understand a concept, at the same time while thinking through ideas and planning something I plot them out into flow charts and diagrams and refer to these mentally while I'm actioning the idea.
Despite thinking I'm very mentally visual I also have non-stop narration, I feel like it impacts my ability to concentrate on information delivered audibly (or even listen to someone talking) because it doesn't stop chattering, so I prefer to consume information in written form because my internal narrator is occupied reading it out. When I'm thinking about ideas it chatters as if it's explaining the concept to some other person while I'm drawing out my mental flowchart.
If you asked me to solve a crossword I'd picture it, my narrator would talk through the clue and narrate the problem solving process, I'd see the answer written out but the letters would all become blurry and move around once I move onto another clue. I can't hold them on the page, if I'm honest I'd really struggle.
Written words (like those on the crossword) I can't hold in my visual memory, but pictures, maps and diagrams I can (I still picture 'words' because I'm used to seeing those on maps and diagrams in real life but if you tried to read you'd realise it was just blurry or squirming lines rather than letters). My diagrams are not labelled like you would on paper by writing something on a box so much as the 'labelling' is held as a concept in my mind which is automagically recalled if I focus on the box.
This is interesting. I wrote in my own comment that I can't visualize. I am, however, a prolific reader, and when I read I almost immediately stop seeing the letters on the page--it's as if the text is beamed directly into my brain (I've always thought most readers would experience this) and my brain "constructs" a much closer, more direct experience of the story that I'm following through the POV of the characters.
But. For me, this massive, complex model of the story is not visual, but conceptual. I'm thinking of cities and forest and building and trees and how the characters are moving around, doing things, using objects, etc. but there's pretty much nothing visual involved. Everything is connected conceptually and if I really try to visualize it I'm getting some toddler level stick figure cartoonish nonsense, likely some colors, but that's all.
You say you're extremely visual, but some of the things you say about diagrams and words makes me wonder if your thinking isn't significantly pattern-based as well.
I find it fascinating how some people don't see images in their thoughts. To me it seems mad that someone doesn't see images into their brain, I can almost step into some of mine and 'see' them more clearly than the real world (which I put out of focus and my mind steps into my mental picture instead).
I think in concepts to an extent I think, though I only realised it recently when supervising a learner driver, and realising it was really hard for me to translate thoughts to words quickly enough to get them out in time. While driving my thoughts go concept to action without stepping through the stage of them being put into words.
Maybe I just don't know how I think! Or maybe it switches contextually a lot.
I'm kind of similar. But mine is a mix of visuals and feelings. When someone is telling me a story, and if it narratively doesn't make sense, it doesn't appear in my head. I won't know what's not making it make sense. I just know I have trouble picturing it, therefore the information I'm receiving is the problem.
But sometimes it doesn't have to be pictures. I also get this heavy feeling when I finally understand something and it makes sense.
I was listening to a panel talk about crypto/metaverse and I intellectually understand the words but I didn't feel anything click. It didn't feel weighted. Then I had to really pay attention and realised they weren't really saying anything at all.
It was just a very good sentence structure where it made it sound like they were saying something, but it meant nothing.
With corporate speak (bullshit buzzword bingo) I feel like I hold all the fluff they say in my head waiting for something to make sense to put the words I'm receiving as nonsense into a context that makes sense.
I don't really get much of a picture in that scenario, just basically grey fuzz, because there is no meaning I can make sense of to draw a diagram of what that company/project/whatever they are talking about does.
For example if you tell me your business is a clothes shop I picture a literal clothes shop. If you tell me your business is part of the supply chain in the clothing industry, I picture a flow chart with a clothes shop at the end of it and the parts of the supply chain process I know filled in (and some fuzzy bits where I don't really know what happens), and whichever part you said you do in greater focus. If you tell my your proposition collaborates with retail enterprises in the garment market to utilise the changing market dynamics to engage customers with positive brand experiences1 I'm just picturing a grey fuzz and maybe images of different ideas popping in to try and see if the description supplied could be made to fit.
1 Maybe this makes too much sense. It's surprisingly hard to write meaningless corporate nonsense.
I do understand the heavy feeling you mention though, because I feel like when something like that clicks the thought gets lighter. Except I can't describe what I mean by 'heavy' and 'lighter', arrgh.
Actually this is pretty cool. I might try the flow chart thing rather than have it all the information exist in a space and waiting for it to all suddenly form a narrative and make sense.
But yeah! I can't really describe the 'heavy' and 'lighter' feeling too. But I know what you mean!
That flow chart part is a bit like how I think, only I don't picture the flow chart as a solid thing, I just... know which components are where, and which parts are moving, and I would also be overlaying it onto my understanding of wherever it is the person physically is located (for some strange reason).
Sometimes I'll think in sort of an inner monologue, like I'm dictating my actions to an audience. Most of the times though, I'm able to condense what would be sentences worth of monologue into a rough concept that I can understand much more quickly. I crack myself up so my inner monologue is often smarmy and amuses me a bit.
I'm not sure how well anyone really visualizes things so I can't really compare, but I can visualize things pretty well.
I can spin the cow. I can visualize a snapshot of, say, a game I play a lot. Like Dark Souls 2. I can envision my character with the jester set on, wielding the greatsword, inside ornifex's hut. Crouched specifically to the left of ornifex so that the jackass mage can't pelt me with his spells. I can recall the stance the character takes to hold the sword. There's also pretty much always a song or a part of a song playing in my head, which tends to retain most of the instruments, but primarily bass, since that's what I play.I don't have a constant monologue, it takes a conscious effort to hear words in my head, like my brain instructing itself to enunciate. I have a hard to visualizing complex objects as well it helps to break it down to constituent parts and focus on them individually than trying to grasp the whole as one. Everything is like a negative image, like the after image you see when you blink after staring at something brightly lit and it fades away quickly unless I'm really focusing on picturing it.
Honestly I often feel like my brain is a black box, I know stuff is going on but it's like I give it input, there's some rustling and muffled talk behind the curtain and then I'm presented with the output.
I definitely have an inner monologue. I talk to myself in my head and also think about conversations I would have with others. The voice in my head, I think, is my own voice or a version of it that I interpret. It's the same when I read. It's my voice, like when I read these comments. It can actually change when I know I'm reading something by a woman. The inner voice changes to a woman's voice, I think.
I think visually as well. That's a big part of how I think, too. For example, when I'm thinking about a day of the week, I visualize a weekly calendar. Sunday is the first day of it, on the left, and Saturday is the end of it, all the way to the right. So if I'm thinking about Wednesday, I look at the calendar in my head and see that it's in the middle of the week. I would say it's not completely clear, but it's clear enough for me to see quite well.
It's very fascinating that some people don't have an inner monologue and also that there is aphantasia. I only learned what that was a few years ago. Another fascination was reading about how blind or deaf people think and dream.
If I were to do a crossword puzzle in my head, I would imagine a real crossword puzzle. I don't know how I would do it without the picture.
I'm sorta similar to this. I also have an inner monologue that I can "talk" to, but its always my voice without any changes in pitch or tone.
I can also visualize, though the strength and quality varies. It's something I need to concentrate on. Such as if I'm measuring spots to hang a picture. I can also recall memories fully (such as they are) but also imagine future events
I have an inner monologue, but I really only think in my own voice when I am typing. The way that I type is, usually, the way that I would string the words together out loud.
I work on cars, small electronics, and sometimes larger consumer electronics. I used to work at a manufacturer cages for a living, doing all the small tweaks, final additions, and quality control before they were sent out the door, or assemble cages with parts and rivets (and then all the steps above). I have an almost perfect catalog of everything I have worked on or built. Once I have taken apart or built something once, I can build an exploded-view drawing in my head of all the parts and pieces. Each part can be rotated around, I can see how they fit together, and I catalog information about the quirks.
Because of this, I am usually excellent at describing a process in detail.
I've gotten a lot of praise in my ability to troubleshoot since I usually understand where a noise or fault may be coming from and why it may happen.
However, none of these parts or exploded-views are in the "picture-esque" view that people describe. I don't see fully colored fields with sunflowers and bees and a big bright sun. All my 3D thoughts are faint, wire-frame shapes I sometimes can't see if an environment is too noisy.
And to answer your question about the crossword puzzle? I simply wouldn't do it because I loathe crosswords.
I have an inner monologue, I'm pretty much constantly in conversation with myself. Well, myself or someone else. I've found over the years that the easiest way for me to think through a problem is to try and explain it to someone that doesn't understand anything about the issue at hand.
The odd thing about my way of thinking though is that instead of proper nouns for many things, my brain just summons up a kind of conceptual object. A thought bubble of a picture of whatever I'm thinking about that encapsulates every element of a thing without properly naming it. This helps me speed up my thought process because I don't need to actively think through each aspect of something (my dog is tall, fuzzy, white/gold fur, always begging for food, loves to go on walks, is the fun police with other dogs, etc.) to move forward with my thoughts, I just have this whole concept and move on. However, in practice I find that when I'm speaking I'll frequently find myself unable to name something that I can picture and describe clearly because my mind has the thought object and its properties saved, but not its name because that's almost redundant information. It can be frustrating and make communication more difficult in a conversation, which is why I enjoy written communication much more. I'm forced to slow down to the speed of my (admittedly clumsy) fingers and can even afford to pause and re-write if necessary.
I don't unless I'm actively trying to construct language in my head, either because I'm choosing my spoken words carefully or because I'm about to write text, then I hear one pretty clearly. But it's actually not a similar experience to hearing at all, it's that I can feel in my vocal cords and back of the tongue where the words would be made, without actually moving them, if that makes any sense (it might not, haha).
I've only ever heard an actual voice for my internal monologue when I've done heroic doses of certain drugs, most notably any dissociatives.
My internal monologue is, weirdly enough, not in my native language. It's a weird voice in English that deconstructs whatever scenario I can think of into possible consequences, cost/benefit, etc.
Whenever I go to the supermarket, I keep overthinking options because if I were to, say, buy a bag of broccoli, I run through what how long it would last in my fridge, what can I make with broccoli, what else could I buy with that money, how many spears of broccoli would I get per meal... and then I would compare it to cauliflower, or something else. Then I need to catch myself because even if I genuinely want to eat broccoli, I have to justify it to some bureaucrat in my head that it is indeed the optimal option.
There are no visuals, it feels like a conversation between a pro-broccoli lobby and an anti-broccoli lobby. Same goes for things like talking to family, it tries to imagine the worst possible scenario that would happen if I told them a certain detail of my life, even if it's mostly benign. Oddly enough, that doesn't happen with friends.
This means that my internal monologue is a systems engineer that tries to apply system design logic to every aspect of my life, and that does not always work, but I am not keen on changing it.
It is genuinely very tiring, and I often don't do things that I want (even if the cost is minimal, less than 1/20th of an hour's pay) because they're not "worth it", but it works out in the end because I avoid a lot of waste and I rarely purchase something that I don't end up using.
No inner monologue. I have what I feel like are background processes that are constantly running but I am not in touch with them. However, when the need arises there's a flurry of intuition that leads directly into action.
I also don't introspect as much as others seem wont to. My episodic memory is pretty bad anyways. I can derive various complex mathematical formulas (if I don't remember the exact formula) and tell you all the parts of an internal combustion engine and how they work, but I can't remember what I did yesterday without a long delay or someone triggering the memory.
My ability to evoke images in my head is very strong, and can be very concrete representations or go full Salvadore Dali at whim.
I “hear” my voice inside my head when I think, when I write, when I analyze objects. Wow it’s almost one, should I eat something? What should I eat? Hm…
My inside voice doesn’t sound exactly like my spoken voice. It has similar intonation/sense stress, but it doesn’t have the quality of a spoken voice, for lack of more accurate words to express this idea. Why don’t we have better words for this kind of stuff? Ugh, my toes are kind of tingling. Or maybe that feels good?
I remember that as a kid I visualized some things in my dreams; I’m not sure that happens now. So I think I probably have the ability to visualize, but I haven’t trained it and don’t use it much. I can think of a space I’ve been in and foggily “see” parts of it. Again, not like seeing something through my eyes. A rough word approximation is that it’s like a hazy memory projection. What all is in that bag? Why haven’t you unpacked it yet? Oh yeah you were pretty tired last night. Are you gonna eat or not?
I didn’t take ADHD medication today, and I haven’t tried this exercise while on it. Happy to answer any follow ups.
I do not normally have an internal monologue.
I can have one if I put forth the effort. For the most part, I only do this if I'm planning out how to word something, if I'm trying to remember a string of words/letters/numbers until I can write it down, if I'm trying to recall something that someone said, etc. When I am in the process of developing ideas or thinking through a problem, I do it in internal silence. Trying to think in words slows me down and makes it harder for me to form complex, nuanced thoughts. When I do need to put something into words, it takes a long time because it's like I'm translating my thoughts into a second language that I don't know as well as my mother tongue.
It is hard to describe the format of my thoughts. For me, it feels like I am thinking in pure concepts, but organized spatially. A concept will have a particular position in space (which may be absolute space or may be relative to my own orientation). Sub-concepts have a position on or in the super-concept. In this way, I can kind of "zoom in" to think about a concept more deeply, or I may "zoom out" to effectively blackbox it and consider its relation to other concepts. It works best if I close my eyes because then I can also almost "see" the concepts.
As a result, I am much better at thinking about or remembering some things than others. I'm good at remembering places I've been; I'm bad at remembering people's names. I'm good at solving shape rotation puzzles; I'm bad at solving word puzzles.
When I speak, it looks like I'm making lots of meaningless gestures, but I'm actually gesturing the shape, size, and location of the concept I'm trying to translate into words.
I have a running monologue that is how I solve problems. If I'm frustreated I mumble. One time I was super drunk in Las Vegas and was told after we went to the buffet I drunkenly mumbled "I'm drunk... I'm drunk.." and thought it was my monologue.
As a musician I think about timbre visually. Not because I'm naturally synaesthetic but because it was helpful in sort of storing sounds and tones that do have formal descriptions, but words are inefficient at storing. I don't know if they track consistently if I were to be asked over time, either, but it helps to draw a visual to hear the sound I'm after on a synth, for example. It also helps when I'm jammingnon an instrument and I want to see the arc of what I want to play a little ahead, so I can follow the vibe.
I definitely do. The post you linked said that an inner monologue would be too slow, but for me it's like I speak 'as fast as thought' (but of course there's never misunderstandings because it's myself in my own head). I don't feel like it slows me down, though on a rare occasion I may be distracted by a pronunciation issue, being not natively english but mostly operating and thinking in english.
It was so mind-blowing to meet someone who said they don't have this at all: they don't think in any sort of words, written or spoken. Things in their head are somehow just ideas and then that somehow translates on the spot to normal words like anyone else. When reasoning about something, there was no actual internal 'reasoning' going on in any verbal sort of sense, but she was one of the brightest students of the class. I couldn't wrap my head around this and still occasionally think back to that conversation ten years later.
I wonder how she's doing, she deleted the chat app we used and didn't respond to an email I sent but maybe the mailbox is also unused. She had some issues so I really do wonder if she's fine, but also don't want to stalk if she doesn't want contact...
The weird thing is I mostly think in words too and sometimes I'll be thinking about something some one said that I disagree strongly with and I'll come up with a really well thought out rant/retort in my head... and yet I can never put it in words properly IRL when I try. Hell, I have a hard time putting my thoughts into words a lot of times if they aren't simple and yet I do think in words.
Hey, I'm the same way! When it comes to the inner dialogues, at least. I find it's not even something I really do consciously, either - there's just some part of me that's always ready to question everything, for better or for worse, and those questions end up turning into full-on internal conversations in my head.
Imagery... I'm not quite sure how to describe how my mind works. I don't know if it's aphantasia as such, but I find there's this weird sort of "gap" between me trying to conjure up a mental image of something, and... being able to wrap my head around it, as such? I'm not sure how to put it, exactly. I can picture it and could probably describe it, if pressed, but even then, the mental image is pretty fuzzy.
I'm also very prone to noticing small patterns or connections between things, which is a good segue to - perhaps not coincidentally, I've also suffered through significant emotional trauma when I was younger. Also, while I haven't been diagnosed with either of them (yet), I suspect - based on interactions with friends and my own research - that I have ADHD, and multiple times, when meeting with a new therapist/psychiatrist/etc., the question of me having some form of ASD has always come up sooner or later. I really wouldn't be surprised to hear I have both, but I don't want to jump to conclusions.
Regarding OP's question about crosswords... What I generally do is start running through words in my head that fit with the description - something like, "Is it this word? Hmm, no, that's too short... Maybe this word? I'm not sure if the definition quite fits, but it's the right length. Maybe it's this word instead, though? I'm not sure which is more likely..."
My inner monologue is represented by my own voice.
If I had to solve a crossword puzzle, I would project the puzzle on a 2D plane in 3D space to my mind's eye.
Sometimes I won't talk in my head though and speak out loud talking to myself. Hearing myself helps. Same thing when I read a novel, if I read it out loud, it helps me with immersion.
I definitely have an internal monologue but for some reason, I have to move my tongue along with it, otherwise I have trouble pronouncing some syllables. when I'm reading a book I also tend to hear the voices but also, I try to imagine the voice of the characters too (is that different from internal monologue ?).
Oh, yes. I constantly chatter to myself, both inwardly and outwardly.
Do you have a voice in your head? Yes!
Is it your own voice? Sometimes!
Do you think in visuals? How strong are the visuals? I don't - I have probably mild aphantasia. I can kind of visualize spacially, but it's not vivid or anything. As a kid I had an illness that causes hallucinations which I found really traumatic, so I might have no inner visual sphere as a trauma response, I'm not really sure.
You didn't ask, but a good amount of my internal chatter is music. Sometimes it's a whole song, sometimes a snippet, sometimes it's like having somebody watching Tiktok in my head because it just flipflops around. Especially during May every year, when Eurovision hits, since there are soooo maaaaaaany eeeeearworms!
Where my Aphantasiacs at?
I have an internal 'voice', but it isn't something I can really hear or anything like that. I just know the words being said and thats that.
Visually? Nothing. Nada. I've never had visuals paired with thoughts, or images to go with dreams, or anything like that. Its still a really weird, obscure(ish) thing that hasn't had much in the way of extensive research because-- What can you research? Its such a subjective and difficult thing to really measure outside of first-hand accounts and experiences.
I'd love to be able to visually see stuff in my mind. I draw (weirdly, no i dont know how), and it really does feel like if I just had this switch to suddenly picture things I want to draw, I'd be cheating the system.
i have a constantly running internal monologue, but i am also perfectly able to visualise complex subjects and hear complex audio (music, boops, other voices, etc). i also often have multi-person arguments in my head when i’m trying to reason about something (the people involved are often random, i have no idea lol). is that just having “normal” thought? i honestly have no idea. normal here meaning, the most common pattern across humans, not me trying to demean people who don't have visual thought or something like that of course.
I have a voice in my head when I think. Let me be clear, I do see associate voice as me but it does come off as a voice... hell, I argue with it sometimes too lol (and both arguments are me). Sometimes the voice narrates my actions (doesn't happen as much. I read a lot more as a kid and it happened more when I read a lot of fiction). I think sometimes I tell it to stop that when it does though (seems kinda corny to me to do that).
I can also imagine being in scenarios and that is more like being in VR (and sometimes I will come up with some thoughts just by the scenarios in my imagination). I wouldn't say it's a movie cause it's more like I'm there but a lot of times I see myself in third person in my imagination tbh (and I usually like to have some continuity to the story but this means a lot of retcons when I want to go back to a previous part and reimagine it). This also translates sometimes to my dreams where I start controlling my dreams like I do my imagination (no, I think this will be more interesting, I'm retconnning it to this <- though this isn't my voice saying that, this is just me deciding that in my dream and putting in words the thoughts). It feels like I'm so good at imagining things sometimes it just carries over into my dreams and actively controlling them too.
My old frenemy, the internal critic, I've learned to ignore it over the last decade he will forever resides in the dark recesses of my mind. I attribute his creation from childhood trauma i internalized for years. In my early 30's I finally hit rock bottom and was able to open up about them. While it will never go away, that alone has helped me push him aside and I think about him or his remarks less and less as time wears on. Truthfully I almost forgot he's there until reading this thread, a testament to how far I've come, healed and grown as a person since then.
I've always found this topic interesting because how most other people think seems so strange to me. Especially inner monologues. Hard to believe they are real!
My core thought architecture is sort of spatial/kinetic - it's sort of like 3D models with moving parts and it has a visual element and also a ... idk, proprioceptive component (kind of like knowing someone is behind you). I can "walk" through every house I've ever lived in, in my mind, and see exactly where everything is, and that's sort of how my mind stores knowledge.
Because I don't think in words, I sometimes hear them in my head when I'm about to type them. Like now.
I've always found it difficult putting this into words.
I guess on a 1-5 scale with 1 being no visuals or audio and 5 being you can imagine what ever you desire I would be at a 1 or a 2.
I can imagine sound somewhat and visuals for like a second in a vague way. but my every thought is silent by default and i just know it without "hearing" it I guess.
I always assumed internal monologues were made up movie things :P.
My internal monologue is ever present, is my own voice and dominant to the point it often easily transitions into me actually speaking to myself.
I personally don't like that that happens often, while I'm old enough to have become very used to it I would rather not be witnessed speaking to myself which can sometimes be a hard thing to control. It's not out of control, I can certainly silence myself but when I assume myself to be alone it happens very easily.
As far as visualisation I would say yes, I'm a very visual person and one of my earlier memories relating to this is how I visualise numbers. I remember once trying to explain this to a teacher when I was quite young who was utterly confused and could not begin to understand what I meant, it was then I learned that not everyone does this.
The simplest way I can put it is that I visualise a lot of numbers as if they were printed on a die, a grid of dots and values split into groups/arrays, usually with 5 being the highest value. It is usually when I'm doing mental arithmetic and I freely admit that maths was never my strong point, I can do enough to survive as an adult just fine but I remember my strong visualisation of numbers in this way being a hindrance at school.