I have them all the time, just wondering if there’s any sane people out there that have relatively normal thoughts on a day to day basis.
I have aphantasia and no internal monologue, and a side benefit of that is that intrusive thoughts aren’t really a thing
Oh wow I’ve never heard of that before, how did you discover you had that?
Like most folk with aphantasia, I thought that people talking about “seeing things in their imagination” were just being dramatic and using common language. It never occurred to me that they could genuinely see things in their minds. And the whole thing where people would be upset when a character in a TV show or movie didn’t look like how they’d imagined they would look, never made sense to me. And shows where people could recall the details of peoples faces for police sketch artists…
Basically, moments like that started adding up over my life, and then about 10 years ago, I read an article from someone who had discovered they had aphantasia through a similar path, and it all just fell in to place.
And the lack of internal monologue? How is that experienced? Do you know what you’re going to say before you say it, or is it simultaneous? How do you problem-solve, can you ask yourself questions?
I’m sorry if I’m being obnoxious, I’m just terribly curious. I’m always hungry for experiences outside my own.
I can think of words, I just don’t think I’m words. And when I think of a word I can run them together in a sentence. But they have no “sound”. They don’t have volume or pitch, they don’t sound like anyone, they’re just the idea of words. And because the words are after the fact, they don’t exist without me willing them in to existence. So no monologue in the way people describe it, and the idea of a conversation in my head doesn’t make sense. It would be more like writing a script for a conversation
I am sorry for the questions, this is really interesting.
What about maths? How do you do geometry? Do you have to have a drawing or can you manage without it? How do you understand geometry if you can’t see it’s objects?
I have very good spatial awareness, but it’s non visual. I can navigate my way mentally through a spaxe and “feel” where the walls are without seeing them. I have a sense of how big something is compared to something else and where they are relative to each other in space, but all non visually.
And I can rotate objects in my mind and change my perspective around them, but all without any visual elements.
I can sense the mental cube, but I can’t see it. It has no colour, no texture etc. Imagine a sort of mental bat sonar?
Ok thanks for the reply. When you said you had aphantasia and no inner monologue I thought you were a philosiphical zombie. I guess I was wrong, but there is no way to know I suppose.
How does one read books silently? Is that not a form of internal monologue?
The words have no sound. No volume, no pitch. They’re word ideas not words. I don’t hear anything, I just understand the words.
must be nice and quiet too
I know this doesn’t answer your question, but I feel like I would be more concerned if someone told me they never had any intrusive thoughts.
Like yeah it’s weird that I always think about what it might be like to drive into oncoming traffic, but I would never actually do it.
Somehow I would be more afraid of the person who’s never even thought about it once than the other
It’s like people who find I don’t believe in hell asking “what’s stopping you from murdering people?”
If religion is all that’s stopping you, I’m worried.
EXACTLY.
I have lost count of the number of times I have heard someone say some variation of “Without God or the punishment of eternal damnation what’s stopping you from raping and murdering???”
It’s like… I don’t need a magic space man to tell me those things are bad in order for me not to do them. If you DO require a magic space man to keep you from being a disgusting piece of shit maybe you gotta do some soul searching. Or dying.
It’s pretty rare for me to think of things I’m not keen on thinking about, redirection is the key. Treat your brain like a toddler trying to touch the stove, saying no doesn’t work, you have to give both something interesting to distract them.
My intrusive thought frequency and vividness have diminished with significant changes to both diet and exercise. Now I’m at the point where I can stand on the edge of a high building balcony and not have the “jump” monologue kick off.
How do you define intrusive in this case?
If your subconscious mind suddenly reminds of that one time you said something stupid and embarrassing… Yeah, that happens to pretty much everyone. Just tell that thought that nobody remembers that day or cares about what anyone said, so carry on as usual. That’s just the human mind doing its thing, making sure we pay attention to social interactions. Humans are social animals after all.
If troublesome thoughts bombard your mind all the time and you’re having trouble living your normal life, consider talking to a mental health professional.
Sometimes puzzles or problems will take root in my head and it becomes nearly impossible to distract myself from them. Often times I mull over them until exhaustion and I just have one phrase or word repeating in my head trying to understand it. Often times accompanied by a migraine and an intense feeling of sorrow
Aren’t people here conflating intrusive thoughts vs the call of the void? I remember someone explaining it to me a bit like this:
Intrusive thoughts are often violent and more “you need to kill yourself right now, jump in front of that train!” Or “push that person down the stairs now, do it!!!”
Where call of the void is much more passive as in “what if/I could I jumped in front of a train right now” or “if I pushed that person down the stairs right now, they would probably get very hurt” and extends to things like “I could just drop my phone in a sewer grate”
My understanding is that everyone™ gets the second but a lot less people get the first. I also get the second but not the first. I could be wrong because it was a random person that explained it to me.
No, those are different things. Intrusive thoughts are your brain telling you terrible things like you suck at your work or your hobbies, you’re worthless, your friends don’t actually like you, and hey remember that time you did a cringey thing in front of people? They’re not true, and you’re not intentionally having these thoughts, but your brain can’t easily rationalize them away. It’s usually something that builds up over a lifetime so that you don’t even realize it’s happening. Thats how so many people get stuck believing the intrusive thoughts.
