[scorpion]

I think this meme is kind of silly and the study being used to support it doesn't actually say what the meme is suggesting. The meme essentially implies that because most people don't engage in "inner speech" that they are somehow incapable of abstract or critical thought. But an inner monologue doesn't really have anything to do with intelligence. Much of intelligence is entirely non-verbal, or more accurately, pre-verbal. Your brain wasn't designed to have to talk to itself in order to function. If anything, an inner monologue actually slows down your ability to think. In the same way that you can speak faster than you write, you can think faster than you can translate those thoughts into words.

I personally don't have much inner speech going on the vast majority of the time. I would characterize most of my thinking as intuitive and pre-verbal. I almost never talk to myself in my head, I just "know" what I want to say or do. It's similar to martial arts: if you're sparring or fighting and you're having to actively think about (i.e. verbalize inside your brain) every move you're making, you're going to be completely ineffective. Way too slow. With training, your brain and body intuitively know the right movements to make at any given point based on the stimuli your senses are feeding in. Or another example: when you trip and fall down, you don't think, "Quick, self: put out your hands to prevent smashing your face into the ground!" No, this happens pre-verbally.

There are probably different cognitive styles. For example, I know that many (most?) people verbalize text when they read. In other words, they "silently read out loud" inside their heads. But I don't do that. I just see words and my brain decodes the abstract meanings behind them, almost as if they were symbols. In other words, when I see the phrase, "in other words", my brain recognizes this as a symbol meaning, "To put something another way," and I place that into the framework of the surrounding text and thus understand the meaning of the sentence. When I write I am basically translating my abstract, intuitive thoughts into these word-symbols. I don't talk to myself as I write or consciously think about particular verbal phrases I want to use. It's all intuitive and sort of generated in real time.

Or maybe I'm actually an NPC. If you greet me and I offer you a quest, then you'll know.