[scorpion]

This thread really got me thinking about cognition and inner monologues. It's strange to think about thinking itself - and stranger still to think about how what I experience as "thinking" might be entirely different from what someone else experiences as "thinking". For some people thinking appears to be a process of dialogue within the brain, in which a logical path is followed linearly in the form of verbal constructions. In other words, thinking is achieved in the same way in which I am writing and you are reading this sentence. Cognition in this form is thus a process of building and navigating through verbal structures, and all conscious activity in the brain is mediated through language. The inner workings of our minds - and indeed our perceptions of ourselves as distinct beings separate from other people and the universe itself - rely on verbal constructions as a framework. "You" exist as an entity inside of your mind only because "You" can also talk to "Yourself" verbally inside of your brain. But who is "You" and "Yourself", exactly? In other words, when you conduct your inner monologue, who is speaking, and who is listening?

In contrast, when I think about my own cognitive style, there is no separation between "Me" and "Myself" in my mind. There is no need for an inner monologue because there is no separation of self. The idea of verbally enunciating ideas inside my mind feels as strange to me as speaking out loud to myself. My inner consciousness is not a rigid stream of verbalized language shaped into precise, logical constructions. It is rather more of a formless, floating cloud of feelings and intuitions. When I seek to translate something from that cloud into a verbal construction, only then does language enter my cognitive process. Thus as I write this text, I am essentially scooping out a bowl of my intuitive, pre-vebal cognition and translating it into English language. The ideas that you're reading right now did not exist verbally pre-formed in my mind. I did not think about them in any sort of inner monologue. They were just there, inchoate and unformed, sort of floating around in a pre-verbal state. But now they have been exported through the process of verbal construction into a format that is logical coherent to other minds.

I would love to get some other takes on this. Can anyone relate to this process of cognition? Can anyone who has a heavy internal monologue explain their process of cognition? I find this rather fascinating.