Late reply — my Hacker News reading app doesn’t give alerts on replies.

You’re right, I don’t have an inner monologue.

Only when I think about words or text literally, like when formulating this reply, I ‘sense’ the words that I come up with. Though I don’t ‘hear’ them.

I also have aphantasia. I can’t mentally ‘see’ things when I imagine them. I can ‘sense’ them, just like the words I formulate. It’s as if I know the thing I imagine is there, but it’s behind a blackout curtain.

Interesting topics! How little we still know about our own brain. And how different our brains seem to work.

I do have inner monologue, and in the past, vocalizing it properly and basically talking to myself was a great focus booster. I've been socially conditioned out of doing that though, but I sometimes still do that in form of typing to a text file.

Whether via inner monologue or explicit talking to myself, vocalizing mentally or out loud is always faster than typing to me, even though I type rather fast.

Still, that's only a "mid gear" for me. The ultimate state of greatest focus, attention and speed, is wordless flow. Inner monologue shuts off near completely there; I don't need to formulate words in my head to do things, I just feel and do. It's my favorite state to be in, and it's where what I consider my best work has been done, but sadly, I very rarely attain such state.

So: Inner monologue < Talking to myself << Wordless flow

(Funny thing, if you were to record me talking to myself, you'd see pretty much the same thing as in LLM thinking traces - including all the "but wait!" bits. My personal "brain dump" journal looks very much like GPT-4/Deepseek-R1 thinking traces - i.e. back before companies realized thinking traces are great for model distillation, and replaced them with summaries.)