I didn't read the article yet but since you're offering... how do you "think through" problems?

Example, this was a dialogue I had in my head this morning:

"Avenue X has a lot of stop signs which is annoying. But Avenue Y is narrow and it's garbage-pickup time, so I can get unlucky and really stuck behind a garbage truck. That's not worth the risk, I'd rather deal with the stop signs so I am taking avenue X"

What is your equivalent of that? Basically, how do you evaluate two alternatives? And how do you know how you made your choice? EG in my case, I know I picked Avenue X because I prefer the annoyance of stop signs to the risk of getting stuck, because that was part of my conversation. How is it for you?

I think in terms of pictures or concepts. Your example becomes me picturing being stuck behind a dump truck, then me stopping at numerous stop signs, then I’d decide based on which one feels like it would be more painful.

Do people actually think in terms of complete sentences like you describe in this passage, or is there some nuance to the experience I’m not understanding? Thinking for me feels more like watching thoughts flow between black boxes representing some known factor than talking to a friend.

> Do people actually think in terms of complete sentences like you describe in this passage, or is there some nuance to the experience I’m not understanding?

I do full sentences when I’m thinking about how to handle a conversation.

> Thinking for me feels more like watching thoughts flow between black boxes representing some known factor than talking to a friend.

I also do that. It’s situational, I guess. [I’m learning more about myself by questions like yours, so please keep asking :)]

If you've played a sport or video games you've probably made all sorts of actions / judgement calls without having time to fully verbalize them, but with the thought still conscious enough that you could explain what you were trying to do afterward. At least for me I'd describe it as something like that, just slower and without the time pressure.

Not OP, but: if you're thirsty and there's a cup of water nearby, presumably you don't need to verbalize the full set of motor commands necessary to move your arm, grasp the cup, and so on. It's a pretty complicated motion involving quite a few decisions, but they're decisions that don't involve verbal ability. (Or at least I assume that's the case.)

For me, at least, most thinking feels like a version of that, but generalized. That doesn't mean it's necessarily easy- I can't come up with a fancy new algorithm by just desiring it momentarily- but most things just don't need words to be thought.

If I want to figure out if, say, some geometric modification obeys some property, the content of the thoughts is the spatial reasoning directly. I can go back and explain the thoughts verbally, but the words are just labels for the more 'native' reasoning.

In my case, I can still think things verbally, though it does seem closer to subvocalization than full inner voice as described. No aphantasia for me either.

I run the timelines with conceptual blocks and then do a final pass to put them back into words to reply. It only takes a fraction of a second to solve the puzzle but it’s a pain to figure out wording each direction. Logical-NOT traps in standardized testing are hell on earth because they’re not language-appropriate uses of negation.

If I can afford five minutes of truck wait I’ll rock out in the car. If I cannot, stop signs earn precedence.

The upside of doing it this way is that I can solve the puzzle without needing the variables to be well-defined, because it’s easy to nail down where the crux points are and then leave the .. I don’t have a word here, the subunit of puzzle? .. unresolved until information exists.

I find difficult to believe that people articulate their thoughts. It sounds too slow to be practical for the every day tasks. I have the (surely wrong) impression that people rationalize their thoughts after the fact with words. I can e.g. read poetry in my head with a voice that captures the sounds and the meaning of the words, but if I'm solving a problem there's no way words can keep up. But I can hear me can say Q.E.D. when the problem is solved.

Yeah, same here. My first reaction to GPs question is that there would be no debate. I dislike being stuck behind garbage trucks more than I dislike having to stop at stop signs (aka I dislike variability in my commute, so I'll take a slower, but more consistent route every time) so the choice would always be the route without the risk of frustration.

I don't always use my inner voice.

I arrange all of the conditions in my head and then logically and rapidly resolve them. In your example, I wouldn't engage my inner voice for something that simple.

If it was planning much more steps than that, I would separate them into blocks and use my inner voice to mentally arrange the inner blocks.

Yeah I think that's fair. I probably wouldn't actually use explicit inner voice to chose between two avenues either (unless this was something I apriori considered a very important decision I sat down to consciously think about)

Question: What happens when you're reading?

For me, my inner voice kind of repeats it, if that make sense. Can't wrap my head around what "understanding" would be without that lol.

This isn't directly related. It's likely a product of how you were taught to read. You can learn to read without it by trying to have the inner voice say something different like 'a, e, i, o, u' while reading. It takes practice but it increases your reading speed.

I just reread your post with my inner voice repeating “foo” over and over. Is that the kind of thing I should practice? I don’t understand.

Yes that works too, probably a nicer one for the HN audience as well! If you can learn to read that way, eventually you won't need to repeat any more and you can read without the voice.

Hmm, I then hear my inner voice repeating that text and shouting FOO at the same time. It makes me feel stupid because I can't stop repeating what I read.

Is comprehension changed?

I don't know of any particular studies on this, but in my own experience comprehension is changed by how quickly I read, not whether the voice is used. Learning this just raises the speed limit for when you want to read easily comprehensible texts such as news or comments.

Thanks for the pro tip!

I glance at the paragraph, it glows briefly, I blink, I trace a spiral from the center counter clockwise, and if I still don’t have comprehension, I go back a couple paragraphs or try again the agonizing word by word way. Sometimes I read left to right to left depending on text width and such. I can usually keep math in the right order but I'm known to add left-to-right which involves the concept of 'one past nine' as a 'digit' for the sake of forcing it into base 10 math, and then I unroll the carries right-to-left, but not always, it depends.

> I trace a spiral from the center counter clockwise, and if I still don’t have comprehension, I go back a couple paragraphs or try again the agonizing word by word way

Wow. What?

I don't know, man. I work with my brain as best I can. Some pages of books are an entire page of "glance, glance, okay, that's all meaningless" next-page. But I also remember books as intensely as TV or in-person experiences, if not moreso.

If I'm trying to figure out whether what I've just written will make any sense to other human beings, sometimes I'll say a fragment of it out loud to hear the emotion and make sure it's landing properly. My edit history on HN is probably >99% of my comments have edits within sixty seconds of sending it, because Fixed-width reads different than Sans-serif, and I can't absorb many Fixed-width fonts very well in white-on-black, certainly not whatever the browser defaults are. (InputMono Light dethroned Menlo Regular after ten years in my Terminal, and I miss it any time I'm in the browser. Yes, I know I how to fix that in the browser.)

Reading is the inverse but the same: sometimes I have to do five passes on a paragraph or page, just to fully grasp whatever it's trying to say.

Have you been tested for dyslexia or other disabilities?

Seconding this. This description sounds like severe dyslexia to me, and the good news is there are a lot of resources and therapies out there which might be able to greatly improve your quality of life if you choose to seek them out.

Definitely worth speaking with an appropriate medical professional for diagnosis.

My experience on reading isn't as dramatic as the person you're replying to, but similar.

I read whole paragraphs and/or sentences in one go. I don't really know "how" I do it, and there are limits (it really, really helps to know the author and their writing style). My eyes hit the paragraph, flick to see the end of it, traverse back up half-scanning each line, then I scan through the lines from the top, and afterwards I know what the paragraph was saying. It takes a few seconds per paragraph.

I can't recite it verbatim but I can effectively describe the content of the paragraph accurately.

If I have to read something word-for-word it's so slow that I tend to get bored or frustrated quickly. I don't find that slow, word-for-word reading gives me much more than by inhaling paragraphs whole.

Yep, basically like this. I can’t repeat anything I read verbatim, but I can remember a sentence someone said and quote it back to them easily when context requires it.

When I read normally, I hear it in real time. There’s a “default” voice, or I can make it a character voice at will. If I want to read a lot faster, I switch the voice off. I seldom do that.

Hey! I don't know if I have the voice or not. I seen this on a video (Joe Scott maybe?) a couple of weeks ago and I wondered too. I don't know the difference between thinking and inner voice. Like if I am approaching a road, I don't recall an inner voice telling me to stop but I don't know if that is valid as an example.

The question might be too broad but how do you know you have no inner voice?

Can you speak to yourself in your head? I also think there's a difference between involuntary and voluntary inner voice.

For me there is definitely a difference between voluntary and involuntary. I can imagine speaking to myself, for example. I do/did that when writing this very sentence. But if I'm not consciously generating language (ie speaking or writing, or thinking about either) then it's nice and quiet in my head :)

Other people apparently hear perceptible voices talking to them. Those cartoons about a devil and angel on your shoulders aren’t just cartoons, it turns out, I guess. I’m not really great at explaining it :)

The problem is the devil and the angel both talk with the same voice. The trick is to recognize who's talking anyway.

I'd love to be you at bedtime. That's when the voices love to just ruin your day/night.

As it turns out, anxiety-insomnia is just as much a problem whether it's with voices or not :(

When you hear a song that you know and like, does the music and singing repeat in your head after the song is over?

So much yes. I can find the beat and hum along with it usually in the first ten or twenty seconds. I can remember songs from a single opening note. Apparently I have excellent pitch.