The "No Internal Monologue = NPC" meme?

Psychology & Sexuality
1

If you’ve been on our little corner of the internet, you may have heard that one statistic that only 30-50% of people have a regular internal monologue. Many of these people seem to treat the inner monologue as a sign of superiority because they tend to think that the others are practically mindless and don’t do intellectual thinking. Some even seem to think of people without internal monologues as philosophical zombies.

I believe this might be because most people without internal monologues tend to have opposing Big 5 traits to the people with. I’ll give an example of what I think (on average):

With Internal Monologue Without Internal Monologue
Higher Openness Lower Openness
Lower Extroversion Higher Extroversion
Higher Neuroticism Lower Neuroticism

It strikes me that people without internal monologues seem more simple, which some may conflate as stupid/inferior. From my own experience, I think having an internal monologue is associated with more intelligent individuals but it seems like a buffer to a more direct connection with experiencing the world. I used to have little-to-no internal monologue in my early youth and while it’s hard to remember what that was like, I still had the same general Big 5 traits as someone with an internal monologue. I just “knew” things subconsciously and there was a lot less distracting “noise” in my head. Imagine how nice music would be if you didn’t worry about nonsense and instead could just listen to it and subconsciously react to threats when they do come up!

What exactly do you guys think the purpose of an internal monologue is when people can function perfectly fine without one? For me it seems like a curse. Alternatively, there’s the “No Inner Mind’s Eye = NPC” meme which feels strangely a lot more tragic to me to lack. I guess it might be related to the concept of beauty and creativity. I think the inner mind’s eye is wonderful for experiencing beautiful landscapes, imagining grandiose worlds, and getting immersed in wonderful fiction. But what does inner monologue do? Nothing like that, at least that’s how I see it.

2

I think it’s difficult to make sense of this topic, because it’s unclear what an inner monologue really is, or if it’s even real in the first place. I would think that it means being aware of one’s own thinking.

As far as intelligence goes, I like George Zipf’s definition, which is economy of action. It’s the number of operations that an object can perform.

For example, a mushroom seems unintelligent, because it eats detritis, grows, and releases spores. But when you start examining its root networks, its internal “language,” then it appears ‘smart.’ It is relative to a standard: IQ of 130 seems smarter than IQ of 100. Intelligence is determined through comparison.

So I would call normies unintelligent, because their range of possible action is greatly truncated in comparison to thinking, feeling, autists.

However, when it is time to socialize, then it is the autist who is the fool!

3

I have an internal monologue but I have no idea what it’s correlated with. My best guess is that maybe people who see life as a story are prone to it. People who have narrative thinking but not necessarily people who are writers. It seems this thinking style can be acquired too. However musical thinking is much more direct. All my musician friends can think in sound but everyone who doesn’t do music, including me, can’t think in original sounds. I disagree that people without internal monologues are npc philosophical zombies though. In my experience, your big 5 correlations seem to apply half of the time. As a meme it was very easy to get hyped up by the othering until I noticed many people that I assumed to have an internal monologue did not have one and vice versa.

4

It seems I got Zipf wrong: he did not explicitly define it, but rather implied it indirectly. ChatGPT came up with it, and I think it’s the right definition.