While everyone can subvocalize (imagining your own voice) or imagine images, most people do not use this as their primary means of thinking! Roughly 25% of people (which, I've found, can be heavily biased depending on the group being polled, Jow Forums being very predominantly subvocalizers) experience logical trains of thoughts in this manner and are able to therefore independently construct meaningful analyses of information. EG. "This politician is such a liar. They are relying on an appeal to novelty when they call right wing ideas outdated". But another 25% of people think in terms of abstract images, by associating a concept with an image or a color or something like that in place of an actual logical thought. For instance, one woman I talked to, who is primarily a visual thinker, I asked "how do you form a logical argument in a discussion?" And she told me, "when you said argument, I pictured someone being angry at me and I got anxious".
Okay, but if you think that is bad, the rest of the population DON'T THINK AT ALL. They simply experience impulses. In terms of their logical thinking abilities, there is none. When asked the same question as above, one person (an educated person) stated that they simply recall something that had been said to them, and adapt it to the audience. They also stated that they think it is a sign of intelligence to be able to adopt other people's opinions in this matter, and this is the right way to learn information.
So what I take from this, is that at most only 25% of people are actually capable of forming coherent thoughts and original ideas that aren't just based on emotions or parroting of other peoples' ideas.
>"This politician is such a liar. They are relying on an appeal to novelty when they call right wing ideas outdated" lmao
You're an NPC yourself, both sides of the consumerbase of the cultural product you call ''''''''''''''''''politics'''''''''''''''''' are.
Anyone who believes they have a tidy, neat, catch-all, barely changing faction-based solution for all that ills and could ever be possibly needed by humanity, for all time, for all problems, in all environments, is retarded, and is proven, time and time again, to be retarded and wrong, with death and disaster.
NPCs fuck off.
Ethan Parker
Assmad feelsthinker detected
Wyatt Watson
all he needed to say to keep face is "I'm only talking about white ppl in the USA" ppl like this make the left look bad
Kayden Cook
>NPC activates strawman.exe
Always the same routine.
Samuel Martinez
>For instance, one woman I talked to, who is primarily a visual thinker, I asked "how do you form a logical argument in a discussion?" And she told me, "when you said argument, I pictured someone being angry at me and I got anxious". sounds a lot like dumb frogposters desu
Aiden Flores
What is the username of the person in the picture? I have to find them and kill them.
John Gonzalez
>feelsthinker
This needs to be a meme. Down with the reign of the feely-wheely-wheelies.
I don't get what's your point, my train of thought can't even be described and it feels as if what I'm doing or say is spontaneously generated in most cases and it feels really weird. I suppose it may have to do with my Aspergers but it may just be me actually not thinking..
Angel Robinson
yeah there's no way she actually said that. it fits the whole >muh wimmin can't logic> meme
John Rivera
You don't spend enough time around dumb people to know how they think
Joseph Stewart
So that's how Discord looks like, nice...
Robert Turner
man i really hate eastern europeans
Dominic Flores
>or imagine images I've got news for you bub, that's wrong
Hunter Cooper
How does death and disaster prove him wrong?
Ian Phillips
user, I hate to break it to you but original ideas don't exist, you can't form thoughts totally independent of external stimuli so regardless of what you'd like to believe they're an amalgam of things you've either taught to yourself or picked up subconsciously
Blake Baker
I'm close enough to her to talk openly about our thoughts, and she doesn't find it embarassing or unusual.
Lucas Cox
Actually, there is such a thing as critical thinking.
Robert Smith
20% of the people have 80% of the souls
Henry Davis
>original ideas that aren't just based on emotions or parroting of other peoples' ideas But that's how part of these ideas are made. Just look at Jow Forums as you took it for an example. What about memes or the heavily static nature of this board? same asif anything Jow Forums is NPC-central like much of the internet
Mason Gonzalez
just imagine this guy repeating some inane muh white pride muh immigrants Jow Forums bullshit over and over while the strangers who are forced to carpool with him awkwardly start humming just to pretend they can't hear him until he gets mad and leaves
Jonathan White
soulless NPC located
Jackson Garcia
It doesn't, it shows that massive groups of people are trapped in belief routines that frequently result in terrible results for themselves, but continue to readopt the same routines through history, resulting in the same negative outcome, over and over. Red, blue, all the same.
Watching normoids argue on the internet about politics, where a guy who knows 1.5% of a thing tries to outdo a guy who knows 1.2% of a thing, and both of them regurgitate media fed talking points, because surely both of them have the right solution for all of people ever, forever.
It's all boring and shit. This board is shit.
Even OP, presenting an emotion provoking extreme version of retardation in his OP picture, to disguise his own, lesser showing retardation, to shill his own talking points, vs the idiot he was talking to e
Too lazy to continue, seen the replies to these posts a thousand times, seen people like OP and his idiot a thousand times etc.
Leave the lights on and the water running when you're done fucking up society, NPCs, thanks!
Blake Rogers
whenever i try to actively talk to myself in my head it gets drowned out by all the other clattering nonsense going on in there
> Anyone who believes they have a tidy, neat, catch-all, barely changing faction-based solution for all that ills and could ever be possibly needed by humanity, for all time, for all problems, in all environments Do people like this exist? I thought politics was a game of how can you construct a system when people are exploited but to a smaller degree; Never actually thought that someone could think that their "plan" was perfect, I think you are trolling m8
I love how you are so illogical as to respond to the minor political points inserted as examples of fallacies, instead of the actual central topic of the post.
This isn't a thread about politics and nobody asked for your thoughtless ideas on how "politics are just arbitrary teams". It is a thread about human psychology.
Hunter Flores
>Tries to bring me down to his level.exe
shit board
Jaxson Nelson
I've always wondered if other people have an internal monologue. Sometimes I go on long conversations with myself in my head, and assumed it was weird. I'm guessing it's abnormal to have any voice in your head at all then.
Owen Jackson
It's not abnormal. But depressed people tend to have very active internal monologues, usually berating themselves. It is also possible to have positive internal monologues.
To elaborate on my original post, the people who do not primarily think in subvocalizations actually find the idea of an internal monologue to be borderline incomprehensible. Talking to the educated nothinker referenced earlier, he thought an internal monologue was just the person reiterating over what someone else said to them. He didn't think that people would actively formulate trains of thought in their head.
Grayson Baker
I do the same thing, I don't think it's that uncommon but who knows Do you talk to a lot of people ? I really don't and If I do it's almost never anything close to meaningful or interesting so I always figured it's my way of coping with my lack of human intearction
David Johnson
>feelsthinker this is too good
David Carter
Fuck you, the Stormcloaks will retake Skyrim and take your Redguard ass to Valhalla. I am a proud Stormcloak, my father was a Stormcloak, and we have a proud history involving non-lizard people and NPCs.
I for one am glad for OP for revealing the truth, that most people are NPCs, specifically anyone who is an Imperial sympathizer. Thank goodness I am on Jow Forums, the ultimate place for Stormcloak culture, where we have true free will and aren't NPCs.
What pisses me off more than a regular NPC is an essential NPC. It is bad enough when one of the shitty Imperials pervades my land and steals my culture, but then we get NPCs that don't even die. I threw a giant warhammer at a guy the other day, didn't even die. You want me to think we are in a world without NPCs when people cannot listen to the rationalizations of Ulfric Stormcloak?
So that leaves you. Are you an infiltrator NPC sent among our numbers to mock us? Or will you roast chicken nuggies and take back Skyrim for the Nords?
in your OP link however, the writer said that 60% of people in one particular study did have internal monologues. where are you getting this 25%/75% number?
Luke Carter
A lot of white people on the USA are decendent from immigrants that came long after slavery was abolished. the left looks bad if you think for one second, always living in the past.
Jason Moore
Another, more recent study. I mentioned I didn't have this on hand, but I can do some digging if necessary. It isn't convenient for me to do so right now though.
Gavin Moore
What if i skip the subvocalization process and just think in concepts, am i thinking in memes?
Lincoln Myers
I fucking hate sub-vocalizing. Sometimes I fuck up a sentence in my head while conversing with myself and I need to repeat the whole thought process until it is perfect and seamless. I've been trying to think more image-like since, but I can't fucking help it.
Brody Cox
I am an NPC. I don't have a personality, just insecurities and coping mechanisms frankensteined together
Joseph Hughes
Sorry but the fact that you're self-aware enough to scrutinize yourself like that means you're not an NPC.
Luis Adams
Sleep with one eye open NPC. Your clothes could provide me with shiny gold coins.
Luis Thompson
I don't have any opinions though everything just comes back to insecurities which are an emotional thing. I only like or dislike things based on how they make me feel.
Elijah Reed
I think in monologue, but often dialogue too. I will have a copy of myself to bounce ideas off of. Sometimes I have imaginary conversations with people I know, or more often characters from fiction since I haven't really had friends for a while. I imagine what they would say. Sometimes I disagree or even argue with them.
Not sure if this relevant or related, but I also perceive qualities in things which don't seem obvious. For example, I once had a wheat beer that tasted "purple" to me. I don't know _how_ it tasted purple, it just did. It didn't remind me of grape or anything. When I hear music I always associate it with a time of day, weather, and colour palette. Some music is sunny, some music is rainy, some music is day music and some night, some music is warm, some cool, some cold. I prefer to listen to music which suits the environment I'm in.
As far as NPCs go, I think everyone is sentient but some people are just more intelligent than others. It's just too simple to class 75% of people as NPCs and 25% of people as free thinkers. Some people are more prone to just believe what others tell them. I think OP just wants to feel like he's a part of some special group. Or maybe I'm just a dumb NPC with no original thought?
everyone thinks by feelings with varying degrees, nobody is perfectly rational also if your post implying "right wing = rational" "left wing = feelings"?
Austin Ross
>As far as NPCs go, I think everyone is sentient but some people are just more intelligent than others. It's just too simple to class 75% of people as NPCs and 25% of people as free thinkers. Some people are more prone to just believe what others tell them. I think OP just wants to feel like he's a part of some special group.
Who is to say that it isn't exactly like this, that most people just are fundamentaly different in how they think. I feel like it is the other way around, that we want to convince ourselves that in fact we aren't that different. But we are.
Caleb Miller
>While everyone can subvocalize (imagining your own voice) or imagine images, most people do not use this as their primary means of thinking! Roughly 25% of people (which, I've found, can be heavily biased depending on the group being polled, Jow Forums being very predominantly subvocalizers) experience logical trains of thoughts in this manner and are able to therefore independently construct meaningful analyses of information. EG. "This politician is such a liar. They are relying on an appeal to novelty when they call right wing ideas outdated". But another 25% of people think in terms of abstract images, by associating a concept with an image or a color or something like that in place of an actual logical thought. For instance, one woman I talked to, who is primarily a visual thinker, I asked "how do you form a logical argument in a discussion?" And she told me, "when you said argument, I pictured someone being angry at me and I got anxious". Why do teenagers have an obsession with "original thinking"? Expanding upon already existing ideas is what makes an idea original per se. Novelty is through synthesis.
Samuel Morales
No, that's really how they operate. If you ever disagree with a woman they consider it an attack on their character, not their one bad idea. Right now you believe women are the same as men because it sounds like a nice fantasy but After you have dealt with more women you'll understand that it's simply not the case.
>menghublog.wordpress.com What type of garbage source is this?
Owen Young
this wrong and junk science
Anthony Johnson
>africans are retarded wow who coulda seen that one coming
Christopher Clark
>For instance, one woman I talked to, who is primarily a visual thinker, I asked "how do you form a logical argument in a discussion?" And she told me, "when you said argument, I pictured someone being angry at me and I got anxious".
Whenever I hear something like this, I assume there's more to the person than what they're actually saying. I know there's more to me than what I say. Even if I have flashes of emotion that sometimes prevent me from expressing myself how I'd like to, when I'm alone I can ruminate and unpack what someone's argument was vs my own. Maybe in the moment this woman was anxious, but it doesn't mean she has no ability to self reflect!
Connor Bell
>internal monologue
Not entirely related to your point OP but I'm curious if you or others have experienced thinking not in words (inner monologue) nor in visual mental images (visual thinking) but in a kind of method of thought that could be described as "instant knowing" for example understanding something intutively and without subvocalizing or mental pictures leading to that thought. For quite some time in childhood and early teens I lacked an "inner voice" but also had trouble visualizing and thinking with pictures, my thinking was like sensing, feeling and intuiting and it felt instant, I remember distinctly thinking (but not subvocalizing) that there must be something wrong with me if I don't have an inner voice and can't "talk to myself internally" when seeing in movies or TV scenes where characters talk to themselves inside their minds I found the concept difficult to believe.
Eventually these concerns led to me trying to think more with sub vocalizing and now many years later it forms a good deal of my thought process, my visual thinking is still rare unless deliberately attempted because my visualization quality in general is poor. However I have noticed in many ways thinking in this way is a detriment, there are still times when I have thoughts that are instant and are understood in miliseconds, yet my subvocalizing thoughts play "catch up", happening after the original thought is fully comprehended and understood instantenously before subvocalization, also my ability to read without subvocalizing and therefore slowing me down (speed reading) is all but gone, books and long articles take longer to read now if every words must be sub-vocalized when before they never had to be and yet could still be understood and comprehended fully
I think this is different from your impulse based thinking idea though OP, anyways I wonder if anyone else experienced thinking in this way, I think it helps tremendously with abstract thinking where images and words fail us
>Who is to say that it isn't exactly like this, that most people just are fundamentally different in how they think. First of all, it doesn't make biological sense. Things don't evolve with sharp borders, especially "soft" features like psychology. Second, you should never just accept a theory at face value just because it kind of sort of sounds okay to you, and especially not one that puts you on a pedestal, since you instinctively want to believe those.
Jeremiah Rodriguez
why does senshougahama have such a fat pussy
Parker Foster
Holy shit... This is awesome! I always fantasized about hypnotizing people into a heart attack or the like, but this could mean that it's realistic! Imagine how amazing it would be for the magic 25 to be able to kill the dull 75 just by staring them in the eye!
Cooper Wood
If that's true I'm just some shitty background NPC who just repeat the same lines, doesn't show any emotions and that the players will forget about the second they take their eyes off me
That type of instant thinking is also normal, although relying only on that is not so common. When you deal with something repetitively you automatically start to use this kind of thinking, when I did a lot of similar types of math problems back around middle school I could solve some of them within way less than a second just by recognizing the pattern. Now that I don't do them often I have to think a lot more about it. You should be able to mix up that instant thinking with the internal monologue, intentionally skipping the monologue when you recognize that it's slowing you down and you already understand the concept of what you are doing.
Jonathan Walker
I can relate but I do not think words fail rather it is my lack of speech skills that cannot keep up with the speed of my thoughts. Perhaps because of simply more time practicing one skill over the other.
Jaxson Peterson
>ly these concerns led to me trying to think more with sub vocalizing and now many years later it forms a good deal of my thought process, my visual thinking is still rare unless deliberately attempted because my visualization quality in general is poor. However I have noticed in many ways thinking in this way is a detriment, there are still times when I have thoughts that are instant and are understood in miliseconds, yet my subvocalizing thoughts play "catch up", happening after the original thought is fully comprehended and understood instantenously before subvocalization, also my ability to read without subvocalizing and therefore slowing me down (speed reading) is all but gone, books and long articles take longer to read now if every words must be sub-vocalized when before they never had to be and yet could still be understood and comprehended fully I hate this. My story is a bit more complex, I never sub-vocalized very much either. But then I learned english and sub-vocalized every thing I read in english and sub-vocalized my thoughts as well, and this carried over to my native language. Now even when my thoughts are complete and whole very quickly, I feel compelled to sub-vocalize them and "sum them up" to make them "official". I can't think straight before I do that. Sometimes when I follow a plot or an article I must also sub-vocalize the plot even if I already know it. Idk if it's linked, but I also experienced a spike in what you may qualify as "OCD-like" behaviors, such as checking gas valves three times, checking fridge door also, etc...
Grayson Reed
same with me. But stress, anxiety and people seem to interrupt this process. It's one of the reasons I prefer being alone. My mind is free to intuit things and think calmly, quickly and clearly when I'm in a peaceful, quiet place with no expectations on me.
William Bailey
>My mind is free to intuit things and think calmly, quickly and clearly when I'm in a peaceful, quiet place I fucking hate it when my mom interrupts my sub-vocalizing, I have to do it all over again, it messes me up.
Liam Morris
I work 50+ hours a week. If any of my co-workers just put a little thought into what they do, we could be done in 30+ hours.
All day fellow managers come to me and ask me to "plan" for them. It's all stuff that you'd think common sense would tell you to do. But they seem utterly lost. They take breaks incessantly to "think", instead of just planning their day/week in advance, they change directions on what they're doing based on how they're feeling, without considering how this is going to affect or delay them. It's just odd. The amount of people I talk to who simply don't think about anything or even have hobbies. I work with a guy who literally hits the strip club and gets drunk once a month, but otherwise just "browses instagram or facebook" when he's not at work. Like, that's it. Doesn't even own a TV or a computer. Just his phone. I'm like; "don't you get bored?";
>No. Why? Look how hot this chick on instagram is?
Jayden Ward
Dirty, stupid feelsthinker.
Camden Phillips
Thank God I'm not a generic Npc, I have so many stalkers that prove I'm not. Theyre always going off on about me, one in particular wanted Anons to have sex with me, good thing a kind user informed me, It was interpersonal btw, I talked to him as a friend and didn't know he disliked Me until after he Made the thread, im also a tomboy, so if I did humor some of the Anons after knowing what happened, they would have orgasmed to someone who is biological female, but hates it, the implications
Liam Hall
if creature thinks of servitude before thinking of itself, it is a slave-creature to me. i can not feel compassion for it.
Jose Gray
Everyone who Types like a German w/ Brain damage is Definitely an Npc
Liam Roberts
kek was about to say pretty much this
Julian Hill
>intentionally skipping the monologue when you recognize that it's slowing you down and you already understand the concept of what you are doing.
Thats what I do now but have to almost train myself to not subvocalize when I don't need to. For example if I want to get up and get a glass of water and then turn on the AC, I don't need to vocalize these thoughts I instinctively know the actions I want to perform but often the subvocalizng follows unnecessarily. Though I have noticed when I'm playing vidya my subvocalizing is suppressed and I just respond by instinct and without subvocalizing what I want to do in the game, this can be both an advantage and disadvantage I noticed, without subvocalizing your goals and intent in the game might not be so clear and you change them on a whim but it also means they are not so restrictive that you can't adapt to new ingame situations, I think theres positives and negatives here.
>lack of speech skills that cannot keep up with the speed of my thoughts Yeah I think that described it well though I wouldn't say I lack speech skills. However I have noticed in my classes especially this manner of thinking means I don't have the exact thing I want to say ready when the professor calls on me (like an exact 1:1 idea of the sentence I will speak) but find while speaking it will draw itself out, more or less by what I intended to say, however this can lead to some lengthier responses than might be necessary (so it is online as well), in this it seems like a disadvantage.
>Now even when my thoughts are complete and whole very quickly, I feel compelled to sub-vocalize them and "sum them up" to make them "official". I can't think straight before I do that
Holy shit this, you put to words what I struggle with, I really gotta stop doing that because I'm afraid doing that will just make me stop thinking without sub-vocalizing entirely and I don't want that.
>Read this thread >Get self-conscious about my way of thinking and thought process >Ideas and thoughts feel weird This happens everytime this topic gets brought up. I don't like it.
Chase Foster
cont.
The link between this and OCD is also interesting because I also have OCD (Pure O type) and feel almost the same OCD mental compulsion to finish sub-vocalizing before I can feel a thought is "complete" and "official" I'm glad you pointed this out because now I'm fully aware that's what is happening and I need to put a stop to it, basically stop assuming that a thought isn't "official" if it isn't sub-vocalized.
Yeah I have noticed an increase in sub-vocalization when I'm suffering from more intense anxiety than normal, like when panic disorder and mental conflict and disarray is at its highest levels
>It's one of the reasons I prefer being alone. My mind is free to intuit things and think calmly, quickly and clearly when I'm in a peaceful, quiet place with no expectations on me. Same user, when there are no people around talking loudly, and when there is no on going mental dialogue in the mind being sub-vocalized, its when true inner and outer silence can be felt and by god is it blissful
I think you're good, the ability to reflect and to feel self-consciousness is something NPCs are incapable of.
Jonathan Gray
Not him, but are we really being reflective and self-conscious or are we just putting on a show for ourselves? I can't tell, everything feels so artificial.
Brandon Fisher
>Tfw not sure if NPC or not since nothing in that article or in this thread comes close to my thinking process Pretty weird stuff tbqh senpai
Angel Evans
Gentlemen, you are merely touching the top of the iceberg. We can distinguish further between that of thinking and that of merely "having thoughts". Chosen or not, your mind will come up with thoughts all day long whether you like it or not. I invite you to investigate for yourself whether or not it is actually -you- doing the subvocalizing. Here's a little experiment for you: >Set on a timer for 60 seconds >Close your eyes >Count every thought that you become aware of >For example, if the thought: "I swear it's been one minute already" appears, you count: "One" >If the thought: "Was that thing just now a thought?" appears, the question itself was definitely a thought, so you count: "Two" After counting your thoughts - it doesn't matter how many you "score" - I invite you to ask yourself: Did you choose to create the thoughts? If not, where did they come from? Once you recognize for yourself that you are not in control of your thoughts, your relationship to thoughts change. You go from believing that you are the voice in your head, to observing the voive in your head neutrally from a metaphysical distance. Only from this distance can your true Self be understood.
I actually do have Brain damage, I smack my head into things alot, and being aware of my stalkers is a good sign too, but it also means that I'm unfortunately interesting enough to be followed...? Like, im a easy target for people, when I just want to live my life without people keeping track of me. welp.
Michael Smith
What is your point? There are clearly many involuntary, reactive thoughts, which would be absent-minded thinking, but you can also consciously think and formulate specific ideas and discuss them with yourself in your mind.
Michael Carter
oh wow I just found what I was describing in the link OP provided no less
>Ricky: No, but, when I think I don't think the sentence as like I'm saying it, it's just a thought, the thought appears, it's conceptual and it's already there [...] I don't think out whole sentences >it's conceptual and it's already there
Right now that I remember I think its referred to as conceptual thinking or at least it makes sense to call it that, thinking instantaneously or quicker than sub vocalizing, in concepts and impressions
So its likely we have these different methods of thinking (conceptual, visual, auditory (internal), and people can utilize them in stronger or weaker ways depending on how they grew up, and other factors, some ways of thinking are stronger and more natural while others are weaker and less natural - but as in my case can be eventually trained or practiced and reached in time
Though visual thinking might be the hardest to improve, as experiments have proven ones visual imagery quality varies along a wide spectrum psychclassics.yorku.ca/Galton/imagery.htm
Yes this is the basic tenants of meditation and the more you do it (meditations) the more the "monkey mind" is suppressed or lessened and you don't react so automatically to every thought that enters your brain anymore, and you learn to distance yourself from your thoughts, the great realization that every OCD sufferer for instant needs to hear "you are not your thoughts".
You realize the brain as an organ is a generator of thoughts, to some like those who have OCD these thoughts can cause a great deal of distress and anxiety- and they don't have to be sub-vocalized thoughts either, but feelings, urges, impressions, and sensations can all be created by the brain and can lead to distress, anxiety, worry if you identify too much yourself with those thoughts.
Also this "NPC" stuff OP talks about feels a lot like recycled Descartes, and philosophical zombie and other thought experiments and theories on consciousness, qualia and the hard problem of consciousness
It depends, understanding comes from critical thinking like how you must understand the rules of an equation to produce the correct answer. An NPC has no way to figure out 2+2=4, it just has the necessary tools to spit 4 back out. Just like a computer will never ask why or how.
Angel Edwards
One of the great advantages of conceptual thinking is that there is no vocal train of thought and so thought interruptions can be quickly overcome when you simple return to the same "feeling" or "sense" of the thought you had, not a sentence structure, not a mental picture but a sensation I guess you can call it
Nicholas Howard
An NPC is something you find in vidya not in real life desu, there may be people who think less lucidly, who have trouble with complex thought but that doesn't make them soulless NPC's, that line of thinking is close to delusional thinking which is a cognitive distortion
Robert Anderson
What you describe in the middle passage sounds a lot like synesthesia, neat.
Gabriel Gray
I am not diagnosed with OCD, I just apparently do things that many people with OCD also seem to do. To react on your and another user's comment, I do find it also easier to have a "free" thought, ie not necessarily sub-vocalized, when I'm in a happy, careless mood. The more stressed I am, the more I find myself compelled to sub-vocalize each of my thoughts. Have you ever succeeded in growing out of this? I think that sub-vocalizing can be an advantage, as in it helps me "clear out the way" in my thoughts, but whenever I must react to something I am too slow because I try to fully analyze and sub-vocalize it in a coherent fashion.
Tyler Wilson
I want data on this that analyzes the presence of wordthink and feelsthink by race and sex, stat
But who, or rather what, does the thinking? The difference between thinking and having thoughts is merely that you choose to believe that your thoughts are of importance, and so you grab one of your thoughts, feed it your attention and let it grow in your awareness. You are not in control of your thoughts; you have never been. You are not your thoughts. You are pure consciousness. The trait of consciousness is awareness. Its ability is to focus. So the only part of your being that you are in control over, is where you choose to focus your awareness. Everything else is product of this choice and the unending movements of the physical realm. If the only choice you have in life is where you focus your awareness, then this indeed becomes the most important choice you will ever make in your life. Do you choose to believe that your thoughts are real? If so, like ghosts, they will appear to have power over you. Your thoughts, like ghosts, lose their power over you as soon as you carefully observe them and realize that they are not real. I invite you to experiment again: >Set a timer on 60 seconds >Close your eyes and observe your thoughts >Pay attention to exactly when and how thoughts emerge >Can you feel the "energy" of a thought approaching before it forms fully completed as words or images? >Are you able to "ward off" this energy? In my own experience, I find that watching out for thoughts is like chasing shadows with a torch: whereupon my awareness shines, thoughts do not form.
Camden Jackson
Desu thinking in concepts is better, you are not bound by the limits of visual thinking which requires a more concrete thought process and the more abstract and imaginative it gets the harder it is to generate an equivalent mental picture of (I think), and with regards to sub-vocalizing you are not bound by the limits of language, concepts, impressions, sensations, feelings and conglomerations of ideas for which words fail us can be experienced by way of conceptual thinking, abstractions are easy to understand, the physical, spatial and timely orientation of an idea or concept is not necessary I think it lends well to higher level thinking and metaphysical thinking as well.
Someone described it I think as ideas that have a sense of solidity to them, and that makes sense, you can almost grasp the concept of an abstract idea before it becomes something more concrete and that allows you to play around with it more, I can't really think of any specific example off the bat though, but I can sense that this description is more or less accurate
Michael Kelly
If you have voices speaking to you in your head you have a mental illness
Everyone thinks to themselves in their head or outloud. g
Jayden Price
>feelsthinker
reminds me of en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotional_reasoning and pic related, other automatic cognitive distortions and biases, different from logical fallacies in that these come automatically and need to be intercepted before they influence your behavior, actions and thinking negatively
You misunderstand, those thoughts aren't separate from you or a foreign entity in your mind, they are the product, the outcome of all the input you have received throughout your life. They only seem new or from outside of yourself because you aren't consciously, but sub-consciously, processing the input and whatever these thoughts are before they reach you conscious.
Isaac Hill
It kind of does make them soulless in a way because there there seems to be a lack of a fundamental self awareness needed to review the script being run. A soulless computer will execute without question.
Jayden Myers
Gentlemen, I will continue by proposing an even more outrageous model: Pure intuition is to thinking what thinking is to violence. Consider the savage brute, whose problem solving abilities are limited to violence. In the paradigm of savage brutes, excellence at problem solving is a matter of how strong and violent you can be. Now imagine that you, a thinker, approaches the savage. You propose to this brute: "No, no, violence is not the way to solve problems. Problems are more efficiently and reliably solved by THINKING!" The brute would give you a sceptic face, before striking you down with its club. Problem solved! Now humans currently live in a paradigm of thinking as the means to problem solving. And I propose to you thinkers: "No, no, thinking is not the way to solve problems. Problems are more efficiently and reliably solved by meditation and pure intuition!" The thinker gives me a sceptic look, thinking: "How is that supposed to work? I find this explanation insufficient." But I say to you, the problems of this world were caused by thinking, and what we need is not more thinking. As the time has passed when humanity evolved from violent societies to thinking societies, evolving into the new species Homo Sapiens, the time has come for humanity to evolve as a society, to evolve as a species beyond thinking into intuiting. Will you join me, or will you perish?
Ayden Hall
There is probably a link between increased stress and anxiety and increased sub-vocalizing if you are not a natural sub-vocalizing thinker yeah. I've noticed it too. But I also think there is the possibility of making subvocalizing your primary method of thinking if you don't "train" yourself in conceptual thinking or especially if you feel you must subvocalize everything, especially to make a thought feel "official" as was described, that probably reinforces the neural pathways responsible for sub-vocalization and strengthens it over time, which I'd want to avoid.
Balance in both methods of thinking is probably ideal, I'm trying to achieve that now, I think meditation can help though, as its not about silencing and suppressing thought but letting it pass without interacting with it, this trains the brain to not get caught up in every thought it generates, and over time can probably lead to less sub-vocalizing maybe. I don't have any concrete answers its like an ongoing process
Meta-cognition is absolutely fascinating to me though, especially how there can be such a massive difference in something as (what we perceive to be universal) how we think. For example there are people who state their only method of thinking is sub-vocalizing, from the moment they wake up to the moment they fall asleep they have a constant inner dialogue running, and that idea really disturbs me, that seems like it would be so annoying, and yet I've noticed in myself lately these past few years longer and longer running inner dialogues, even when just out walking, I'd like to avoid that, its probably harder to get peace of mind that way I would imagine
Just as the thinker should have demonstrated to the brute how his method is superior, you should demonstrate how meditation is more effective. It's better to persuade that way. Personally, I think meditation is crap, how can you honestly believe non-thinking is going to lead to anywhere new?
David Wilson
>Do you choose to believe that your thoughts are real? If so, like ghosts, they will appear to have power over you. Your thoughts, like ghosts, lose their power over you as soon as you carefully observe them and realize that they are not real.
Well said user, its all things I've come upon in my study of meditation, these are liberating insights.
I think what we need is balance between intuition and thinking, not just cast aside thinking altogether. Just like there needs to be balance between thinking and violence, for a society that thinks about the problematic nation next door building up an army and preparing to invade will find that their thoughts have led them nowhere as they are invaded, chained and oppressed by the nation next door whose thinking led to the conclusion of violence.
Balance is key.
Parker Ross
Don't throw aside meditation without first researching its benefits yourself, here's some starting material
