I don&#x27;t generally hear an &quot;audible&quot; voice in my head, the thoughts just appear, as concepts, or at least as atomic words. I look at the words on the page and the shape of them manifests the meaning. I still kindof imagine speaking the word, but it&#x27;s not like imagining any other sound.<p>In contrast, I can imagine music very vividly, with different instruments and their timbres fully defined. It&#x27;s very close to the sensation of hearing music, to the point where I sometimes have to stop myself from dancing to music that only I can hear, definitely not something to do in public! (The music never has lyrics btw. Even if I&#x27;m imagining a real song that has words, they just end up as wordless vocalizations.)<p>The closer to being in the &quot;flow&quot; state I am, the less of an experience of inner speech I have. When I&#x27;ve been programming or doing music for an hour, I don&#x27;t really think in words at all, the concepts just seem to flash past, going almost directly from the unconscious to motor actions. With art especially you don&#x27;t have words for most of the things you&#x27;re doing anyway, so how could you possibly think in a monologue?<p>However when I need to think carefully about what I&#x27;m doing, when I need to use deductive logic or it&#x27;s very important that I make absolutely no mistakes, I do veer more towards inner speech. The other major one is rehearsing possible social interactions, or having hypothetical conversations, which is something I actually do quite a lot of (I think it&#x27;s quite common) and obviously that involves speech.<p>Finally, at times of emotional stress or fear (but not panic), I&#x27;m forced into a consistent inner monologue. It&#x27;s very similar to the way you can&#x27;t deliberately give up conscious control of your breathing once you take hold of it, and I can easily see how it could be scary for some people. Sometimes it does feel like a step down the road towards madness, in comparison to my normal state. If I woke up one morning and was stuck like that, I would 100% be going to a psychiatrist.<p>Don&#x27;t get any of that stuff about being able to see numbers unfortunately. I have very poor imaging ability. I can&#x27;t really see pictures in my head at all.