I have an inner monologue when thinking and I hear an inner voice when reading (sometimes several if there are several characters in a text).<p>The voices differ. When reading something from a friend I will hear their voice, my own when reading my own, and my brain will try to create a auditory context if its by an unknown author. For example, Hacker News covers a lot of news from Silicon Valley&#x2F;San Francisco so reading the comments here I mostly hear an American voice with an Californian accent, mixed together with my own voice.<p>My brain pairs this together with inner images. So if I read a book about exploding stars, for example, I will hear an inner voice narrating the topic while also seeing images of the things being explained. These voices and images are very weak compared to the real thing though. My inner voices lack clarity and my inner images have no color.<p>Obviously this is not great for my reading speed. I did a test a while ago and according to that test my reading speed was compared to that of a 5th grader, with high memory retention of general concepts and average memory retention of specific details. I read for several hours every day.<p>As for numbers, when doing maths in my head, I do it visually. I see the numbers as images. What is strange though, compared to other things I imagine, is that results to math problems manifest themselves as a gut feeling rather than as the logical result from a chain of continuous inner dialogues and imagery. If I try to calculate 5*5 I get a gut feeling to answer 25, often faster than I consciously understand how I arrived at the answer.<p>Needless to so say I have a very strong imagination, sometimes so strong that I stop paying attention to the real world for a little while.