Somehow, I’ve labored under the impression that everyone experiences their thoughts in the same way. That is, like me. And my thoughts are almost entirely verbal. I have a distinct inner voice that speaks to me much of my waking hours. And it is a voice. My own—at least as I perceive it when I speak out loud (although much softer and with less prosody). It’s the same voice I “hear” when I am reading or writing. Mixed in is a lot of “inner dialogue.” That is, I talk to myself, silently, a fair amount. But this is different. When I do it, even though I “hear” the same voice, I can notice subtle sub-contractile motor firings going on in my tongue and oropharynx—some sort of articulation pre-activation—just a few steps away from speaking out loud. The inner monologue, though, seems an entity unto itself—spontaneously addressing me, making observations, posing questions, voicing concerns, drawing my attention to things, admonishing me (it is often pretty sharp-tongued), whenever I am not tying it up with distractions. I can readily and vividly pull up other voices—my wife’s, my children’s, Mick Jagger’s—but then my conscious stream rapidly reverts back to my own voice. My thoughts, therefore, exist almost entirely in the form of this inner monologue/dialogue.

This is how everyone thinks, contemplates, and processes, right? Well I had assumed so. Then in casual conversation I learned that one of my sons also experiences a continuous inner monologue but it’s not in his voice, it’s much more nebulous than that. It’s a verbal, auditory-like experience, but not as distinct as mine. One of my daughters-in-law experiences very little........

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