> Can't you type faster than you speak? Doesn't your speaking inhibit your thinking?
For me personally: no, I speak faster than I type; and speaking actually helps me get more ideas compared to typing.
(Not sure if that’s due to having no typing speed barrier, or maybe because speaking activates different parts of the brain.)
Once you get over the feeling of self-consciousness, it’s a great way. I even go on short walks sometimes and mumble to my phone to prepare some long prompt. Thinking works even better, when walking outside :-)
Late reply — my Hacker News reading app doesn’t give alerts on replies.
You’re right, I don’t have an inner monologue.
Only when I think about words or text literally, like when formulating this reply, I ‘sense’ the words that I come up with. Though I don’t ‘hear’ them.
I also have aphantasia. I can’t mentally ‘see’ things when I imagine them. I can ‘sense’ them, just like the words I formulate. It’s as if I know the thing I imagine is there, but it’s behind a blackout curtain.
Interesting topics! How little we still know about our own brain. And how different our brains seem to work.
I do have inner monologue, and in the past, vocalizing it properly and basically talking to myself was a great focus booster. I've been socially conditioned out of doing that though, but I sometimes still do that in form of typing to a text file.
Whether via inner monologue or explicit talking to myself, vocalizing mentally or out loud is always faster than typing to me, even though I type rather fast.
Still, that's only a "mid gear" for me. The ultimate state of greatest focus, attention and speed, is wordless flow. Inner monologue shuts off near completely there; I don't need to formulate words in my head to do things, I just feel and do. It's my favorite state to be in, and it's where what I consider my best work has been done, but sadly, I very rarely attain such state.
So: Inner monologue < Talking to myself << Wordless flow
(Funny thing, if you were to record me talking to myself, you'd see pretty much the same thing as in LLM thinking traces - including all the "but wait!" bits. My personal "brain dump" journal looks very much like GPT-4/Deepseek-R1 thinking traces - i.e. back before companies realized thinking traces are great for model distillation, and replaced them with summaries.)
For me personally: no, I speak faster than I type; and speaking actually helps me get more ideas compared to typing.
(Not sure if that’s due to having no typing speed barrier, or maybe because speaking activates different parts of the brain.)
Once you get over the feeling of self-consciousness, it’s a great way. I even go on short walks sometimes and mumble to my phone to prepare some long prompt. Thinking works even better, when walking outside :-)