Truly nobody knows, it’s an open research question. And to complicate matters more we know (as others have mentioned here) that everyone doesn’t think in the same way.
I can offer you a very small example of a difference in thinking that I experience.
I’m a grown ass man and I can’t easily tell my left from right. The best example of this is when I’m gaming and the tutorial tells me to press ‘left thumb stick’, I usually fuck it up. It took me a long time and a lot of thinking on it to realise what was going on. For me, left and right is not instinctive like up or down, but rather, it’s either a feeling, or not a feeling.
The reason for this is because when I was 5 I nearly lost my left index finger in an accident. It was reattached, but during the healing process I was constantly told my left finger was the one I hurt, so I literally learnt left from right as ‘injury’ or ‘no injury’, which I then attributed to as ‘hurt’ or ‘not hurt’.
So now, when I have to choose left or right, my brain has to remember an injury and where it was, then kind of feel that injury to know if a) yes, I feel it so that’s left, or b) I feel nothing so that’s right.
And that delay is why I fuck up left or right because when I’m forced to make a quick decision like ‘press left bumper’ or ‘make a right turn here’, it’s not instinctive and I don’t have the time to process the memory of the injury and then the feeling, so I guess.
Truly nobody knows, it’s an open research question. And to complicate matters more we know (as others have mentioned here) that everyone doesn’t think in the same way.
I can offer you a very small example of a difference in thinking that I experience.
I’m a grown ass man and I can’t easily tell my left from right. The best example of this is when I’m gaming and the tutorial tells me to press ‘left thumb stick’, I usually fuck it up. It took me a long time and a lot of thinking on it to realise what was going on. For me, left and right is not instinctive like up or down, but rather, it’s either a feeling, or not a feeling.
The reason for this is because when I was 5 I nearly lost my left index finger in an accident. It was reattached, but during the healing process I was constantly told my left finger was the one I hurt, so I literally learnt left from right as ‘injury’ or ‘no injury’, which I then attributed to as ‘hurt’ or ‘not hurt’.
So now, when I have to choose left or right, my brain has to remember an injury and where it was, then kind of feel that injury to know if a) yes, I feel it so that’s left, or b) I feel nothing so that’s right.
And that delay is why I fuck up left or right because when I’m forced to make a quick decision like ‘press left bumper’ or ‘make a right turn here’, it’s not instinctive and I don’t have the time to process the memory of the injury and then the feeling, so I guess.
We do actually know quite a bit about the Internal Monologue and other forms of intrapersonal communication.
There isn’t one single use for it or benefit of it (in the same way water has many uses)