As I sit on the train scrolling through the FT of a morning, I get a bit bored and decide to scroll through Twitter instead. This is usually a really bad idea, being full of complete misinformation and made up AI articles.
But today I find an interesting article. it turns out that “50-70%” of people do not have an inner monologue. There is no constant replay. I probably work with people who do not reword conversations in their heads, who don’t go on a run and get back home having remade the world. I do rather wonder how anyone would design a study that could come up with the rather broad population estimates, but I’m sure Psychology Today looked into that before publishing any clickbait. Yes, I’m sure.
Anyway, so it turns out that what I thought was the human condition is possibly unknown to many people. Work is quite stressful at the moment, so in the process of replaying and reorganising all the week’s events on my run, I lost track of everything else, and was really surprised to find myself back home. I then spent the rest of the day replaying the replay. Most of it of course was about how I could have positioned things differently to get a different outcome, about the things I said that I shouldn’t have, and the things I didn’t.
Apparently these mute minds are more image focussed and think in pictures. I’m sure that is more pleasant. I always know when I need to calm down when I get to the point of breaking down every word I come across into the number of letters, with a particular and obsessive focus on 10 letter words. It’s fun to see if I can instantly see the composition – is it 3,3,4, or some other syllable arrangement? Or have I mistaken 9 for 10? It’s diverting, but a frustrating piece of brain chatter that can make it hard to follow a film. I’m too busy enthusing about the deceptive construction of “straighten”, and miss half the plot development.
Everyone is weird in their own way I suppose!
The resting writer 
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