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.)
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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.)