>And I suppose, as someone who does a lot of thinking without an internal narrative I feel a bit attacked by the whole idea.
When ideas like this and Sapir-Whorf pop up it really makes me wonder if maybe the social "sciences" are studied exclusively by some subset of the population that thinks entirely different from me. How else would they come to the conclusion that thoughts take the form of articulated monologues? Maybe I'm the outlier but it takes deliberate effort for me to serialize my thoughts into anything articulate. I mean do other people just hear "I didn't give the correct arguments to this function" in their head when they code?
When I'm doing serious thinking about software design / architecture, or debugging/problem-solving, I often find the I have a kernel of an idea which seems fully-formed but inexpressible. I can "see", in my mind's eye, the different interactions between components (floating around in sort of a three-dimensional space), but it's often hard to put it to paper.
For me, the hardest work I often do is to describe my ideas in English text. Source code is somehow easier in some way; possibly because it's more concrete and less "squishy".
When philosophers sit down and ask themselves, "How do I think?", they invariably end up concluding that consciousness is an internal monologue. A monologue is one of the many capabilities of the mind, but it's highly overrepresented in philosophical writings because the subject is himself trying to formulate the answer in words while doing it.
If instead you developed your theory of the mind while observing people performing tasks, you might see occasional evidence of inner monologue but it wouldn't be the dominant paradigm.
I doubt they do, but have you never had a sort of "heart-to-heart with yourself"? I'll sometimes take a walk with the explicit intention of having a good think, and whenever I do that, my thoughts absolutely take the form of internal monologue. I think if you're really thinking something through, on a subject you haven't really explored, the 'voice' manifests. Just my .02.
People are different. There's a wide variety of extents to which people perceive their thoughts as comprising of words and also a wide variety of extents to which people are able to form mental imagery.
For me, most thinking isn't verbal unless I'm thinking of explaining my thoughts to some one else. Sometimes this is annoying when I've worked something out for myself and I go to explain it but then this nice chunked[1] concept for a step but when I hit that concept I realize it doesn't correspond to a word and I have to go on a long, unexpected digression. But sometimes there are words for which I haven't chunked the underlying concept well and I just use that word in isolation inside my head.
Also, some seem to be basically unable to form mental imagery and often assume that people are speaking in metaphor when they describe this. Some people are able to form mental imagery with fairly high fidelity to what their eyes see with very little effort. Personally I have an easy time with shapes but things don't tend to have colors unless I make a conscious effort.
I sort of suspect that people who refer to people by name inside their heads have an easier time remembering names but AFAIK it hasn't been studied. Likewise, I suspect there are correlations between mental subjective experience and what jobs people take. More research is needed, clearly.
I wonder how much of the mental thought process is genetic vs learned, because I can totally relate to your description.
You mention colour, which is interesting, because I was never attuned to colour until I worked as a photographer for a decade where it actually matters beyond just symbolism (ie blue sky = nice day, red light = stop). Now it is often prevalent in my thought process.
I would say my own thinking is a wild mix of language, maths ('just' another language really), graphs and other visual representations. Nigh impossible to form it into a coherent linear narrative.
When ideas like this and Sapir-Whorf pop up it really makes me wonder if maybe the social "sciences" are studied exclusively by some subset of the population that thinks entirely different from me. How else would they come to the conclusion that thoughts take the form of articulated monologues? Maybe I'm the outlier but it takes deliberate effort for me to serialize my thoughts into anything articulate. I mean do other people just hear "I didn't give the correct arguments to this function" in their head when they code?