You noted the possibility that you might have mental images or monologue but don't experience them. That's interesting.

I expect someone will object that it's logically contradictory to propose that you have an inner monologue but don't experience it; I don't think it is, actually.

I get migraines. I've experienced them for about forty-five years. They're not just headaches. They're some kind of unusual neural and vascular activity in the brain that can cause a whole slew of weird effects.

One effect that I've experienced many times is called scotoma. It's a phenomenon where a region of the visual field is taken over by a vivid abstract pattern. Scotomas take various shapes, but they generally have a few things in common: they are more vivid than real seen objects; they often flicker rapidly and may move slowly; they often have high-contrast black-and-white-striped zigzag patterns; they may be surrounded by faint or vivid colorful auras that pulse or stream.

I've seen lots of scotomas over the years with all of these attributes.

One time just a few years ago I was reading a good book and I began to notice the mild visual distortions that alert me to an oncoming scotoma. There's nothing much I can do about them, and I was really interested in the book, so I sort of shrugged and figured I'd continue reading until I had to stop.

I never had to stop.

The scotoma came on full-force and took over the center of my visual field. I couldn't see anything except the scotoma directly in front of me.

Nevertheless, I was able to continue reading without any trouble. Well, the scotoma was distracting, but it didn't prevent me from reading.

As you can imagine, I found this really weird. If you don't believe me, I don't really blame you. I found it so surprising that I started reading the book aloud, as if that would somehow serve as a reasonable test that I wasn't simply making up the contents of the book without realizing it.

I continued reading. The scotoma eventually faded away, and I could confirm that, yes, the pages I had read while I couldn't see them were just as I had heard myself reading them aloud.

This experience suggests to me that seeing the book is one process, but consciously experiencing the seeing of it is another, completely separate, process. The migraine sabotaged my ability to consciously experience seeing the book, but it didn't interfere with the process of actually seeing or reading it.

If that's true, it suggests that the process of running an internal monologue, or of constructing internal images, could be separate from the process of being conscious of them. Perhaps you indeed have an internal monologue and you simply don't experience it?

That's really interesting. I can believe it happens. Some portion of your brain is still seeing the words, since the retina and optical nerves aren't affected, it's just that your visual field is getting interference from somewhere else. Like getting interference on an old CRT monitor with a magnet. It affects what you can see, but it doesn't stop anything from seeing the data come through the graphics card itself.

The reason I wonder about whether I am seeing things on a "screen" I can't access has to do with my ability to recognize things. When I see something I've seen before, I immediately recognize it, just like normal people do. So it's saved off somewhere, I just can't access it in the meantime. So it's possible that when I try to imagine a beach or whatever, it's appearing on a screen I can't see. I think of it as if my visual projector has a burnt out bulb. It could be showing it to me if I could somehow change the bulb, possibly.

How many thoughts/ideas/things can you process simultaneously?

I can probably do up to 8 different subjects/thesis, but I also can imagine in: audio, touch, sound, color, space, abstract, visual, time, taste, smell, linguistic, and hyperdimensional. Couple of these things I had to practice though.

That's a hard question for me to answer. I know it sounds weird but "I" am not the one doing the thinking. It happens elsewhere in my brain; I only get notified of the results. So my answer is either 1, 0, or "no idea", depending upon how you look at it. I can keep track of a lot of pieces of a large process or program all at once, but it's happening in the abstract, I guess. This might just be a communication problem, though.

In terms of the senses, I can walk into a busy scene and take everything in. The sounds, the sights, the smells, etc. I seem to be more situationally aware than a lot of other people I interact with. Just no record button. Notes I make to myself or overall impressions stay, but I would not be very helpful as a witness to a crime if I wasn't trying to memorize what I was seeing in the specific.

This is a difficult thing for me to "look at", in some ways I don't do much thinking at all, but am still successful and am thought of as that guy that can figure out the problem when others are stuck.