(Feb 17, 2019 01:15 AM)confused2 Wrote: Personal experience coming up... When I was about 20 I caught glandular fever and (probably) a side effect was that I became partially deaf. I gave up trying to talk to people and would walk in the loneliest places I could think of. I found that the internal dialogue we all have (do we?) became a bit wild after about a week on my own and after a few more days it would stop almost completely. I don't have any deep and meaningful insights from that time - just O and she - end of story.
On the flip-side, some people never seem to be alone in their lives except temporarily, say, in a bathroom or dressing room. And if they're constantly engaged in discourse with whoever they're with, it's almost as if their "thoughts" are always public -- transpiring outside their bodies in the course of interacting with those other individuals. With the latter actually being part of their mind in a sense, contributing to their decision-making and conceptual evaluations of "what's going on".
Seriously, apart from the aforementioned exceptions, I don't know when they are ever by themselves enough to have a chance to reflect entirely on their own. Perhaps in bed at night they lay awake for an hour finally privately mulling over what happened during the day and what to do tomorrow, and what it all meant according to their own psyche. Free of that "extended mind" of interacting family members, co-workers, clients, customers, agents, friends, neighbors, and chance encounters regulating them and the chit-chat exchanges composing those "speech thoughts" occurring outside the head.
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