Internal Monologue
Not only mere words
You have certainly heard about inner speech even if you don’t experience it personally. The first thing to get rid of while starting to speed read, is the internal narrator who does voice-overs of what you read and quite often, what you think. The machinery of the internal monologue goes far beyond simply hearing texts in your head and enables the engines that parse visual and auditory1 information for you.
Getting rid of words
On the path to the full-fledged ability for non-verbal thinking, one should learn how to silence their thoughts to the fullest possible extent. Some achieve this with sheer willpower and a guess on how it should feel but, of course, there are exercises.
Overload
The simplest trick you can pull on yourself is to make your conscious mind too busy with external stimuli to maintain any speech, be it external or internal. Sit on a chair and start to drum with your left hand fingers. Add circular motions of your right hand. Stomp with your left foot in a pattern that is different from the first two actions. Draw squares in the air with the toes on your right foot. If you’re still able to think in words, you either come from an alien world or you are slacking.
Change of modality
Another exercise that employs external changes. If you are a visual person, blindfold yourself and try to live like that for a couple of hours. If you are an auditory person, use earplugs and sound-canceling headphones. And so on. The shift may help you catch the sense of how your inner monologue halts. Though, according to anecdotal evidence from some of my peers, this technique is not very reliable.
Kick out and fade away
These two methods may sound silly but they have worked at least for some people and therefore it may be helpful for somebody else. The idea of the first one is to induce an ever faster-changing internal monologue: start thinking gibberish but switch between different kinds of it like you could switch between TV channels. Start singing a song, then recite an ad, then cuss, then remember what your parents told you once. At some point, your inner speech should halt.
The second one is the opposite: you catch the thought that appears in your mind and you try to make it less “loud” step by step. It gradually “fades” away. I could never get how that might work (after all, you focus your attention on those thoughts) but again, at least some people have found it helpful so I’m including it here.
Intercept
This exercise is the closest one to meditation (someone hinted at one of the Dzogchen meditations but I couldn’t verify that). Here, you focus on the appearing thoughts and not extinguish them gradually but interrupt them at the very brink of appearance. It’s somewhat similar to contemplating the contemplator: as a thought process, you are trying to point at the part of yourself where thoughts are born and counter them.
Vision
Our visual cortex works tirelessly and provides us with an image segmentation map, not unlike the one in the picture below, but more elaborate, with momentum and depth maps (even if only partially rendered for each particular layout).
Halting its operation is very useful if you want to approach thinking purely in inner representations, not spending any power on rendering them as visual concepts. The next publication will be dedicated to a couple of techniques that will help you freeze your visual-to-semantics parsing process.
Hearing
Similar principles work for auditory perception. Let’s say you can learn to stop audio parsing just to have another tool in your skill set and to get a better grip on extracting the overarching abstractions for a greater number of modalities. The only immediate boon you get from a high enough level of mastery in this is the ability to ignore people who are talking too much (even if they are talking in your native language).
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It actually goes beyond even that into the tactile, the olfactory, and conceptual parsing. We won’t delve into those just yet since those depths are underexplored and may be dangerous.