The inner monologue is thinking by ‘hearing’ your own voice ‘speaking’ in your mind. It’s the mental equivalent of literally talking to yourself.

Do people have a non metaphorical inner monologue where they physically hear thoughts?

Yes, in the sense that they hear themselves ‘voicing’ out their own thoughts. If you have the ability to form images in your mind, it’s like that, but with sound.

Would they equally write ‘mothers’ vs. ‘childless women’ in another article about remote work, I wonder.

you can’t trust its explanations as to what it has just done.

I might have had a lucky guess, but this was basically my assumption. You can’t ask LLMs how they work and get an answer coming from an internal understanding of themselves, because they have no ‘internal’ experience.

Unless you make a scanner like the one in the study, non-verbal processing is as much of a black box to their ‘output voice’ as it is to us.

You live in a warm place, I think