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It seems to me the ways we can be internally wired are surprisingly numerous. For me its neither. Emotions aren't a physical sensation, they aren't thoughts either. Instead they are a different sensation i'm at a loss to describe. Same for internal monologue, I can do it, but it's not something that's inherently needed for thoughts. In a sense I can construct ideas/notions/sentences instantly as fully formed thoughts. Indeed it takes concentration and some work to translate these into words in English (or other languages), the speed of this subjective experience is incredibly fast, I have nothing to compare it to, but it feels like it's definitely on another scale compared to some of the people i've talked about this with. It's like the monologuers are beholden to this external framework of language and ideas they have absorbed from the outside, but that's not it for me.
It feels more like my mind operates in an abstract, global regime, where meaning exists in a raw, platonic form before any linguistic scaffolding is applied. The “translation” into language is almost a compression process, reducing something vast, multi-layered, and instantaneous into a linear stream of words that inevitably loses detail. Emotions in this space are not felt as muscle tension, chest tightness, or heart rate changes, nor are they simply patterns of thought.
This matches my experience as well. I find that consciousness almost constantly throws off quanta that emerge as concepts to which language then attaches, which defines and refines the concept into something more definite. My attention inevitably engages something from this firehose-like blast of experience and from this my inner monologue emerges, describing my experience to me. Emotions are unusually intense quanta with fractal-like definition that require much more attention and language to tease out, almost as if I have to weave my thought and language around them to accurately capture what I'm experiencing.
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I would basically agree with this, yes. That was the "something ineffable" part I mentioned in my own description. I think that's what a lot of the people who answered "thoughts" were getting at, although obviously there's no way to be entirely sure.
One person mentioned that they literally have to examine the linguistic contents of their internal monologue in order to know what they're feeling, which is quite bizarre to me, and not how I experience things.
The MBTI jargon for this way of thinking is called "introverted intuition". I was always under the impression that this is just how "thought" worked in general, although recently I've discovered reasons to doubt that this experience of thought is as universal as I had originally anticipated. Although I wouldn't describe my experience quite as intensely as yours (maybe you just have a stronger "CPU" than me haha), I do feel that my thoughts exist in non-linguistic form prior to being given linguistic expression (the "thought" comes first, abstractly, and then I have to start "writing out" as a sentence what the thought actually means and what implications can be drawn from it, assuming I want to communicate it).
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