[HN Gopher] Inner Speech
___________________________________________________________________
Inner Speech
Author : keiferski
Score : 75 points
Date : 2024-01-12 07:55 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (plato.stanford.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (plato.stanford.edu)
| politelemon wrote:
| It's a bit odd reading this because I learned just a few months
| ago, right here, that I am aphantastic (no mental imagery).
| Shortly after that, while discussing with some coworkers, I also
| learned I am anauralic (no inner voice). It appears they do
| sometimes go together:
|
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8551557/
|
| I think for those of us who don't have an inner voice, section
| "3.2 The Semantic Content View" seems to be a somewhat match, but
| it also says
|
| > Gauker's style of pure semantic content view is not widely
| endorsed. This may be because it clashes with the widespread view
| that inner speech has a sensory character similar to that of
| hearing speech.
|
| So I wonder if the people that wrote this article are unable to
| fathom that people without an inner voice exist?
| cl3misch wrote:
| > So I wonder if the people that wrote this article are unable
| to fathom that people without an inner voice exist?
|
| I asked myself the same. There was a famous Reddit thread a
| couple years ago from a person who recently learned they did
| not have an inner voice, which made myself realize I also don't
| have one. I don't have the link saved and there seem to be a
| couple of such posts, but this one was pretty impactful in my
| bubble.
| xwolfi wrote:
| But then, by which mean did you "ask yourself the same" ? Or
| is it that you cannot imagine a conversation ?
| cl3misch wrote:
| I don't have an inner voice myself. So I asked myself
| whether the authors of the Plato post can't imagine that.
| drupe wrote:
| But what is the experience of "asking yourself something"
| like for you if you don't literally hear a question being
| asked in your head?
| Epholys wrote:
| I don't have an inner voice, it's just completely
| abstract thoughts. I "feel" the interrogation about a
| subject, just without words.
| thinkingemote wrote:
| So if I ask you to form an image of a song, (or recall it
| in your mind): the "happy birthday" song. How vivid or
| clear is it? Do you have no clarity, some, or lots? is it
| vivid as the actual sound as if you were hearing it in
| real life? Do you notice the tune as well as the words?
|
| Now change this image of happy birthday so that it's now
| a childrens choir singing it. Now change it so its by a
| bunch of cynical unix grey beards singing it in a
| convention.
|
| How easy was it to change this image? Did changing it
| affect the clarity?
| Epholys wrote:
| Wow, these questions are really interesting, I've never
| thought about it!
|
| For my favorite songs, I can recall it perfectly... But I
| don't hear it at all as if I was hearing it in real life.
| In fact, I don't know how to describe how vivid it is.
| Maybe I don't hear it at all? But I can sing these songs
| (out loud) without a problem.
|
| However, I seem to be incapable of changing some elements
| about it. I can't seem to be able to make it faster,
| slower, change the singer, or the instruments. But, when
| I sing it out loud, I can of course modify it.
|
| For "Happy birthday" (well, in my native language), it's
| really weird. Because I don't have a specific song in
| mind, I can follow the words, the tune, but I don't
| "feel" the voice of a specific singer. And I'm incapable
| to change this recall to different voices, like children
| or grown men. But if I listen to a version sung by these
| people, I can recall it after (until I forget).
|
| Thanks again for these questions, I was aware of my lack
| of inner voice, my difficulties of a "inner sight"
| (that's a whole other can of worms), but I never applied
| this interrogations to a "inner hearing".
| thinkingemote wrote:
| I got and adapted the questions from a survey about these
| issues but I've been trying to get the question right as
| we tend to use language which presupposes things.
|
| I like this one as it asks to form an image and asks
| about clarity. The image is about hearing. So it crosses
| both parts.
|
| Another example would be to form an image of a
| telemarketer on the telephone. Change the accent.
| Introduce line distortion.
|
| For me it's in the middle. Happy birthday is clear to
| visualise and I can follow the tune. it's not very vivid
| but it's like I'm singing to myself with my mouth shut. I
| don't have a mental "visual" image of the song by
| default. When changing it the imagery appears a bit more
| but the focus is on the sound. I can easily change it to
| children's voices, the unix greybeards is more difficult
| as it requires me working out what they would sound like
| including spatial echoes from the auditorium. I find the
| resulting image (which is clearer than the children) is
| amusing.
| Epholys wrote:
| Ha, interesting! I don't have the control you have on my
| inner hearing. For a song I love, I can like sing along
| with my mouth shut, not only the voices, but also the
| instruments. Strangely, it's hard to have the complete
| song at the same time (voice + instruments), but I
| suspect it's more of a skill issue, as I seem to be able
| to do it faintly.
|
| I'm not envious of the people who have an inescapable
| inner voice. I think it would hinder my thoughts, the
| speed of it, and the ability to think abstractly. It's
| not totally baseless, because I can force myself to have
| an inner voice, but it's a conscious effort. Sometimes
| useful if I need to clarify my thoughts. On the same
| note, not having a inner voice makes it really difficult
| sometimes to put my emotions and thoughts into words.
|
| But I'm really jealous about anyone that can clearly
| conjure images, "videos", and sounds in their mind, I
| feel like I have a big disadvantage if I want to learn to
| draw, 3D model, or play an instrument.
| HKH2 wrote:
| You're referring to thinking proactively. Is your inner
| narrative proactive or reactive?
| HKH2 wrote:
| In Chinese, if you just put 'big' and 'small' together,
| you get 'size', and if you just put 'big' and 'not big'
| together, it means 'Is it big?'. By the same token,
| juxtaposed memories are questions or suggestions. I think
| it's the logic before logic.
| bondarchuk wrote:
| That's a really interesting tidbit about Chinese. Can't
| think of anything similar in any language I know, though.
| Does remind me of those primitive languages where the
| word for "forest" is just the word for "tree" repeated
| two or three times.
| HKH2 wrote:
| In English, we have 'oxymoron', and 'chiaroscuro' from
| Italian, but Chinese has a lot of words with contrasts,
| the yin and yang etc.
| yetihehe wrote:
| I have inner voice, it's very hard for me to comprehend
| how can you think, but it's possible. How I understand
| it: you just write what you think, without rehearsing it
| before inside your mind. We all do it to some extent when
| writing, it's not like I actually need to replay
| everything before I write.
|
| "I asked myself" by a person who has no inner voice
| sounds like a blind person saying "I see..." when he
| understands something. It's just a figure of speech, not
| used in some languages (like polish, we say "I see" ONLY
| when we actually see something).
| cl3misch wrote:
| This may be surprising, but I indeed can "ask myself"
| (aka. think about) things, without explicitely
| verbalizing the question in my head. "Thinking" is more
| abstract, but it can be faster that way.
| yetihehe wrote:
| I also don't always explicitly verbalize things. The
| whole problem seems to be more of disagreement about a
| definition of inner voice and what it means for different
| people.
| cl3misch wrote:
| Maybe not the _whole_ problem, but yeah, I also wonder
| about what people mean with "inner voice" respectively.
|
| I do think though that I verbalize _less_ than other
| (maybe most) people.
| bhaak wrote:
| Thinking doesn't need words. Thinking for me is a process
| of ideas and concepts coming from different directions,
| colliding, merging, splitting, transforming, and then
| going into other directions to interact with other
| thoughts.
|
| The translation between these concepts to words or
| sentences from my mouth or my fingers is effortless by
| the way. Which I myself find interesting. I think it
| should take some effort but it doesn't.
|
| If you wonder how one can think without an inner voice
| then I wonder can you even think without your inner
| voice? And can your inner voice be faster than your vocal
| voice and if not, doesn't that slow down your thought
| process?
| teamonkey wrote:
| This is exactly how I would describe it, as someone
| without much of an inner eye or an inner voice.
|
| I _can_ have an inner voice. I use it to practice how
| things sound in my head, or if I want to be very specific
| about wording, or when trying to parse some complex text,
| or to work out a sum. That's how I know that most of the
| time I don't use an inner voice to think.
|
| Most of the time it's like I have thoughts without words,
| and turning it into words must be handled by some
| unconscious part of my brain, because it's automatic and
| silent.
| stavros wrote:
| Same here, and the thought itself is basically instant,
| so why go through the long process of narrating the
| thought to myself? I just have the next one.
| LesZedCB wrote:
| > doesn't that slow down your thought process?
|
| probably yes.
|
| also, when being asked questions I rehearse and rephrase
| the answer in my head often stumbling or pausing
| uncomfortably long to actually get it out for fear of it
| sounding weird or wrong or dumb.
| bondarchuk wrote:
| It's an interesting question, since learning that some
| people have visualization and internal monologue I've
| been paying attention to how writers/philosophers
| describe thought processes and based on that whether they
| are visualizers (and monologue-havers) or not, and
| whether they are aware that the other thing is also
| possible. One really gets the sense that a lot of
| writers/philosophers[1] are visualizers and monologue-
| havers and are completely unaware of the other
| possibilities. An exception was Musil (The Man without
| Qualities) who goes quite deep into the thought processes
| of his characters and describes both varieties. Also
| interesting to read in this respect is Julian Jaynes, who
| purports (quite controversially) to trace a development
| from a primitive type of mentality that obeyed something
| like command hallucinations to the current type of
| mentality that can think freely. But (even though his
| theory seemed deeply involved with internal monologue) I
| couldn't really get a grip on what he actually thinks of
| how people think these days.
|
| [1] it does seem that it is much more common among
| "humanities-type" people and the general population, and
| more common to have no visualization among "exact
| sciences-type" people. This was also the observation of
| Galton https://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Galton/imagery.htm
| (ctrl-f "men of science")
| Armisael16 wrote:
| I imagine it's just an ingrained use of language picked up
| from other people - no thought behind it, like an atheist
| who says 'Christ' as an expletive.
| vidarh wrote:
| It goes beyond that, I think, in that many of us have
| gone most of our lives believing others used this
| language metaphorically, and assigning a meaning to these
| words.
|
| I was about 45 by the point I realized most people to
| varying degrees actually meant that they saw things when
| imagining them.
|
| And so to me it's not that there no thought behind it,
| because I do _something_ when I "imagine" something,
| just not the same thing. The word means something
| different to me, and most of the time you wouldn't notice
| even when it's staring you in the face.
|
| E.g."I imagined her face" has a meaning to me even though
| I can't literally see a face when imagining it, but I can
| recall qualities and emotions and sensations of it anyway
| and to me those things add up to the meaning of that
| word, because nobody ever thought to assume it needed
| explaining that it was literal.
|
| Opening that line of inquiry quickly makes it apparent
| that we assume a whole lot about how similar our inner
| lives are that just doesn't consistently hold up, but
| that we don't challenge without digging into precisely
| how people use various words.
| vidarh wrote:
| I have aphantasia, but I still say I "imagine" things (in
| the visual sense; I find it funny that this notion of
| visualising things in our mind is so ingrained that
| "imagine" has broadened to refer to the other senses)
| because I still clearly recall or imagine imagery in a way
| that means I can mentally operate on them.
|
| E.g. I can draw things I imagine, or describe them, or
| "mentally navigate" spaces I remember with ease.
|
| I also see images in my _dreams_ , which seems to be pretty
| normal for people with aphantasia, so clearly a lot of us
| are not _unable_ to see things in our mind, but something
| is - usually - preventing it from happening while we 're
| away. Usually rather than always because some people see
| brief flashes, and I sometimes think I might but I'm not
| sure (it's surprisingly hard to determine). I've also had
| exactly one experience that _seems_ to have been in a
| waking state where I saw clear imagery. I say seems,
| because while I don 't think I fell asleep, I was
| meditating, and while I was aware and able to manipulate
| the imagery, it's possible it was lucid dreaming, but it
| was noticeable in particular because the imagery was far
| clearer than when I dream.
| failingslowly wrote:
| You said you have aphantasia, then you listed a number of
| ways in which you can mentally process images, so I
| couldn't really understand what you were missing. Then I
| went and did the aphantasia test, and apparently I have
| hypophantasia, so I guess that explains it.
|
| I wonder if there's a link between engineering skills and
| aphantasia, given the prevalence of the "programmer art"
| meme?
| vidarh wrote:
| > You said you have aphantasia, then you listed a number
| of ways in which you can mentally process images, so I
| couldn't really understand what you were missing. Then I
| went and did the aphantasia test, and apparently I have
| hypophantasia, so I guess that explains it.
|
| This is similar to how I found out - I assumed what I
| experienced _was_ what people meant when they talked
| about visualizing things, and it took a long time before
| I realised that a lot of them meant it very literally
| when they said they could "see" things.
|
| > I wonder if there's a link between engineering skills
| and aphantasia, given the prevalence of the "programmer
| art" meme?
|
| Ed Catmull, ex-president of Pixar, has aphantasia, and he
| found that artists at Pixar where not all that more
| likely to be able to visualize well [1], so the
| "programmer art" bit is far more likely to be down to
| practice and interest (on average, at least). I think
| it's more likely that the better you are in a field, the
| less time you're likely to have to devote to getting good
| in another field. Of course there are always exceptions.
|
| But his sample was hardly representative, and so it's
| hard to tell whether it makes a difference. Maybe it
| does, and people who work at Pixar, including non-art
| staff are just more likely to be sufficiently interested
| in art to overcome extra difficulties.
|
| That said, for my part I was decent at art when I was
| younger, but my drawing style was different when
| "imagining" things than when drawing something I had in
| front of me. But I also suspect I'd commit "programmer
| art" if I tried again now, at least without a lot of
| practice.
|
| [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-47830256
| HKH2 wrote:
| Do you 'randomly' replay memories?
| keiferski wrote:
| Is inner voice the same thing as inner speech? I'm interpreting
| "inner voice" to be a kind of pseudo-personality similar to
| what people mean by conscience, while inner speech is simply
| the mental version of speech.
|
| I can understand someone not having an inner voice, but I can't
| see how writing is possible without inner speech. Otherwise,
| how can you have thoughts prior to writing them down?
|
| Also note that the article is titled inner speech, not inner
| voice.
| ithkuil wrote:
| Luckily the text editor has been invented giving you the
| possibility of endlessly editing your sentence until it makes
| some sense.
|
| Only half joking. I'm always impressed by those ancient
| people who could write long letters by hand in beautiful
| orthography, composing complex texts and make them just flow
| linearly. I'm sure here and there there would be a rewriting
| step involved but that can't have been always the case; there
| was surely practical pressure to get the output right at
| first try.
|
| Perhaps this skill could be trained but perhaps it also
| leverages the ability to tap into your inner voice and inner
| speech
| mmasu wrote:
| i think it's a matter of training/habit. Also, back then
| (educated) people used memory a lot more efficiently; this
| might have played a role too... i.e. compose and edit the
| whole text in your mind before writing it down.
| ithkuil wrote:
| > compose and edit the whole text in your mind before
| writing it down
|
| yeah; doesn't that basically mean you have to have "inner
| speech"?
| JaumeGreen wrote:
| I can have thoughts without inner speech or text. Why?
| Probably it helps that I'm multilingual, I can use several
| languages (3) more or less indistinctively.
|
| So when I have something to talk about I have the idea in my
| head, then I have to translate it to written or oral medium.
| Sometimes it's faulty and I use a different language for
| certain words, because they convey a more nuanced meaning
| that better corresponds to my idea, and I have a hard time
| finding the right word or phrase in the language I need to
| express myself with.
|
| Inside my head I sometimes have inner speech, sometimes I
| just have a vivid imagination, sometimes it's concepts, and
| sometimes it's a mix of it all. For example, my first two
| paragraphs were translation from concepts, while the first
| line of this one came more from inner speech (half in
| Catalan, half in English), and this phrase has started as a
| mix of concept and inner speech.
|
| Not using inner speech as my main medium also means that
| sometimes I find hard to understand puns that derive from
| pronunciation, if they come in the written form. When I read
| I don't imagine the sounds in my head, so I don't "hear" the
| words and the puns are missed.
| boxed wrote:
| > I can understand someone not having an inner voice, but I
| can't see how writing is possible without inner speech.
| Otherwise, how can you have thoughts prior to writing them
| down?
|
| The conscious experience of inner
| voice/speece/eye/nose/whatever is not really saying something
| about how the rest of the brain functions. Almost everything
| anyone does is indeed not projected in inner mind before
| being executed. The subjective experience is a post-hoc
| narrative of what the mind did, not really a part of the
| planning process itself. Think about running in a dense
| forest for example. There's no way to plan with inner mind
| where to direct your eye muscles first and then having
| received the visual input, plan with inner mind where to put
| your feet on the ground to not trip on a rock or root.
| keiferski wrote:
| I'm talking more about "thinking before you speak." As in,
| it seems to me that without some form of inner speech, it
| would be impossible to plan anything before vocalizing it,
| as you'd need to start talking/writing in order to actually
| think.
| vidarh wrote:
| Why do you think that?
| keiferski wrote:
| How could one "think about what they're going to say"
| without some level of prior inner speech or
| conceptualization? It may not be precisely the same as
| spoken speech, but it would still be a kind of speech.
| vidarh wrote:
| Why do you assume conceptualization requires
| verbalization?
| keiferski wrote:
| That's just how I understand the process, from my
| experience.
|
| Can you elaborate why you think it doesn't, instead of
| writing single sentence replies?
| vidarh wrote:
| I don't know whether it does or doesn't, but I just don't
| see any evidence that demonstrates that we do. E.g. how
| do you know from your experience whether the
| verbalization drove the conceptualization or whether it's
| effectively purely narration of non-verbal
| conceptualization? It's not even a given that they happen
| at the same time vs. being a post-rationalization of
| processes happening separately (e.g. we know from split-
| brain experiments that the brain halves are perfectly
| happy to verbalize explanations for decisions they
| demonstrably didn't make)
| vidarh wrote:
| I definitely have both inner speech and inner voice in the
| ways you're using them, but when I write I don't verbalize
| things and then write down what I verbalize.
|
| Consider that you've created an infinite regress problem. One
| might just as well as how inner speech is possible without
| _preceding inner speech_ - clearly it must be possible for
| speech, whether inner, outer, oral or written to be formed
| from a non-verbal antecedent some way or other.
|
| If you accept that, then there's no particular reason to
| think that it must be inherently necessary for writing to
| have a verbal antecedent rather than "hooking right into" the
| same non-verbal antecedent.
| raducu wrote:
| > I am aphantastic
|
| Were you always like this?
|
| I clearly remember as a child/teenager I had exquisite inner
| imagery, but around 17-18 anxiety set in and the imagery slowly
| faded away to the point that today I can only conjure faint
| images for fractions of a second
| vidarh wrote:
| Not the person above, but I believe I've always been like
| this. I can vividly remember (but not see) imagery from
| dreams that I know I see while dreaming, and I think I'd
| remember if I used to do that in my waking state. I've also
| had _one_ incidence of seeing things as an adult, during
| meditation, and never managed to again, so I do have a clear
| idea of what is possible to compare to.
| drcongo wrote:
| Weirdly I'm aphantasic but hyperauralic. What I wouldn't give
| for it to be the other way around.
| noduerme wrote:
| If you're anauralic, what happens when you're reading and you
| hit a foreign word, or a word you don't know? Do you have to
| say it out loud, or can you "hear" the pronunciation in your
| mind by essentially speaking it sublingually? For me, I think
| my "inner voice" really is just sublingual speech wherein I
| don't move my lips, tongue or vocal chords. Although I can also
| "hear" the voices of other people I know if I think about them
| talking. (This would seem to be a requisite skill if you want
| to do impressions of people).
|
| [edit: Maybe "sublingual" isn't the correct term for what I'm
| describing. I remember reading about some MRI experiments where
| they asked people to "talk" without making any sound, and this
| activated the speech parts of the brain as if they were using
| motor function to speak. But I can't recall the term used for
| doing this.]
| prossercj wrote:
| Okay, I'll bite. Pardon my ignorance, but this is a new concept
| to me. If you have no inner voice, how are you able to speak?
| Surely you formed those words in your mind before writing them.
| Is it that you only do so when speaking to others, and never to
| yourself?
| pama wrote:
| To people who have trouble with this concept I suggest the
| analogy to reading without voicing out words yet still
| internalizing the concepts, and often at a much faster rate
| than when vocalizing during reading (which in turn can be
| pleasant for some poetry). It is possible to read multiple
| lines in parallel and the mechanism is similar to sight
| reading piano music when you have two (or occasionally three)
| lines of information that immediately translate to actions in
| your arms, hands, and fingers. In a related sense, sight
| reading music does not involve any inner voice or chatter yet
| a lot of conscious decisions are being made and a lot of hard
| non-verbal thinking goes into optimizing technique. Human
| language is just too inefficient for most high performance
| thinking but it is the best tool we currently have for
| storing and transmitting thoughts.
| riversflow wrote:
| > how are you able to speak?
|
| How are you able to walk? You don't think about every muscle
| contraction.
|
| Speaking, writing, drawing and walking are all about the same
| to me.
|
| (I also have no inner voice and aphantasia)
| jimkleiber wrote:
| I have a lots of questions, as I find it hard for me to
| imagine:
|
| 1) When you read, do you ever say the words in your head or
| is it always more like an automatic recognition of the
| characters without voicing them?
|
| 2) Can you force yourself to have an inner voice, aka
| forcing yourself to say something like "I am thinking to
| myself right now"?
|
| Also, it's ok if you don't want to answer but I'd be
| curious to learn more about your experience.
| eikenberry wrote:
| > Is it that you only do so when speaking to others, and
| never to yourself?
|
| For me, yes... when I'm thinking about words (spoken or
| written) I think in those words but otherwise not.
| candlemas wrote:
| Did thought bubbles in cartoons/comics confuse you?
| neoberg wrote:
| I'm not sure if I have inner voice or not. Do you really "hear" a
| voice? I can imagine concepts as well as construct whole
| sentences in my mind but there is no actual voice that I'm
| hearing. Is this what's called inner voice?
| travisjungroth wrote:
| Yes. This stuff is hard to pin down, but I'd put the most
| common understanding in vaguely Western culture as:
|
| 1. Most people experience something similar to imagining
| themselves talk much of the time.
|
| 2. Most people do not hear voices, as in hearing a voice that
| you could easily mistake as coming into your awareness through
| your ears perceiving physical sound.
|
| Your experience sounds like the "default", for lack of a better
| term.
| neoberg wrote:
| Interesting, thank you. I've found some subreddits while
| trying to undrestand this and it's amazing what some people
| experience and how different it is for everyone.
|
| There is a person on r/hyperphantasia who says that they can
| look at a ruler, take that image and overlay it on something
| else to measure. Wild.
| red1reaper wrote:
| Wait... Isn't that normal? I mean, doing that kind of stuff
| is kind of mentally taxing as it requires quite the amount
| of focus but excluding people with aphantasia and the like,
| isn't it normal just to be able to imagine sensory stimuli
| and overlay it with any of your senses? I mean, the inner
| dialogue is just doing this with auditory stimuli and even
| empathy is just an extension of that, were you overlay your
| perception of the physical or mental pain of other with
| your own to feel what it's like? It also is not that rare
| to remember tastes or smells and feel like you are feeling
| them even if a bit faint. So overlaying stuff in your
| vision is just an application of this with the eyes, i mean
| even if we say that we imagine stuff in our heads, we just
| imagine it positioned in space above our heads were we
| don't see with our normal eyes so they do not overlap and
| is less taxing, but moving it to your field of vision is
| not that rare right? just takes focus to keep it clear
| enough to be useful like a ruler would.
|
| I mean, the whole phrase "imagine everyone else is nude"
| that is given to people that are going to do something with
| a public to reduce their awkwardness is based on this, you
| overlay your imagination of everyone nude with your vision.
| neoberg wrote:
| I don't know what's normal anymore but most of your
| examples are not normal for me :D
|
| > I mean, the whole phrase "imagine everyone else is
| nude" that is given to people that are going to do
| something with a public to reduce their awkwardness is
| based on this, you overlay your imagination of everyone
| nude with your vision.
|
| Do you imagine this visually? Like, do you mentally see
| them nude? I just imagine the idea of it without any
| visuals accompanying.
| red1reaper wrote:
| Yep, I mean, is a bit tricky, like an optical illusion
| that requires you to focus in the center, but if i focus
| enough, I can, imagining a whole person with all their
| details and overlaying it with my POV is quite hard and
| usually requires way too much focus, but just overlaying
| the image of a person over the same person in front of
| you is easy, specially if you are just changing the body
| and hands and face are already visible, thus not needing
| change. Is a bit weird to explain, is not like an
| allucination in the sense that it literally replaces your
| normal vision, is like overlaying another vision on top
| of your vision, it requires focus and you can tell the
| imaginary overlay is distinct from your actual visual
| stimuli but like with some optical illusions you can
| force your brain to just accept it and you see people
| nude, even if the nude models are not very detailed. The
| easiest stuff to overlay are ruler thingies tho, for
| example to extime distance you imagine a line similar to
| the letter "I" with a base on top and at the bottom of
| your reference and then you can copy paste a bunch of
| times and count them it to measure stuff roughly. That is
| the most common day to day use for overlay imagination I
| use, the imagining people nude is not exactly a everyday
| stuff. When I was a kiddo I used to use this to play with
| things that are not toys as if they were, for example I
| could pick up a 2L bottle, overlay the image of a rocket
| and play with it, same with a lot of other stuff that had
| somewhat similar shapes to things interesting for a kid,
| I still can do it, sometimes do in the bathroom while
| taking a very long shit.
|
| For me this is normal and I tough most people were like
| that, like... the phrase about imagining people being
| nude is there for a reason... and kids do play with
| random stuff as if they were other things, people look at
| stuff and use it as a reference to visually measure stuff
| even if it is rough.
|
| I mean, there is not that much difference between
| imagining inside the black void and outside, you are just
| moving it, the only thing is that outside it is fighting
| with your actual visual stimuly for attention so it
| requires a bit of extra focus or to anchor it to
| something similar, you know the visual illusion were
| there are pink spots but when you look at the center a
| green spot appear and eats all the pink spots until it is
| blank but the moment you ever so slightly unfocus from
| the center the pink appear again, it feels like that, the
| illusion is named "Lilac chaser" for reference, it feels
| kinda like that in the sense that if you lose focus, the
| effect disappears but if you focus yo can keep it?
|
| IDK, as I said, I thought this was normal, so it is quite
| hard to explain? is not like imagining stuff in the black
| void, there one can easy mount a movie if they want, a
| crappy movie usually, but its possible, outside not so
| much, but it is still possible to imagine stuff there,
| just harder.
| justanotherjoe wrote:
| i mean, it's not that amazing when you think about it. If i
| have a ruler laying on the table and a computer screen on
| that same table, yeah, it's not hard to measure the width
| of the screen without moving the ruler.
| neoberg wrote:
| The way they described it was more akin to mentally
| "grabbing" it. Like they would be able to place imaginary
| things they grabbed from somewhere else in a real
| physical space accurately.
| sparks1970 wrote:
| Same here.
|
| This video was interesting to me:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNQyubd9ARc&t=60s in it you are
| asked to shout "I like crickets" <In your mind> and then to
| whisper "I like crickets" again, in your mind and not out loud.
|
| The presenter then claims, "The volume is the same because you
| can't change the volume of the voice in your head, only the
| tone and pitch."
|
| My experience of trying this is that I can produce the phrase
| "I like crickets" in my mind but I have no conception of what
| it means to "shout" or "whisper" this in my mind and the idea
| that there is tone or pitch to the representation is
| meaningless to me.
|
| I can think in words so that I can prepare to write something
| (like this) but there is no audio. I'd say it's more like a
| stream of words on a screen except that there is no screen, it
| feels more like a buffer. The experience is the same as reading
| to me, no audio, just a stream of words.
|
| My partner says she hears her own voice in her head and it's
| quite critical, prompting her to action. I feel motivation to
| do things but there is no voice.
|
| Can someone report on their experience with the crickets
| experiment above, do you hear a voice, can you change its
| volume or tone?
| scruple wrote:
| I can't shout or whisper in my inner voice. Wild. It'd never
| occurred to me to even try. But I absolutely have an inner
| voice. In fact, it's very noisy and sometimes I wish it would
| shut the fuck up. It's also oftentimes critical and forces me
| to action.
|
| I also have aphantasia, so it's not words on a screen, it's
| literally me talking to myself in an internal dialogue.
| mandmandam wrote:
| I can change volume and tone.
|
| There's something quite arrogant about groundless
| declarations of other's mental limitations. The other example
| that comes to mind is the notion that people only dream in
| black and white - so daft.
| jcrites wrote:
| I do think it is interesting to explore, compare, and
| contrast the operating modes and limitations of our minds.
|
| Like you, I can also vary volume and tone of an imagined
| voice. I can make it arbitrarily loud, but there does seem
| to be a limit on how quiet I can make it, unless I'm
| imagining hearing a voice from elsewhere.
|
| I don't think I dream in color, though, but I wouldn't call
| it black and white either. It's more like I'm dreaming of
| objects in an abstract space where color isn't relevant. I
| have memories of my dreams from time to time, and those
| memories aren't of a scene with color in them. I absolutely
| dream of conversations, and so perhaps I dream with audio,
| but I'm not exactly dreaming visually. I'm dreaming of
| _circumstances_. I can totally believe that other people
| might dream in color though.
| vidarh wrote:
| I think to some it's easy to assume because how you think
| feels so natural that it's hard to imagine how it could be
| different, and so much easier to assume it's just
| misunderstandings.
| jcrites wrote:
| > The presenter then claims, "The volume is the same because
| you can't change the volume of the voice in your head, only
| the tone and pitch."
|
| Very interesting, and not at all true for me. I can imagine
| shouting "I like crickets" with a near ear-splitting level of
| volume, tantamount to the force of a storm with a shockwave.
| Imagine an anime scene where a character is radiating power,
| arms raised into the air, like Saurman calling a storm down
| upon a mountain in LOTR. When I imagine this substantial
| level of volume, my muscles want to start to tense, like my
| body wants to brace itself for an impact.
|
| I can also imagine whispering the same thing. It _is_
| actually difficult to reduce the volume of the whisper down
| as low as I 'd like it to go (as low as I could hear), but
| it's substantially lower "volume" than the shout.
|
| I can get the volume even lower if I imagine _someone else_ ,
| or a voice from somewhere else, whispering it.
|
| > I can think in words so that I can prepare to write
| something (like this) but there is no audio.
|
| I can do all of these. I can think as a sequence of abstract
| thoughts, with no audio component (this is most natural); I
| can think as a sequence of words, which are optionally
| rendered as audio (I would do this if sounding out an
| unfamiliar word), and I can render audio in the mind as a
| particular voice (i.e. my voice or someone else's, similar to
| a deepfake). I could imagine Barack Obama speaking any
| arbitrary words in his particular style of dictation. "My
| fellow Americans..."
|
| My most common kinds of "inner voice", though, are not
| speaking actual words, but ideas. They are often critical, or
| perhaps playing devil's advocate in some way. In fact,
| thinking using actual words is uncommon for me, unless I
| specifically need language in some way, so the "inner
| voice(s)" appear as a kind of alternative narrative to
| whatever my primary thought process is.
| justanotherjoe wrote:
| I'm pretty sure I have inner voice since i'm often occupied by
| it. But no, I won't mistake it for an actual sound. The way i
| take it is that it's very much like an LLM generated text. The
| mind just 'saying stuffs' for the sake of saying them, without
| much goal directed purpose. I have it but it's not really
| useful. Like an LLM, it can appear useful but not really. It's
| when I apply deliberateness to it that it becomes useful. But
| if i'm deliberate, i suppose that's when it would be just like
| how you do it.
| netcan wrote:
| I think "hearing" the voice is the confusing part, or only.
|
| Hard to know if it's a difference in the phenomenon itself or
| in how people characterize and perceive it.
|
| To me the question is about thinking conversationally. Internal
| dialogue. Whether or not that dialogue is perceived as sound is
| perhaps interesting, it's not hard to imagine it working
| differently. Written language exists. Sign language. Non-
| auditory language is not a stretch.
|
| What _is_ hard to conceive of is thought, especially intricate
| reasoning, without internal dialogue.
|
| Hard to conceive, but not hard to _believe_. We all do lots of
| non-dialogue thinking. The evidence of this is everywhere. We
| come to conclusions, find answers to questions without
| "verbal" reasoning all the time.
|
| Say you've been building software. You're considering changing
| something. As soon as its suggested, you realize a whole list
| of implications. User implications. Server implications.
| Testing process X will have Y issue. Advisor A will probably
| advise B. You didn't verbally reason your way to all these
| conclusions... yet they exist.
|
| That said... all this stuff is kinda "subconscious." You don't
| know where these reasoned conclusions came from. It feels like
| a "from the muse" thing.
|
| If I am consciously trying to reason... I'm most (only?)
| conscious of my verbal reasoning.
| sparks1970 wrote:
| What do you mean by "internal dialogue" here?
|
| To me a dialog would mean some back-and-forth, some
| difference of opinion or two individuals sharing ideas that
| one side doesn't have.
|
| Does your inner voice have autonomy, does it want things
| separate from what "you" want? Is it in any way "other" from
| you?
|
| Apologies if these seem like dumb questions. I have never
| heard a voice in my head so it's a bit like a monochromatic
| person discovering people see in color, it just seems very
| strange.
| red1reaper wrote:
| Im not netcan, but in my case... I am the inner voice, the
| inner voice is essentially the me in me, it is myself, the
| most basic and self, mind you, the conversation while 99%
| verbal can be non verbal, I can talk to myself in images
| and even concepts and have a dialogue/debate with that, its
| just kind of weird?
|
| But the inner voice, at least from my POV is essentially
| the self, if you want to experience, just go to a bathroom
| with a mirror and try to debate with your reflection, it is
| essentially the same thing, ofc to debate with yourself you
| have to be able to debate points you do not believe in,
| like a lawyer or a politic, there is only you only a single
| opinion, but you are putting your opinion to the test, so
| you try to defend and try to attack your opinion and your
| acts, is like playing devil's advocate against your own
| opinions while you defend them, there is not two people or
| two wills is like talking to the mirror, is only you. It
| can also be used to essentially praise yourself if you do
| something good, or console yourself if you are sad or
| insult yourself drill sargent style to get that extra
| adrenaline to run the extra meter to not lose the train,
| you can also sign to yourself with that, which is horrible,
| s you will distill any song to its most catchy part and
| repeat it ad infinitum every moment like a very crappy
| self-sountrack.
|
| Inner dialogue ofc can also be used for the obvious...
| simulate conversations with others if you know them well
| enough to have counterarguments against them available, is
| like thinking a comeback later but instead of later, before
| and instead of one, a lot of them, 99% never used.
|
| Another use is that you can use your inner voice to repeat
| a thing constantly to nor forget it short term, for example
| holding into a 4 digit code that you can only read for 1
| second and you have to remember a minute later, you can
| just read it the first second in your head "one two there
| seven" and just keep repeating it over and over in your
| head "one two there seven,one two there seven,one two there
| seven,one two there seven,one two there seven" until you
| need it, that way you can store a bit of info very short
| term without memorizing anything, I remember doing exactly
| this with a multiplication table math test when i was a
| kiddo, I was not able to memorize the multiplications with
| 7, so 2 minutes before the test i just started chanting the
| results of 2 _7 up to 2_ 9 and when i received the test i
| just wrote that on the side(we were allowed to write stuff
| on the side) and thus i used my inner voice to sneak a
| cheat sheet into the test, I did similar stuff all trough
| my school years.
| vidarh wrote:
| You will often find authors talking about characters
| "telling them" what they do, and while some means that
| metaphorically, if you dig into it you'll find a lot of
| people who mean it literally. Not (usually) in the sense
| that they believe this is some separate entity, but that
| they do often have the characters story play out with
| varying fidelity of both visual and aural presence in their
| mind.
|
| A surprising number of people also have e.g. multiple
| voices speaking in their minds (again, the distinction
| between mental illnesses causing people to have intrusive
| voices they believe to be other entities vs "just" seeing
| them as thoughts/imagination playing out)
| taopai wrote:
| Are you unable to imagine any sound? Even a church bell or a
| drum rolling?
| sparks1970 wrote:
| I can imagine these sounds but they don't have any audio
| texture - no volume, no tone. At the same time, if I imagine
| a large bell and a small bell ringing then there is a
| difference but its like reading "BONG!" and "ting" (which for
| me also has no audio).
|
| Can you sing in your mind? I can represent the words and I
| can recall the tune so I can represent the words at the
| correct pace to match the tune but there is no audio so it's
| a bit like subtitles.
| neoberg wrote:
| I can imagine them conceptually but not the actual sounds
| themselves. Same for a song; I can't "hear" a song in my mind
| but I can imagine it. Hard to explain.
| vidarh wrote:
| I don't believe I hear a voice, but some argue they do, up to
| and including hearing different voices, as well as hearing
| music with the correct instruments (I can "hear music", but
| it's always as if I'm singing or humming it).
|
| For my part, my "inner voice" feels to me like my real voice,
| but I have the sensation of "almost vocalizing" it, but cutting
| it off before producing any sound - whether in or out of my
| head.
|
| So I recognize it as "me", but can't say there is an actual
| sensation of _hearing_ the sound.
| asimovfan wrote:
| Sometimes called manas in buddhism. The discursive mind. Its
| incredible to me in the middle of all this mental unease nobody
| is talking about this stuff.
| causi wrote:
| After keeping track for a while, my conclusion as regards my
| inner voice is that it's an artifact of "paying too much
| attention" to what's going on in my mind. If I'm in a flow state
| I have no inner voice. If I'm overly bored, or nervous, or have
| some other reason to be actively and _consciously_ paying
| attention to the decisions I 'm making, I have a very clear inner
| voice. It's an artifact of recasting subconscious thought into
| conscious terms.
| 5- wrote:
| some good related discussion (2020, 886 comments):
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22193451
| feverzsj wrote:
| > Primarily though, most completely deaf people think in sign
| language. Similar to how an "inner voice" of a hearing person is
| experienced in one's own voice, a completely deaf person sees or,
| more aptly, feels themselves signing in their head as they "talk"
| in their heads.
|
| The question is: is inner voice just some sort of echo or a
| necessary part of thought.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| I became interested in this topic after related discussions here
| in HN and listening to Sam Harris talking about meditation.
|
| Like learning to meditate, it's possible to learn to be anauralic
| _at will_.
|
| I started practicing while going on long walks, trying to think
| about the things I was seeing without mentally discussing it with
| my inner voice.
|
| At first it was extremely difficult, but I now do it sometimes
| without even trying.
|
| Speaking of "alternate modalities of thought", a while ago I made
| a comment here on HN that I've had "dreams in C++".
|
| As in, I wasn't thinking about programming in English, the
| language of my thoughts _were_ C++!
|
| It was one of the freakiest things that had ever happened to me.
|
| I liken it to how if you play a game like Tetris too much, you
| start "seeing" blocks moving even if you stop playing and go
| outside.
| taopai wrote:
| Have you tried to change the tone in your inner voice?
|
| Like talking more energetically and happy or using your favorite
| voice actor? It's pretty awesome.
|
| If you have good imaginary you can combine it with epic music and
| a hall full of people cheering.
|
| I found it in this small free epub, just 5 pages. I can't find it
| right now, but here it is in html.
|
| https://www.bookfrom.net/jason-fladlien/589457-how_to_elimin...
| shunyaekam wrote:
| What is the difference in inner dialogue in happy vs unhappy
| people?
|
| I guess the inner voice is what one strives to just observe and
| let be while meditating. After a good meditation session I feel
| less mentally tense (eg not clinging on to superficially
| important todo items).
|
| Seems like inner voice is related to mental state in a major way.
| I have pretty severe adhd and am unmedicated so my inner voice is
| more like an old radio inbetween stations (= chaotic).
| bsenftner wrote:
| Unhappy people with an inner voice have a grumpy crank
| personality as their inner voice. Taming and neutralizing that
| grumpy crank is the entire point of the Cognitive Behavioral
| Therapy school of Psychology. They have a process called an
| Inner Dialogue Audit where a list of 10-20 simple questions are
| given, and you ask yourself these questions. If you answer
| "yes" to any of them, then your inner voice has a bias, is
| effectively lying to you about your moment to moment
| observations and thoughts. And once this bias is identified, it
| evaporates because deception known no longer deceives.
| _tom_ wrote:
| I do either, depending on the situation. For me, verbalizing
| things, internally, is like writing things down - it allows for
| more organization and review. (Consider
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging)
|
| It's clear to me that the main ideas come non-verbally first, and
| then I translate into words.
| vidarh wrote:
| I will have conversations with myself, but it's clear thoughts
| also form without verbal translation.
|
| Interestingly another distinction when it comes to inner life
| is whether people have a monologue or multiple voices. I only
| have a rather incessant monologue of myself narrating and
| practicing things to say or going over multiple sides of an
| argument in my own voice. It only ever stops when I sleep or
| meditate.
| omani wrote:
| to my fellow humans:
|
| if you read a comment saying it has no inner voice, remember...
|
| GPT is active on HN, too. ;)
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