> But as this is the first ever investigation into the question, and it used an unconventional methodology, it's fair to say the results are far from conclusive.
As I understand it (and I could be wrong) "hearing a voice" pretty much means you hear a voice as if someone was speaking but there's noone there. The paper talked about claimed that 80% of people "hear a voice" when they read.
I find that surprising, and I'd want to know what exactly is meant by "inner reading voices" - are these voices that people hear, or are they something else?
> Why hasn't this topic been studied before? Vilhauer's study hints at an answer because she found that many people assumed that their inner experiences when reading were shared by everyone. This worked both ways, so some of the people who had an inner reading voice were convinced of its normality: "We all hear our voices in our heads at times – even those of others we know – especially while reading," said one Yahoo contributor. Yet others who claimed to have no inner voice felt they were the normal ones. For example, in response to a question posted on the site about whether anyone else hears an inner voice while reading, one responder said "Nooo. You should get that checked out" and another wrote, in capitals: "NO, I'M NOT A FREAK".
The other reason is that until relatively recently everyone freaked the fuck out if you said you heard voices, and hearing voices was a sign of serious severe mental illness. We now know that's probably not true.
I hear a voice in my head both when I read and when I write. AFAIK it's such a common experience that everyone (myself included) just assumed everyone else did... Until they discovered someone who didn't share that experience.
For me, when I say I "hear a voice" when I read, I mean that it's the same 'mental voice' as when I'm thinking, stream-of-consciousness stuff. It's definitely not like hearing an out-in-the-world audio thing, but reading to me is me saying the words in my head.
> I find that surprising, and I'd want to know what exactly is meant by "inner reading voices" - are these voices that people hear, or are they something else?
I do this sometimes to shut out distractions. For me it's like remembering someone saying what you're reading.
I don't understand how it can be "the first ever investigation into the question" when the number one tip of basically every speed reading technique ever is to suppress that inner voice…
Or is there a separate notion of hearing a voice over and apart from subvocalizing? (If I had to try to think about them as different concepts, I'd probably say that I never subvocalize, and usually don't hear a voice when reading quickly, but perhaps do hear a voice when reading slowly or focusing on individual words.)
As your Wikipedia link discusses, the "internal voice" is a component of subvocalization, but subvocalization also includes other things that happen at the same time (involuntary muscle movements.)
> If I had to try to think about them as different concepts, I'd probably say that I never subvocalize, and usually don't hear a voice when reading quickly, but perhaps do hear a voice when reading slowly or focusing on individual words.
Since the involuntary muscle movements that are the other part of subvocalization are generally undetectable to the person doing the reading, what is your basis for saying that you never subvocalize, even though you do hear a voice when reading slowly?
> Since the involuntary muscle movements that are the other part of subvocalization are generally undetectable to the person doing the reading, what is your basis for saying that you never subvocalize, even though you do hear a voice when reading slowly?
I guess that's a totally unsubstantiated intuition. Can I test it effectively with an EMG?
I had this problem with Shakespeare, as well. No internal voice. He's very hard to read unless spoken aloud, probably because it lets you experiment with intonation and emphasis.
That's what I heard about JRR Tolkien's Silmarillion too. I tried reading it when I was younger, and when I tend to drop sound conversion when I read. It seemed impenetrable. Years later, when someone told me it was meant to be heard, not to be read, I gave that a try, reading it aloud in my head. It was a much different experience. Reading Silmarillion felt like reading a magical book of creation, where the speaking of the words themselves create the world.
I agree. Particularly with the Sonnets where, once you get the sense of the expected rhythm of the words, and try to add how they would sound like spoken, they are much more enjoyable.
The only experience I can think of that is similar would be sight-reading music before trying to play it.
Perhaps we only perceive a "voice" when someone makes us direct our conscious mind towards analyzing, describing, or remembering the reading experience.
I mean, consider reflex actions in response to pain: Plenty of people will (quite honestly) tell you that "it hurt, so I pulled my hand back" but the lower-level neurological evidence suggests we're fooling ourselves.
Not really. I do when writing/typing, but not when reading. I don't even really subvocalize, that I've ever been able to tell - I read too quickly to transform the words into sounds.
I have a slightly above average reading speed (with average to above-average retention), mostly because I don't spend as time converting the words to sounds.
Of course, this does mean that I don't always recognize words when said aloud that I've only seen in text before. Less of an issue as I grow older, but hearing some words vocalized was an interesting experience the first time (such as aileron or Qeynos (pronounced as kē-nōs, for those who never played Everquest))
Interesting, I think I always subvocalise when reading and found it hard not to when I just tried. I just asked my wife and she says she never hears a voice or even music in her head like that and was a bit shocked when I said I could.
When I was a teenager I took elocution lessons, read poetry and acted in plays. I would read through a piece imagining where I would pause, where to put emphasis, etc. So I know I subvocalised then, but don't know if I did before or if that's when I learned to do it.
I know it takes me much longer to read a book than my brother or father or many of my friends. I can read a book once and remember small details from the story they have completely forgotten and sometimes they've read a book multiple times when I have far better recollection of it from a single much slower reading. I'm wondering if subvocalisation plays a part in that.
Edit: another factor is that I remember words from their sound, not their spelling, so have always had difficulty with spelling. I can't visualise the word, and often need to actualy write a word out before I can figure out how to spell it. Just spelling out words letter by letter vocally is very hard for me.
I've have experience with both reading with sound and not reading with sound. When I drop the sound when I read, it stays a stream of concepts, and I can read fast. On the other hand, it also drops pretty much all of the emotional nuances. I don't read much poetry, but I don't think it makes much sense to read it without a voice. I don't think I have tried typing without voicing things out, except maybe when I'm writing code.
I don't read without vocalizing in my head much anymore. I found that without hearing that, my EQ in relation to communicating with a person drops. On the other hand, if I'm visualizing some systems interactions in my head, it's not going to be verbalized. Until maybe, I try to explain it to someone.
Funny that you bring up spelling. I have absolutely no subvocalisation when reading and have always been an impeccable speller. When I read, I have trouble with fiction because I can't imagine pauses, emphasis, or any other non-textual cues in dialogue. I read a lot of non-fiction.
> I have absolutely no subvocalisation when reading and have always been an impeccable speller.
I'm also an impeccable speller and I attribute that to my brain somehow leapfrogging past sounding out words to recognizing them by shape. Not certain if I subvocalize, but I do have an internal reader.
Interesting. I do subvocalize but my memory is terrible. The best way I can describe it is that I have a inaccurate lookup table so I can kind of remember things but recalling specific things is hard particularly when I need the information. I don't usually have issues with spelling though.
So I end up using a ton of Google and obsessively taking notes/making lists. Quip has been a lifesaver.
I like Quip because it's multi platform shared note taking. I use it to generate todos (different notes for different subjects), lists and scratch for developing ideas/documents.
For example, I've been working on a security primer for internal consumption. The output will get turned into a presentation eventually. Quip makes it easy to invite a colleague to collaborate.
I also subvocalize what I read which slows me down, but also helps me remember, I think. My eyes can read faster but if they get ahead of the sound, I will get tripped up and have to backtrack. I also subvocalize my thoughts as one-way discussions in my head with people I know. But that made me remember/realize that I sometimes imagine someone I know reading what I am reading, which I think incorporates even more brain circuits in order to memorize it, although that's not why I do that. I don't choose to do any of those things; it's involuntary. I also enjoy rewatching movies with people who haven't seen it. I put myself in their position in my head and experience it from (what I think is) their perspective.
I listen to podcasts at 2.7x speed. There is a funny jump, from the speed where you still vocalize to something faster. It feels like it's pumping it directly in to your brain :)
2.7 is the speed I can jump in any time, if I speed up incrementally I can easily go to 3.2 or something.
(i use windows media player for the speed up, best real-time sound stretching I found)
That's interesting that speeding up your podcast would change your reading speed.
It wasn't like that for me. I used to speed up the voice speed in my head when reading and occasionally drop them all together (so it's a stream of concepts, not voice). Then one day, I noticed that I would drop a lot of emotional nuances when I do, or misread/misinterpret emails and messages from other people. I started to try to slow things down, to even read it in the voice of the person sending the message (assuming I know them well enough to have heard their voice). My reading speed had dropped but it feels like I get a lot more out of what I read now.
I've found that any more than a mild speedup and I lose interest in a spoken word piece. The pauses, the emphasis on certain words, etc all help me put myself into the emotional shoes of the speaker. Without that anchor, my mind quickly wanders and the podcast just becomes a distracting presence.
By "sound stretching", do you you just mean increased audio speed, or something more complicated? I'm generally stuck at about 1.7x or 1.8x because I stop being able to make out the words even though I'm not having a problem processing them. It's hard for me to imagine 2.7x being remotely intelligible. (Can you do this for any sort of speech, or only speech where you can fill in half the words mentally?)
I've been dying for a audio/video playback program that would speed up faster between pauses (breaths, breaks, etc.) while slowing down to ~1.6 speed for words. I don't even really know what search terms to use. Here's my SE question:
Unfortunately, PocketCast isn't very aggressive about clipping short pauses in speech, probably because it would tend to mangle things unless done carefully. (I suspect it would require a lot more software sophistication with human speech to appreciably change the average playback speed.) It cut out less than a second over the first few minutes of a conversation I used as an example, so it essentially does nothing.
Thanks for the suggestion, though. I never tried Overcast since I'm on an android, but I suspect it's similar to Pocketcast.
I really wants something that ups the average speed to ~2.5 while maintaining intelligibility.
This is what I listened too a lot, maybe I'd should have claimed lower speeds for the other podcasts :) But your native language (german for me) is also easier.
I used to do that, until I realised that anything I could comprehend at 2.5x wasn't new to me, and therefore wasn't worth listening to at all. I cut my podcast subs by half (to a mere 100!) after figuring that out. I'm now at a lazy 1.4x (entertainment/philosophy) - 1.8x (technical).
For me the best sound speed up I've found is the Android app "Presto" that can be used by the Podcast app as a speedup service. It uses the Sonic algorithm which is specifically tailored for speech speedups above 2x.
I do, and I don't. If you imagine there's some form of pipeline in your brain from sound to phonemes to words to concepts to comprehension, my reading probably comes in right at the "words" level. I "hear" the words like I hear them when real people are speaking them, but they do not really have "sounds" or "phonemes". When reading fiction, I may pick up accent if the author is spelling it out but I generally have no voice particularly in mind for a character. Not a "neutral" voice, it's really no voice whatsoever. Just words.
For one thing, if a real voice was speaking at the speed I normally read, it would be virtually incomprehensible. I can't be simply "sounding out words" for that reason.
I imagine people come in at different places in the pipeline and that probably explains the difference. There more phases of the pipeline than there are common words to try to explain our experience.
My inner voice is much the same. I never realized until reading this article that some people do have an "audible" component to theirs. Very interesting.
Count me in on this as well. It's very strange because it's not a voice, but in some sense there is sound--I can "hear" when there's a rhyme, for instance.
I've heard it claimed that the reason some people think they dream in black and white is that there wasn't any color content at all (not even grayscale). They think back and can't remember any colors, and assume it must have been grayscale, because their waking consciousness can't imagine what it would be like to see something without color.
Similarly, it's hard to imagine how you could hear words with no voice speaking them (at least it's hard for me) even though we're experiencing it right now!
I hear a voice when I read, but what's amazing is that I hear a British voice when I read The Economist. TE uses various britishisms, but even in the parts that don't, I always hear some brit reading to me. It's partly why I like reading it so much.
"For people who only ever heard the same internal reading voice, this was usually their own voice, but it was often different in some way from their speaking voice, for example in terms of pitch or emotional tone."
I hear a voice when I read, and it's always the same one, but I don't think of it as my own voice. An interesting side effect of that is, even though I read posts from hundreds of people on the internet every week, they're all in the same voice, so I basically imagine all of you as, like, one person.
Why is that person such a jerk all the time, right? What's their problem? ;)
I have the "voice when I read" thing too; I've actually always thought of it as some kind of "true voice." I haven't perceived that it's changed since kindergarten (though, of course, change could be so slow that I don't notice it, since it's not like I have any external recordings to compare it against).
If you think this is interesting, definitely read "Generalizing From One Example" at Less Wrong [1].
Turns out that people have varying degrees of ability to mentally imagine things, where the range seems to be from "purely abstract" to "number of stripes on a tiger".
Also; Feynman noted that people keep track of time in very different ways[2], either visual (imagining a clock) or symbolic (counting by talking to yourself inside your head).
And that whole internal monologue thing? Turns out that some people report not having that...
If anyone has more examples, please add them. This stuff is endlessly fascinating :)
I lost the internal monologue during puberty. It was initially pretty scary when I noticed that -- it though I'm ceasing to exist, and in a few years the "me" will be gone from my shell, while everyone else around me will be none the wiser. Fortunately, it did not happen (yet).
I think the way it happened was that as I read lots of books, I realized I need to stop processing consciously every word if I want to read faster. Additionally, I started to spend lots of time interacting with English language (which is not my native), and I was sometimes thinking in English before I stopped thinking in words altogether.
I developed a speech impediment because of that: whenever I need to speak, I need to synchronize my mental state with the words coming from my mouth, which requires a little effort.
Yeah if I read aloud "in my head" my reading speed is like 50% of what it is if I don't do that. But for fiction and poetry its fun to "hear" the words in my head so for literature I definitely read differently than when I read for information or training.
I share your experience (lacking any inner voice), except when I'm staging words to be spoken (or written as a conversation). I'm a native English speaker, and I never remember having an inner voice. Until reading a page linked here, I had thought I had mental imagery, but it sounds like I don't have that as others do, either.
Ever since I was a kid, there are some things that, when I mentally picture them, have associated colors bound to them. Days of the week are pretty clear for me.
Monday is red, Tuesday and Thursday are green. Wednesday is a light blue, Friday is red (feels a bit warmer, maybe slightly orange than Monday). Saturday is yellow, Sunday is black (I always associated Sunday with church, and either dread of going or formal wear).
I do this with other things too but days of the week are the most obvious and have been with me my whole life (I'm 30 now).
Oh, I guess I do the inner monologue when estimating time. Something like "Lets see... is it 8 minutes? No that's too fast. 12 minutes? Maybe. Let's go with 11". Didn't even consider it as part of the process until your comment.
Sounds like synesthesia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synesthesia ). People with synesthesia tend to associate colors with numbers or similar. Often it's extremely specific colors, like "deep electric purple with sparkles" for 125. These colors can be consistently identified and described across multiple tests, suggesting that the person actually maintains a consistent inner representation of numbers in terms of color.
I only know about this because I had a friend in middle school who was a synesthete. We thought he was making it up until we gave him a list of (long) random numbers to describe the colors of. We then mixed up the order and gave them to him a week later and he provided consistent descriptions. It was pretty cool actually, I've always been a bit envious.
Yeah, that's fascinating. I didn't realize there was a name, or even that the colors and days of the week is a thing that other people experience. How weird is it that my Wednesday is blue too?
As gh02t says, this sounds very much like synesthesia, which my wife also has. Her colours differ to yours, she sees Tuesday as blue. May I ask if it causes you problems reading, particularly coloured lettering? Words written in colours are difficult to recognise as the actual colours clash with how she sees them. "Rainbow" sentences like a child would write with different colours are almost impossible for her to decipher.
Hi Starwatcher. I had never even considered that this has a name, much less that it's common enough for other people to associate with it too. Cool.
I love to read, actually. As far as I know I haven't noticed any difficulty in colors. I can definitely see a word "red" that may have been written in blue color really screwing with me, but maybe not more than it would screw with any other person.
I take the claimed difference that are based purely on self report with a grain of salt. ("No, I can really see the tiger"....) Even when some people are better at recalling details of a visual scene, there are lots of confounding factors. Do they really have qualitatively different subjective experiences, or just worse memory over all? Or difficulty concentrating? Hard to disentangle these, or even know for sure if they are distinct things.
However, I found Feynman's example very compelling, where the self-report (visual vs. auditory counting) matched up with how visual or auditory side tasks interfered with time keeping.
I have this with numbers (and consequently arithmetic). When I think of a number, in my mind I see its position in a never ending, wavy line of numbers that goes from left bottom to top right. This 'ribbon' of numbers kinda scales logarithmically and I can 'adjust my view' to 'look at' higher/lower numbers. Now that I think of it, I mostly use/see this ribbon when adding or subtracting numbers, not when multiplying or dividing.
Don't know if it's related but in one of my first classes as a kid (where we learned to count), we had some sort of banner on the wall that listed the number from 0 to 100. Maybe picked it up there.. Sometimes I also think this makes the more abstract math concepts harder for me to understand. If I can't visualize it, it won't stick (easily).
Asked some friends how they saw numbers, and they don't have anything like that. Wondering how this is for other people.
I can report a similar visual. Mine isn't wavy, it's straight line from bottom left to top right in which each unit has a sort of notch division.
Aaaaand having to actually explain it seems to have completely messed the whole visual up. At this point I feel like I'm inventing a system based on childhood memories...
It does stretch back to my childhood though. I have strong memories of visualizing numbers in class, even specific problems like when we were asked to add all the numbers from 1 to 100. A problem in which I mentally drew half circles from 99 to 1, 98 to 2 and so on. I solved it almost instantly and thinking back I'm a little disappointed my teacher didn't investigate this more and help me explore this skill.
Wow. This rung a bell for me. I wouldn't have known how to put it so concisely, but this is exactly how numbers automatically reveal themselves to me visually when I'm considering them.
If only that extended to the size estimation part of my brain. I've gotten pretty okay at eyeballing kitchen measurements, but I'm completely useless at determining what will fit in the back of my car when shopping at Home Depot without a tape measure.
I've got a cursor in my head that I mentally move around and click and select things with. When I go insane, I'll probably experience somebody else moving my cursor around, instead of voices in my head.
I wonder if people used to think like typewriters, and heard a right margin bell as they thought, and then had to mentally hit carriage return every 87 characters before they could think any more...
My internal number line exists as a ribbon of squares laying flat (i.e roughly parallel to the ground plane, although they exist floating in an infinite black space). From zero, it goes right to left, then turns around at 10 and goes back behind that line from left to right and then loops around again at 20 in front of the first line. Also, at this point the "camera" turns around following the line, such that it is now viewed behind the first line, going left to right. From there it proceeds in a straight line, with a slight incline, and then plateaus at 100.
I don't generally hear an "audible" voice in my head, the thoughts just appear, as concepts, or at least as atomic words. I look at the words on the page and the shape of them manifests the meaning. I still kindof imagine speaking the word, but it's not like imagining any other sound.
In contrast, I can imagine music very vividly, with different instruments and their timbres fully defined. It's very close to the sensation of hearing music, to the point where I sometimes have to stop myself from dancing to music that only I can hear, definitely not something to do in public! (The music never has lyrics btw. Even if I'm imagining a real song that has words, they just end up as wordless vocalizations.)
The closer to being in the "flow" state I am, the less of an experience of inner speech I have. When I've been programming or doing music for an hour, I don't really think in words at all, the concepts just seem to flash past, going almost directly from the unconscious to motor actions. With art especially you don't have words for most of the things you're doing anyway, so how could you possibly think in a monologue?
However when I need to think carefully about what I'm doing, when I need to use deductive logic or it's very important that I make absolutely no mistakes, I do veer more towards inner speech. The other major one is rehearsing possible social interactions, or having hypothetical conversations, which is something I actually do quite a lot of (I think it's quite common) and obviously that involves speech.
Finally, at times of emotional stress or fear (but not panic), I'm forced into a consistent inner monologue. It's very similar to the way you can't deliberately give up conscious control of your breathing once you take hold of it, and I can easily see how it could be scary for some people. Sometimes it does feel like a step down the road towards madness, in comparison to my normal state. If I woke up one morning and was stuck like that, I would 100% be going to a psychiatrist.
Don't get any of that stuff about being able to see numbers unfortunately. I have very poor imaging ability. I can't really see pictures in my head at all.
Wow, this is word-for-word how my brain works. I don't hear words when I read and I tend not to see pictures in my head despite being a very spatial person. This is really neat! Thanks for articulating this!
Whenever the book turns into a movie, my friends all say, "Yeah, that casting is exactly who I imagined." That just never happens to me. I don't have preconceived notions of what characters look like, even if I read their descriptions. But I'm very spatial and good with layouts and furniture. I keep thinking that because I'm spatial I should be visual but... not so much.
EDIT: Oh, almost forgot! Despite all that, I'm great with faces. If we've met before I'm going to recognize you. But I'm embarrassingly bad at names, forgetting them almost instantly if I don't concentrate for a long time.
On the other side of things I've got great relative pitch. If I can get the first note on the piano I can pretty much just play the rest of the melody. And, same thing, music is pretty finely textured for me when I concentrate.
For me, it's the same, but I don't have memory for faces and my pitch is not that good, but I had no problem playing piano. I'm good at navigating with maps, but can't remember them easily, and I have a thing which is stereotypical for women: I can't remember which side is left and which is right, I mean calling them or parsing from a word which hand is which. I can show with hand on which side something is, but calling this side by name requires concentration.
> For me, it's the same, but I don't have memory for faces
This is something that has always concerned me in general. I was worried for the first year I dated my now-wife that I would not be able to recognize her when meeting her at a crowded place. I wouldn't go so far as to say she would turn around and I couldn't recognize her, but the permanence just wasn't there.
For the first couple of months of my most recent relationship I would meet my partner at the train station. I was always worried that I wouldn't recognize her in the crowd and she would somehow know. I also can't recall a person's name moments after I hear it. But I can do many other mental gymnastics that surprise my friends and family.
Thinking about it further it only affects one lookup direction. Name -> Face is incredibly difficult for me, but Face -> Name is a lot easier (and really the reason I didn't need to worry as much as I did).
For me, I think it depends on how closely I care about the words or (for fiction at least) whether the scene is people talking or a description of the area or some action.
With dialog, or a narrator's voice, I often imagine them speaking it or provide a voice for them in my own head. With action scenes, especially engrossing ones, I sort of just spend the extra mental energy trying to picture the scene rather than "hearing" the words. I have a very hard time paying attention to what the characters look like or are wearing. Usually imagine it briefly as it is being described and move on.
Oddly enough, when I'm reading aloud, sometimes I sort of stop imagining what is going on as I'm too busy trying to sort out how to speak the dialog (especially in some different voices) that I no longer pay complete attention to the scene.
For non-fiction, I generally spend more mental energy trying to visualize the concepts being described and stop "hearing" the words. Or if I'm merely skimming and want to get a sense of what is being said without the details.
So I think a "voice" is something I can and do switch on and off depending on whether my brain thinks it is important and probably on the difficulty of the text itself.
I have a similar experience. When browsing articles and blog posts online, I definitely don't hear a voice unless the author uses a noticeable conversational tone in their writing. Especially if I'm familiar with the writer's speaking voice.
In narrative fiction, I often hear the words spoken by distinct voices, though this too wanes as I focus on reading quickly or become tired.
I agree that the type of content is important. I personally experience reading as similar to a campfire story, hearing someone else describe a situation. My brain just isn't good at filling in the details of a scene. I am able to control the voice though. Reading textbooks became way more fun once I started reading them as documentaries narrated by Morgan Freeman! I have found the key is to read no faster than a person could speak the words, otherwise I just hear my own voice talking rapidly. I would guess this would be due to a lack of familiarity with the "templates" for the other voices talking quickly.
> In contrast, I can imagine music very vividly, with different instruments and their timbres fully defined. It's very close to the sensation of hearing music, to the point where I sometimes have to stop myself from dancing to music that only I can hear, definitely not something to do in public!
When stuck in a procrastinating loop, I can almost feel the word bounce on my visual cortex. They're just packs of glyphs. Like a full queue, I have to carefully wait for more "room" occur and then swallow a few words, so on and so forth. And after a few runs likes this, all of a sudden my brain starts crunching again and I can run through a paragraph in logic-mode. It activates blood flow in deeper parts of my brain (a recent reduced cardio vascular capacity , "make me feel" where blood is going). It's also very emotionally linked. Whenever something valuable happens to me I don't struggle to get into the nice state.
With re: music, I find I can go to full blown auditory hallucinations with a quiet room and relaxation - one moment you're imagining the orchestra, the next you're hearing it - and when I say hearing I mean it - indistinguishable from being in the pit. The moment you pay too much attention it slips away, like trying to look at a floater in your eye. I have absolute pitch, if it's on any way relevant.
For more reading on this topic I throughly recommend Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks.
I experience similar musical phenomenon, I can even create new, complete songs in my imagination. Though I don't think I have absolute pitch, I play guitar and I can't play what I hear. Or maybe it's because of lack of training, IDK, but I'd really like to bump into some scientific information about this.
I write music mentally all the time, it's incredibly frustrating that I can't transcribe or play anything close in the real world. I'm a guitarist also.
"The other major one is rehearsing possible social interactions, or having hypothetical conversations,..."
This week I started to experiment writing dialogs to untangle complicated situations where I don't know where to start from. It helps me to overcome mental blocks, when the situation becomes overwhelming.
One character is more logical, the other one is the one performing the actions. It's like a coach talking to a player. After a while coming back and forth fro the dialog and the code editor, I find myself in a deep flow, and then I don't need to write but I can "imagine" the conversation.
I was wondering if dialogues have a special properties for driving thinking, then I remembered Plato the philosopher, he use to write his "Plato dialogues" although I never read them.
When reading, I have an internal monologue. I find it hard to hold a definite train of though when walking, though, because there's too much too see.
So, I'll go for a walk to think about some algorithm, or whatnot, but can't really consciously thing through the algo because of all the visual input. The visual input does tend to drive visual or tactile thinking, but there are no words for this.
In the past, I've resorted to speaking out loud to think through concepts, carefully. Somehow spoken (not subvocalized) words are more concrete (and limiting) they don't flap and fray in the wind of my mental music video.
Until today, I didn't know one could read a text without the internal monologue voicing it as well. I certainly can't. It also seems to explain why I'm a slow reader and why I tend to retain with precision, text that I've only read once. Definitely helps with understanding tech specs and manuals. And also why I dislike reading fiction because I find the language too verbose and inefficient.
But I don't actually hear a voice when reading and hence no detectable accents or tone. However, if I try to remember a line from a movie or a visual, like a scene, I can actually hear and see it, as if temporarily my brain routes my memories through my visual and auditory path, and sometimes it's unsettling even though I'm expecting it. As for the visual, I seem to have two distinct sense of vision, one from my eyes, and the other one that is so called the "mind's eye". For me, it lacks color and even shades.
As for remembering things, I can instantly tell a movie by a single frame of it even if I've watched it once and I'm yet to come across someone who can do that.
I have the internal voice while reading but I also read faster than almost everyone I know. The "voice" is disembodied and doesn't "sound" like anyone I know. It doesn't sound like VoiceOver at high speed, but the sensation is more like my brain is fast-forwarding time so the voice and the understanding of the words are happening at an accelerated rate. I recognize word shapes while reading but that doesn't seem to affect the voice. If the real sound of the word differs from what I thought it was when I first learned the word it is extremely difficult to change the internal voice and consequently how I pronounce the word.
My internal thoughts also seem to be expressed this way, though not necessarily all the time. Doubts or alternate viewpoints are often alternate voices and I can "hear" the arguments.
>As for remembering things, I can instantly tell a movie by a single frame of it even if I've watched it once and I'm yet to come across someone who can do that.
hello friend, I can do that too. 1 frame will tell me if I've seen something before, though it sometimes takes several more to get a title.
I like to call it cinematic memory, it's like photographic memory but shittier because if I try to reconstruct a photographic memory it comes out blurry :v)
I am like that for movies and similarly for music. Within a bar or two I can almost always tell you if I know the song. Sometimes it takes a few moments for the name to surface, but it's there.
I have no internal monologue unless I'm internally assembling bits of language for speech or writing (for example, putting my thoughts together for this sentence). If I get into a deep "flow state" while writing, or I'm in casual conversation with someone I'm comfortable with, that too goes away.
If I try to mentally visualize something I'm not looking at, even if I'm very familiar with it, it's usually impressionistic at best - rough outlines and swaths of color.
Pedantically, I would contend that anything some people are missing out on fails the test for being a "universal experience", because it's not universal unless everyone has it, so the answer to the title of that post is "nothing".
Update: apologies if this came off as rude. One theory of humour is that comes about from a benign violation of expectations, known as the "benign violation theory"[1]. Using this model one can see the title as humourous.
I can read very quickly and not hear a voice, but usually I read slow enough that I can. The tone usually depends on what it is I'm reading (Hacker News sounds different to Harry Potter), but I think the actual voice is the same. I've never really thought about it before.
I generally don't hear a voice when I read and find that when I do intentionally, it slows me down. I've found that I often miss puns and other plays on the sounds of words in written text due to not sounding out the words.
Speed reading techniques often try to break written word streams down into visual chunks and let the wetware do the rest. Unsurprisingly, results vary widely. Ironically though, this sounds a bit like a very high level description of segmentation as in computer vision
Ok this is very strange. When I read I hear the same inner voice or steady stream of consciousness I hear all the time. It's my own voice. The article says some people find it scary or distracting? So when they have normal thoughts and are not reading does that mean they don't hear their own voice like me? Is it scary and distracting when just having normal thoughts and not reading? This is amazing if this hasn't really been discussed much and studied before.
I'm really curious to hear other people's answers to this.
The majority of the time when I'm reading, I don't hear anything at all. So, you'll probably be unsurprised by my answer to your second question - I generally don't hear my voice (or any voice) when I'm thinking. That does happen sometime, but only when my task is particularly language-focused, like when I'm writing.
When I'm writing _english_, that is. No voices, no language when coding.
That's interesting, because I was wondering "what must it be like to not hear a voice when reading?" and until you said the bit about coding, I didn't know.
Then I realized the same thing. I don't hear a voice when I'm coding or reading code. Odd.
Ah-ha! This was a great insight for me. I can't not subvocalise when reading. But I too certainly don't subvocalise when reading code. Now I know what it's like.
I usually read with "my" voice, but some texts are different. For example I read comments of some people on the internet with deep voice. Don't know why.
There could be a "feed forward" mechanism in language processing, which gets involved in reading also. That is to say, when you hear speech, perhaps that same "reading voice" is also there: perhaps the speech that you're hearing is synthesized into a voice, and those voices are compared, which reinforces whether or not you "heard it right", and perhaps this takes place in a loop which clarifies the speech.
I don't usually have an inner voice when I read. Now I do, thank you!
Seriously though, I don't really have an inner voice, unless it is maybe something like this where I'm expressing myself and I read in my voice the thoughts I'm trying to express. I was just trying to image accents as I read and this comment sealed it that yes, I can hear accents and a separate voice when I read something.
Normally, I read slower and experience an internal voice. It is different from hearing a voice with my ears. Not just quieter, but different in a way I can't put into words. Yet also similar.
If I either speed up, or consciously suppress it, I can read without the internal voice, but comprehension goes way down. There's some comprehension, but it's pretty ineffective overall.
If I'm in a relatively quiet place, I don't move my lips or tongue. If I'm in a very noisy place, moving my lips/tongue seems to help.
I once knew someone who said she could not read at all without whispering the words to herself.
If I know who wrote a piece and they have a distinctive manner of speaking, I sometimes "hear" the text colored by their voice. In most cases I don't experience anything like that, but I suppose it's possible that I do and just read so much that it gets filtered out.
I hear a voice when I read, and I just need a few seconds of concentration to change it to another voice. I can choose voices that seem to fit the content in energy level, general way of speaking and accent and do that a lot. But they never speak to me when I am not reading.
I realized just now that it is my brain reading me a story and I listen to the voice that reads it to me like a fascinated kid.
I hear a voice when I read, and I just need a few seconds of concentration to change it to another voice. I can choose voices that seem to fit the content in energy level, general way of speaking and accent and do that a lot. But they never speak to me when I am not reading.
I realized just now that it is my brain reading me a story and I listen to the voice that reads it to me like a fascinated kid.
For me, reading definitely doesn't involve any internal dialog. My eyes scan the page and the information passes directly into my consciousness. I guess that I'm a very fluent reader, however I don't remember any intermediate "translation" steps when I was young.
I think a good illustration of this internal dialog is learning a new language. At first you (verbally) translate each word in your head into your native language. But as you gain fluency, you begin to understand the new language directly.
Many decades ago I learnt Morse Code, and the process was similar. At first I mentally (and painstakingly) translated each letter. Later I translated each word. But eventually the information just flowed into my head without any intermediate steps.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 203 ms ] threadSee also the Independent article here: http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/...
As I understand it (and I could be wrong) "hearing a voice" pretty much means you hear a voice as if someone was speaking but there's noone there. The paper talked about claimed that 80% of people "hear a voice" when they read.
I find that surprising, and I'd want to know what exactly is meant by "inner reading voices" - are these voices that people hear, or are they something else?
> Why hasn't this topic been studied before? Vilhauer's study hints at an answer because she found that many people assumed that their inner experiences when reading were shared by everyone. This worked both ways, so some of the people who had an inner reading voice were convinced of its normality: "We all hear our voices in our heads at times – even those of others we know – especially while reading," said one Yahoo contributor. Yet others who claimed to have no inner voice felt they were the normal ones. For example, in response to a question posted on the site about whether anyone else hears an inner voice while reading, one responder said "Nooo. You should get that checked out" and another wrote, in capitals: "NO, I'M NOT A FREAK".
The other reason is that until relatively recently everyone freaked the fuck out if you said you heard voices, and hearing voices was a sign of serious severe mental illness. We now know that's probably not true.
I do this sometimes to shut out distractions. For me it's like remembering someone saying what you're reading.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subvocalization
Or is there a separate notion of hearing a voice over and apart from subvocalizing? (If I had to try to think about them as different concepts, I'd probably say that I never subvocalize, and usually don't hear a voice when reading quickly, but perhaps do hear a voice when reading slowly or focusing on individual words.)
> If I had to try to think about them as different concepts, I'd probably say that I never subvocalize, and usually don't hear a voice when reading quickly, but perhaps do hear a voice when reading slowly or focusing on individual words.
Since the involuntary muscle movements that are the other part of subvocalization are generally undetectable to the person doing the reading, what is your basis for saying that you never subvocalize, even though you do hear a voice when reading slowly?
I guess that's a totally unsubstantiated intuition. Can I test it effectively with an EMG?
This may have something to do with why I can only appreciate poetry when read aloud.
The only experience I can think of that is similar would be sight-reading music before trying to play it.
I mean, consider reflex actions in response to pain: Plenty of people will (quite honestly) tell you that "it hurt, so I pulled my hand back" but the lower-level neurological evidence suggests we're fooling ourselves.
What would be a good experiment to test your hypothesis?
I have a slightly above average reading speed (with average to above-average retention), mostly because I don't spend as time converting the words to sounds.
Of course, this does mean that I don't always recognize words when said aloud that I've only seen in text before. Less of an issue as I grow older, but hearing some words vocalized was an interesting experience the first time (such as aileron or Qeynos (pronounced as kē-nōs, for those who never played Everquest))
When I was a teenager I took elocution lessons, read poetry and acted in plays. I would read through a piece imagining where I would pause, where to put emphasis, etc. So I know I subvocalised then, but don't know if I did before or if that's when I learned to do it.
I know it takes me much longer to read a book than my brother or father or many of my friends. I can read a book once and remember small details from the story they have completely forgotten and sometimes they've read a book multiple times when I have far better recollection of it from a single much slower reading. I'm wondering if subvocalisation plays a part in that.
Edit: another factor is that I remember words from their sound, not their spelling, so have always had difficulty with spelling. I can't visualise the word, and often need to actualy write a word out before I can figure out how to spell it. Just spelling out words letter by letter vocally is very hard for me.
I don't read without vocalizing in my head much anymore. I found that without hearing that, my EQ in relation to communicating with a person drops. On the other hand, if I'm visualizing some systems interactions in my head, it's not going to be verbalized. Until maybe, I try to explain it to someone.
I'm also an impeccable speller and I attribute that to my brain somehow leapfrogging past sounding out words to recognizing them by shape. Not certain if I subvocalize, but I do have an internal reader.
So I end up using a ton of Google and obsessively taking notes/making lists. Quip has been a lifesaver.
How do you use quip?
For example, I've been working on a security primer for internal consumption. The output will get turned into a presentation eventually. Quip makes it easy to invite a colleague to collaborate.
2.7 is the speed I can jump in any time, if I speed up incrementally I can easily go to 3.2 or something.
(i use windows media player for the speed up, best real-time sound stretching I found)
It wasn't like that for me. I used to speed up the voice speed in my head when reading and occasionally drop them all together (so it's a stream of concepts, not voice). Then one day, I noticed that I would drop a lot of emotional nuances when I do, or misread/misinterpret emails and messages from other people. I started to try to slow things down, to even read it in the voice of the person sending the message (assuming I know them well enough to have heard their voice). My reading speed had dropped but it feels like I get a lot more out of what I read now.
I've been dying for a audio/video playback program that would speed up faster between pauses (breaths, breaks, etc.) while slowing down to ~1.6 speed for words. I don't even really know what search terms to use. Here's my SE question:
http://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/questions/27175/video-...
Would love more info here.
For audiobooks, Listen Audiobook Player on Android does the same, though for some reason I find it distracting for audiobooks.
Thanks for the suggestion, though. I never tried Overcast since I'm on an android, but I suspect it's similar to Pocketcast.
I really wants something that ups the average speed to ~2.5 while maintaining intelligibility.
It also depends a lot on the source material. This for example is sooooooo slow: https://soundcloud.com/diezeit/auf-ein-fruhstucksei-mit-aus-... (german, but I think you can hear the speed)
This is what I listened too a lot, maybe I'd should have claimed lower speeds for the other podcasts :) But your native language (german for me) is also easier.
https://github.com/waywardgeek/sonic
For one thing, if a real voice was speaking at the speed I normally read, it would be virtually incomprehensible. I can't be simply "sounding out words" for that reason.
I imagine people come in at different places in the pipeline and that probably explains the difference. There more phases of the pipeline than there are common words to try to explain our experience.
I've heard it claimed that the reason some people think they dream in black and white is that there wasn't any color content at all (not even grayscale). They think back and can't remember any colors, and assume it must have been grayscale, because their waking consciousness can't imagine what it would be like to see something without color.
Similarly, it's hard to imagine how you could hear words with no voice speaking them (at least it's hard for me) even though we're experiencing it right now!
I hear a voice when I read, and it's always the same one, but I don't think of it as my own voice. An interesting side effect of that is, even though I read posts from hundreds of people on the internet every week, they're all in the same voice, so I basically imagine all of you as, like, one person.
I have the "voice when I read" thing too; I've actually always thought of it as some kind of "true voice." I haven't perceived that it's changed since kindergarten (though, of course, change could be so slow that I don't notice it, since it's not like I have any external recordings to compare it against).
Turns out that people have varying degrees of ability to mentally imagine things, where the range seems to be from "purely abstract" to "number of stripes on a tiger".
Also; Feynman noted that people keep track of time in very different ways[2], either visual (imagining a clock) or symbolic (counting by talking to yourself inside your head).
And that whole internal monologue thing? Turns out that some people report not having that...
If anyone has more examples, please add them. This stuff is endlessly fascinating :)
[1]http://lesswrong.com/lw/dr/generalizing_from_one_example/
[2]http://generallythinking.com/richard-feynman-on-thinking-pro...
I think the way it happened was that as I read lots of books, I realized I need to stop processing consciously every word if I want to read faster. Additionally, I started to spend lots of time interacting with English language (which is not my native), and I was sometimes thinking in English before I stopped thinking in words altogether.
I developed a speech impediment because of that: whenever I need to speak, I need to synchronize my mental state with the words coming from my mouth, which requires a little effort.
Monday is red, Tuesday and Thursday are green. Wednesday is a light blue, Friday is red (feels a bit warmer, maybe slightly orange than Monday). Saturday is yellow, Sunday is black (I always associated Sunday with church, and either dread of going or formal wear).
I do this with other things too but days of the week are the most obvious and have been with me my whole life (I'm 30 now).
Oh, I guess I do the inner monologue when estimating time. Something like "Lets see... is it 8 minutes? No that's too fast. 12 minutes? Maybe. Let's go with 11". Didn't even consider it as part of the process until your comment.
Associating colors with days of the week is another well known example, described in the book "Wednesday is Indigo Blue" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wednesday_Is_Indigo_Blue ). You might find it interesting.
I only know about this because I had a friend in middle school who was a synesthete. We thought he was making it up until we gave him a list of (long) random numbers to describe the colors of. We then mixed up the order and gave them to him a week later and he provided consistent descriptions. It was pretty cool actually, I've always been a bit envious.
Thanks for sharing, I've got some reading to do.
I love to read, actually. As far as I know I haven't noticed any difficulty in colors. I can definitely see a word "red" that may have been written in blue color really screwing with me, but maybe not more than it would screw with any other person.
However, I found Feynman's example very compelling, where the self-report (visual vs. auditory counting) matched up with how visual or auditory side tasks interfered with time keeping.
Don't know if it's related but in one of my first classes as a kid (where we learned to count), we had some sort of banner on the wall that listed the number from 0 to 100. Maybe picked it up there.. Sometimes I also think this makes the more abstract math concepts harder for me to understand. If I can't visualize it, it won't stick (easily).
Asked some friends how they saw numbers, and they don't have anything like that. Wondering how this is for other people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_form
Aaaaand having to actually explain it seems to have completely messed the whole visual up. At this point I feel like I'm inventing a system based on childhood memories...
It does stretch back to my childhood though. I have strong memories of visualizing numbers in class, even specific problems like when we were asked to add all the numbers from 1 to 100. A problem in which I mentally drew half circles from 99 to 1, 98 to 2 and so on. I solved it almost instantly and thinking back I'm a little disappointed my teacher didn't investigate this more and help me explore this skill.
If only that extended to the size estimation part of my brain. I've gotten pretty okay at eyeballing kitchen measurements, but I'm completely useless at determining what will fit in the back of my car when shopping at Home Depot without a tape measure.
I've got a cursor in my head that I mentally move around and click and select things with. When I go insane, I'll probably experience somebody else moving my cursor around, instead of voices in my head.
I wonder if people used to think like typewriters, and heard a right margin bell as they thought, and then had to mentally hit carriage return every 87 characters before they could think any more...
In contrast, I can imagine music very vividly, with different instruments and their timbres fully defined. It's very close to the sensation of hearing music, to the point where I sometimes have to stop myself from dancing to music that only I can hear, definitely not something to do in public! (The music never has lyrics btw. Even if I'm imagining a real song that has words, they just end up as wordless vocalizations.)
The closer to being in the "flow" state I am, the less of an experience of inner speech I have. When I've been programming or doing music for an hour, I don't really think in words at all, the concepts just seem to flash past, going almost directly from the unconscious to motor actions. With art especially you don't have words for most of the things you're doing anyway, so how could you possibly think in a monologue?
However when I need to think carefully about what I'm doing, when I need to use deductive logic or it's very important that I make absolutely no mistakes, I do veer more towards inner speech. The other major one is rehearsing possible social interactions, or having hypothetical conversations, which is something I actually do quite a lot of (I think it's quite common) and obviously that involves speech.
Finally, at times of emotional stress or fear (but not panic), I'm forced into a consistent inner monologue. It's very similar to the way you can't deliberately give up conscious control of your breathing once you take hold of it, and I can easily see how it could be scary for some people. Sometimes it does feel like a step down the road towards madness, in comparison to my normal state. If I woke up one morning and was stuck like that, I would 100% be going to a psychiatrist.
Don't get any of that stuff about being able to see numbers unfortunately. I have very poor imaging ability. I can't really see pictures in my head at all.
Whenever the book turns into a movie, my friends all say, "Yeah, that casting is exactly who I imagined." That just never happens to me. I don't have preconceived notions of what characters look like, even if I read their descriptions. But I'm very spatial and good with layouts and furniture. I keep thinking that because I'm spatial I should be visual but... not so much.
EDIT: Oh, almost forgot! Despite all that, I'm great with faces. If we've met before I'm going to recognize you. But I'm embarrassingly bad at names, forgetting them almost instantly if I don't concentrate for a long time.
On the other side of things I've got great relative pitch. If I can get the first note on the piano I can pretty much just play the rest of the melody. And, same thing, music is pretty finely textured for me when I concentrate.
This is something that has always concerned me in general. I was worried for the first year I dated my now-wife that I would not be able to recognize her when meeting her at a crowded place. I wouldn't go so far as to say she would turn around and I couldn't recognize her, but the permanence just wasn't there.
With dialog, or a narrator's voice, I often imagine them speaking it or provide a voice for them in my own head. With action scenes, especially engrossing ones, I sort of just spend the extra mental energy trying to picture the scene rather than "hearing" the words. I have a very hard time paying attention to what the characters look like or are wearing. Usually imagine it briefly as it is being described and move on.
Oddly enough, when I'm reading aloud, sometimes I sort of stop imagining what is going on as I'm too busy trying to sort out how to speak the dialog (especially in some different voices) that I no longer pay complete attention to the scene.
For non-fiction, I generally spend more mental energy trying to visualize the concepts being described and stop "hearing" the words. Or if I'm merely skimming and want to get a sense of what is being said without the details.
So I think a "voice" is something I can and do switch on and off depending on whether my brain thinks it is important and probably on the difficulty of the text itself.
In narrative fiction, I often hear the words spoken by distinct voices, though this too wanes as I focus on reading quickly or become tired.
Why not?
With re: music, I find I can go to full blown auditory hallucinations with a quiet room and relaxation - one moment you're imagining the orchestra, the next you're hearing it - and when I say hearing I mean it - indistinguishable from being in the pit. The moment you pay too much attention it slips away, like trying to look at a floater in your eye. I have absolute pitch, if it's on any way relevant.
For more reading on this topic I throughly recommend Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks.
This week I started to experiment writing dialogs to untangle complicated situations where I don't know where to start from. It helps me to overcome mental blocks, when the situation becomes overwhelming.
One character is more logical, the other one is the one performing the actions. It's like a coach talking to a player. After a while coming back and forth fro the dialog and the code editor, I find myself in a deep flow, and then I don't need to write but I can "imagine" the conversation.
I was wondering if dialogues have a special properties for driving thinking, then I remembered Plato the philosopher, he use to write his "Plato dialogues" although I never read them.
When reading, I have an internal monologue. I find it hard to hold a definite train of though when walking, though, because there's too much too see.
So, I'll go for a walk to think about some algorithm, or whatnot, but can't really consciously thing through the algo because of all the visual input. The visual input does tend to drive visual or tactile thinking, but there are no words for this.
In the past, I've resorted to speaking out loud to think through concepts, carefully. Somehow spoken (not subvocalized) words are more concrete (and limiting) they don't flap and fray in the wind of my mental music video.
But I don't actually hear a voice when reading and hence no detectable accents or tone. However, if I try to remember a line from a movie or a visual, like a scene, I can actually hear and see it, as if temporarily my brain routes my memories through my visual and auditory path, and sometimes it's unsettling even though I'm expecting it. As for the visual, I seem to have two distinct sense of vision, one from my eyes, and the other one that is so called the "mind's eye". For me, it lacks color and even shades.
As for remembering things, I can instantly tell a movie by a single frame of it even if I've watched it once and I'm yet to come across someone who can do that.
My internal thoughts also seem to be expressed this way, though not necessarily all the time. Doubts or alternate viewpoints are often alternate voices and I can "hear" the arguments.
I can glance over text quite quickly to understand what it's saying, but can only "read" it is as fast as the voice can talk.
Typing prose is the same, even if I type text without looking at the screen the voice still speaks to me and I can only type as fast as it speaks.
I've typed full emails while talking to others, I can't imagine doing that while sub-vocalizing what I'm writing.
hello friend, I can do that too. 1 frame will tell me if I've seen something before, though it sometimes takes several more to get a title. I like to call it cinematic memory, it's like photographic memory but shittier because if I try to reconstruct a photographic memory it comes out blurry :v)
If I try to mentally visualize something I'm not looking at, even if I'm very familiar with it, it's usually impressionistic at best - rough outlines and swaths of color.
http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/17/what-universal-human-ex...
Update: apologies if this came off as rude. One theory of humour is that comes about from a benign violation of expectations, known as the "benign violation theory"[1]. Using this model one can see the title as humourous.
[1]: http://humorresearchlab.org/
I'm really curious to hear other people's answers to this.
When I'm writing _english_, that is. No voices, no language when coding.
Then I realized the same thing. I don't hear a voice when I'm coding or reading code. Odd.
I need to go back and screen which of futurama episodes are ok-enough for a 9 year old...
Seriously though, I don't really have an inner voice, unless it is maybe something like this where I'm expressing myself and I read in my voice the thoughts I'm trying to express. I was just trying to image accents as I read and this comment sealed it that yes, I can hear accents and a separate voice when I read something.
If I either speed up, or consciously suppress it, I can read without the internal voice, but comprehension goes way down. There's some comprehension, but it's pretty ineffective overall.
If I'm in a relatively quiet place, I don't move my lips or tongue. If I'm in a very noisy place, moving my lips/tongue seems to help.
I once knew someone who said she could not read at all without whispering the words to herself.
I realized just now that it is my brain reading me a story and I listen to the voice that reads it to me like a fascinated kid.
I realized just now that it is my brain reading me a story and I listen to the voice that reads it to me like a fascinated kid.
I think a good illustration of this internal dialog is learning a new language. At first you (verbally) translate each word in your head into your native language. But as you gain fluency, you begin to understand the new language directly.
Many decades ago I learnt Morse Code, and the process was similar. At first I mentally (and painstakingly) translated each letter. Later I translated each word. But eventually the information just flowed into my head without any intermediate steps.