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:
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?
> 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.
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?
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".
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.
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.
People speak of these things in term of identity, but I wonder how true that is. I could easily imagine (pun intended) these are more akin to skills, that can be improved with practice.
Actually now that I think about it, I do know that this is a well-known phenomenon in the chess world. Newcomers are unable to to play blind-chess. But experienced players say that they gradually learned how to do it. How it started as a really blurry picture of just a small part of the board, and how they gradually got better at remembering and visualizing the whole board at the same and were able to play full games with a blindfold.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
This is getting more confusing. Just because you can think in words doesn’t mean you enumerate everything in words. I think of myself as someone with an inner voice that I use often but not everything that happens in my mind is subvocalized. A lot of it is imagining or recalling images or movements, there’s spatial awareness when thinking about positioning things and manipulating objects, there are non verbal recollections like music or recalling a sound something made and there are thoughts that are more like pure concepts or feelings. Maybe there is some misunderstanding about how the inner voice is used or maybe I’m wrong and there are people who exclusively think in words?
There are people who have all their thoughts in words (most people, in fact). I don't think they actually have their thoughts in words, I think they just narrate them to themselves after they have them.
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.
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")
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.
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.
This is so earth shattering to me. I'm completely unable to actually "see" anything when I imagine it, but I think I can visualize in the sense of recalling or imagining how it would look.
Do people actually close their eyes and hallucinate or am I reading way to far into this?
In these exchanges the language typically gets sloppy and one person's "see" gets translated and reacted to as whoa, with their eyes?.
If you can imagine a red car and see it in your mind's eye (fairly ephemeral, especially if you force it, and nothing like as vivid as a hallucination) I think you're pretty normal from having followed a few of these threads over the years.
If you have aphantasia, you can't "see it in your minds eye", but that does not mean I can't imagine what it looks like.
I know the distinction both from comparing with dreams, where I do see, and with a single experience during meditation (which I've tried many times but so far failed to replicate). They're nothing alike what it is to "imagine" for me.
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.
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?
> 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.
I think people with an inner voice don't notice their 'random' memories as much because they don't fit the narrative. Like confirmation bias, the bits that don't fit get filtered out, yet visual narratives are more flexible than that.
When you dream, it's like a montage, right? Do you hear sound at all? The dream still makes sense when you're in it though. How is waking reality any different in that regard?
The term "Non-Player Characters" for fellow humans is incredibly condescending. Please acknowledge that every human is a player character. Albeit with a different quest and skilltree than you.
There is also the other point of view, that every other human that is not you IS an NPC, we can only prove that we exist, and even then that is muddy, for all we know everyone else is just a figment of our imagination, we can neither affirm nor deny it, so it is not wrong that since the only one that you can affirm to some extent is a player character is yourself, to call everyone else an NPC, as you have no way to prove they are not an NPC, you can't see what they think, you can only assume that like you, they think and they are.
And yes, I am being pedantic with a philosophy I do not even endorse nor fully understand, just wanted to be a contrarian.
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.
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
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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)
I personally have a very hard time thinking out loud but have no problem thinking quietly. I'm for example terrible at explaining something while working on it but could easily explain it afterwards.
In a normal conversation I certainly don't do that. There's no way in hell I would have TIME to do that. It's too fast.
And anyway, why would that make any more sense? How would you plan the internal voice in order to produce it? An inner-inner-voice? That would need an inner-inner-inner voice?
It sounds like you have the homunculus idea of how human brain works. But this idea is nonsensical...
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.
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
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.
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.]
For myself I can learn a written word without having any idea of how it is pronounced. Growing up there were multiple occasions when I was speaking and mid way through a sentence realize I don't know the pronunciation of the next word I was going to say.
Also I can read text and completely miss rhymes unless the formatting draws attention to it like how poetry is often written with lines split. (More likely to miss rhymes like half and graph where the word endings visually are different.)
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?
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.
I'll answer from my own experience (with no inner voice):
1) I have to be very explicit when reading with an inner voice (which goes to your second point). Generally, it is a kind of recognition that a word has a meaning and I "feel" that meaning, if that makes sense?
But then how do you do what I'd consider simple things like sanity checks?
For example, hooking up jumper cables. I suppose I could hook them up without an inner dialog.
But then at any point if I get confused or remember that dangerous things can happen, I can go back and compare against a list in my head of the steps to hook them up. E.g., don't let clamps touch, start with the dead battery, positive first, crank and rev the working car, etc.
How can you get the same type of sanity check without an inner dialog? Do you memorize an ordered sequence of "feels" that correspond to the steps?
You know, I've never really thought about it. Yeah, I guess I do just remember the feeling and know that it's a step that I've completed. And when I recall the steps that need to be done, it's not really a cohesive spoken thought. It's like impulses of sensations? My brain is just like "Order's important. Red red, black black." without the words.
For really difficult mental tasks, I'll actually talk to myself or write things down so that they are less chaotic since the feelings/impulses in my brain may not line up. Kind of like a buffer filling up.
Now what really bothers my wife is when we talk about how we have conversations with others. I don't necessarily think about what I'm going to say verbatim when I'm talking to someone. It's impulses like I mention above where things kind of "flash" into my brain the moment before I say it. The best way that I can think of it is that it's similar to playing a sport where you have moments to change your trajectory and movement to accomplish what you want. I know thematically what I want to say, but I don't actually build the sentence in my brain.
> The best way that I can think of it is that it's similar to playing a sport where you have moments to change your trajectory and movement to accomplish what you want.
If I had to speculate I'd say a lot of people have the experience of both this and the inner voice, depending on context.
It doe make me wonder: are people who can't spontaneously "surf" sentences in realtime and instead rely wholly on an inner voice? :)
Edit: I've noticed that reflecting on this kind of stuff can wreak havoc on young musicians. I remember a colleague who learned the Grieg concerto but was having a small number of wrong notes (say, 5% or so) creep into various sections of the piece, seemingly at random. The teacher started to drill down on each section, having the student write down which finger plays what, subdivide tricky rhythms, and so forth.
What was wild was that each time the teacher asked the student to notate the chord at the point where a mistake occurred, this would generate a cascade of more mistakes. She'd essentially been playing mostly by feel without thinking about the harmony at all. The added anxiety about harmony increased her error rate for relying on feel; pretty soon she wasn't able to make it through the piece. They then went back methodically through the entire thing, having her notate each and every harmony and describe how each one relates to the next, which were primary vs. ancillary, and so forth. Only then could she play the entire piece with precision.
So sometimes to get from 95% to 100% you have to go back down to zero!
Ironically, I have trouble imagining being able to think properly with an inner monologue. If I try to plan my words rather than just let them flow, I almost always stumble and become incapable of selecting the proper words.
If I'm reading something very very difficult, like a research paper in a field I'm only just getting my feet wet in, I will actually vocalize what I'm reading to help me figure out what I need to look up. But this is only when I'm confused.
To answer your question further down about sanity checking, I just know what know, so a sanity check involves me verifying that yes, indeed, black is the minus terminal on both batteries and red is the positive terminal on both batteries, that is my visual memory is correct. That said, a lot of people have remarked that I'm pretty deft in my actions. So maybe it's related?
It's hard for me to generalize about my experience as it seems very natural to me and I haven't really had a lot of exposure to others like me, so I don't know what parts are necessarily about me being me, and which are about me not having mental imagery(for lack of a better term). I get the feeling that an innervoice is kinda stressful though? I'm a very relaxed person by nature. The concept of "negative self talk" is completely alien to my brain.
I find if I listen closely to my inner voice, it starts going in a circle for exactly this reason. This makes me think maybe the actual order is backwards and the voice comes second, but it feels first because brains are weird.
Right, my point is there is some point at which our "generation" of dialogue transitions from subconscious to conscious. This is true for people with or without inner dialogs.
Agreed. I don't need to be convinced because I definitely do some language related tasks without using my normal, chatty inner monologue. For example, when I try to speak Japanese via an English inner monologue, it's extremely slow. To be fluent I need to just go straight to Japanese, preferably without thinking at all.
I dunno how it worked, but I went much of my childhood without an inner voice. Didn’t seem to hinder me at all.
One day I played around with imagining my thoughts as a voice in my head. Kept it up for a few more days. When I tried to stop, found I couldn’t, not entirely. Had one ever since.
I still wouldn’t say my inner voice forms my words for speech or much of my writing, even now. If I consider what I might say ahead of time, yes, if I’m just talking, no. And of course if I think about it (as I am now) then it gets more involved in that process.
Im aphantastic to some extent and lack inner voice except for certain situations where there is a semblance of inner voice. Im learning for the first time about anauralia and am intrigued, seems I do to some extend have this. I'm just curious, do you present no inner voice whatsoever or do you have the occasional inner voice in some cases, when for example you attempt to collect some information when getting ready to write down something or in a very stressful situation you need to enumerate some steps to get out of it, etc...
Not sure if it applies to me, i do have an inner voice, but it's way too slow for my thoughts. Never know how to explain it, but even though i am quick with finding the right words, it's so much slower than my thoughts. But i guess that's normal, so then, most people that have an inner voice, still don't use it for their thinking. It comes afterwards, at least that's how it seems to me.
I use my inner voice when I'm reading or trying to construct sentences, but I don't think in sentences. I have to convert my thoughts to words so I'm an extremely slow and clumsy talker. I thought this was normal to be honest, but others have sworn to me that they think in sentences and I wonder if that's why some people are such brilliant speakers since for some thoughts and speech are linked instead of being two separate processes.
I just can't really believe people with that. But i just asked 3 more people and they sworn the same as yours. Sure, language had an enormous impact on human intelligence and "thinking capability", but structured and complex language has evolved much later than clever and intelligent thinking was important for humans.
I feel very often like the need of having the right words to describe thoughts to fellow humans is on one hand crafting reality at the same time it's holding it, and therefore all of us, back.
Maybe this way of thinking is more what people understand as intuition?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
I pretty much share the same capacities which you’ve described. Regarding the last part, about the inner voice not defaulting to verbal projections, when I reflect about what form such pattern takes, I can only interpret it as sort of “semantic impulses”. Explaining: we know very well the feeling of hunger (impulse to eat), but we can’t emulate it at will, because it’s tied to physiological state. The scope of impulses, however, is much broader than those extreme feelings, such as sadness, happiness, etc. There’s an infinite number of feelings, and new ones are created upon experiencing novel situations, and they’re unique to you. Those finer feelings, differently from the physiologically-bounded ones, you can summon upon recalling mental imagery which are anchored with the feelings and thus able to trigger them. Most people know cringe, nostalgia, etc, which comes when recalling past events; those, again are very crude and broad impulses. If we make an analogy with colors, strong (common) feelings are like primary hues, sitting at the extremes of luminance and saturation. Finer feelings are everything else and all the possible mixtures/overlays. Thus, I can conceive my mind to be a multidimensional canvas, and as the painter I can mix and match whatever colors I have at my disposal to conjure a complex sensation which progresses over time, and that I can make use of to manifest ideas, arguments, scenes, whatever I like. In this context, there’s absolutely no active verbalization (perhaps I need to repeat some phrase mentally to invoke the color I want, but this is just for the lookup process, what I am interested in is the yield, i.e what it will trigger). Then, when I’m satisfied with the general piece, and since it’s so unstable by nature, the finishing process involves piecing together the words which will index it. If it’s something of material use in the physical reality then it becomes a note. Of course I could use any other kind of graphics as the index, it’s just that language provides all these shared, easy to remember, stereo (picture and sound), malleable, composable symbols called the alphabet. It’s the most basic yet the most powerful tool we have at our disposal. The cool thing is that all of the experience of crafting these mental pieces has also increased my repertoire/palette, beyond the final product. Sort like all products can also be ingredients, or phrased differently: ending points become starting points for new explorations.
> "The volume is the same because you can't change the volume of the voice in your head, only the tone and pitch."
Huh? That's not true at all, I shouted "I like crickets" in my head so loudly I told myself to stop shouting it's giving me a headache. I said this sentence in my head too, of course.
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.
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.
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.
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 27 up to 29 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.
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)
Yes... basically. Dialogue. Audible-like dialogue. Back and forth. Difference of opinion. exactly that,
> Does your inner voice have autonomy, does it want things separate from what "you" want?
...Almost. I'm aware that it's all me. All my voice. By nature of dialogue, I cn sometimes feel like there's a "me" and a "voice" sometimes. But, it's quite fluid. Which one is which can reverse. I also try to use "me" or "I" instead of "you" or "we." Feels more sane... to me.
Just imagine a person having a conversation or debate with themselves out loud. It's similar to that.
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.
Yes, I too can sing in my mind, but also I can hear the music. So sometimes, I sing a song in my head and it sounds great! But then I try to sing in real life, and since there's no music it's just my voice, and it doesn't sound that great.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
I don't have an internal dialogue, but I do have imaginary conversations and I compose blog posts, thread comments (like this one) and emails in my head quite a lot.
But speaking to myself as a separate voice? It only happens when I'm high. Really. I only discovered that a few years ago when marijuana became legal in California. I was worried at first that I was having some sort of mental break, because I'm really not used to having two separate voices like that talking to each other. Then I looked it up and realized that many (most?) people have some sort of inner dialogue. Thank goodness. I truly thought I was losing my mind. I wonder what it is about THC which causes that effect in my brain? Also, I don't drink - I wonder if many people have a voice because they're commonly imbibing, even a little.
I would guess my lack of inner voice is why I tend to blurt out what I'm thinking way more than other people. And I'm not one to engage in conversations in a contemplative way. I realize now that many people I've talked to who seem like they're speaking carefully are actually having a whole other voice in their head making observations, etc.
It’s happened to me a few times lately that I’ve heard music playing that was as vivid as a recording. As soon as I became aware of the fact that it was playing in my head and not in reality it stopped. I can’t make it start at will. I’d love to hear of other people’s experiences with this.
It's interesting that the paper mentions Andy Clark's work and hallucinations in separate threads but doesn't connect Anil Seth's introduction of controlled hallucinations and Andy Clark's work on that topic:
I had always conceived of metacognition as genetic, given my own phenomenological experience dating to childhood. It wasn't until a colleague challenged this idea a few years ago at Carnegie Mellon that I'd even considered that metacognition may be taught and learned.
which makes sense, because this Anil Seth guy sounds really aloof and seems to have no problem making grandiose statements. Reads like a tabloid that's desperately trying to keep your attention by saying big things.
It's interesting to me how all of the comments are about the title, but nothing (absolutely nothing) about the actual post linked; which is fair, plato stanford articles are dense philosophical essays, not really suited for the layperson.
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[ 7.6 ms ] story [ 325 ms ] threadhttps://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?
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.
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?
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".
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.
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.
Actually now that I think about it, I do know that this is a well-known phenomenon in the chess world. Newcomers are unable to to play blind-chess. But experienced players say that they gradually learned how to do it. How it started as a really blurry picture of just a small part of the board, and how they gradually got better at remembering and visualizing the whole board at the same and were able to play full games with a blindfold.
Come to think of it, Chinese does that too: 'forest' is '森林'.
"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).
I do think though that I verbalize less than other (maybe most) people.
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?
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.
I used to do this, but I stopped at some point.
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.
[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")
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.
Do people actually close their eyes and hallucinate or am I reading way to far into this?
In these exchanges the language typically gets sloppy and one person's "see" gets translated and reacted to as whoa, with their eyes?.
If you can imagine a red car and see it in your mind's eye (fairly ephemeral, especially if you force it, and nothing like as vivid as a hallucination) I think you're pretty normal from having followed a few of these threads over the years.
I know the distinction both from comparing with dreams, where I do see, and with a single experience during meditation (which I've tried many times but so far failed to replicate). They're nothing alike what it is to "imagine" for me.
It's not vivid like a dream though, and doesn't have that 1st-personness either.
Only 2-4% or so see nothing at all.
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.
I wonder if there's a link between engineering skills and aphantasia, given the prevalence of the "programmer art" meme?
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
I think people with an inner voice don't notice their 'random' memories as much because they don't fit the narrative. Like confirmation bias, the bits that don't fit get filtered out, yet visual narratives are more flexible than that.
When you dream, it's like a montage, right? Do you hear sound at all? The dream still makes sense when you're in it though. How is waking reality any different in that regard?
And yes, I am being pedantic with a philosophy I do not even endorse nor fully understand, just wanted to be a contrarian.
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.
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
yeah; doesn't that basically mean you have to have "inner speech"?
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.
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.
Can you elaborate why you think it doesn't, instead of writing single sentence replies?
And anyway, why would that make any more sense? How would you plan the internal voice in order to produce it? An inner-inner-voice? That would need an inner-inner-inner voice?
It sounds like you have the homunculus idea of how human brain works. But this idea is nonsensical...
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.
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
[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.]
Also I can read text and completely miss rhymes unless the formatting draws attention to it like how poetry is often written with lines split. (More likely to miss rhymes like half and graph where the word endings visually are different.)
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)
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.
1) I have to be very explicit when reading with an inner voice (which goes to your second point). Generally, it is a kind of recognition that a word has a meaning and I "feel" that meaning, if that makes sense?
2) Yes. It feels unnatural though.
For example, hooking up jumper cables. I suppose I could hook them up without an inner dialog.
But then at any point if I get confused or remember that dangerous things can happen, I can go back and compare against a list in my head of the steps to hook them up. E.g., don't let clamps touch, start with the dead battery, positive first, crank and rev the working car, etc.
How can you get the same type of sanity check without an inner dialog? Do you memorize an ordered sequence of "feels" that correspond to the steps?
For really difficult mental tasks, I'll actually talk to myself or write things down so that they are less chaotic since the feelings/impulses in my brain may not line up. Kind of like a buffer filling up.
Now what really bothers my wife is when we talk about how we have conversations with others. I don't necessarily think about what I'm going to say verbatim when I'm talking to someone. It's impulses like I mention above where things kind of "flash" into my brain the moment before I say it. The best way that I can think of it is that it's similar to playing a sport where you have moments to change your trajectory and movement to accomplish what you want. I know thematically what I want to say, but I don't actually build the sentence in my brain.
Hope that helps!
If I had to speculate I'd say a lot of people have the experience of both this and the inner voice, depending on context.
It doe make me wonder: are people who can't spontaneously "surf" sentences in realtime and instead rely wholly on an inner voice? :)
Edit: I've noticed that reflecting on this kind of stuff can wreak havoc on young musicians. I remember a colleague who learned the Grieg concerto but was having a small number of wrong notes (say, 5% or so) creep into various sections of the piece, seemingly at random. The teacher started to drill down on each section, having the student write down which finger plays what, subdivide tricky rhythms, and so forth.
What was wild was that each time the teacher asked the student to notate the chord at the point where a mistake occurred, this would generate a cascade of more mistakes. She'd essentially been playing mostly by feel without thinking about the harmony at all. The added anxiety about harmony increased her error rate for relying on feel; pretty soon she wasn't able to make it through the piece. They then went back methodically through the entire thing, having her notate each and every harmony and describe how each one relates to the next, which were primary vs. ancillary, and so forth. Only then could she play the entire piece with precision.
So sometimes to get from 95% to 100% you have to go back down to zero!
If I'm reading something very very difficult, like a research paper in a field I'm only just getting my feet wet in, I will actually vocalize what I'm reading to help me figure out what I need to look up. But this is only when I'm confused.
To answer your question further down about sanity checking, I just know what know, so a sanity check involves me verifying that yes, indeed, black is the minus terminal on both batteries and red is the positive terminal on both batteries, that is my visual memory is correct. That said, a lot of people have remarked that I'm pretty deft in my actions. So maybe it's related?
It's hard for me to generalize about my experience as it seems very natural to me and I haven't really had a lot of exposure to others like me, so I don't know what parts are necessarily about me being me, and which are about me not having mental imagery(for lack of a better term). I get the feeling that an innervoice is kinda stressful though? I'm a very relaxed person by nature. The concept of "negative self talk" is completely alien to my brain.
For me, yes... when I'm thinking about words (spoken or written) I think in those words but otherwise not.
One day I played around with imagining my thoughts as a voice in my head. Kept it up for a few more days. When I tried to stop, found I couldn’t, not entirely. Had one ever since.
I still wouldn’t say my inner voice forms my words for speech or much of my writing, even now. If I consider what I might say ahead of time, yes, if I’m just talking, no. And of course if I think about it (as I am now) then it gets more involved in that process.
Which I'm sure someone will link to :-)
I use my inner voice when I'm reading or trying to construct sentences, but I don't think in sentences. I have to convert my thoughts to words so I'm an extremely slow and clumsy talker. I thought this was normal to be honest, but others have sworn to me that they think in sentences and I wonder if that's why some people are such brilliant speakers since for some thoughts and speech are linked instead of being two separate processes.
I feel very often like the need of having the right words to describe thoughts to fellow humans is on one hand crafting reality at the same time it's holding it, and therefore all of us, back.
Maybe this way of thinking is more what people understand as intuition?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?
I also have aphantasia, so it's not words on a screen, it's literally me talking to myself in an internal dialogue.
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.
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.
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.
Huh? That's not true at all, I shouted "I like crickets" in my head so loudly I told myself to stop shouting it's giving me a headache. I said this sentence in my head too, of course.
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.
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.
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 27 up to 29 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.
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)
> Does your inner voice have autonomy, does it want things separate from what "you" want?
...Almost. I'm aware that it's all me. All my voice. By nature of dialogue, I cn sometimes feel like there's a "me" and a "voice" sometimes. But, it's quite fluid. Which one is which can reverse. I also try to use "me" or "I" instead of "you" or "we." Feels more sane... to me.
Just imagine a person having a conversation or debate with themselves out loud. It's similar to that.
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.
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.
The question is: is inner voice just some sort of echo or a necessary part of thought.
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.
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...
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).
It's clear to me that the main ideas come non-verbally first, and then I translate into words.
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.
if you read a comment saying it has no inner voice, remember...
GPT is active on HN, too. ;)
But speaking to myself as a separate voice? It only happens when I'm high. Really. I only discovered that a few years ago when marijuana became legal in California. I was worried at first that I was having some sort of mental break, because I'm really not used to having two separate voices like that talking to each other. Then I looked it up and realized that many (most?) people have some sort of inner dialogue. Thank goodness. I truly thought I was losing my mind. I wonder what it is about THC which causes that effect in my brain? Also, I don't drink - I wonder if many people have a voice because they're commonly imbibing, even a little.
I would guess my lack of inner voice is why I tend to blurt out what I'm thinking way more than other people. And I'm not one to engage in conversations in a contemplative way. I realize now that many people I've talked to who seem like they're speaking carefully are actually having a whole other voice in their head making observations, etc.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/08/25/1032121/brains-c...
I had always conceived of metacognition as genetic, given my own phenomenological experience dating to childhood. It wasn't until a colleague challenged this idea a few years ago at Carnegie Mellon that I'd even considered that metacognition may be taught and learned.