3 ms·

I find it fascinating to try to elucidate what exactly that "inner voice" we hear is, and why we consider it less of a hallucination than other "hallucinatory"

by themgt 11y ago

I find it fascinating to try to elucidate what exactly that "inner voice" we hear is, and why we consider it less of a hallucination than other "hallucinatory" voices. Because "I" control it? But then who is the I? Related to meditation/mindfulness, I like to try to "get in front of" the inner voice. If I control it, I should be able to know what words it will use before it "speaks" them, right? I find if direct my attention to my inner voice, I can begin to sense the ideas and words just before they're internally spoken, but that attention tends to disrupt the normal monkey-mind rambling of words, or to cause me to switch to a more internal/less linear and concrete/more wordless mode of thought. But in the end, other than what seems a relatively illusory sense of "control" over "the" voice, I'm not sure I understand the supposed difference between our internal monologue and "hearing voices", beyond the stigma or negativity of it (but doesn't most people's internal monologue get pretty negative sometimes?)

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- themgt 11y ago
  It's actually addressed in the paper; that's a real oversimplification of what people "hearing voices" are actually experiencing. Listening to people talk about their voices, one is struck by the variety of the human voice-hearing experience. People experience many phenomena (Tuttle, 1902). They hear scratching and whispering and murmurs loud enough to hear but too indistinct to under-stand. They hear noise that resolves into voices, so that words seem to slough off cars as they pass. They are sometimes clear and precise about exactly what they hear and some-times frustratingly vague. They report voices they clearly identify as external and voices they hear in their heads but do not experience as their own thoughts and thoughts and images that seem neither internal nor external but feel somehow impressed upon their awareness from outside. They talk about recognizing a single voice that seems to come out of more than one person, and about real people who say things they hear, but are not the words those people spoke. (“I know you are not speaking words of sex,” one man said, “but when you speak, words of sex are what I hear.”) In each of our settings, people reported this broad range of phenomena.
  - tbrownaw 11y ago
    Huh. Some of that sounds a bit like those "deep dream" pictures from that neural network Google was experimenting with.

by themgt 11y ago

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

themgt 11y ago
It's actually addressed in the paper; that's a real oversimplification of what people "hearing voices" are actually experiencing. Listening to people talk about their voices, one is struck by the variety of the human voice-hearing experience. People experience many phenomena (Tuttle, 1902). They hear scratching and whispering and murmurs loud enough to hear but too indistinct to under-stand. They hear noise that resolves into voices, so that words seem to slough off cars as they pass. They are sometimes clear and precise about exactly what they hear and some-times frustratingly vague. They report voices they clearly identify as external and voices they hear in their heads but do not experience as their own thoughts and thoughts and images that seem neither internal nor external but feel somehow impressed upon their awareness from outside. They talk about recognizing a single voice that seems to come out of more than one person, and about real people who say things they hear, but are not the words those people spoke. (“I know you are not speaking words of sex,” one man said, “but when you speak, words of sex are what I hear.”) In each of our settings, people reported this broad range of phenomena.
- tbrownaw 11y ago
  Huh. Some of that sounds a bit like those "deep dream" pictures from that neural network Google was experimenting with.