8 ms·

If you think this is interesting, definitely read "Generalizing From One Example" at Less Wrong [1]. Turns out that people have varying degrees of ability to

If you think this is interesting, definitely read "Generalizing From One Example" at Less Wrong [1]. Turns out that people have varying degrees of ability to mentally imagine things, where the range seems to be from "purely abstract" to "number of stripes on a tiger". Also; Feynman noted that people keep track of time in very different ways[2], either visual (imagining a clock) or symbolic (counting by talking to yourself inside your head). And that whole internal monologue thing? Turns out that some people report not having that... If anyone has more examples, please add them. This stuff is endlessly fascinating :) [1]http://lesswrong.com/lw/dr/generalizing_from_one_example/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/dr/generalizing_from_one_example/ [2]http://generallythinking.com/richard-feynman-on-thinking-processes-did-he-know-nothing-about-psychology-v/ http://generallythinking.com/richard-feynman-on-thinking-pro...

xyzzyz 11y ago
I lost the internal monologue during puberty. It was initially pretty scary when I noticed that -- it though I'm ceasing to exist, and in a few years the "me" will be gone from my shell, while everyone else around me will be none the wiser. Fortunately, it did not happen (yet). I think the way it happened was that as I read lots of books, I realized I need to stop processing consciously every word if I want to read faster. Additionally, I started to spend lots of time interacting with English language (which is not my native), and I was sometimes thinking in English before I stopped thinking in words altogether. I developed a speech impediment because of that: whenever I need to speak, I need to synchronize my mental state with the words coming from my mouth, which requires a little effort.
- shams93 11y ago
  Yeah if I read aloud "in my head" my reading speed is like 50% of what it is if I don't do that. But for fiction and poetry its fun to "hear" the words in my head so for literature I definitely read differently than when I read for information or training.
- landtuna 11y ago
  I share your experience (lacking any inner voice), except when I'm staging words to be spoken (or written as a conversation). I'm a native English speaker, and I never remember having an inner voice. Until reading a page linked here, I had thought I had mental imagery, but it sounds like I don't have that as others do, either.
frikk 11y ago
Ever since I was a kid, there are some things that, when I mentally picture them, have associated colors bound to them. Days of the week are pretty clear for me. Monday is red, Tuesday and Thursday are green. Wednesday is a light blue, Friday is red (feels a bit warmer, maybe slightly orange than Monday). Saturday is yellow, Sunday is black (I always associated Sunday with church, and either dread of going or formal wear). I do this with other things too but days of the week are the most obvious and have been with me my whole life (I'm 30 now). Oh, I guess I do the inner monologue when estimating time. Something like "Lets see... is it 8 minutes? No that's too fast. 12 minutes? Maybe. Let's go with 11". Didn't even consider it as part of the process until your comment.
- gh02t 11y ago
  Sounds like synesthesia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synesthesia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synesthesia ). People with synesthesia tend to associate colors with numbers or similar. Often it's extremely specific colors, like "deep electric purple with sparkles" for 125. These colors can be consistently identified and described across multiple tests, suggesting that the person actually maintains a consistent inner representation of numbers in terms of color. Associating colors with days of the week is another well known example, described in the book "Wednesday is Indigo Blue" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wednesday_Is_Indigo_Blue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wednesday_Is_Indigo_Blue ). You might find it interesting. I only know about this because I had a friend in middle school who was a synesthete. We thought he was making it up until we gave him a list of (long) random numbers to describe the colors of. We then mixed up the order and gave them to him a week later and he provided consistent descriptions. It was pretty cool actually, I've always been a bit envious.
  - frikk 11y ago
    Yeah, that's fascinating. I didn't realize there was a name, or even that the colors and days of the week is a thing that other people experience. How weird is it that my Wednesday is blue too? Thanks for sharing, I've got some reading to do.
- Starwatcher2001 11y ago
jessriedel 11y ago
I take the claimed difference that are based purely on self report with a grain of salt. ("No, I can really see the tiger"....) Even when some people are better at recalling details of a visual scene, there are lots of confounding factors. Do they really have qualitatively different subjective experiences, or just worse memory over all? Or difficulty concentrating? Hard to disentangle these, or even know for sure if they are distinct things. However, I found Feynman's example very compelling, where the self-report (visual vs. auditory counting) matched up with how visual or auditory side tasks interfered with time keeping.
rakk 11y ago
I have this with numbers (and consequently arithmetic). When I think of a number, in my mind I see its position in a never ending, wavy line of numbers that goes from left bottom to top right. This 'ribbon' of numbers kinda scales logarithmically and I can 'adjust my view' to 'look at' higher/lower numbers. Now that I think of it, I mostly use/see this ribbon when adding or subtracting numbers, not when multiplying or dividing. Don't know if it's related but in one of my first classes as a kid (where we learned to count), we had some sort of banner on the wall that listed the number from 0 to 100. Maybe picked it up there.. Sometimes I also think this makes the more abstract math concepts harder for me to understand. If I can't visualize it, it won't stick (easily). Asked some friends how they saw numbers, and they don't have anything like that. Wondering how this is for other people.
- JonnieCache 11y ago
  This is called a number form: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_form https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_form
- flycaliguy 11y ago
  I can report a similar visual. Mine isn't wavy, it's straight line from bottom left to top right in which each unit has a sort of notch division. Aaaaand having to actually explain it seems to have completely messed the whole visual up. At this point I feel like I'm inventing a system based on childhood memories... It does stretch back to my childhood though. I have strong memories of visualizing numbers in class, even specific problems like when we were asked to add all the numbers from 1 to 100. A problem in which I mentally drew half circles from 99 to 1, 98 to 2 and so on. I solved it almost instantly and thinking back I'm a little disappointed my teacher didn't investigate this more and help me explore this skill.
- thedudemabry 11y ago
  Wow. This rung a bell for me. I wouldn't have known how to put it so concisely, but this is exactly how numbers automatically reveal themselves to me visually when I'm considering them. If only that extended to the size estimation part of my brain. I've gotten pretty okay at eyeballing kitchen measurements, but I'm completely useless at determining what will fit in the back of my car when shopping at Home Depot without a tape measure.
JonnieCache 11y ago
I don't generally hear an "audible" voice in my head, the thoughts just appear, as concepts, or at least as atomic words. I look at the words on the page and the shape of them manifests the meaning. I still kindof imagine speaking the word, but it's not like imagining any other sound. In contrast, I can imagine music very vividly, with different instruments and their timbres fully defined. It's very close to the sensation of hearing music, to the point where I sometimes have to stop myself from dancing to music that only I can hear, definitely not something to do in public! (The music never has lyrics btw. Even if I'm imagining a real song that has words, they just end up as wordless vocalizations.) The closer to being in the "flow" state I am, the less of an experience of inner speech I have. When I've been programming or doing music for an hour, I don't really think in words at all, the concepts just seem to flash past, going almost directly from the unconscious to motor actions. With art especially you don't have words for most of the things you're doing anyway, so how could you possibly think in a monologue? However when I need to think carefully about what I'm doing, when I need to use deductive logic or it's very important that I make absolutely no mistakes, I do veer more towards inner speech. The other major one is rehearsing possible social interactions, or having hypothetical conversations, which is something I actually do quite a lot of (I think it's quite common) and obviously that involves speech. Finally, at times of emotional stress or fear (but not panic), I'm forced into a consistent inner monologue. It's very similar to the way you can't deliberately give up conscious control of your breathing once you take hold of it, and I can easily see how it could be scary for some people. Sometimes it does feel like a step down the road towards madness, in comparison to my normal state. If I woke up one morning and was stuck like that, I would 100% be going to a psychiatrist. Don't get any of that stuff about being able to see numbers unfortunately. I have very poor imaging ability. I can't really see pictures in my head at all.
- drhayes9 11y ago
  Wow, this is word-for-word how my brain works. I don't hear words when I read and I tend not to see pictures in my head despite being a very spatial person. This is really neat! Thanks for articulating this! Whenever the book turns into a movie, my friends all say, "Yeah, that casting is exactly who I imagined." That just never happens to me. I don't have preconceived notions of what characters look like, even if I read their descriptions. But I'm very spatial and good with layouts and furniture. I keep thinking that because I'm spatial I should be visual but... not so much. EDIT: Oh, almost forgot! Despite all that, I'm great with faces. If we've met before I'm going to recognize you. But I'm embarrassingly bad at names, forgetting them almost instantly if I don't concentrate for a long time. On the other side of things I've got great relative pitch. If I can get the first note on the piano I can pretty much just play the rest of the melody. And, same thing, music is pretty finely textured for me when I concentrate.
oxplot 11y ago
Until today, I didn't know one could read a text without the internal monologue voicing it as well. I certainly can't. It also seems to explain why I'm a slow reader and why I tend to retain with precision, text that I've only read once. Definitely helps with understanding tech specs and manuals. And also why I dislike reading fiction because I find the language too verbose and inefficient. But I don't actually hear a voice when reading and hence no detectable accents or tone. However, if I try to remember a line from a movie or a visual, like a scene, I can actually hear and see it, as if temporarily my brain routes my memories through my visual and auditory path, and sometimes it's unsettling even though I'm expecting it. As for the visual, I seem to have two distinct sense of vision, one from my eyes, and the other one that is so called the "mind's eye". For me, it lacks color and even shades. As for remembering things, I can instantly tell a movie by a single frame of it even if I've watched it once and I'm yet to come across someone who can do that.
- xenadu02 11y ago
  I have the internal voice while reading but I also read faster than almost everyone I know. The "voice" is disembodied and doesn't "sound" like anyone I know. It doesn't sound like VoiceOver at high speed, but the sensation is more like my brain is fast-forwarding time so the voice and the understanding of the words are happening at an accelerated rate. I recognize word shapes while reading but that doesn't seem to affect the voice. If the real sound of the word differs from what I thought it was when I first learned the word it is extremely difficult to change the internal voice and consequently how I pronounce the word. My internal thoughts also seem to be expressed this way, though not necessarily all the time. Doubts or alternate viewpoints are often alternate voices and I can "hear" the arguments.
- lucaspiller 11y ago
  > why I'm a slow reader I can glance over text quite quickly to understand what it's saying, but can only "read" it is as fast as the voice can talk. Typing prose is the same, even if I type text without looking at the screen the voice still speaks to me and I can only type as fast as it speaks.
  - 11y ago
zyxley 11y ago
I have no internal monologue unless I'm internally assembling bits of language for speech or writing (for example, putting my thoughts together for this sentence). If I get into a deep "flow state" while writing, or I'm in casual conversation with someone I'm comfortable with, that too goes away. If I try to mentally visualize something I'm not looking at, even if I'm very familiar with it, it's usually impressionistic at best - rough outlines and swaths of color.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
Smaug123 11y ago
Likewise "What Universal Human Experiences are you Missing Without Realizing it?" from SlateStarCodex. http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/17/what-universal-human-experiences-are-you-missing-without-realizing-it/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/17/what-universal-human-ex...
- onion2k 11y ago
  Pedantically, I would contend that anything some people are missing out on fails the test for being a "universal experience", because it's not universal unless everyone has it, so the answer to the title of that post is "nothing".
  - noelwelsh 11y ago
    And I would contend you do not experience humour. Update: apologies if this came off as rude. One theory of humour is that comes about from a benign violation of expectations, known as the "benign violation theory"[1]. Using this model one can see the title as humourous. [1]: http://humorresearchlab.org/ http://humorresearchlab.org/
    - onion2k 11y ago
      Rude? I thought you were joking.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
_bdog 11y ago
When I'm thinking about how somebody feels, an image about that person assuming a particular bodily posture, comes up.

xyzzyz 11y ago

I lost the internal monologue during puberty. It was initially pretty scary when I noticed that -- it though I'm ceasing to exist, and in a few years the "me" will be gone from my shell, while everyone else around me will be none the wiser. Fortunately, it did not happen (yet). I think the way it happened was that as I read lots of books, I realized I need to stop processing consciously every word if I want to read faster. Additionally, I started to spend lots of time interacting with English language (which is not my native), and I was sometimes thinking in English before I stopped thinking in words altogether. I developed a speech impediment because of that: whenever I need to speak, I need to synchronize my mental state with the words coming from my mouth, which requires a little effort.

shams93 11y ago
Yeah if I read aloud "in my head" my reading speed is like 50% of what it is if I don't do that. But for fiction and poetry its fun to "hear" the words in my head so for literature I definitely read differently than when I read for information or training.
landtuna 11y ago
I share your experience (lacking any inner voice), except when I'm staging words to be spoken (or written as a conversation). I'm a native English speaker, and I never remember having an inner voice. Until reading a page linked here, I had thought I had mental imagery, but it sounds like I don't have that as others do, either.

frikk 11y ago

Ever since I was a kid, there are some things that, when I mentally picture them, have associated colors bound to them. Days of the week are pretty clear for me. Monday is red, Tuesday and Thursday are green. Wednesday is a light blue, Friday is red (feels a bit warmer, maybe slightly orange than Monday). Saturday is yellow, Sunday is black (I always associated Sunday with church, and either dread of going or formal wear). I do this with other things too but days of the week are the most obvious and have been with me my whole life (I'm 30 now). Oh, I guess I do the inner monologue when estimating time. Something like "Lets see... is it 8 minutes? No that's too fast. 12 minutes? Maybe. Let's go with 11". Didn't even consider it as part of the process until your comment.

gh02t 11y ago
Sounds like synesthesia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synesthesia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synesthesia ). People with synesthesia tend to associate colors with numbers or similar. Often it's extremely specific colors, like "deep electric purple with sparkles" for 125. These colors can be consistently identified and described across multiple tests, suggesting that the person actually maintains a consistent inner representation of numbers in terms of color. Associating colors with days of the week is another well known example, described in the book "Wednesday is Indigo Blue" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wednesday_Is_Indigo_Blue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wednesday_Is_Indigo_Blue ). You might find it interesting. I only know about this because I had a friend in middle school who was a synesthete. We thought he was making it up until we gave him a list of (long) random numbers to describe the colors of. We then mixed up the order and gave them to him a week later and he provided consistent descriptions. It was pretty cool actually, I've always been a bit envious.
- frikk 11y ago
  Yeah, that's fascinating. I didn't realize there was a name, or even that the colors and days of the week is a thing that other people experience. How weird is it that my Wednesday is blue too? Thanks for sharing, I've got some reading to do.
Starwatcher2001 11y ago

jessriedel 11y ago

I take the claimed difference that are based purely on self report with a grain of salt. ("No, I can really see the tiger"....) Even when some people are better at recalling details of a visual scene, there are lots of confounding factors. Do they really have qualitatively different subjective experiences, or just worse memory over all? Or difficulty concentrating? Hard to disentangle these, or even know for sure if they are distinct things. However, I found Feynman's example very compelling, where the self-report (visual vs. auditory counting) matched up with how visual or auditory side tasks interfered with time keeping.

rakk 11y ago

I have this with numbers (and consequently arithmetic). When I think of a number, in my mind I see its position in a never ending, wavy line of numbers that goes from left bottom to top right. This 'ribbon' of numbers kinda scales logarithmically and I can 'adjust my view' to 'look at' higher/lower numbers. Now that I think of it, I mostly use/see this ribbon when adding or subtracting numbers, not when multiplying or dividing. Don't know if it's related but in one of my first classes as a kid (where we learned to count), we had some sort of banner on the wall that listed the number from 0 to 100. Maybe picked it up there.. Sometimes I also think this makes the more abstract math concepts harder for me to understand. If I can't visualize it, it won't stick (easily). Asked some friends how they saw numbers, and they don't have anything like that. Wondering how this is for other people.

JonnieCache 11y ago
This is called a number form: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_form https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_form
flycaliguy 11y ago
I can report a similar visual. Mine isn't wavy, it's straight line from bottom left to top right in which each unit has a sort of notch division. Aaaaand having to actually explain it seems to have completely messed the whole visual up. At this point I feel like I'm inventing a system based on childhood memories... It does stretch back to my childhood though. I have strong memories of visualizing numbers in class, even specific problems like when we were asked to add all the numbers from 1 to 100. A problem in which I mentally drew half circles from 99 to 1, 98 to 2 and so on. I solved it almost instantly and thinking back I'm a little disappointed my teacher didn't investigate this more and help me explore this skill.
thedudemabry 11y ago
Wow. This rung a bell for me. I wouldn't have known how to put it so concisely, but this is exactly how numbers automatically reveal themselves to me visually when I'm considering them. If only that extended to the size estimation part of my brain. I've gotten pretty okay at eyeballing kitchen measurements, but I'm completely useless at determining what will fit in the back of my car when shopping at Home Depot without a tape measure.

JonnieCache 11y ago

I don't generally hear an "audible" voice in my head, the thoughts just appear, as concepts, or at least as atomic words. I look at the words on the page and the shape of them manifests the meaning. I still kindof imagine speaking the word, but it's not like imagining any other sound. In contrast, I can imagine music very vividly, with different instruments and their timbres fully defined. It's very close to the sensation of hearing music, to the point where I sometimes have to stop myself from dancing to music that only I can hear, definitely not something to do in public! (The music never has lyrics btw. Even if I'm imagining a real song that has words, they just end up as wordless vocalizations.) The closer to being in the "flow" state I am, the less of an experience of inner speech I have. When I've been programming or doing music for an hour, I don't really think in words at all, the concepts just seem to flash past, going almost directly from the unconscious to motor actions. With art especially you don't have words for most of the things you're doing anyway, so how could you possibly think in a monologue? However when I need to think carefully about what I'm doing, when I need to use deductive logic or it's very important that I make absolutely no mistakes, I do veer more towards inner speech. The other major one is rehearsing possible social interactions, or having hypothetical conversations, which is something I actually do quite a lot of (I think it's quite common) and obviously that involves speech. Finally, at times of emotional stress or fear (but not panic), I'm forced into a consistent inner monologue. It's very similar to the way you can't deliberately give up conscious control of your breathing once you take hold of it, and I can easily see how it could be scary for some people. Sometimes it does feel like a step down the road towards madness, in comparison to my normal state. If I woke up one morning and was stuck like that, I would 100% be going to a psychiatrist. Don't get any of that stuff about being able to see numbers unfortunately. I have very poor imaging ability. I can't really see pictures in my head at all.

drhayes9 11y ago
Wow, this is word-for-word how my brain works. I don't hear words when I read and I tend not to see pictures in my head despite being a very spatial person. This is really neat! Thanks for articulating this! Whenever the book turns into a movie, my friends all say, "Yeah, that casting is exactly who I imagined." That just never happens to me. I don't have preconceived notions of what characters look like, even if I read their descriptions. But I'm very spatial and good with layouts and furniture. I keep thinking that because I'm spatial I should be visual but... not so much. EDIT: Oh, almost forgot! Despite all that, I'm great with faces. If we've met before I'm going to recognize you. But I'm embarrassingly bad at names, forgetting them almost instantly if I don't concentrate for a long time. On the other side of things I've got great relative pitch. If I can get the first note on the piano I can pretty much just play the rest of the melody. And, same thing, music is pretty finely textured for me when I concentrate.

oxplot 11y ago

Until today, I didn't know one could read a text without the internal monologue voicing it as well. I certainly can't. It also seems to explain why I'm a slow reader and why I tend to retain with precision, text that I've only read once. Definitely helps with understanding tech specs and manuals. And also why I dislike reading fiction because I find the language too verbose and inefficient. But I don't actually hear a voice when reading and hence no detectable accents or tone. However, if I try to remember a line from a movie or a visual, like a scene, I can actually hear and see it, as if temporarily my brain routes my memories through my visual and auditory path, and sometimes it's unsettling even though I'm expecting it. As for the visual, I seem to have two distinct sense of vision, one from my eyes, and the other one that is so called the "mind's eye". For me, it lacks color and even shades. As for remembering things, I can instantly tell a movie by a single frame of it even if I've watched it once and I'm yet to come across someone who can do that.

xenadu02 11y ago
I have the internal voice while reading but I also read faster than almost everyone I know. The "voice" is disembodied and doesn't "sound" like anyone I know. It doesn't sound like VoiceOver at high speed, but the sensation is more like my brain is fast-forwarding time so the voice and the understanding of the words are happening at an accelerated rate. I recognize word shapes while reading but that doesn't seem to affect the voice. If the real sound of the word differs from what I thought it was when I first learned the word it is extremely difficult to change the internal voice and consequently how I pronounce the word. My internal thoughts also seem to be expressed this way, though not necessarily all the time. Doubts or alternate viewpoints are often alternate voices and I can "hear" the arguments.
lucaspiller 11y ago
> why I'm a slow reader I can glance over text quite quickly to understand what it's saying, but can only "read" it is as fast as the voice can talk. Typing prose is the same, even if I type text without looking at the screen the voice still speaks to me and I can only type as fast as it speaks.
- 11y ago

zyxley 11y ago

I have no internal monologue unless I'm internally assembling bits of language for speech or writing (for example, putting my thoughts together for this sentence). If I get into a deep "flow state" while writing, or I'm in casual conversation with someone I'm comfortable with, that too goes away. If I try to mentally visualize something I'm not looking at, even if I'm very familiar with it, it's usually impressionistic at best - rough outlines and swaths of color.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

Smaug123 11y ago

Likewise "What Universal Human Experiences are you Missing Without Realizing it?" from SlateStarCodex. http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/17/what-universal-human-experiences-are-you-missing-without-realizing-it/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/17/what-universal-human-ex...

onion2k 11y ago
Pedantically, I would contend that anything some people are missing out on fails the test for being a "universal experience", because it's not universal unless everyone has it, so the answer to the title of that post is "nothing".
- noelwelsh 11y ago
  And I would contend you do not experience humour. Update: apologies if this came off as rude. One theory of humour is that comes about from a benign violation of expectations, known as the "benign violation theory"[1]. Using this model one can see the title as humourous. [1]: http://humorresearchlab.org/ http://humorresearchlab.org/
  - onion2k 11y ago
    Rude? I thought you were joking.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]

_bdog 11y ago

When I'm thinking about how somebody feels, an image about that person assuming a particular bodily posture, comes up.