5 ms·

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 th

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.
- yetihehe 11y ago
  For me, it's the same, but I don't have memory for faces and my pitch is not that good, but I had no problem playing piano. I'm good at navigating with maps, but can't remember them easily, and I have a thing which is stereotypical for women: I can't remember which side is left and which is right, I mean calling them or parsing from a word which hand is which. I can show with hand on which side something is, but calling this side by name requires concentration.
  - lfowles 11y ago
    > For me, it's the same, but I don't have memory for faces This is something that has always concerned me in general. I was worried for the first year I dated my now-wife that I would not be able to recognize her when meeting her at a crowded place. I wouldn't go so far as to say she would turn around and I couldn't recognize her, but the permanence just wasn't there.
    - alsetmusic 11y ago
      For the first couple of months of my most recent relationship I would meet my partner at the train station. I was always worried that I wouldn't recognize her in the crowd and she would somehow know. I also can't recall a person's name moments after I hear it. But I can do many other mental gymnastics that surprise my friends and family.
      - lfowles 11y ago
        Thinking about it further it only affects one lookup direction. Name -> Face is incredibly difficult for me, but Face -> Name is a lot easier (and really the reason I didn't need to worry as much as I did).
nikdaheratik 11y ago
For me, I think it depends on how closely I care about the words or (for fiction at least) whether the scene is people talking or a description of the area or some action. With dialog, or a narrator's voice, I often imagine them speaking it or provide a voice for them in my own head. With action scenes, especially engrossing ones, I sort of just spend the extra mental energy trying to picture the scene rather than "hearing" the words. I have a very hard time paying attention to what the characters look like or are wearing. Usually imagine it briefly as it is being described and move on. Oddly enough, when I'm reading aloud, sometimes I sort of stop imagining what is going on as I'm too busy trying to sort out how to speak the dialog (especially in some different voices) that I no longer pay complete attention to the scene. For non-fiction, I generally spend more mental energy trying to visualize the concepts being described and stop "hearing" the words. Or if I'm merely skimming and want to get a sense of what is being said without the details. So I think a "voice" is something I can and do switch on and off depending on whether my brain thinks it is important and probably on the difficulty of the text itself.
- thedudemabry 11y ago
  I have a similar experience. When browsing articles and blog posts online, I definitely don't hear a voice unless the author uses a noticeable conversational tone in their writing. Especially if I'm familiar with the writer's speaking voice. In narrative fiction, I often hear the words spoken by distinct voices, though this too wanes as I focus on reading quickly or become tired.
- Abraln 11y ago
  I agree that the type of content is important. I personally experience reading as similar to a campfire story, hearing someone else describe a situation. My brain just isn't good at filling in the details of a scene. I am able to control the voice though. Reading textbooks became way more fun once I started reading them as documentaries narrated by Morgan Freeman! I have found the key is to read no faster than a person could speak the words, otherwise I just hear my own voice talking rapidly. I would guess this would be due to a lack of familiarity with the "templates" for the other voices talking quickly.
inatreecrown 11y ago
> 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! Why not?
- icebraining 11y ago
  Not everyone enjoys the attention it attracts.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
agumonkey 11y ago
When stuck in a procrastinating loop, I can almost feel the word bounce on my visual cortex. They're just packs of glyphs. Like a full queue, I have to carefully wait for more "room" occur and then swallow a few words, so on and so forth. And after a few runs likes this, all of a sudden my brain starts crunching again and I can run through a paragraph in logic-mode. It activates blood flow in deeper parts of my brain (a recent reduced cardio vascular capacity , "make me feel" where blood is going). It's also very emotionally linked. Whenever something valuable happens to me I don't struggle to get into the nice state.
madaxe_again 11y ago
Very similar here. With re: music, I find I can go to full blown auditory hallucinations with a quiet room and relaxation - one moment you're imagining the orchestra, the next you're hearing it - and when I say hearing I mean it - indistinguishable from being in the pit. The moment you pay too much attention it slips away, like trying to look at a floater in your eye. I have absolute pitch, if it's on any way relevant. For more reading on this topic I throughly recommend Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks.
- gkya 11y ago
  I experience similar musical phenomenon, I can even create new, complete songs in my imagination. Though I don't think I have absolute pitch, I play guitar and I can't play what I hear. Or maybe it's because of lack of training, IDK, but I'd really like to bump into some scientific information about this.
  - RUG3Y 11y ago
    I write music mentally all the time, it's incredibly frustrating that I can't transcribe or play anything close in the real world. I'm a guitarist also.
alfonsodev 11y ago
"The other major one is rehearsing possible social interactions, or having hypothetical conversations,..." This week I started to experiment writing dialogs to untangle complicated situations where I don't know where to start from. It helps me to overcome mental blocks, when the situation becomes overwhelming. One character is more logical, the other one is the one performing the actions. It's like a coach talking to a player. After a while coming back and forth fro the dialog and the code editor, I find myself in a deep flow, and then I don't need to write but I can "imagine" the conversation. I was wondering if dialogues have a special properties for driving thinking, then I remembered Plato the philosopher, he use to write his "Plato dialogues" although I never read them.
JabavuAdams 11y ago
Interesting. When reading, I have an internal monologue. I find it hard to hold a definite train of though when walking, though, because there's too much too see. So, I'll go for a walk to think about some algorithm, or whatnot, but can't really consciously thing through the algo because of all the visual input. The visual input does tend to drive visual or tactile thinking, but there are no words for this. In the past, I've resorted to speaking out loud to think through concepts, carefully. Somehow spoken (not subvocalized) words are more concrete (and limiting) they don't flap and fray in the wind of my mental music video.

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.

yetihehe 11y ago
For me, it's the same, but I don't have memory for faces and my pitch is not that good, but I had no problem playing piano. I'm good at navigating with maps, but can't remember them easily, and I have a thing which is stereotypical for women: I can't remember which side is left and which is right, I mean calling them or parsing from a word which hand is which. I can show with hand on which side something is, but calling this side by name requires concentration.
- lfowles 11y ago
  > For me, it's the same, but I don't have memory for faces This is something that has always concerned me in general. I was worried for the first year I dated my now-wife that I would not be able to recognize her when meeting her at a crowded place. I wouldn't go so far as to say she would turn around and I couldn't recognize her, but the permanence just wasn't there.
  - alsetmusic 11y ago
    For the first couple of months of my most recent relationship I would meet my partner at the train station. I was always worried that I wouldn't recognize her in the crowd and she would somehow know. I also can't recall a person's name moments after I hear it. But I can do many other mental gymnastics that surprise my friends and family.
    - lfowles 11y ago
      Thinking about it further it only affects one lookup direction. Name -> Face is incredibly difficult for me, but Face -> Name is a lot easier (and really the reason I didn't need to worry as much as I did).

nikdaheratik 11y ago

For me, I think it depends on how closely I care about the words or (for fiction at least) whether the scene is people talking or a description of the area or some action. With dialog, or a narrator's voice, I often imagine them speaking it or provide a voice for them in my own head. With action scenes, especially engrossing ones, I sort of just spend the extra mental energy trying to picture the scene rather than "hearing" the words. I have a very hard time paying attention to what the characters look like or are wearing. Usually imagine it briefly as it is being described and move on. Oddly enough, when I'm reading aloud, sometimes I sort of stop imagining what is going on as I'm too busy trying to sort out how to speak the dialog (especially in some different voices) that I no longer pay complete attention to the scene. For non-fiction, I generally spend more mental energy trying to visualize the concepts being described and stop "hearing" the words. Or if I'm merely skimming and want to get a sense of what is being said without the details. So I think a "voice" is something I can and do switch on and off depending on whether my brain thinks it is important and probably on the difficulty of the text itself.

thedudemabry 11y ago
I have a similar experience. When browsing articles and blog posts online, I definitely don't hear a voice unless the author uses a noticeable conversational tone in their writing. Especially if I'm familiar with the writer's speaking voice. In narrative fiction, I often hear the words spoken by distinct voices, though this too wanes as I focus on reading quickly or become tired.
Abraln 11y ago
I agree that the type of content is important. I personally experience reading as similar to a campfire story, hearing someone else describe a situation. My brain just isn't good at filling in the details of a scene. I am able to control the voice though. Reading textbooks became way more fun once I started reading them as documentaries narrated by Morgan Freeman! I have found the key is to read no faster than a person could speak the words, otherwise I just hear my own voice talking rapidly. I would guess this would be due to a lack of familiarity with the "templates" for the other voices talking quickly.

inatreecrown 11y ago

> 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! Why not?

icebraining 11y ago
Not everyone enjoys the attention it attracts.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]

agumonkey 11y ago

When stuck in a procrastinating loop, I can almost feel the word bounce on my visual cortex. They're just packs of glyphs. Like a full queue, I have to carefully wait for more "room" occur and then swallow a few words, so on and so forth. And after a few runs likes this, all of a sudden my brain starts crunching again and I can run through a paragraph in logic-mode. It activates blood flow in deeper parts of my brain (a recent reduced cardio vascular capacity , "make me feel" where blood is going). It's also very emotionally linked. Whenever something valuable happens to me I don't struggle to get into the nice state.

madaxe_again 11y ago

Very similar here. With re: music, I find I can go to full blown auditory hallucinations with a quiet room and relaxation - one moment you're imagining the orchestra, the next you're hearing it - and when I say hearing I mean it - indistinguishable from being in the pit. The moment you pay too much attention it slips away, like trying to look at a floater in your eye. I have absolute pitch, if it's on any way relevant. For more reading on this topic I throughly recommend Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks.

gkya 11y ago
I experience similar musical phenomenon, I can even create new, complete songs in my imagination. Though I don't think I have absolute pitch, I play guitar and I can't play what I hear. Or maybe it's because of lack of training, IDK, but I'd really like to bump into some scientific information about this.
- RUG3Y 11y ago
  I write music mentally all the time, it's incredibly frustrating that I can't transcribe or play anything close in the real world. I'm a guitarist also.

alfonsodev 11y ago

"The other major one is rehearsing possible social interactions, or having hypothetical conversations,..." This week I started to experiment writing dialogs to untangle complicated situations where I don't know where to start from. It helps me to overcome mental blocks, when the situation becomes overwhelming. One character is more logical, the other one is the one performing the actions. It's like a coach talking to a player. After a while coming back and forth fro the dialog and the code editor, I find myself in a deep flow, and then I don't need to write but I can "imagine" the conversation. I was wondering if dialogues have a special properties for driving thinking, then I remembered Plato the philosopher, he use to write his "Plato dialogues" although I never read them.

JabavuAdams 11y ago

Interesting. When reading, I have an internal monologue. I find it hard to hold a definite train of though when walking, though, because there's too much too see. So, I'll go for a walk to think about some algorithm, or whatnot, but can't really consciously thing through the algo because of all the visual input. The visual input does tend to drive visual or tactile thinking, but there are no words for this. In the past, I've resorted to speaking out loud to think through concepts, carefully. Somehow spoken (not subvocalized) words are more concrete (and limiting) they don't flap and fray in the wind of my mental music video.