9 ms·

What's Up with Those Voices in Your Head?

40 points by lermontov 10y ago

StavrosK 10y ago
What about those of us who don't have internal voices?
- a_humean 10y ago
  I've identified a Philosophical Zombie. Someone contact the nobel committee, for I have refuted Physicalism. I knew your kind would finally let it slip. I jest! http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zombies/ http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zombies/
  - StavrosK 10y ago
    Huh?
  - eivarv 10y ago
    What does inner voices have to do consciousness or sentience?
    - StavrosK 10y ago
      I wonder if deaf-mute people have them.
      - n0us 10y ago
        not sure about deaf-mute people but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosopagnosia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosopagnosia is an area of interest for people who study philosophy of mind
      - grownseed 10y ago
        Perhaps not quite the answer you're after, but I was deaf as a child, though I was able to hear as a toddler and had therefore been exposed to spoken language before going deaf. I absolutely had inner voices while I was deaf, to a practically debilitating degree. The isolation inherent to deafness caused me to have strong inner dialogues, to develop a full world inside my head. I would often "go away" in my head, to the point that I was completely detached from and unresponsive to the physical world. It's apparently very unsettling to people standing right by you. My grandfather used to be fascinated by it, he'd say that I'd gone to my secret garden and that it was ok to leave me alone. Even after recovering my hearing years later, I kept this habit (whether it's good or bad is debatable). Over the years I developed a better hang of it and I can now trigger it mostly at will. The level of introspection that came with all this is rather hard to explain, though for all my quirks, I don't regret it one bit.
        StavrosK 10y ago
        Hmm, that's interesting. Was it voice as we know it, i.e. sounds? Inner voices are usually "sounds" instead of, say, images, but if you were deaf, what sounds did you know? Or was it because you could hear as a toddler?
  - armitron 10y ago
    Rather than getting into dualism or non-intuitive philosophy/metaphysics, it's better to view humans as philosophical zombies from the get-go. Consciousness is not something we possess from birth, but a self-model that gradually emerges as the organism's cybernetic interactions with the environment increase. It then follows that any process that could disrupt this would lead to people with a not fully-developed sense of self or in other words partial PZombies.
    - projektir 10y ago
      I strongly disagree that it's better since that's effectively implying solipsism and that there are no ethical considerations for doing bad things to people since they, well, don't really exist as agents-that-can-feel-things. Regardless of how hard it is to describe philosophically, and what kind of terms one tries to use, the fact that we process things we feel is the reality of our existence and it drastically modifies how we act.
      - voxic11 10y ago
        Why do you think entities without consciousness are not worthy of ethical consideration? Most animals and even human babies don't have it but most people still make a big deal about their ethical treatment.
        projektir 10y ago
        I don't. I think there's a conflation where "zombie" is interpreted as "lacking consciousness". But the description I'm seeing in the Encyclopedia, as well as LW's definition and my own definition is closer to "entity that doesn't process what they feel" (doesn't feel what they process? Sees blindly? Blargh). > by definition there is ‘nothing it is like’ to be a zombie Non-conscious animals are still often perceived as processing feelings and therefore capable of the concept of suffering. You could try imagining being a simple animal, even if it's as simple as a single signal that goes 1 and 0. Zombies don't process any feelings and ethical consideration in their address wouldn't make much sense, it's like being concerned with the ethics relating to a sun or a hydroelectric dam.
- Filligree 10y ago
  Voiceless people, represent! I had a long discussion on this subject over on Lesswrong, back in the day. Suffice to say that a lot of people have trouble imagining it's even an option.
  - gm-conspiracy 10y ago
    Can you speed read?
  - Joof 10y ago
    It would have to be. People didn't start out with language, but could undoubtedly think. I'm fairly mixed, probably like the majority. Some things are images or words and occasionally just ideas (although I'm not certain how to describe that).
    - StavrosK 10y ago
      I know exactly what you mean. It's that process where an idea just forms, wordlessly, and you just "know" it now. Sometimes I start narrating it to myself, but then stop mid-way, realizing it's pointless, since I already know it.
  - cairo_x 10y ago
    Do you prefer non-fiction to fiction? I find non-fiction way easier to read without a voice, and certain kinds of fiction require a voice (somewhat).
    - Filligree 10y ago
      Fiction. And yes, when reading fiction I can generally hear the characters' voices when they're speaking; this is somewhat deliberate, as I find it improves immersion. But I don't really have one of my own.
- Broken_Hippo 10y ago
  It happens - though it is hard for me to imagine. Mine is pretty active - I think in words, and can get into an inner monologue that is basically narrating what I do. But my spouse doesn't have that - it seems to be a foreign concept to him. I think some folks think more in pictures or sounds and other such things.
  - StavrosK 10y ago
    I can get into an inner monologue too, but, more often than not, I realize that it's going on, think "this is useless, I already know what I'm thinking" (wordlessly) and stop it.
- dmd 10y ago
  Yeah. I have a lot of trouble imagining what it would be like to have what they're describing.
  - gm-conspiracy 10y ago
    Can you speed read?
  - StavrosK 10y ago
    I used to have one when I was younger, it's just like talking to yourself all the time, only inside your head.
    - praveer13 10y ago
      Same here, I think I had it too when I was a kid..I wonder if my excessive internet use drowned my internal voice or something else.
- ourmandave 10y ago
  What I wouldn't give for a Mute button some days. You know that Good Will Hunting scene, "It's not your fault"? I wake up to my inner voice saying, "It's all your fault. It's all your fault."
  - bbctol 10y ago
    I don't think in words that often, but when I do, it's usually just the word "Stupid." on repeat.
- gm-conspiracy 10y ago
  Can you speed read?
  - StavrosK 10y ago
    Yes, but that's a bit orthogonal (I don't think it has to do with not having/using an inner voice). I could since I was young, which made the teachers irritatedly think I was joking when I was done before the rest of the class were a third of the way into the text.
    - GrinningFool 10y ago
      Which inevitably leads to additional questions probing your actual comprehension. Fortunately, after a few weeks in each grade, I found that teachers did tend to accept it. After sufficient probing attempts that felt like they were trying publicly disgrace me for claiming to have read the material but not actually doing so...
      - gm-conspiracy 10y ago
        So, how did you learn to read or sight words?
        GrinningFool 10y ago
        Sight words were a new concept to me when I saw that's what they were using to teach my son, so I have to assume it was standard reading. I don't have a clear memory one way or the other though, so I can't be sure.
      - StavrosK 10y ago
        With me, they wouldn't even bother, they'd just say "stop joking around and read", so I just re-read the whole thing, more slowly.
  - lostcolony 10y ago
    That...is a fascinating question. Usually when dealing with verbal thought, it turns into voices in my head, unlike the OP. That might be why while I can read pretty fast, I still can only do so about carnival barker or auctioneer speed, rather than faster than speech. I could be automatically limited in my rate of comprehension due to how it's being processed, still as a 'voice', rather than visuals that map directly to concepts. I would -love- to see survey results on that, whether people had tried to speed read, if, having tried, they succeeded, and whether they tend to/ever have an 'internal voice' in their minds when thinking
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  Get a wireless camera, wireless headset, big powerbank and even bigger data plan, and I'll happily narrate your life for you ;).
  - StavrosK 10y ago
    Haha, I might just take you up on that. I've always wanted a narrator, he wrote in the comment box.
- c3534l 10y ago
  Have you tried drinking way too much coffee?
- joeldg 10y ago
  When I found out people to talk to themselves in their thoughts I was blown away. I absolutely do not understand it.
wccrawford 10y ago
Wait... Some people can't turn them off? Some people don't have them at all? I've always been able to think without voices in my head, or deliberately use them to focus my thoughts. I never even considered that others might be stuck in one mode or the other.
- lostcolony 10y ago
  Yeah. This is really interesting to think about. I can talk with myself in my head, when I'm internally debating something (having one perspective question another, then another question the questioner, etc, a kind of 'second thoughts' per Pratchett), or I can sort of...play out a script in my head, like a monologue, when I want to 'hear' how something will come across before saying it, or when writing (such as now), to try and sound it out, and I can think in non-verbal ways, where there's no voice, where I'm examining and abstracting and constructing patterns and etc, things that are innately non-verbal...but I never actually thought about those as being distinct methods of ~thinking~, and that some people might not be able to do it.
- squeaky-clean 10y ago
  I can't think without vocalizing, and I can't control when thoughts flow in/out of my head (well I've been practicing, but I'm nowhere near there), so I can't really control my inner voice. They're so tied together for me, I can't really understand the idea of thinking without it, or even that the "thought" and "voice" are separate things. For example, when reading, I need to vocalize everything, and I'm sure this contributes to me being a slow reader. I've tried speed reading techniques, or learning to read words in groups, and I can take in the words, but don't actually "process" them. By the time I've read the next sentence, I've forgotten what the previous one said. I can read much faster than I could physically talk (maybe 2-3x), but any faster than that and my inner-voice jumbles together, I can no longer comprehend it. With speed reading tools that show you one word at a time very quickly, like Spritz [0], I can get over 600wpm and still read every word, but my inner voice sounds like one of those robotic voices that combine recorded samples together (like a subway announcement: "The next. BROOKLYN BOUND. train will. ARRIVE IN... TWO. minutes."). And I've found that anything above 200wpm, I couldn't tell you 5 minutes later what I had read. [0] http://spritzinc.com/ http://spritzinc.com/ Edit: There's a fun story by Richard Feynman about him and a friend trying to count in their heads while reading or speaking aloud. And Feynman found he could read and count, but not speak and count, and his friend was the opposite. It turns out it was because Feynman was verbalizing the counting, while his friend was visualizing it. Couldn't find a link that wasn't a PDF filled with illustrations, but it's a short read. http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/3591/ http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/3591/
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
istorical 10y ago
There's an interesting Reddit thread that's somewhat related to this as it pertains to reading: https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/4wttu4/do_you_hear_a_voice_while_you_read/ https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/4wttu4/do_you_hear_a...
mrec 10y ago
SSC had a good piece about missing "universal" experiences a while back; lighter than his usual fare, with more anecdotal examples in the comments. 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...
zw123456 10y ago
This reminds me of Bicamealism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism_(psychology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism_(psychology) his book is a free read http://s-f-walker.org.uk/pubsebooks/pdfs/Julian_Jaynes_The_Origin_of_Consciousness.pdf http://s-f-walker.org.uk/pubsebooks/pdfs/Julian_Jaynes_The_O... A very interesting theory, not sure I agree with all of it but he raises some interesting questions for anyone who finds this topic fascinating.
cairo_x 10y ago
I find when reading fiction, or certain kinds of literature (not including avant guard lit), using an inner voice is vital to get the full meter and rhythm. Then with slowing down my thoughts -- self talk -- rational thinking, having an inner voice helps too. When reading non-fiction I can more easily drift into a sub-vocal whisper, to nothing at all speed read, skipping over to points I'm interested in, going back over points, etc. I suspect this is why a lot of non-fiction has standards and formats and certain clichés that make visual comprehension less intensive. A friend of mine said she had no inner voice at all. I've noticed when using Ketamine that I can do this sub-mental-vocal speed reading incredibly well for certain kinds of avant guard literature or philosophy lit, like Camus and David Foster Wallace, or Pyncheon, where the voice can change from chapter to chapter -- or rather the content is very info dense. I had great trouble 'getting' Hunter S. Thompson before I'd ever heard him speak. When I heard his voice it suddenly all made sense. Same for William S Boroughs, for his more avant-guard lit works. Junky, on the other hand, has a more more straight forward voice and I was able to get into that quite easily without having heard his actual voice beforehand. This is why I don't buy into the bicameral mind crap. Non-vocal thinking seems easier for more info dense material, wheras a voice is helpful for very emotive things like poetry or some kinds of lit. Then again I could be simply confusing standard voice with non-standard. Hard to be objective.

40 points by lermontov 10y ago

StavrosK 10y ago

What about those of us who don't have internal voices?

a_humean 10y ago
I've identified a Philosophical Zombie. Someone contact the nobel committee, for I have refuted Physicalism. I knew your kind would finally let it slip. I jest! http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zombies/ http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zombies/
- StavrosK 10y ago
  Huh?
- eivarv 10y ago
  What does inner voices have to do consciousness or sentience?
  - StavrosK 10y ago
    I wonder if deaf-mute people have them.
    - n0us 10y ago
      not sure about deaf-mute people but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosopagnosia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosopagnosia is an area of interest for people who study philosophy of mind
    - grownseed 10y ago
      Perhaps not quite the answer you're after, but I was deaf as a child, though I was able to hear as a toddler and had therefore been exposed to spoken language before going deaf. I absolutely had inner voices while I was deaf, to a practically debilitating degree. The isolation inherent to deafness caused me to have strong inner dialogues, to develop a full world inside my head. I would often "go away" in my head, to the point that I was completely detached from and unresponsive to the physical world. It's apparently very unsettling to people standing right by you. My grandfather used to be fascinated by it, he'd say that I'd gone to my secret garden and that it was ok to leave me alone. Even after recovering my hearing years later, I kept this habit (whether it's good or bad is debatable). Over the years I developed a better hang of it and I can now trigger it mostly at will. The level of introspection that came with all this is rather hard to explain, though for all my quirks, I don't regret it one bit.
      - StavrosK 10y ago
        Hmm, that's interesting. Was it voice as we know it, i.e. sounds? Inner voices are usually "sounds" instead of, say, images, but if you were deaf, what sounds did you know? Or was it because you could hear as a toddler?
- armitron 10y ago
  Rather than getting into dualism or non-intuitive philosophy/metaphysics, it's better to view humans as philosophical zombies from the get-go. Consciousness is not something we possess from birth, but a self-model that gradually emerges as the organism's cybernetic interactions with the environment increase. It then follows that any process that could disrupt this would lead to people with a not fully-developed sense of self or in other words partial PZombies.
  - projektir 10y ago
    I strongly disagree that it's better since that's effectively implying solipsism and that there are no ethical considerations for doing bad things to people since they, well, don't really exist as agents-that-can-feel-things. Regardless of how hard it is to describe philosophically, and what kind of terms one tries to use, the fact that we process things we feel is the reality of our existence and it drastically modifies how we act.
    - voxic11 10y ago
      Why do you think entities without consciousness are not worthy of ethical consideration? Most animals and even human babies don't have it but most people still make a big deal about their ethical treatment.
      - projektir 10y ago
        I don't. I think there's a conflation where "zombie" is interpreted as "lacking consciousness". But the description I'm seeing in the Encyclopedia, as well as LW's definition and my own definition is closer to "entity that doesn't process what they feel" (doesn't feel what they process? Sees blindly? Blargh). > by definition there is ‘nothing it is like’ to be a zombie Non-conscious animals are still often perceived as processing feelings and therefore capable of the concept of suffering. You could try imagining being a simple animal, even if it's as simple as a single signal that goes 1 and 0. Zombies don't process any feelings and ethical consideration in their address wouldn't make much sense, it's like being concerned with the ethics relating to a sun or a hydroelectric dam.
Filligree 10y ago
Voiceless people, represent! I had a long discussion on this subject over on Lesswrong, back in the day. Suffice to say that a lot of people have trouble imagining it's even an option.
- gm-conspiracy 10y ago
  Can you speed read?
- Joof 10y ago
  It would have to be. People didn't start out with language, but could undoubtedly think. I'm fairly mixed, probably like the majority. Some things are images or words and occasionally just ideas (although I'm not certain how to describe that).
  - StavrosK 10y ago
    I know exactly what you mean. It's that process where an idea just forms, wordlessly, and you just "know" it now. Sometimes I start narrating it to myself, but then stop mid-way, realizing it's pointless, since I already know it.
- cairo_x 10y ago
  Do you prefer non-fiction to fiction? I find non-fiction way easier to read without a voice, and certain kinds of fiction require a voice (somewhat).
  - Filligree 10y ago
    Fiction. And yes, when reading fiction I can generally hear the characters' voices when they're speaking; this is somewhat deliberate, as I find it improves immersion. But I don't really have one of my own.
Broken_Hippo 10y ago
It happens - though it is hard for me to imagine. Mine is pretty active - I think in words, and can get into an inner monologue that is basically narrating what I do. But my spouse doesn't have that - it seems to be a foreign concept to him. I think some folks think more in pictures or sounds and other such things.
- StavrosK 10y ago
  I can get into an inner monologue too, but, more often than not, I realize that it's going on, think "this is useless, I already know what I'm thinking" (wordlessly) and stop it.
dmd 10y ago
Yeah. I have a lot of trouble imagining what it would be like to have what they're describing.
- gm-conspiracy 10y ago
  Can you speed read?
- StavrosK 10y ago
  I used to have one when I was younger, it's just like talking to yourself all the time, only inside your head.
  - praveer13 10y ago
    Same here, I think I had it too when I was a kid..I wonder if my excessive internet use drowned my internal voice or something else.
ourmandave 10y ago
What I wouldn't give for a Mute button some days. You know that Good Will Hunting scene, "It's not your fault"? I wake up to my inner voice saying, "It's all your fault. It's all your fault."
- bbctol 10y ago
  I don't think in words that often, but when I do, it's usually just the word "Stupid." on repeat.
gm-conspiracy 10y ago
Can you speed read?
- StavrosK 10y ago
  Yes, but that's a bit orthogonal (I don't think it has to do with not having/using an inner voice). I could since I was young, which made the teachers irritatedly think I was joking when I was done before the rest of the class were a third of the way into the text.
  - GrinningFool 10y ago
    Which inevitably leads to additional questions probing your actual comprehension. Fortunately, after a few weeks in each grade, I found that teachers did tend to accept it. After sufficient probing attempts that felt like they were trying publicly disgrace me for claiming to have read the material but not actually doing so...
    - gm-conspiracy 10y ago
      So, how did you learn to read or sight words?
      - GrinningFool 10y ago
        Sight words were a new concept to me when I saw that's what they were using to teach my son, so I have to assume it was standard reading. I don't have a clear memory one way or the other though, so I can't be sure.
    - StavrosK 10y ago
      With me, they wouldn't even bother, they'd just say "stop joking around and read", so I just re-read the whole thing, more slowly.
- lostcolony 10y ago
  That...is a fascinating question. Usually when dealing with verbal thought, it turns into voices in my head, unlike the OP. That might be why while I can read pretty fast, I still can only do so about carnival barker or auctioneer speed, rather than faster than speech. I could be automatically limited in my rate of comprehension due to how it's being processed, still as a 'voice', rather than visuals that map directly to concepts. I would -love- to see survey results on that, whether people had tried to speed read, if, having tried, they succeeded, and whether they tend to/ever have an 'internal voice' in their minds when thinking
TeMPOraL 10y ago
Get a wireless camera, wireless headset, big powerbank and even bigger data plan, and I'll happily narrate your life for you ;).
- StavrosK 10y ago
  Haha, I might just take you up on that. I've always wanted a narrator, he wrote in the comment box.
c3534l 10y ago
Have you tried drinking way too much coffee?
joeldg 10y ago
When I found out people to talk to themselves in their thoughts I was blown away. I absolutely do not understand it.

wccrawford 10y ago

Wait... Some people can't turn them off? Some people don't have them at all? I've always been able to think without voices in my head, or deliberately use them to focus my thoughts. I never even considered that others might be stuck in one mode or the other.

lostcolony 10y ago
Yeah. This is really interesting to think about. I can talk with myself in my head, when I'm internally debating something (having one perspective question another, then another question the questioner, etc, a kind of 'second thoughts' per Pratchett), or I can sort of...play out a script in my head, like a monologue, when I want to 'hear' how something will come across before saying it, or when writing (such as now), to try and sound it out, and I can think in non-verbal ways, where there's no voice, where I'm examining and abstracting and constructing patterns and etc, things that are innately non-verbal...but I never actually thought about those as being distinct methods of ~thinking~, and that some people might not be able to do it.
squeaky-clean 10y ago
I can't think without vocalizing, and I can't control when thoughts flow in/out of my head (well I've been practicing, but I'm nowhere near there), so I can't really control my inner voice. They're so tied together for me, I can't really understand the idea of thinking without it, or even that the "thought" and "voice" are separate things. For example, when reading, I need to vocalize everything, and I'm sure this contributes to me being a slow reader. I've tried speed reading techniques, or learning to read words in groups, and I can take in the words, but don't actually "process" them. By the time I've read the next sentence, I've forgotten what the previous one said. I can read much faster than I could physically talk (maybe 2-3x), but any faster than that and my inner-voice jumbles together, I can no longer comprehend it. With speed reading tools that show you one word at a time very quickly, like Spritz [0], I can get over 600wpm and still read every word, but my inner voice sounds like one of those robotic voices that combine recorded samples together (like a subway announcement: "The next. BROOKLYN BOUND. train will. ARRIVE IN... TWO. minutes."). And I've found that anything above 200wpm, I couldn't tell you 5 minutes later what I had read. [0] http://spritzinc.com/ http://spritzinc.com/ Edit: There's a fun story by Richard Feynman about him and a friend trying to count in their heads while reading or speaking aloud. And Feynman found he could read and count, but not speak and count, and his friend was the opposite. It turns out it was because Feynman was verbalizing the counting, while his friend was visualizing it. Couldn't find a link that wasn't a PDF filled with illustrations, but it's a short read. http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/3591/ http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/3591/

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

istorical 10y ago

There's an interesting Reddit thread that's somewhat related to this as it pertains to reading: https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/4wttu4/do_you_hear_a_voice_while_you_read/ https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/4wttu4/do_you_hear_a...

mrec 10y ago

SSC had a good piece about missing "universal" experiences a while back; lighter than his usual fare, with more anecdotal examples in the comments. 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...

zw123456 10y ago

This reminds me of Bicamealism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism_(psychology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism_(psychology) his book is a free read http://s-f-walker.org.uk/pubsebooks/pdfs/Julian_Jaynes_The_Origin_of_Consciousness.pdf http://s-f-walker.org.uk/pubsebooks/pdfs/Julian_Jaynes_The_O... A very interesting theory, not sure I agree with all of it but he raises some interesting questions for anyone who finds this topic fascinating.

cairo_x 10y ago

I find when reading fiction, or certain kinds of literature (not including avant guard lit), using an inner voice is vital to get the full meter and rhythm. Then with slowing down my thoughts -- self talk -- rational thinking, having an inner voice helps too. When reading non-fiction I can more easily drift into a sub-vocal whisper, to nothing at all speed read, skipping over to points I'm interested in, going back over points, etc. I suspect this is why a lot of non-fiction has standards and formats and certain clichés that make visual comprehension less intensive. A friend of mine said she had no inner voice at all. I've noticed when using Ketamine that I can do this sub-mental-vocal speed reading incredibly well for certain kinds of avant guard literature or philosophy lit, like Camus and David Foster Wallace, or Pyncheon, where the voice can change from chapter to chapter -- or rather the content is very info dense. I had great trouble 'getting' Hunter S. Thompson before I'd ever heard him speak. When I heard his voice it suddenly all made sense. Same for William S Boroughs, for his more avant-guard lit works. Junky, on the other hand, has a more more straight forward voice and I was able to get into that quite easily without having heard his actual voice beforehand. This is why I don't buy into the bicameral mind crap. Non-vocal thinking seems easier for more info dense material, wheras a voice is helpful for very emotive things like poetry or some kinds of lit. Then again I could be simply confusing standard voice with non-standard. Hard to be objective.