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But there is always a voice talking in our heads. It's just that we generally ascribe it to our own consciousness but when you really sit down and think about i

• hacker_9 9y ago
  You should try meditation. Effectively you 'stop' listening to the voice and then things all go a bit crazy. The voice talks to itself, memories become really vivid, hallucinations can happen too. And all while you just observe what is going on. Can be quite fun.
  • daveguy 9y ago
    Are you serious? Sounds almost like a dream state. I've "meditated" with breathing control somewhat superficially for a few minutes at a time, but never experienced anything like that. Any guides to this kind of meditation?
    • hacker_9 9y ago
      Do it everyday when you lie down to sleep. I don't set a timer and usually do it until at least my mind is calm (results in better sleep). I listen to my heartbeat in my veins in my forehead instead of breathe, which sounds harder than it is. Also at the beginning of the session it can be difficult to 'relax', so don't even try just wholly focus on listening to the heartbeat even if you need to tense, scrunch up face etc. Then as you get more into it you will relax naturally and fully. Hard part after that is drifting off into memories, which takes experience to lessen that. Effectively you get better at observation, which leaves the unconscious free to do as it likes and it can get up to all kinds of weird stuff. I've observed it playing a racing game and controlling the car and overtaking other cars. Or sometimes it'll jump me into a lucid dream state, (where you know you are dreaming). You are never quite sure what it'll do.
      • daveguy 9y ago
        Thank you. I usually do a breathing control thing to relax as I am falling asleep, so this should be a straightforward switch. During the time when you drift from relaxed focus to memories -- try to just keep focusing on the heartbeat for a longer period of time instead?
        • hacker_9 9y ago
          Yes maintain focus on heartbeat, breathe, whatever works for you. If you drift off, just return back to your focus as soon as you notice.
  • catshirt 9y ago
    the observer & the observee. the opposite seems more true, no? you're turning out the observee, not the observer ("the voice"). the voice takes over.
  • simon83 9y ago
    I can confirm this. I wasn't able to get into meditation on my own, and so I took the more extreme route and visited a dedicated 10 day Vipassana mediation course. The effects were incredible and lasted for quite some time even after the course. It's hard to explain, but they teach you to be more empathetic and to listen to the "vibrations" in your body. Once the course was over and I was back in the real world my body was vibrating (not visibly of course) like crazy when I was interacting with other people, simply due to my happiness and love for everything, everyone and the whole universe. I know this sounds like some crazy new age foo, but it's really not. All in all this was one of the hardest, but also best experiences in my life. Unfortunately once I got back home, daily life and stress took over and I stopped meditating. But I plan to visit another course again as soon as I can, and then I will try to stick with regular mediation. I can highly recommend this.
    • daveguy 9y ago
      When I was younger I used to be able to separate the sensation of what my hands were feeling from the location of my hands or the material they were actually feeling. Mainly on fabric. I guess the best way to describe it -- it's as if the surface of my palm was like a hundred fingertips rather than a single palm. When the sensation first happened it freaked me out. I didn't know what was going on and couldn't stop it because it was just scary. Then for a while I could flip it on and off like a switch. Every once in a while that state of interpreting sensation from my hand will switch on randomly as I am falling asleep. I wonder if this is related to this type of meditation or a tactile rather than auditory sensory hallucination.
      • simon83 9y ago
        I can't really answer your question, I'm no expert in this field, but I can tell you that I did experiment with lucid dreaming/out of body experience techniques in the past and this usually involved the strangest body sensations. So what you describe may be similar. I never really succeeded, but I had a few, very short OOBEs. They only lasted a few seconds because I always got too excited the moment I realized it finally happened, and so I immediately woke up. When you say this happens randomly when you are falling asleep, then this sounds to me a bit like the start of an OOBE. Here is what I did and felt when I tried to experience an OOBE: lay down comfortably and try to let your body fall asleep. Take deep breaths, observe your body and look out for certain sensations, try to focus on the here and now so that the mind stays awake. Most of the time I just fell asleep and woke up in the morning, without remembering anything. But if you stay focused enough, you may start to feel and hear some kind of vibrations in your body, which may intensify if you stay focused. This phase is usually referred to as the "separation of the mind from the body". Once the vibrations are over, and you stay focused, you may start to get the feeling of "floating" and other strange body sensations. Sometimes it felt like my feet started to float, then my legs, and finally my whole body. If you are really good at this then you can try to "open" your eyes and look around. It may be really dark at first, but with enough focus you can literally say "let there be light". I was only once at this stage, my body started to float, and I "opened" my eyes after a while when I suddenly "saw" the ceiling right in front of my face. I got so excited that I immediately got "sucked" back into my body, and then I woke up. Nothing really happens in the physical world, an observer will see you falling asleep, but the whole experience always feels so damn real, the beginning is almost always the same and many people can confirm this. It's incredible and fascinating. Unfortunately I never got really good at this and I lost motivation. I was around 17-18 back then and seeking for the meaning of life. Another fascinating part is that there is no real scientific explanation for this phenomenon. Of course it's usually labeled as some kind of dream state, or just a chemical reaction in our brains. It depends on who you ask, but for some people this is esoteric nonsense and just simple dreams, for others this is the gateway to a another reality/dimension/quantum world. Personally I have no idea and never figured it out, and I don't care anymore. I got older and I have other problems now, like paying my bills. But it's still fascinating stuff and I like to think back about it every now and then. The internet is full of information and reports about this topic, some serious, some less serious. Anyway, thanks for making me remember about all of this, after a very long time. It was a fun experience.
  • mr_overalls 9y ago
    This is not the norm for meditation. Although sensory hallucinations can occur, most Buddhists encourage the practitioner to ignore them. They are seen as a sign of meditative intensity, but a potentially-disturbing distraction from the goal of clear insight into the nature of self and reality. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Makyo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Makyo
    • deleted 9y ago
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  • WalterSear 9y ago
    That's hypnogogia, not meditation. You started to fall asleep.
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• BurningFrog 9y ago
  I talk to myself in my brain, but I don't really hear a voice. It's my "cadence", but it doesn't register as sound to me.
  • branchless 9y ago
    I often think of something in a way that is not a voice but more a compressed idea, then a subsecond later my inner monologue says this to me and as it's doing it I think "you are wasting your time inner monologue I know what you are going to say" yet never manage to suppress it before it is done. I hope that does not sound too mad.
    • ajnin 9y ago
      I have the same feeling, it makes me feel better to know I'm not alone in madness ;) I have a reminiscence of a time when that did not occur, when I was a small child ideas would not be followed by the inner monologue. I guess that's a trade off : verbalising ideas help to flesh them out and detect inconsistencies but it comes at a price of inefficiency.
      • catshirt 9y ago
        the other price is creativity. some ideas don't translate well- or can't translate to English. when logic and language becomes your core cognitive filtering mechanism, you start filtering "nonsense", as defined within the formal constraints of logic and language.
      • branchless 9y ago
        Yes I think as a child I was more instinctive, the wall between my subconscious and conscious was more permeable. Now everything has to be handed to the go-between that is my monologue and into the conscious. This is why I love playing soccer. You just allow your brain to express its ideas physically, there is no time for intermediation.
      • daveguy 9y ago
        Are either or both of you multi-lingual?
• o_____________o 9y ago
  You raise a fascinating subject, but a distinction needs to be made between auditory hallucinations and inner dialogue. They may be interconnected concepts, but the manifestation is very different.
  • deleted 9y ago
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• Razengan 9y ago
  Here’s a related experiment: Try counting without “talking.” That is, without saying the numbers in your head. Try tapping on the desk or your lap an arbitrary number of times without going “1, 2, 3..” and see if you can still know how many times you tapped. —— Follow-up question: Is language necessary for thought? Try forming thoughts without forming any words in your head. You might notice that there’s a much faster “higher priority process” in the head that already “knows” what to say before you “hear” the words of that thought forming in your head.. But there WILL be words. It may seem almost impossible to suppress the formation of words while thinking. Do “feral children” that grow up without any human contact have the ability to “think?” —— Also, during inner monologues or what have you, do you refer to yourself in the singular or plural? e.g., do you go “I should [do that]” or “We should [do that]?”
  • bllguo 9y ago
    Your last question intrigues me. I say "I." I'm curious whether other people use "we"
    • Razengan 9y ago
      I’ve always said “we”, since I was a child, and assumed it was normal.. :)
    • mysterydip 9y ago
      I've heard "you" before as well. As in, "you should go talk to that person before they leave," for example.
  • ajkjk 9y ago
    Just in case it's interesting to anyone: As far as I can tell, the internal 'talking' I do when counting in my head (I was unable to disable it, though I could tap numbers on my fingers without talking just fine) is like a 'test activation' of my speech muscles. The same way you can.. Imagine moving an arm, say, and it feels like it involves a communication with the muscles in your arm but they don't actually fire. Counting feels like it's imagining activating the muscles to say the words for the numbers, without actually doing it.
• saltcured 9y ago
  I don't hear a voice in my head nor do I really have the sort of internal monologue or dialogue that many people describe here. My thoughts are much more spatial, for lack of a better word. A sense of expanse and topology, neither visual nor aural. I have to go through a step of composition to put thoughts into words, whether writing or speaking. I've had close contact with a paranoid schizophrenic relative, and from what I can tell they really experience intrusive "other" thoughts and perceptions. It's not always a voice talking in their head or over their shoulder, but sometimes a sense that ideas or beliefs have intruded from elsewhere with no clear sense of arrival or beginning. Like a glitch in the matrix.
  • idibidiart 9y ago
    Same here but how do we know when we suddenly think of something (sometimes like total random recall or random idea) that it is not just a healthy version of the voices that folks with mental illness hear? Maybe mental illness in this context is just them associating a voice with what would otherwise be silent (potentially self-intrusive) thoughts?
• whytaka 9y ago
  I rarely, if ever, hear voices in my head that I don't will myself to have, like when I'm considering the phrasing of this sentence. Although, I am always very puzzled when I think about my speech, especially in conversation, and how the phrasing of words get put in order so quickly, almost unconsciously.
• pharrington 9y ago
  The contrast is explicitly between thoughts that feel internal and guided versus those that feel intrusive and uncontrollable. edit: personally, the fact that I don't have an intimate understanding of how my nervous system works doesn't make it creepier than anything else that exists.
• brazzledazzle 9y ago
  One thing that never bothered me much was those intuitive insights or logical leaps thay seemingly come out of nowhere. That is until I read a comment about speculation that ancient cultures viewed it as coming from an external (mystical) source and then I realized just how little conscious thought goes into many of those thoughts. It's kind of unsettling that there's so much going on that's "separate" from our conscious minds. If those thoughts were even a little screwy or misaligned it would be a nightmare.