9 ms·

It wasn't until I was ~25 years old when I realized that some people really do have a "voice in their head" and it's not just a movie thing that they use for la

by WJW 5y ago

It wasn't until I was ~25 years old when I realized that some people really do have a "voice in their head" and it's not just a movie thing that they use for lazy storytelling. My own train of thought is more like a graph of concepts/shapes/colors that does not necessarily have words attached. I can consciously "talk to myself in my mind", but there is not anything like a subconscious voice.

mypastself 5y ago
Yeah, I remember being annoyed by comic books as a kid when I’d see a person thinking in full sentences. I’m still not convinced verbalization is the default mode: how slow would a person’s thought processes have to be if they had to spell everything out in internal monologues?
- jiggawatts 5y ago
  I don’t know about other people, but I don’t “have to”. I can and do think in both verbal and nonverbal modes. Verbal is usually when mulling over options, like what to get for dinner.
  - mypastself 5y ago
    Well, I guess we all verbalize internally in certain situations (I definitely do when I’m writing comments or deliberately organizing my thoughts). In that case, it seems the original Reddit thread is based on a misunderstanding of the definition and scope of “internal monologue”. It’s certainly nothing like aphantasia, which seems like a genuine condition.
  - dsego 5y ago
    Me too, my inner monologue sometimes helps keep me on track. But it's only a mode of thinking.
- LtWorf_ 5y ago
  Do you read at the same speed of speech? Same thing.
  - mypastself 5y ago
    Surely there’s a lower time limit at which verbalization is even possible. Split-second decisions cannot involve any words, let alone sentences, regardless of the speed at which they’re produced.
- Gravityloss 5y ago
  It's easy to prove, you can think about some graph or some physical object. If you can manipulate it in your mind and can answer questions about it, then you're probably not thinking verbally. Say, how to go from place A to place B, if you've never travelled that route. But you know how things are laid out. Some people really struggle with this by the way.
- stephen_g 5y ago
  Definitely the default for me. I often do think in other ways - I have very vivid auditory imaging, especially with music training, but think visually for a especially anything spatial, navigation, etc., but often even narrate that to some extent (for example thinking through a route before driving and just narrating something in my mind like “yes, yes, yep, yeah, nope, no, ok, uh huh, yep” while I visualise each turn).
- JackFr 5y ago
  Well most thought isn’t done that way even for those of us with robust internal monologues. In fact that’s the working definition of subconscious.
- candlemas 5y ago
  >how slow would a person’s thought processes have to be if they had to spell everything out in internal monologues? The verbalized "thoughts" come after the fact. They thought already exists and then you put it into words to yourself. The verbalization can be confused for thinking.
  - BizarroLand 5y ago
    This is a good point. I bet a lot of people who assume that since they process their thoughts verbally in their head that all of their thoughts are word based, but there had to be some function under that stringing the words together to express the thoughts verbally. It would be like your Operating System thinking that it performed the computations it needed to show this web browser on your screen without the help of the CPU.
- adolph 5y ago
  I suspect the "words" are post-hoc rationalization for default mode network. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Default_mode_network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Default_mode_network
flacebo 5y ago
I had this realization in the last couple of weeks slowly, starting from a discussion about who thinks in which language in my friend group. I've tried to convince them how thoughts aren't in any language, but nobody agreed, which made me think. I found these threads later when trying to research it. For me, thinking in words and sentences sounds like thoughs being weighed and slowed down. Seems very unnecessary. On the other hand, I did and always had the the issue of putting my thoughts into words properly. Like the translator is pretty bad and I always struggle and feel like most of the information is lost. I think there might be some correlation between this and being introverted, socializing is exhausting for me because the translator is not well trained as I don't use it while thinking, and it has to run at 100%. I've talked with my better half about this and she said it's easy for her because the sentences are already there and it takes zero effort to say them, which aligns with my theory. I do have a terrible "mind chatter" though, I'd rather describe it as white noise. Way too many thoughts going through at once, which makes it very hard to concentrate on anything. So even though not everyone is thinking in words and sentences, this issue can effect all of us.
- stephen_g 5y ago
  That’s interesting, I basically always have a clearly English monologue going on, even while visually thinking about things or thinking about sounds or music at the same time. The monologue becomes more sparse and simple the harder I’m thinking in another way (sometimes just reducing to words of agreement or disagreement to the visualisation of something I’m designing or a route I’m planning). But then as soon as I stop doing that I just revert back to monologuing. I know a little Spanish and a tiny bit of German and I can purposely think in those languages, but I’m way too limited in what I can express that it takes a lot of conscious effort. The really fun thing that I’m not sure is normal is that I can very easily switch my monologue to different accents which sound (as I perceive it in my mind) identical to real ones I’ve heard for long enough to replicate. I’m quite good at doing different accents in real life so I expect that’s linked.
  - ascar 5y ago
    The part about accents sounds interesting to me. I always believed I can't do accents because I absolutely can't fake/hear them in my head. I can even only speak my own accent with close family and switch to regular German with everyone else. I also can't hear/recall music from memory, so it's near impossible for me to sing freely, while singing along works fine. I can imitate different voices in my head when reading a novel and I can't even comprehend how one would read and comprehend without hearing everything spoken in ones head. It's just impossible for me. I do have a constant monologue though that is impossible to shut up. Even if I try to calm it or meditate I would think out loud "calm/meditate/don't think", so that doesn't work at all xD I did start thinking in English at some point. Before that I would translate all English to German, think about it and translate my German thoughts to English, if I needed to say something. By now I just think in English when I'm in an English context. It feels entirely natural.
bhaak 5y ago
I have that too (minus colors, if you actually see colors in your mind, colors in my mind is only an conceptual attribute attached to a thing). How do you articulate speech? With me, the concepts in my mind just turn into vocalized words. It's note even an effort, it just happens when I want to speak. Like my thoughts move the muscles in my arms. I don't know how and I am surprised that my line of thought rarely stumbles and doesn't produce the correct words. I think it should be some kind of effort to turn that wordless cloud of abstract thoughts and concepts into words but it just isn't. I do have vocalization when I'm reading or when I'm preparing a text (like this one I'm just writing). But this is just to get the phrases and wordings the way I like them to be with the right effect.
- pbhjpbhj 5y ago
  I'm the same, re not having internally-vocalised thought. Can you read without vocalising though? That was an idea I discovered on HN, in the context of speed reading. Seems we go from reading out loud, to reading in our heads (internally-vocalising), but you can continue and read without the internal-vocalisation. I can do it a bit, but under test conditions I only picked up about half of what I would do when I read to myself in my head. Amazing how different people's headspaces are.
  - bhaak 5y ago
    I also encountered the vocalising/non-vocalising thing when going into speedreading. I can supress the vocalising with a bit of conscious effort but it's not the vocalising that limits my reading speed. It's all the rest that goes on in my mind that processes the information I just read. If I'm looking for some specific words, not vocalising is helpful but if I need to remember and understand the text I'm reading, I do vocalising as that doesn't impact the rest that goes on in my mind. So I'm not a speedreader but it did help me to improve my glancing skills and if I need to I can count really fast now by visualizing the numbers turning into each other.
sph 5y ago
There's a voice for me, but it makes no sound. It directly activates the speech centres in my brain. Like my aphantasia, that I can imagine things without seeing them.
- mach1ne 5y ago
  I also deduced that my inner monologue isn't making any sound even though I 'hear' the words. For each word it's like the average of every time you have heard that word. But it's easy to mistake that into hearing the sounds, which is probably what is happening when most people claim to hear their inner monologue.
- technovader 5y ago
  I think it's absurd to be talking about your inner monologue "making sounds" I just mean the idea itself is absurd. Obviously nothing in your mind is making sounds. If you just mean "imagining sounds" I would still question what it actually means. Maybe they're both the same thing (inner monologue that makes imagined sounds, vs inner monologue that doesnt make imagined sounds)
  - riffraff 5y ago
    I think in words, but I do not hear voices. I can tell the difference, because I can easily imagine voices too, it's like remembering them, but you make them say something else :) But normally my "inner monologue" is voiceless.
- BizarroLand 5y ago
  My inner monologue can be visualized as phantasmal gray words floating in a blank black space. When I imagine what that monologue sounds like it is mostly has my own voice but occasionally has no definable voice, or it takes on the lilt of some unknown reader as if it were telling me a bedtime story or reading a poem that it knows by heart.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
FrozenVoid 5y ago
Could you explain what happens when you read text?
- photochemsyn 5y ago
  I think it's called 'chunking'. So 'Could you explain' (concept #1: explain -> describe / analyze) 'what happens' (concept #2: happens -> series of events, a process) 'when you read text' (concept #3: reading -> interpreting symbols). For me it's all visual / mechanical, kind of like playing with Legos. No 'inner voices' are involved; though sometimes I will sort of internally mutter to myself, 'okay, let's get to work' at the start. For example if I read the word 'seventy-two' I visualize the decimal numbers '72' as an image. I read a lot of scientific and technical literature, and I've found that trying to verbalize it isn't of much use and just leads to confusion. In contrast, I will 'hear voices' when reading a work of fiction but only when it's dialogue.
  - mach1ne 5y ago
    Interesting! Gauging from the original Reddit post, it seems that people exist on a spectrum regarding this for whatever reason. This could explain a lot about why some people learn certain stuff faster than others. For example, maths encoded into language is just a set of meaningless rules you have to memorize, but when you process it in concept-space the ideas behind maths make so much more sense. So, if you have someone who processes stuff mainly through language, their speed of learning math is significantly slower than someone who processes them in concept-space.
quirino 5y ago
I've seen this "inner voice" thing on the internet a couple of times and I'm yet to find a source that convinces me there's a real difference between people in this respect. I can definitely relate more to the way you described your mind than to the usual "inner voice". But I suspect it's the same for all people, they just subconsciously abstract it in another way. I suspect a similar confusion happens when people talk about aphantasia. But I haven't really put in the work to discover how serious the research around these things is.
- electriclizard 5y ago
  I can do both. Getting rid of the inner voice took a lot of therapy and meditation and I still struggle; I had it for most of my life. The "inner voice" is absolutely a real voice, as real as my own; and it's not necessarily the only voice. The voices are not auditory hallucinations—they are very distinctly discernible from sounds I'd hear with my ears. I have learned how to think without this voice and I prefer doing so immensely, as the voice is akin to vapid calculation, while thinking without it is a sensational experience with feelings and is a much more enjoyable experience, extending beyond the location of where I hear the inner voice and goes as far experiencing sensation throughout my entire body; this sensation can be as vivid as physical touch. In fact the voice is slower than sensational thinking. It occurs after the sensational thinking and the sensational thinking rarely can occur at the same time as the voice; they very easily become mutually exclusive and the inner voice tends to be the one that dominates. I hope to reverse this relationship with continued work. Thinking without an inner voice is a much more enjoyable life for me.
- alpple 5y ago
  I do agree that just because people describe their experience as different, that is not a convincing argument that it is very different. Sometimes people don't understand what other people are describing or assume too much. In my opinion, I think if we were to live inside someone else's mind for a day, depending on who that other person is, we may not recognize the world as the same world. I believe people are more different than many people know. Some people may be similar inside, but some people may be extremely different inside. Like you, I would also like to know more about this.
glenstein 5y ago
>when I realized that some people really do have a "voice in their head" and it's not just a movie thing that they use for lazy storytelling. For some of us it's quite literal, and goes by the term subvocalization. I know that I, for one, when speaking to myself, sometimes am doing it through little breathy throat quasi-vocalizations, like I'm beginning to say a word that I'm mentally saying. I wonder at my ability to carry on an internal mental monolog without it.
- KMag 5y ago
  I've been told that it's likely that most people who could read still read out loud in the not-so-distant past. For instance, I've heard it said that the Apostle Paul knew what the Ethopian eunuch was reading in his chariot as he went along the road because the eunuch was almost certainly reading aloud to himself. We still teach children to read aloud, and it takes a bit of effort for them to switch over to reading silently, often with an intermediate phase of silently moving the lips.
Kharvok 5y ago
My thoughts work much like this. For example, if I'm discussing some kind of design or graph relationship, I actually see what I'm talking about vividly. The problem is it's really hard to make eye contact while doing this. It's not that I find eye contact uncomfortable in conversation. It's just that discussing many topics, especially technical ones, it's not possible to see my ideas while looking directly at someone. I find this most frustrating in work that is interrupted and explanation is sought. So for example, if I'm thinking through the most efficient way to accomplish X, taking into accounty Y and Z, and someone walks into my office and asks me what I'm working on it's frustrating stating my thought process on the spot because none of that reasoning was assembled using language. What are others experience with this?

by WJW 5y ago

mypastself 5y ago

Yeah, I remember being annoyed by comic books as a kid when I’d see a person thinking in full sentences. I’m still not convinced verbalization is the default mode: how slow would a person’s thought processes have to be if they had to spell everything out in internal monologues?

jiggawatts 5y ago
I don’t know about other people, but I don’t “have to”. I can and do think in both verbal and nonverbal modes. Verbal is usually when mulling over options, like what to get for dinner.
- mypastself 5y ago
  Well, I guess we all verbalize internally in certain situations (I definitely do when I’m writing comments or deliberately organizing my thoughts). In that case, it seems the original Reddit thread is based on a misunderstanding of the definition and scope of “internal monologue”. It’s certainly nothing like aphantasia, which seems like a genuine condition.
- dsego 5y ago
  Me too, my inner monologue sometimes helps keep me on track. But it's only a mode of thinking.
LtWorf_ 5y ago
Do you read at the same speed of speech? Same thing.
- mypastself 5y ago
  Surely there’s a lower time limit at which verbalization is even possible. Split-second decisions cannot involve any words, let alone sentences, regardless of the speed at which they’re produced.
Gravityloss 5y ago
It's easy to prove, you can think about some graph or some physical object. If you can manipulate it in your mind and can answer questions about it, then you're probably not thinking verbally. Say, how to go from place A to place B, if you've never travelled that route. But you know how things are laid out. Some people really struggle with this by the way.
stephen_g 5y ago
Definitely the default for me. I often do think in other ways - I have very vivid auditory imaging, especially with music training, but think visually for a especially anything spatial, navigation, etc., but often even narrate that to some extent (for example thinking through a route before driving and just narrating something in my mind like “yes, yes, yep, yeah, nope, no, ok, uh huh, yep” while I visualise each turn).
JackFr 5y ago
Well most thought isn’t done that way even for those of us with robust internal monologues. In fact that’s the working definition of subconscious.
candlemas 5y ago
>how slow would a person’s thought processes have to be if they had to spell everything out in internal monologues? The verbalized "thoughts" come after the fact. They thought already exists and then you put it into words to yourself. The verbalization can be confused for thinking.
- BizarroLand 5y ago
  This is a good point. I bet a lot of people who assume that since they process their thoughts verbally in their head that all of their thoughts are word based, but there had to be some function under that stringing the words together to express the thoughts verbally. It would be like your Operating System thinking that it performed the computations it needed to show this web browser on your screen without the help of the CPU.
adolph 5y ago
I suspect the "words" are post-hoc rationalization for default mode network. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Default_mode_network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Default_mode_network

flacebo 5y ago

I had this realization in the last couple of weeks slowly, starting from a discussion about who thinks in which language in my friend group. I've tried to convince them how thoughts aren't in any language, but nobody agreed, which made me think. I found these threads later when trying to research it. For me, thinking in words and sentences sounds like thoughs being weighed and slowed down. Seems very unnecessary. On the other hand, I did and always had the the issue of putting my thoughts into words properly. Like the translator is pretty bad and I always struggle and feel like most of the information is lost. I think there might be some correlation between this and being introverted, socializing is exhausting for me because the translator is not well trained as I don't use it while thinking, and it has to run at 100%. I've talked with my better half about this and she said it's easy for her because the sentences are already there and it takes zero effort to say them, which aligns with my theory. I do have a terrible "mind chatter" though, I'd rather describe it as white noise. Way too many thoughts going through at once, which makes it very hard to concentrate on anything. So even though not everyone is thinking in words and sentences, this issue can effect all of us.

stephen_g 5y ago
That’s interesting, I basically always have a clearly English monologue going on, even while visually thinking about things or thinking about sounds or music at the same time. The monologue becomes more sparse and simple the harder I’m thinking in another way (sometimes just reducing to words of agreement or disagreement to the visualisation of something I’m designing or a route I’m planning). But then as soon as I stop doing that I just revert back to monologuing. I know a little Spanish and a tiny bit of German and I can purposely think in those languages, but I’m way too limited in what I can express that it takes a lot of conscious effort. The really fun thing that I’m not sure is normal is that I can very easily switch my monologue to different accents which sound (as I perceive it in my mind) identical to real ones I’ve heard for long enough to replicate. I’m quite good at doing different accents in real life so I expect that’s linked.
- ascar 5y ago
  The part about accents sounds interesting to me. I always believed I can't do accents because I absolutely can't fake/hear them in my head. I can even only speak my own accent with close family and switch to regular German with everyone else. I also can't hear/recall music from memory, so it's near impossible for me to sing freely, while singing along works fine. I can imitate different voices in my head when reading a novel and I can't even comprehend how one would read and comprehend without hearing everything spoken in ones head. It's just impossible for me. I do have a constant monologue though that is impossible to shut up. Even if I try to calm it or meditate I would think out loud "calm/meditate/don't think", so that doesn't work at all xD I did start thinking in English at some point. Before that I would translate all English to German, think about it and translate my German thoughts to English, if I needed to say something. By now I just think in English when I'm in an English context. It feels entirely natural.

bhaak 5y ago

I have that too (minus colors, if you actually see colors in your mind, colors in my mind is only an conceptual attribute attached to a thing). How do you articulate speech? With me, the concepts in my mind just turn into vocalized words. It's note even an effort, it just happens when I want to speak. Like my thoughts move the muscles in my arms. I don't know how and I am surprised that my line of thought rarely stumbles and doesn't produce the correct words. I think it should be some kind of effort to turn that wordless cloud of abstract thoughts and concepts into words but it just isn't. I do have vocalization when I'm reading or when I'm preparing a text (like this one I'm just writing). But this is just to get the phrases and wordings the way I like them to be with the right effect.

pbhjpbhj 5y ago
I'm the same, re not having internally-vocalised thought. Can you read without vocalising though? That was an idea I discovered on HN, in the context of speed reading. Seems we go from reading out loud, to reading in our heads (internally-vocalising), but you can continue and read without the internal-vocalisation. I can do it a bit, but under test conditions I only picked up about half of what I would do when I read to myself in my head. Amazing how different people's headspaces are.
- bhaak 5y ago
  I also encountered the vocalising/non-vocalising thing when going into speedreading. I can supress the vocalising with a bit of conscious effort but it's not the vocalising that limits my reading speed. It's all the rest that goes on in my mind that processes the information I just read. If I'm looking for some specific words, not vocalising is helpful but if I need to remember and understand the text I'm reading, I do vocalising as that doesn't impact the rest that goes on in my mind. So I'm not a speedreader but it did help me to improve my glancing skills and if I need to I can count really fast now by visualizing the numbers turning into each other.

sph 5y ago

There's a voice for me, but it makes no sound. It directly activates the speech centres in my brain. Like my aphantasia, that I can imagine things without seeing them.

mach1ne 5y ago
I also deduced that my inner monologue isn't making any sound even though I 'hear' the words. For each word it's like the average of every time you have heard that word. But it's easy to mistake that into hearing the sounds, which is probably what is happening when most people claim to hear their inner monologue.
technovader 5y ago
I think it's absurd to be talking about your inner monologue "making sounds" I just mean the idea itself is absurd. Obviously nothing in your mind is making sounds. If you just mean "imagining sounds" I would still question what it actually means. Maybe they're both the same thing (inner monologue that makes imagined sounds, vs inner monologue that doesnt make imagined sounds)
- riffraff 5y ago
  I think in words, but I do not hear voices. I can tell the difference, because I can easily imagine voices too, it's like remembering them, but you make them say something else :) But normally my "inner monologue" is voiceless.
BizarroLand 5y ago
My inner monologue can be visualized as phantasmal gray words floating in a blank black space. When I imagine what that monologue sounds like it is mostly has my own voice but occasionally has no definable voice, or it takes on the lilt of some unknown reader as if it were telling me a bedtime story or reading a poem that it knows by heart.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

FrozenVoid 5y ago

Could you explain what happens when you read text?

photochemsyn 5y ago
I think it's called 'chunking'. So 'Could you explain' (concept #1: explain -> describe / analyze) 'what happens' (concept #2: happens -> series of events, a process) 'when you read text' (concept #3: reading -> interpreting symbols). For me it's all visual / mechanical, kind of like playing with Legos. No 'inner voices' are involved; though sometimes I will sort of internally mutter to myself, 'okay, let's get to work' at the start. For example if I read the word 'seventy-two' I visualize the decimal numbers '72' as an image. I read a lot of scientific and technical literature, and I've found that trying to verbalize it isn't of much use and just leads to confusion. In contrast, I will 'hear voices' when reading a work of fiction but only when it's dialogue.
- mach1ne 5y ago
  Interesting! Gauging from the original Reddit post, it seems that people exist on a spectrum regarding this for whatever reason. This could explain a lot about why some people learn certain stuff faster than others. For example, maths encoded into language is just a set of meaningless rules you have to memorize, but when you process it in concept-space the ideas behind maths make so much more sense. So, if you have someone who processes stuff mainly through language, their speed of learning math is significantly slower than someone who processes them in concept-space.

quirino 5y ago

I've seen this "inner voice" thing on the internet a couple of times and I'm yet to find a source that convinces me there's a real difference between people in this respect. I can definitely relate more to the way you described your mind than to the usual "inner voice". But I suspect it's the same for all people, they just subconsciously abstract it in another way. I suspect a similar confusion happens when people talk about aphantasia. But I haven't really put in the work to discover how serious the research around these things is.

electriclizard 5y ago
I can do both. Getting rid of the inner voice took a lot of therapy and meditation and I still struggle; I had it for most of my life. The "inner voice" is absolutely a real voice, as real as my own; and it's not necessarily the only voice. The voices are not auditory hallucinations—they are very distinctly discernible from sounds I'd hear with my ears. I have learned how to think without this voice and I prefer doing so immensely, as the voice is akin to vapid calculation, while thinking without it is a sensational experience with feelings and is a much more enjoyable experience, extending beyond the location of where I hear the inner voice and goes as far experiencing sensation throughout my entire body; this sensation can be as vivid as physical touch. In fact the voice is slower than sensational thinking. It occurs after the sensational thinking and the sensational thinking rarely can occur at the same time as the voice; they very easily become mutually exclusive and the inner voice tends to be the one that dominates. I hope to reverse this relationship with continued work. Thinking without an inner voice is a much more enjoyable life for me.
alpple 5y ago
I do agree that just because people describe their experience as different, that is not a convincing argument that it is very different. Sometimes people don't understand what other people are describing or assume too much. In my opinion, I think if we were to live inside someone else's mind for a day, depending on who that other person is, we may not recognize the world as the same world. I believe people are more different than many people know. Some people may be similar inside, but some people may be extremely different inside. Like you, I would also like to know more about this.

glenstein 5y ago

>when I realized that some people really do have a "voice in their head" and it's not just a movie thing that they use for lazy storytelling. For some of us it's quite literal, and goes by the term subvocalization. I know that I, for one, when speaking to myself, sometimes am doing it through little breathy throat quasi-vocalizations, like I'm beginning to say a word that I'm mentally saying. I wonder at my ability to carry on an internal mental monolog without it.

KMag 5y ago
I've been told that it's likely that most people who could read still read out loud in the not-so-distant past. For instance, I've heard it said that the Apostle Paul knew what the Ethopian eunuch was reading in his chariot as he went along the road because the eunuch was almost certainly reading aloud to himself. We still teach children to read aloud, and it takes a bit of effort for them to switch over to reading silently, often with an intermediate phase of silently moving the lips.

Kharvok 5y ago

My thoughts work much like this. For example, if I'm discussing some kind of design or graph relationship, I actually see what I'm talking about vividly. The problem is it's really hard to make eye contact while doing this. It's not that I find eye contact uncomfortable in conversation. It's just that discussing many topics, especially technical ones, it's not possible to see my ideas while looking directly at someone. I find this most frustrating in work that is interrupted and explanation is sought. So for example, if I'm thinking through the most efficient way to accomplish X, taking into accounty Y and Z, and someone walks into my office and asks me what I'm working on it's frustrating stating my thought process on the spot because none of that reasoning was assembled using language. What are others experience with this?