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i call bs on this. i think everyone is able to summon a voice in their head. maybe these people think that this voice should make an audible sound. i dont know

i call bs on this. i think everyone is able to summon a voice in their head. maybe these people think that this voice should make an audible sound. i dont know how you can formulate concrete thoughts using abstract or symbolic things. maybe they are neanderthals or some other species.

bhaak 5y ago
Being able to summon a voice and having this voice as default (apparently some aren't even able to quiet this inner voice) are different things. Would you also call bullshit if some people told you that they don't see colors the way you do or that they can hear colors?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- alar44 5y ago
  Yes if fucking everyone started saying they can hear colors. Suddenly, half the population lacks a voice in their head or claims not to be able to imagine images. Not being "neurotypical" whatever the fuck that means, has become SUPER trendy. Out of nowhere, suddenly everyone has a mental disorder. I don't fucking buy it.
  - bhaak 5y ago
    It's not a mental disorder. The brain is a very complex machine. It would be quite surprising if every brain would work exactly the same. It's possible what people have talked about here is a pretty normal spectrum between the extremes of hyperphantasia and aphantasia. Especially aphantasia is not well researched yet.
- User23 5y ago
  I know with absolute certainty that others don't see colors the way I do. The reason is my left and right eyes see color slightly but observably differently. If my two eyes don't even agree with each other, they can't possibly agree with the eyes of others.
ehnto 5y ago
Some people can't picture images in their head, while I can, it's not so hard to imagine some people can do images but not voice.
- 5350-uiop-1130 5y ago
  again, i think people are just being naive or faux-confused about what images in your head should look like. they think it should maybe clear and lucid as opposed to something much more ephemeral and difficult to grasp.
  - ehnto 5y ago
    There is a body of research on the topic already, so if you're truly skeptical it might be worth reading into it some more. I think you're being a bit unempathetic, in that you're unable to consider that anyone thinks any differently to you. If you really must in order to accept it, consider it a defect, just like some people can't remember faces, some people have no long-term memory, some people can't recognize letters or numbers, so on and so forth. It shouldn't be so hard to believe that our brains, as complex and unknown as they are, might perform differently. There are billions of brains, some of them are probably going to be wired weirdly.
q3k 5y ago
Able to summon? Sure, but it feels unnatural. It sometimes happens when I gather all of my focus on a single task, eg. a debugging session. But then it's closer to talking to myself. My mind defaults to such a jumbled mess of simultanelous trains of thought that attempting to linearize them into a single voice is impossible.
pbhjpbhj 5y ago
>i dont know how you can formulate concrete thoughts using abstract or symbolic things. // What are you saying here, thoughts are abstract, but to me seem purer and more varied than the (both abstract and symbolic) constraints of language. There are lots of things that come to mind that are almost impossible to describe fully and clearly -- thoughts would seem very constrained if you could only have them in a language you knew. Children often described things they don't really have the language for. I think that constraining thought to use language is only an appearance and must necessarily arrive with language learning. Side note: I suffer intrusive thoughts which are in the form of images and compulsions, they are never word based and I never choose to describe them to myself (perhaps I should?).
- 5350-uiop-1130 5y ago
  for example, how would you write a piece of code? using images in your head? are those images of code? if so, then that for me is dialogue. i dont think people have some kind of mental sign language to represent every possible concept they have ever experienced. thats what language is for.
  - Jensson 5y ago
    > how would you write a piece of code? using images in your head? are those images of code? You think about what you want to write, then you write it. No, not images, thoughts doesn't need to be images, its just thoughts. No, they aren't code, the thoughts are just representations of programming concepts and abstractions that I can't name or visualize. It is like, when you think about a person and their personality, how does those thoughts work? Do you get words that represents everything about that persons personality? No, of course not, you can't fully capture a person in words or images. Yet you can still think and reason about their personality. That is the pure way your thoughts works. You can think about everything using abstract thoughts like that, including math, programming etc. The fact that some people can't think about math or programming without translating that to language is very fascinating to me.
  - Karawebnetwork 5y ago
    No images, no text, no voice. When I code, I simply sit in front of the computer and it happens. It's similar to tying knots or driving a car, except applied to my entire life. Once people master tying their shoes they don't think "alright friend, let's have this rabbit run around the tree". They just do it and it happens. When you drive as an experienced driver, you do not think "red means stop, red means stop, look in the mirror, look at the road". You just automatically compute what is going around you. Simply apply that to everything and that's how my mind, and the mind of a lot of people, works. I once tried to learn how to speed read. One of the core concept is "do not vocalize the words, just think through them". At first this had me confused as to why people would actually focus for long enough to generate an internal noise for each sound. This sounded like a way to slow down your reading on purpose. Then I learned that some people have an automatic voice that reads everything and the effort is flipped, it's a conscious effort to quiet it while for me it's a conscious effort to generate it. In my eyes, since people are able to unlearn that, it's not impossible for you to empathize about it. It's simply hard to put yourself in someone else's shoes when the concepts are very alien to how you experience life. Take the aphantasic community as an example, at first many people "call bs" about the fact that other people could see images.
Lambdanaut 5y ago
Haha really? Because a good friend of mine has spent a large amount of his life seeking an internal experience that he feels he so desperately needs in order to have lived a complete life. It's called complete aphantasia* and it's not too incredibly rare. I've met at least two people who would sit down and have a conversation with me about it. By the way, my aphantasic friend is a talented composer and an INCREDIBLY powerful writer. He's described composition as "sitting down at the piano and letting his hands do the work." He's never heard music in his mind because he's never had any internal experience whatsoever. * No dreams * No internal chatter * No internal recollection at all When asked to recall his life, he is able to tell a basic story, but it's not because he internally experiences remembering anything. Instead, he opens his mouth, and the story flows from him, as he has learned to say it. He's sought out psychedelic experiences just to feel something that is not there, and even then on the most powerful psychedelics he sees nothing (though he does feel things from them). The range of internal experience is far vaster than many of us ever thought possible. Sometimes I wonder if what is cartoon to me, is the lived experience of some other human being out there. It certainly would explain somethings. * https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia
- benlivengood 5y ago
  Has your friend heard of p-zombies, and if so, compared his experience to the description of them?
  - Lambdanaut 5y ago
    HAHA Yes. Very much so. "Sometimes I like to think of myself as a philosophical zombie".
- bsedlm 5y ago
  He seems like he's somehow split or fragmented or segmented away? Or possibly he just has a radically different way to bring all of his own self together. What if he were to sit in the morning to write down a plan of what he'll do in the afternoon with the idea that he'd do it? What if he didn't even write it?
- 5y ago
amatic 5y ago
In some cases it might be bs, and I think there could be a test for that. The idea is from Feynman, of all people, who once discovered that his colleague counts in "visual" numbers while he counted in "auditory", or maybe I mixed them up. The idea is to simultaneously do two tasks that would interfere with each other if they were of the same kind, and would be performed successfully if they are different. So, give a person a text to read out loud and make them perform a cognitive task that requires, in your opinion, verbal reasoning. If they can read and still solve the task in the same time as "normal" people, they could probably reason in non-verbal terms.
harpersealtako 5y ago
Is an inner monologue supposed to be completely intelligible, or at the same speed as spoken conversation, or in complete sentences, or always on by default? Because I can, e.g. look at the painting on my wall and summon a voice and think "ok what do I think of this painting?", and then I start getting random ideas like "blue sky" and "leaf, leaf, leaf" and "that's a weird curve" and "I'm getting hungry". But it's not like a fully formatted paragraph with coherant thoughts, in fact the voices are almost always overlapping, like someone is speaking 3 or 4 things at once and I can sort of hone in on one or two of them at a time. Then when I stop thinking about it, my mind fades back into whatever it was on before, usually some music that's stuck in my head (which interestingly is always in the correct key and tempo even if it repeats the catchy bit more than it should if I'm not paying attention). The weirdest part is that when I'm actually listening to or playing music the narrative DOES actually collapse into a single spoken-conversation-speed track.

bhaak 5y ago

Being able to summon a voice and having this voice as default (apparently some aren't even able to quiet this inner voice) are different things. Would you also call bullshit if some people told you that they don't see colors the way you do or that they can hear colors?

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
alar44 5y ago
Yes if fucking everyone started saying they can hear colors. Suddenly, half the population lacks a voice in their head or claims not to be able to imagine images. Not being "neurotypical" whatever the fuck that means, has become SUPER trendy. Out of nowhere, suddenly everyone has a mental disorder. I don't fucking buy it.
- bhaak 5y ago
  It's not a mental disorder. The brain is a very complex machine. It would be quite surprising if every brain would work exactly the same. It's possible what people have talked about here is a pretty normal spectrum between the extremes of hyperphantasia and aphantasia. Especially aphantasia is not well researched yet.
User23 5y ago
I know with absolute certainty that others don't see colors the way I do. The reason is my left and right eyes see color slightly but observably differently. If my two eyes don't even agree with each other, they can't possibly agree with the eyes of others.

ehnto 5y ago

Some people can't picture images in their head, while I can, it's not so hard to imagine some people can do images but not voice.

5350-uiop-1130 5y ago
again, i think people are just being naive or faux-confused about what images in your head should look like. they think it should maybe clear and lucid as opposed to something much more ephemeral and difficult to grasp.
- ehnto 5y ago
  There is a body of research on the topic already, so if you're truly skeptical it might be worth reading into it some more. I think you're being a bit unempathetic, in that you're unable to consider that anyone thinks any differently to you. If you really must in order to accept it, consider it a defect, just like some people can't remember faces, some people have no long-term memory, some people can't recognize letters or numbers, so on and so forth. It shouldn't be so hard to believe that our brains, as complex and unknown as they are, might perform differently. There are billions of brains, some of them are probably going to be wired weirdly.

q3k 5y ago

Able to summon? Sure, but it feels unnatural. It sometimes happens when I gather all of my focus on a single task, eg. a debugging session. But then it's closer to talking to myself. My mind defaults to such a jumbled mess of simultanelous trains of thought that attempting to linearize them into a single voice is impossible.

pbhjpbhj 5y ago

>i dont know how you can formulate concrete thoughts using abstract or symbolic things. // What are you saying here, thoughts are abstract, but to me seem purer and more varied than the (both abstract and symbolic) constraints of language. There are lots of things that come to mind that are almost impossible to describe fully and clearly -- thoughts would seem very constrained if you could only have them in a language you knew. Children often described things they don't really have the language for. I think that constraining thought to use language is only an appearance and must necessarily arrive with language learning. Side note: I suffer intrusive thoughts which are in the form of images and compulsions, they are never word based and I never choose to describe them to myself (perhaps I should?).

5350-uiop-1130 5y ago
for example, how would you write a piece of code? using images in your head? are those images of code? if so, then that for me is dialogue. i dont think people have some kind of mental sign language to represent every possible concept they have ever experienced. thats what language is for.
- Jensson 5y ago
  > how would you write a piece of code? using images in your head? are those images of code? You think about what you want to write, then you write it. No, not images, thoughts doesn't need to be images, its just thoughts. No, they aren't code, the thoughts are just representations of programming concepts and abstractions that I can't name or visualize. It is like, when you think about a person and their personality, how does those thoughts work? Do you get words that represents everything about that persons personality? No, of course not, you can't fully capture a person in words or images. Yet you can still think and reason about their personality. That is the pure way your thoughts works. You can think about everything using abstract thoughts like that, including math, programming etc. The fact that some people can't think about math or programming without translating that to language is very fascinating to me.
- Karawebnetwork 5y ago
  No images, no text, no voice. When I code, I simply sit in front of the computer and it happens. It's similar to tying knots or driving a car, except applied to my entire life. Once people master tying their shoes they don't think "alright friend, let's have this rabbit run around the tree". They just do it and it happens. When you drive as an experienced driver, you do not think "red means stop, red means stop, look in the mirror, look at the road". You just automatically compute what is going around you. Simply apply that to everything and that's how my mind, and the mind of a lot of people, works. I once tried to learn how to speed read. One of the core concept is "do not vocalize the words, just think through them". At first this had me confused as to why people would actually focus for long enough to generate an internal noise for each sound. This sounded like a way to slow down your reading on purpose. Then I learned that some people have an automatic voice that reads everything and the effort is flipped, it's a conscious effort to quiet it while for me it's a conscious effort to generate it. In my eyes, since people are able to unlearn that, it's not impossible for you to empathize about it. It's simply hard to put yourself in someone else's shoes when the concepts are very alien to how you experience life. Take the aphantasic community as an example, at first many people "call bs" about the fact that other people could see images.

Lambdanaut 5y ago

Haha really? Because a good friend of mine has spent a large amount of his life seeking an internal experience that he feels he so desperately needs in order to have lived a complete life. It's called complete aphantasia* and it's not too incredibly rare. I've met at least two people who would sit down and have a conversation with me about it. By the way, my aphantasic friend is a talented composer and an INCREDIBLY powerful writer. He's described composition as "sitting down at the piano and letting his hands do the work." He's never heard music in his mind because he's never had any internal experience whatsoever. * No dreams * No internal chatter * No internal recollection at all When asked to recall his life, he is able to tell a basic story, but it's not because he internally experiences remembering anything. Instead, he opens his mouth, and the story flows from him, as he has learned to say it. He's sought out psychedelic experiences just to feel something that is not there, and even then on the most powerful psychedelics he sees nothing (though he does feel things from them). The range of internal experience is far vaster than many of us ever thought possible. Sometimes I wonder if what is cartoon to me, is the lived experience of some other human being out there. It certainly would explain somethings. * https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia

benlivengood 5y ago
Has your friend heard of p-zombies, and if so, compared his experience to the description of them?
- Lambdanaut 5y ago
  HAHA Yes. Very much so. "Sometimes I like to think of myself as a philosophical zombie".
bsedlm 5y ago
He seems like he's somehow split or fragmented or segmented away? Or possibly he just has a radically different way to bring all of his own self together. What if he were to sit in the morning to write down a plan of what he'll do in the afternoon with the idea that he'd do it? What if he didn't even write it?
5y ago

amatic 5y ago

In some cases it might be bs, and I think there could be a test for that. The idea is from Feynman, of all people, who once discovered that his colleague counts in "visual" numbers while he counted in "auditory", or maybe I mixed them up. The idea is to simultaneously do two tasks that would interfere with each other if they were of the same kind, and would be performed successfully if they are different. So, give a person a text to read out loud and make them perform a cognitive task that requires, in your opinion, verbal reasoning. If they can read and still solve the task in the same time as "normal" people, they could probably reason in non-verbal terms.

harpersealtako 5y ago

Is an inner monologue supposed to be completely intelligible, or at the same speed as spoken conversation, or in complete sentences, or always on by default? Because I can, e.g. look at the painting on my wall and summon a voice and think "ok what do I think of this painting?", and then I start getting random ideas like "blue sky" and "leaf, leaf, leaf" and "that's a weird curve" and "I'm getting hungry". But it's not like a fully formatted paragraph with coherant thoughts, in fact the voices are almost always overlapping, like someone is speaking 3 or 4 things at once and I can sort of hone in on one or two of them at a time. Then when I stop thinking about it, my mind fades back into whatever it was on before, usually some music that's stuck in my head (which interestingly is always in the correct key and tempo even if it repeats the catchy bit more than it should if I'm not paying attention). The weirdest part is that when I'm actually listening to or playing music the narrative DOES actually collapse into a single spoken-conversation-speed track.