9 ms·

Inner Speech

119 points by keiferski 3y ago

politelemon 3y ago
It's a bit odd reading this because I learned just a few months ago, right here, that I am aphantastic (no mental imagery). Shortly after that, while discussing with some coworkers, I also learned I am anauralic (no inner voice). It appears they do sometimes go together: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8551557/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8551557/ I think for those of us who don't have an inner voice, section "3.2 The Semantic Content View" seems to be a somewhat match, but it also says > Gauker’s style of pure semantic content view is not widely endorsed. This may be because it clashes with the widespread view that inner speech has a sensory character similar to that of hearing speech. So I wonder if the people that wrote this article are unable to fathom that people without an inner voice exist?
- cl3misch 3y ago
  > So I wonder if the people that wrote this article are unable to fathom that people without an inner voice exist? I asked myself the same. There was a famous Reddit thread a couple years ago from a person who recently learned they did not have an inner voice, which made myself realize I also don't have one. I don't have the link saved and there seem to be a couple of such posts, but this one was pretty impactful in my bubble.
  - xwolfi 3y ago
    But then, by which mean did you "ask yourself the same" ? Or is it that you cannot imagine a conversation ?
    - cl3misch 3y ago
      I don't have an inner voice myself. So I asked myself whether the authors of the Plato post can't imagine that.
      - drupe 3y ago
        But what is the experience of "asking yourself something" like for you if you don't literally hear a question being asked in your head?
        Epholys 3y ago
        I don't have an inner voice, it's just completely abstract thoughts. I "feel" the interrogation about a subject, just without words.
        thinkingemote 3y ago
        So if I ask you to form an image of a song, (or recall it in your mind): the "happy birthday" song. How vivid or clear is it? Do you have no clarity, some, or lots? is it vivid as the actual sound as if you were hearing it in real life? Do you notice the tune as well as the words? Now change this image of happy birthday so that it's now a childrens choir singing it. Now change it so its by a bunch of cynical unix grey beards singing it in a convention. How easy was it to change this image? Did changing it affect the clarity?
        Epholys 3y ago
        Wow, these questions are really interesting, I've never thought about it! For my favorite songs, I can recall it perfectly... But I don't hear it at all as if I was hearing it in real life. In fact, I don't know how to describe how vivid it is. Maybe I don't hear it at all? But I can sing these songs (out loud) without a problem. However, I seem to be incapable of changing some elements about it. I can't seem to be able to make it faster, slower, change the singer, or the instruments. But, when I sing it out loud, I can of course modify it. For "Happy birthday" (well, in my native language), it's really weird. Because I don't have a specific song in mind, I can follow the words, the tune, but I don't "feel" the voice of a specific singer. And I'm incapable to change this recall to different voices, like children or grown men. But if I listen to a version sung by these people, I can recall it after (until I forget). Thanks again for these questions, I was aware of my lack of inner voice, my difficulties of a "inner sight" (that's a whole other can of worms), but I never applied this interrogations to a "inner hearing".
    - Armisael16 3y ago
      I imagine it’s just an ingrained use of language picked up from other people - no thought behind it, like an atheist who says ‘Christ’ as an expletive.
      - vidarh 3y ago
        It goes beyond that, I think, in that many of us have gone most of our lives believing others used this language metaphorically, and assigning a meaning to these words. I was about 45 by the point I realized most people to varying degrees actually meant that they saw things when imagining them. And so to me it's not that there no thought behind it, because I do something when I "imagine" something, just not the same thing. The word means something different to me, and most of the time you wouldn't notice even when it's staring you in the face. E.g."I imagined her face" has a meaning to me even though I can't literally see a face when imagining it, but I can recall qualities and emotions and sensations of it anyway and to me those things add up to the meaning of that word, because nobody ever thought to assume it needed explaining that it was literal. Opening that line of inquiry quickly makes it apparent that we assume a whole lot about how similar our inner lives are that just doesn't consistently hold up, but that we don't challenge without digging into precisely how people use various words.
        jvanderbot 3y ago
        This is so earth shattering to me. I'm completely unable to actually "see" anything when I imagine it, but I think I can visualize in the sense of recalling or imagining how it would look. Do people actually close their eyes and hallucinate or am I reading way to far into this?
        jddj 3y ago
        I think there's some of that over-reading. In these exchanges the language typically gets sloppy and one person's "see" gets translated and reacted to as whoa, with their eyes?. If you can imagine a red car and see it in your mind's eye (fairly ephemeral, especially if you force it, and nothing like as vivid as a hallucination) I think you're pretty normal from having followed a few of these threads over the years.
    - vidarh 3y ago
      I have aphantasia, but I still say I "imagine" things (in the visual sense; I find it funny that this notion of visualising things in our mind is so ingrained that "imagine" has broadened to refer to the other senses) because I still clearly recall or imagine imagery in a way that means I can mentally operate on them. E.g. I can draw things I imagine, or describe them, or "mentally navigate" spaces I remember with ease. I also see images in my dreams, which seems to be pretty normal for people with aphantasia, so clearly a lot of us are not unable to see things in our mind, but something is - usually - preventing it from happening while we're away. Usually rather than always because some people see brief flashes, and I sometimes think I might but I'm not sure (it's surprisingly hard to determine). I've also had exactly one experience that seems to have been in a waking state where I saw clear imagery. I say seems, because while I don't think I fell asleep, I was meditating, and while I was aware and able to manipulate the imagery, it's possible it was lucid dreaming, but it was noticeable in particular because the imagery was far clearer than when I dream.
      - failingslowly 3y ago
        You said you have aphantasia, then you listed a number of ways in which you can mentally process images, so I couldn't really understand what you were missing. Then I went and did the aphantasia test, and apparently I have hypophantasia, so I guess that explains it. I wonder if there's a link between engineering skills and aphantasia, given the prevalence of the "programmer art" meme?
        vidarh 3y ago
        > You said you have aphantasia, then you listed a number of ways in which you can mentally process images, so I couldn't really understand what you were missing. Then I went and did the aphantasia test, and apparently I have hypophantasia, so I guess that explains it. This is similar to how I found out - I assumed what I experienced was what people meant when they talked about visualizing things, and it took a long time before I realised that a lot of them meant it very literally when they said they could "see" things. > I wonder if there's a link between engineering skills and aphantasia, given the prevalence of the "programmer art" meme? Ed Catmull, ex-president of Pixar, has aphantasia, and he found that artists at Pixar where not all that more likely to be able to visualize well [1], so the "programmer art" bit is far more likely to be down to practice and interest (on average, at least). I think it's more likely that the better you are in a field, the less time you're likely to have to devote to getting good in another field. Of course there are always exceptions. But his sample was hardly representative, and so it's hard to tell whether it makes a difference. Maybe it does, and people who work at Pixar, including non-art staff are just more likely to be sufficiently interested in art to overcome extra difficulties. That said, for my part I was decent at art when I was younger, but my drawing style was different when "imagining" things than when drawing something I had in front of me. But I also suspect I'd commit "programmer art" if I tried again now, at least without a lot of practice. [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-47830256 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-47830256
  - HKH2 3y ago
    Do you 'randomly' replay memories?
    - cl3misch 3y ago
      Not more or less than someone who verbalizes their thoughts more. I would think it is orthogonal to inner voice. Do you think otherwise?
      - HKH2 3y ago
        How would you know how frequently others do that? I think people with an inner voice don't notice their 'random' memories as much because they don't fit the narrative. Like confirmation bias, the bits that don't fit get filtered out, yet visual narratives are more flexible than that. When you dream, it's like a montage, right? Do you hear sound at all? The dream still makes sense when you're in it though. How is waking reality any different in that regard?
  - poopoopeepee59 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - cl3misch 3y ago
      The term "Non-Player Characters" for fellow humans is incredibly condescending. Please acknowledge that every human is a player character. Albeit with a different quest and skilltree than you.
      - poopoopeepee59 3y ago
        [flagged]
      - red1reaper 3y ago
        There is also the other point of view, that every other human that is not you IS an NPC, we can only prove that we exist, and even then that is muddy, for all we know everyone else is just a figment of our imagination, we can neither affirm nor deny it, so it is not wrong that since the only one that you can affirm to some extent is a player character is yourself, to call everyone else an NPC, as you have no way to prove they are not an NPC, you can't see what they think, you can only assume that like you, they think and they are. And yes, I am being pedantic with a philosophy I do not even endorse nor fully understand, just wanted to be a contrarian.
- keiferski 3y ago
  Is inner voice the same thing as inner speech? I’m interpreting “inner voice” to be a kind of pseudo-personality similar to what people mean by conscience, while inner speech is simply the mental version of speech. I can understand someone not having an inner voice, but I can’t see how writing is possible without inner speech. Otherwise, how can you have thoughts prior to writing them down? Also note that the article is titled inner speech, not inner voice.
  - ithkuil 3y ago
    Luckily the text editor has been invented giving you the possibility of endlessly editing your sentence until it makes some sense. Only half joking. I'm always impressed by those ancient people who could write long letters by hand in beautiful orthography, composing complex texts and make them just flow linearly. I'm sure here and there there would be a rewriting step involved but that can't have been always the case; there was surely practical pressure to get the output right at first try. Perhaps this skill could be trained but perhaps it also leverages the ability to tap into your inner voice and inner speech
    - mmasu 3y ago
      i think it’s a matter of training/habit. Also, back then (educated) people used memory a lot more efficiently; this might have played a role too… i.e. compose and edit the whole text in your mind before writing it down.
      - ithkuil 3y ago
        > compose and edit the whole text in your mind before writing it down yeah; doesn't that basically mean you have to have "inner speech"?
    - SuperHeavy256 3y ago
      Perhaps only the letters which were 'really good' were preserved by historians, and most of the average human writing was not as preserved .
  - deleted 3y ago
- raducu 3y ago
  > I am aphantastic Were you always like this? I clearly remember as a child/teenager I had exquisite inner imagery, but around 17-18 anxiety set in and the imagery slowly faded away to the point that today I can only conjure faint images for fractions of a second
  - vidarh 3y ago
    Not the person above, but I believe I've always been like this. I can vividly remember (but not see) imagery from dreams that I know I see while dreaming, and I think I'd remember if I used to do that in my waking state. I've also had one incidence of seeing things as an adult, during meditation, and never managed to again, so I do have a clear idea of what is possible to compare to.
- drcongo 3y ago
  Weirdly I'm aphantasic but hyperauralic. What I wouldn't give for it to be the other way around.
- noduerme 3y ago
  If you're anauralic, what happens when you're reading and you hit a foreign word, or a word you don't know? Do you have to say it out loud, or can you "hear" the pronunciation in your mind by essentially speaking it sublingually? For me, I think my "inner voice" really is just sublingual speech wherein I don't move my lips, tongue or vocal chords. Although I can also "hear" the voices of other people I know if I think about them talking. (This would seem to be a requisite skill if you want to do impressions of people). [edit: Maybe "sublingual" isn't the correct term for what I'm describing. I remember reading about some MRI experiments where they asked people to "talk" without making any sound, and this activated the speech parts of the brain as if they were using motor function to speak. But I can't recall the term used for doing this.]
  - deleted 3y ago
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  - RichardLake 3y ago
    For myself I can learn a written word without having any idea of how it is pronounced. Growing up there were multiple occasions when I was speaking and mid way through a sentence realize I don't know the pronunciation of the next word I was going to say. Also I can read text and completely miss rhymes unless the formatting draws attention to it like how poetry is often written with lines split. (More likely to miss rhymes like half and graph where the word endings visually are different.)
- prossercj 3y ago
  Okay, I'll bite. Pardon my ignorance, but this is a new concept to me. If you have no inner voice, how are you able to speak? Surely you formed those words in your mind before writing them. Is it that you only do so when speaking to others, and never to yourself?
  - pama 3y ago
    To people who have trouble with this concept I suggest the analogy to reading without voicing out words yet still internalizing the concepts, and often at a much faster rate than when vocalizing during reading (which in turn can be pleasant for some poetry). It is possible to read multiple lines in parallel and the mechanism is similar to sight reading piano music when you have two (or occasionally three) lines of information that immediately translate to actions in your arms, hands, and fingers. In a related sense, sight reading music does not involve any inner voice or chatter yet a lot of conscious decisions are being made and a lot of hard non-verbal thinking goes into optimizing technique. Human language is just too inefficient for most high performance thinking but it is the best tool we currently have for storing and transmitting thoughts.
  - riversflow 3y ago
    > how are you able to speak? How are you able to walk? You don’t think about every muscle contraction. Speaking, writing, drawing and walking are all about the same to me. (I also have no inner voice and aphantasia)
    - jimkleiber 3y ago
      I have a lots of questions, as I find it hard for me to imagine: 1) When you read, do you ever say the words in your head or is it always more like an automatic recognition of the characters without voicing them? 2) Can you force yourself to have an inner voice, aka forcing yourself to say something like "I am thinking to myself right now"? Also, it's ok if you don't want to answer but I'd be curious to learn more about your experience.
      - razerbeans 3y ago
- candlemas 3y ago
  Did thought bubbles in cartoons/comics confuse you?
- tacheiordache 3y ago
  Im aphantastic to some extent and lack inner voice except for certain situations where there is a semblance of inner voice. Im learning for the first time about anauralia and am intrigued, seems I do to some extend have this. I'm just curious, do you present no inner voice whatsoever or do you have the occasional inner voice in some cases, when for example you attempt to collect some information when getting ready to write down something or in a very stressful situation you need to enumerate some steps to get out of it, etc...
- endofreach 3y ago
  Not sure if it applies to me, i do have an inner voice, but it's way too slow for my thoughts. Never know how to explain it, but even though i am quick with finding the right words, it's so much slower than my thoughts. But i guess that's normal, so then, most people that have an inner voice, still don't use it for their thinking. It comes afterwards, at least that's how it seems to me.
  - kypro 3y ago
    That's exactly the same for me. I use my inner voice when I'm reading or trying to construct sentences, but I don't think in sentences. I have to convert my thoughts to words so I'm an extremely slow and clumsy talker. I thought this was normal to be honest, but others have sworn to me that they think in sentences and I wonder if that's why some people are such brilliant speakers since for some thoughts and speech are linked instead of being two separate processes.
    - endofreach 3y ago
      I just can't really believe people with that. But i just asked 3 more people and they sworn the same as yours. Sure, language had an enormous impact on human intelligence and "thinking capability", but structured and complex language has evolved much later than clever and intelligent thinking was important for humans. I feel very often like the need of having the right words to describe thoughts to fellow humans is on one hand crafting reality at the same time it's holding it, and therefore all of us, back. Maybe this way of thinking is more what people understand as intuition?
neoberg 3y ago
I'm not sure if I have inner voice or not. Do you really "hear" a voice? I can imagine concepts as well as construct whole sentences in my mind but there is no actual voice that I'm hearing. Is this what's called inner voice?
- travisjungroth 3y ago
  Yes. This stuff is hard to pin down, but I’d put the most common understanding in vaguely Western culture as: 1. Most people experience something similar to imagining themselves talk much of the time. 2. Most people do not hear voices, as in hearing a voice that you could easily mistake as coming into your awareness through your ears perceiving physical sound. Your experience sounds like the “default”, for lack of a better term.
  - neoberg 3y ago
    Interesting, thank you. I've found some subreddits while trying to undrestand this and it's amazing what some people experience and how different it is for everyone. There is a person on r/hyperphantasia who says that they can look at a ruler, take that image and overlay it on something else to measure. Wild.
    - red1reaper 3y ago
      Wait... Isn't that normal? I mean, doing that kind of stuff is kind of mentally taxing as it requires quite the amount of focus but excluding people with aphantasia and the like, isn't it normal just to be able to imagine sensory stimuli and overlay it with any of your senses? I mean, the inner dialogue is just doing this with auditory stimuli and even empathy is just an extension of that, were you overlay your perception of the physical or mental pain of other with your own to feel what it's like? It also is not that rare to remember tastes or smells and feel like you are feeling them even if a bit faint. So overlaying stuff in your vision is just an application of this with the eyes, i mean even if we say that we imagine stuff in our heads, we just imagine it positioned in space above our heads were we don't see with our normal eyes so they do not overlap and is less taxing, but moving it to your field of vision is not that rare right? just takes focus to keep it clear enough to be useful like a ruler would. I mean, the whole phrase "imagine everyone else is nude" that is given to people that are going to do something with a public to reduce their awkwardness is based on this, you overlay your imagination of everyone nude with your vision.
asimovfan 3y ago
Sometimes called manas in buddhism. The discursive mind. Its incredible to me in the middle of all this mental unease nobody is talking about this stuff.
causi 3y ago
After keeping track for a while, my conclusion as regards my inner voice is that it's an artifact of "paying too much attention" to what's going on in my mind. If I'm in a flow state I have no inner voice. If I'm overly bored, or nervous, or have some other reason to be actively and consciously paying attention to the decisions I'm making, I have a very clear inner voice. It's an artifact of recasting subconscious thought into conscious terms.
- deleted 3y ago
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5- 3y ago
some good related discussion (2020, 886 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22193451 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22193451
feverzsj 3y ago
> Primarily though, most completely deaf people think in sign language. Similar to how an “inner voice” of a hearing person is experienced in one's own voice, a completely deaf person sees or, more aptly, feels themselves signing in their head as they “talk” in their heads. The question is: is inner voice just some sort of echo or a necessary part of thought.
jiggawatts 3y ago
I became interested in this topic after related discussions here in HN and listening to Sam Harris talking about meditation. Like learning to meditate, it’s possible to learn to be anauralic at will. I started practicing while going on long walks, trying to think about the things I was seeing without mentally discussing it with my inner voice. At first it was extremely difficult, but I now do it sometimes without even trying. Speaking of “alternate modalities of thought”, a while ago I made a comment here on HN that I’ve had “dreams in C++”. As in, I wasn’t thinking about programming in English, the language of my thoughts were C++! It was one of the freakiest things that had ever happened to me. I liken it to how if you play a game like Tetris too much, you start “seeing” blocks moving even if you stop playing and go outside.
taopai 3y ago
Have you tried to change the tone in your inner voice? Like talking more energetically and happy or using your favorite voice actor? It's pretty awesome. If you have good imaginary you can combine it with epic music and a hall full of people cheering. I found it in this small free epub, just 5 pages. I can't find it right now, but here it is in html. https://www.bookfrom.net/jason-fladlien/589457-how_to_eliminate_procrastination.html https://www.bookfrom.net/jason-fladlien/589457-how_to_elimin...
deleted 3y ago
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shunyaekam 3y ago
What is the difference in inner dialogue in happy vs unhappy people? I guess the inner voice is what one strives to just observe and let be while meditating. After a good meditation session I feel less mentally tense (eg not clinging on to superficially important todo items). Seems like inner voice is related to mental state in a major way. I have pretty severe adhd and am unmedicated so my inner voice is more like an old radio inbetween stations (= chaotic).
- bsenftner 3y ago
  Unhappy people with an inner voice have a grumpy crank personality as their inner voice. Taming and neutralizing that grumpy crank is the entire point of the Cognitive Behavioral Therapy school of Psychology. They have a process called an Inner Dialogue Audit where a list of 10-20 simple questions are given, and you ask yourself these questions. If you answer "yes" to any of them, then your inner voice has a bias, is effectively lying to you about your moment to moment observations and thoughts. And once this bias is identified, it evaporates because deception known no longer deceives.
_tom_ 3y ago
I do either, depending on the situation. For me, verbalizing things, internally, is like writing things down - it allows for more organization and review. (Consider https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging) It's clear to me that the main ideas come non-verbally first, and then I translate into words.
- vidarh 3y ago
  I will have conversations with myself, but it's clear thoughts also form without verbal translation. Interestingly another distinction when it comes to inner life is whether people have a monologue or multiple voices. I only have a rather incessant monologue of myself narrating and practicing things to say or going over multiple sides of an argument in my own voice. It only ever stops when I sleep or meditate.
omani 3y ago
to my fellow humans: if you read a comment saying it has no inner voice, remember... GPT is active on HN, too. ;)
- SuperHeavy256 3y ago
  unnecessary paranoia.
riffic 3y ago
Most of the time I pity the people who lack an inner voice but sometimes, rarely, I envy them.
russellbeattie 3y ago
I don't have an internal dialogue, but I do have imaginary conversations and I compose blog posts, thread comments (like this one) and emails in my head quite a lot. But speaking to myself as a separate voice? It only happens when I'm high. Really. I only discovered that a few years ago when marijuana became legal in California. I was worried at first that I was having some sort of mental break, because I'm really not used to having two separate voices like that talking to each other. Then I looked it up and realized that many (most?) people have some sort of inner dialogue. Thank goodness. I truly thought I was losing my mind. I wonder what it is about THC which causes that effect in my brain? Also, I don't drink - I wonder if many people have a voice because they're commonly imbibing, even a little. I would guess my lack of inner voice is why I tend to blurt out what I'm thinking way more than other people. And I'm not one to engage in conversations in a contemplative way. I realize now that many people I've talked to who seem like they're speaking carefully are actually having a whole other voice in their head making observations, etc.
- vanjajaja1 3y ago
  .. two separate voices? do they sound different or.. how do you identify which is which voice?
kajic 3y ago
It’s happened to me a few times lately that I’ve heard music playing that was as vivid as a recording. As soon as I became aware of the fact that it was playing in my head and not in reality it stopped. I can’t make it start at will. I’d love to hear of other people’s experiences with this.
davidthewatson 3y ago
It's interesting that the paper mentions Andy Clark's work and hallucinations in separate threads but doesn't connect Anil Seth's introduction of controlled hallucinations and Andy Clark's work on that topic: https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/08/25/1032121/brains-controlled-hallucination/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/08/25/1032121/brains-c... I had always conceived of metacognition as genetic, given my own phenomenological experience dating to childhood. It wasn't until a colleague challenged this idea a few years ago at Carnegie Mellon that I'd even considered that metacognition may be taught and learned.
- SuperHeavy256 3y ago
  which makes sense, because this Anil Seth guy sounds really aloof and seems to have no problem making grandiose statements. Reads like a tabloid that's desperately trying to keep your attention by saying big things.
GeoAtreides 3y ago
It's interesting to me how all of the comments are about the title, but nothing (absolutely nothing) about the actual post linked; which is fair, plato stanford articles are dense philosophical essays, not really suited for the layperson.
6R1M0R4CL3 3y ago
i have no inner speech and i have no clue what people are talking about that inner speech inside their heads.
- SuperHeavy256 3y ago
  usually it's talking about stuff we're going to do before we do it.

119 points by keiferski 3y ago

It's a bit odd reading this because I learned just a few months ago, right here, that I am aphantastic (no mental imagery). Shortly after that, while discussing with some coworkers, I also learned I am anauralic (no inner voice). It appears they do sometimes go together: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8551557/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8551557/ I think for those of us who don't have an inner voice, section "3.2 The Semantic Content View" seems to be a somewhat match, but it also says > Gauker’s style of pure semantic content view is not widely endorsed. This may be because it clashes with the widespread view that inner speech has a sensory character similar to that of hearing speech. So I wonder if the people that wrote this article are unable to fathom that people without an inner voice exist?

cl3misch 3y ago
> So I wonder if the people that wrote this article are unable to fathom that people without an inner voice exist? I asked myself the same. There was a famous Reddit thread a couple years ago from a person who recently learned they did not have an inner voice, which made myself realize I also don't have one. I don't have the link saved and there seem to be a couple of such posts, but this one was pretty impactful in my bubble.
- xwolfi 3y ago
  But then, by which mean did you "ask yourself the same" ? Or is it that you cannot imagine a conversation ?
  - cl3misch 3y ago
    I don't have an inner voice myself. So I asked myself whether the authors of the Plato post can't imagine that.
    - drupe 3y ago
      But what is the experience of "asking yourself something" like for you if you don't literally hear a question being asked in your head?
      - Epholys 3y ago
        I don't have an inner voice, it's just completely abstract thoughts. I "feel" the interrogation about a subject, just without words.
        thinkingemote 3y ago
        So if I ask you to form an image of a song, (or recall it in your mind): the "happy birthday" song. How vivid or clear is it? Do you have no clarity, some, or lots? is it vivid as the actual sound as if you were hearing it in real life? Do you notice the tune as well as the words? Now change this image of happy birthday so that it's now a childrens choir singing it. Now change it so its by a bunch of cynical unix grey beards singing it in a convention. How easy was it to change this image? Did changing it affect the clarity?
        Epholys 3y ago
        Wow, these questions are really interesting, I've never thought about it! For my favorite songs, I can recall it perfectly... But I don't hear it at all as if I was hearing it in real life. In fact, I don't know how to describe how vivid it is. Maybe I don't hear it at all? But I can sing these songs (out loud) without a problem. However, I seem to be incapable of changing some elements about it. I can't seem to be able to make it faster, slower, change the singer, or the instruments. But, when I sing it out loud, I can of course modify it. For "Happy birthday" (well, in my native language), it's really weird. Because I don't have a specific song in mind, I can follow the words, the tune, but I don't "feel" the voice of a specific singer. And I'm incapable to change this recall to different voices, like children or grown men. But if I listen to a version sung by these people, I can recall it after (until I forget). Thanks again for these questions, I was aware of my lack of inner voice, my difficulties of a "inner sight" (that's a whole other can of worms), but I never applied this interrogations to a "inner hearing".
  - Armisael16 3y ago
    I imagine it’s just an ingrained use of language picked up from other people - no thought behind it, like an atheist who says ‘Christ’ as an expletive.
    - vidarh 3y ago
      It goes beyond that, I think, in that many of us have gone most of our lives believing others used this language metaphorically, and assigning a meaning to these words. I was about 45 by the point I realized most people to varying degrees actually meant that they saw things when imagining them. And so to me it's not that there no thought behind it, because I do something when I "imagine" something, just not the same thing. The word means something different to me, and most of the time you wouldn't notice even when it's staring you in the face. E.g."I imagined her face" has a meaning to me even though I can't literally see a face when imagining it, but I can recall qualities and emotions and sensations of it anyway and to me those things add up to the meaning of that word, because nobody ever thought to assume it needed explaining that it was literal. Opening that line of inquiry quickly makes it apparent that we assume a whole lot about how similar our inner lives are that just doesn't consistently hold up, but that we don't challenge without digging into precisely how people use various words.
      - jvanderbot 3y ago
        This is so earth shattering to me. I'm completely unable to actually "see" anything when I imagine it, but I think I can visualize in the sense of recalling or imagining how it would look. Do people actually close their eyes and hallucinate or am I reading way to far into this?
        jddj 3y ago
        I think there's some of that over-reading. In these exchanges the language typically gets sloppy and one person's "see" gets translated and reacted to as whoa, with their eyes?. If you can imagine a red car and see it in your mind's eye (fairly ephemeral, especially if you force it, and nothing like as vivid as a hallucination) I think you're pretty normal from having followed a few of these threads over the years.
  - vidarh 3y ago
    I have aphantasia, but I still say I "imagine" things (in the visual sense; I find it funny that this notion of visualising things in our mind is so ingrained that "imagine" has broadened to refer to the other senses) because I still clearly recall or imagine imagery in a way that means I can mentally operate on them. E.g. I can draw things I imagine, or describe them, or "mentally navigate" spaces I remember with ease. I also see images in my dreams, which seems to be pretty normal for people with aphantasia, so clearly a lot of us are not unable to see things in our mind, but something is - usually - preventing it from happening while we're away. Usually rather than always because some people see brief flashes, and I sometimes think I might but I'm not sure (it's surprisingly hard to determine). I've also had exactly one experience that seems to have been in a waking state where I saw clear imagery. I say seems, because while I don't think I fell asleep, I was meditating, and while I was aware and able to manipulate the imagery, it's possible it was lucid dreaming, but it was noticeable in particular because the imagery was far clearer than when I dream.
    - failingslowly 3y ago
      You said you have aphantasia, then you listed a number of ways in which you can mentally process images, so I couldn't really understand what you were missing. Then I went and did the aphantasia test, and apparently I have hypophantasia, so I guess that explains it. I wonder if there's a link between engineering skills and aphantasia, given the prevalence of the "programmer art" meme?
      - vidarh 3y ago
        > You said you have aphantasia, then you listed a number of ways in which you can mentally process images, so I couldn't really understand what you were missing. Then I went and did the aphantasia test, and apparently I have hypophantasia, so I guess that explains it. This is similar to how I found out - I assumed what I experienced was what people meant when they talked about visualizing things, and it took a long time before I realised that a lot of them meant it very literally when they said they could "see" things. > I wonder if there's a link between engineering skills and aphantasia, given the prevalence of the "programmer art" meme? Ed Catmull, ex-president of Pixar, has aphantasia, and he found that artists at Pixar where not all that more likely to be able to visualize well [1], so the "programmer art" bit is far more likely to be down to practice and interest (on average, at least). I think it's more likely that the better you are in a field, the less time you're likely to have to devote to getting good in another field. Of course there are always exceptions. But his sample was hardly representative, and so it's hard to tell whether it makes a difference. Maybe it does, and people who work at Pixar, including non-art staff are just more likely to be sufficiently interested in art to overcome extra difficulties. That said, for my part I was decent at art when I was younger, but my drawing style was different when "imagining" things than when drawing something I had in front of me. But I also suspect I'd commit "programmer art" if I tried again now, at least without a lot of practice. [1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-47830256 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-47830256
- HKH2 3y ago
  Do you 'randomly' replay memories?
  - cl3misch 3y ago
    Not more or less than someone who verbalizes their thoughts more. I would think it is orthogonal to inner voice. Do you think otherwise?
    - HKH2 3y ago
      How would you know how frequently others do that? I think people with an inner voice don't notice their 'random' memories as much because they don't fit the narrative. Like confirmation bias, the bits that don't fit get filtered out, yet visual narratives are more flexible than that. When you dream, it's like a montage, right? Do you hear sound at all? The dream still makes sense when you're in it though. How is waking reality any different in that regard?
- poopoopeepee59 3y ago
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  - cl3misch 3y ago
    The term "Non-Player Characters" for fellow humans is incredibly condescending. Please acknowledge that every human is a player character. Albeit with a different quest and skilltree than you.
    - poopoopeepee59 3y ago
      [flagged]
    - red1reaper 3y ago
      There is also the other point of view, that every other human that is not you IS an NPC, we can only prove that we exist, and even then that is muddy, for all we know everyone else is just a figment of our imagination, we can neither affirm nor deny it, so it is not wrong that since the only one that you can affirm to some extent is a player character is yourself, to call everyone else an NPC, as you have no way to prove they are not an NPC, you can't see what they think, you can only assume that like you, they think and they are. And yes, I am being pedantic with a philosophy I do not even endorse nor fully understand, just wanted to be a contrarian.
keiferski 3y ago
Is inner voice the same thing as inner speech? I’m interpreting “inner voice” to be a kind of pseudo-personality similar to what people mean by conscience, while inner speech is simply the mental version of speech. I can understand someone not having an inner voice, but I can’t see how writing is possible without inner speech. Otherwise, how can you have thoughts prior to writing them down? Also note that the article is titled inner speech, not inner voice.
- ithkuil 3y ago
  Luckily the text editor has been invented giving you the possibility of endlessly editing your sentence until it makes some sense. Only half joking. I'm always impressed by those ancient people who could write long letters by hand in beautiful orthography, composing complex texts and make them just flow linearly. I'm sure here and there there would be a rewriting step involved but that can't have been always the case; there was surely practical pressure to get the output right at first try. Perhaps this skill could be trained but perhaps it also leverages the ability to tap into your inner voice and inner speech
  - mmasu 3y ago
    i think it’s a matter of training/habit. Also, back then (educated) people used memory a lot more efficiently; this might have played a role too… i.e. compose and edit the whole text in your mind before writing it down.
    - ithkuil 3y ago
      > compose and edit the whole text in your mind before writing it down yeah; doesn't that basically mean you have to have "inner speech"?
  - SuperHeavy256 3y ago
    Perhaps only the letters which were 'really good' were preserved by historians, and most of the average human writing was not as preserved .
- deleted 3y ago
raducu 3y ago
> I am aphantastic Were you always like this? I clearly remember as a child/teenager I had exquisite inner imagery, but around 17-18 anxiety set in and the imagery slowly faded away to the point that today I can only conjure faint images for fractions of a second
- vidarh 3y ago
  Not the person above, but I believe I've always been like this. I can vividly remember (but not see) imagery from dreams that I know I see while dreaming, and I think I'd remember if I used to do that in my waking state. I've also had one incidence of seeing things as an adult, during meditation, and never managed to again, so I do have a clear idea of what is possible to compare to.
drcongo 3y ago
Weirdly I'm aphantasic but hyperauralic. What I wouldn't give for it to be the other way around.
noduerme 3y ago
If you're anauralic, what happens when you're reading and you hit a foreign word, or a word you don't know? Do you have to say it out loud, or can you "hear" the pronunciation in your mind by essentially speaking it sublingually? For me, I think my "inner voice" really is just sublingual speech wherein I don't move my lips, tongue or vocal chords. Although I can also "hear" the voices of other people I know if I think about them talking. (This would seem to be a requisite skill if you want to do impressions of people). [edit: Maybe "sublingual" isn't the correct term for what I'm describing. I remember reading about some MRI experiments where they asked people to "talk" without making any sound, and this activated the speech parts of the brain as if they were using motor function to speak. But I can't recall the term used for doing this.]
- deleted 3y ago
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- RichardLake 3y ago
  For myself I can learn a written word without having any idea of how it is pronounced. Growing up there were multiple occasions when I was speaking and mid way through a sentence realize I don't know the pronunciation of the next word I was going to say. Also I can read text and completely miss rhymes unless the formatting draws attention to it like how poetry is often written with lines split. (More likely to miss rhymes like half and graph where the word endings visually are different.)
prossercj 3y ago
Okay, I'll bite. Pardon my ignorance, but this is a new concept to me. If you have no inner voice, how are you able to speak? Surely you formed those words in your mind before writing them. Is it that you only do so when speaking to others, and never to yourself?
- pama 3y ago
  To people who have trouble with this concept I suggest the analogy to reading without voicing out words yet still internalizing the concepts, and often at a much faster rate than when vocalizing during reading (which in turn can be pleasant for some poetry). It is possible to read multiple lines in parallel and the mechanism is similar to sight reading piano music when you have two (or occasionally three) lines of information that immediately translate to actions in your arms, hands, and fingers. In a related sense, sight reading music does not involve any inner voice or chatter yet a lot of conscious decisions are being made and a lot of hard non-verbal thinking goes into optimizing technique. Human language is just too inefficient for most high performance thinking but it is the best tool we currently have for storing and transmitting thoughts.
- riversflow 3y ago
  > how are you able to speak? How are you able to walk? You don’t think about every muscle contraction. Speaking, writing, drawing and walking are all about the same to me. (I also have no inner voice and aphantasia)
  - jimkleiber 3y ago
    I have a lots of questions, as I find it hard for me to imagine: 1) When you read, do you ever say the words in your head or is it always more like an automatic recognition of the characters without voicing them? 2) Can you force yourself to have an inner voice, aka forcing yourself to say something like "I am thinking to myself right now"? Also, it's ok if you don't want to answer but I'd be curious to learn more about your experience.
    - razerbeans 3y ago
candlemas 3y ago
Did thought bubbles in cartoons/comics confuse you?
tacheiordache 3y ago
Im aphantastic to some extent and lack inner voice except for certain situations where there is a semblance of inner voice. Im learning for the first time about anauralia and am intrigued, seems I do to some extend have this. I'm just curious, do you present no inner voice whatsoever or do you have the occasional inner voice in some cases, when for example you attempt to collect some information when getting ready to write down something or in a very stressful situation you need to enumerate some steps to get out of it, etc...
endofreach 3y ago
Not sure if it applies to me, i do have an inner voice, but it's way too slow for my thoughts. Never know how to explain it, but even though i am quick with finding the right words, it's so much slower than my thoughts. But i guess that's normal, so then, most people that have an inner voice, still don't use it for their thinking. It comes afterwards, at least that's how it seems to me.
- kypro 3y ago
  That's exactly the same for me. I use my inner voice when I'm reading or trying to construct sentences, but I don't think in sentences. I have to convert my thoughts to words so I'm an extremely slow and clumsy talker. I thought this was normal to be honest, but others have sworn to me that they think in sentences and I wonder if that's why some people are such brilliant speakers since for some thoughts and speech are linked instead of being two separate processes.
  - endofreach 3y ago
    I just can't really believe people with that. But i just asked 3 more people and they sworn the same as yours. Sure, language had an enormous impact on human intelligence and "thinking capability", but structured and complex language has evolved much later than clever and intelligent thinking was important for humans. I feel very often like the need of having the right words to describe thoughts to fellow humans is on one hand crafting reality at the same time it's holding it, and therefore all of us, back. Maybe this way of thinking is more what people understand as intuition?

neoberg 3y ago

I'm not sure if I have inner voice or not. Do you really "hear" a voice? I can imagine concepts as well as construct whole sentences in my mind but there is no actual voice that I'm hearing. Is this what's called inner voice?

travisjungroth 3y ago
Yes. This stuff is hard to pin down, but I’d put the most common understanding in vaguely Western culture as: 1. Most people experience something similar to imagining themselves talk much of the time. 2. Most people do not hear voices, as in hearing a voice that you could easily mistake as coming into your awareness through your ears perceiving physical sound. Your experience sounds like the “default”, for lack of a better term.
- neoberg 3y ago
  Interesting, thank you. I've found some subreddits while trying to undrestand this and it's amazing what some people experience and how different it is for everyone. There is a person on r/hyperphantasia who says that they can look at a ruler, take that image and overlay it on something else to measure. Wild.
  - red1reaper 3y ago
    Wait... Isn't that normal? I mean, doing that kind of stuff is kind of mentally taxing as it requires quite the amount of focus but excluding people with aphantasia and the like, isn't it normal just to be able to imagine sensory stimuli and overlay it with any of your senses? I mean, the inner dialogue is just doing this with auditory stimuli and even empathy is just an extension of that, were you overlay your perception of the physical or mental pain of other with your own to feel what it's like? It also is not that rare to remember tastes or smells and feel like you are feeling them even if a bit faint. So overlaying stuff in your vision is just an application of this with the eyes, i mean even if we say that we imagine stuff in our heads, we just imagine it positioned in space above our heads were we don't see with our normal eyes so they do not overlap and is less taxing, but moving it to your field of vision is not that rare right? just takes focus to keep it clear enough to be useful like a ruler would. I mean, the whole phrase "imagine everyone else is nude" that is given to people that are going to do something with a public to reduce their awkwardness is based on this, you overlay your imagination of everyone nude with your vision.

asimovfan 3y ago

Sometimes called manas in buddhism. The discursive mind. Its incredible to me in the middle of all this mental unease nobody is talking about this stuff.

causi 3y ago

After keeping track for a while, my conclusion as regards my inner voice is that it's an artifact of "paying too much attention" to what's going on in my mind. If I'm in a flow state I have no inner voice. If I'm overly bored, or nervous, or have some other reason to be actively and consciously paying attention to the decisions I'm making, I have a very clear inner voice. It's an artifact of recasting subconscious thought into conscious terms.

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5- 3y ago

some good related discussion (2020, 886 comments): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22193451 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22193451

feverzsj 3y ago

> Primarily though, most completely deaf people think in sign language. Similar to how an “inner voice” of a hearing person is experienced in one's own voice, a completely deaf person sees or, more aptly, feels themselves signing in their head as they “talk” in their heads. The question is: is inner voice just some sort of echo or a necessary part of thought.

jiggawatts 3y ago

I became interested in this topic after related discussions here in HN and listening to Sam Harris talking about meditation. Like learning to meditate, it’s possible to learn to be anauralic at will. I started practicing while going on long walks, trying to think about the things I was seeing without mentally discussing it with my inner voice. At first it was extremely difficult, but I now do it sometimes without even trying. Speaking of “alternate modalities of thought”, a while ago I made a comment here on HN that I’ve had “dreams in C++”. As in, I wasn’t thinking about programming in English, the language of my thoughts were C++! It was one of the freakiest things that had ever happened to me. I liken it to how if you play a game like Tetris too much, you start “seeing” blocks moving even if you stop playing and go outside.

taopai 3y ago

Have you tried to change the tone in your inner voice? Like talking more energetically and happy or using your favorite voice actor? It's pretty awesome. If you have good imaginary you can combine it with epic music and a hall full of people cheering. I found it in this small free epub, just 5 pages. I can't find it right now, but here it is in html. https://www.bookfrom.net/jason-fladlien/589457-how_to_eliminate_procrastination.html https://www.bookfrom.net/jason-fladlien/589457-how_to_elimin...

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shunyaekam 3y ago

What is the difference in inner dialogue in happy vs unhappy people? I guess the inner voice is what one strives to just observe and let be while meditating. After a good meditation session I feel less mentally tense (eg not clinging on to superficially important todo items). Seems like inner voice is related to mental state in a major way. I have pretty severe adhd and am unmedicated so my inner voice is more like an old radio inbetween stations (= chaotic).

bsenftner 3y ago
Unhappy people with an inner voice have a grumpy crank personality as their inner voice. Taming and neutralizing that grumpy crank is the entire point of the Cognitive Behavioral Therapy school of Psychology. They have a process called an Inner Dialogue Audit where a list of 10-20 simple questions are given, and you ask yourself these questions. If you answer "yes" to any of them, then your inner voice has a bias, is effectively lying to you about your moment to moment observations and thoughts. And once this bias is identified, it evaporates because deception known no longer deceives.

_tom_ 3y ago

I do either, depending on the situation. For me, verbalizing things, internally, is like writing things down - it allows for more organization and review. (Consider https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging) It's clear to me that the main ideas come non-verbally first, and then I translate into words.

vidarh 3y ago
I will have conversations with myself, but it's clear thoughts also form without verbal translation. Interestingly another distinction when it comes to inner life is whether people have a monologue or multiple voices. I only have a rather incessant monologue of myself narrating and practicing things to say or going over multiple sides of an argument in my own voice. It only ever stops when I sleep or meditate.

omani 3y ago

to my fellow humans: if you read a comment saying it has no inner voice, remember... GPT is active on HN, too. ;)

SuperHeavy256 3y ago
unnecessary paranoia.

riffic 3y ago

Most of the time I pity the people who lack an inner voice but sometimes, rarely, I envy them.

russellbeattie 3y ago

I don't have an internal dialogue, but I do have imaginary conversations and I compose blog posts, thread comments (like this one) and emails in my head quite a lot. But speaking to myself as a separate voice? It only happens when I'm high. Really. I only discovered that a few years ago when marijuana became legal in California. I was worried at first that I was having some sort of mental break, because I'm really not used to having two separate voices like that talking to each other. Then I looked it up and realized that many (most?) people have some sort of inner dialogue. Thank goodness. I truly thought I was losing my mind. I wonder what it is about THC which causes that effect in my brain? Also, I don't drink - I wonder if many people have a voice because they're commonly imbibing, even a little. I would guess my lack of inner voice is why I tend to blurt out what I'm thinking way more than other people. And I'm not one to engage in conversations in a contemplative way. I realize now that many people I've talked to who seem like they're speaking carefully are actually having a whole other voice in their head making observations, etc.

vanjajaja1 3y ago
.. two separate voices? do they sound different or.. how do you identify which is which voice?

kajic 3y ago

It’s happened to me a few times lately that I’ve heard music playing that was as vivid as a recording. As soon as I became aware of the fact that it was playing in my head and not in reality it stopped. I can’t make it start at will. I’d love to hear of other people’s experiences with this.

davidthewatson 3y ago

It's interesting that the paper mentions Andy Clark's work and hallucinations in separate threads but doesn't connect Anil Seth's introduction of controlled hallucinations and Andy Clark's work on that topic: https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/08/25/1032121/brains-controlled-hallucination/ https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/08/25/1032121/brains-c... I had always conceived of metacognition as genetic, given my own phenomenological experience dating to childhood. It wasn't until a colleague challenged this idea a few years ago at Carnegie Mellon that I'd even considered that metacognition may be taught and learned.

SuperHeavy256 3y ago
which makes sense, because this Anil Seth guy sounds really aloof and seems to have no problem making grandiose statements. Reads like a tabloid that's desperately trying to keep your attention by saying big things.

GeoAtreides 3y ago

It's interesting to me how all of the comments are about the title, but nothing (absolutely nothing) about the actual post linked; which is fair, plato stanford articles are dense philosophical essays, not really suited for the layperson.

6R1M0R4CL3 3y ago

i have no inner speech and i have no clue what people are talking about that inner speech inside their heads.

SuperHeavy256 3y ago
usually it's talking about stuff we're going to do before we do it.