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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

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.
    - neoberg 3y ago
      I don't know what's normal anymore but most of your examples are not normal for me :D > 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. Do you imagine this visually? Like, do you mentally see them nude? I just imagine the idea of it without any visuals accompanying.
      - red1reaper 3y ago
        Yep, I mean, is a bit tricky, like an optical illusion that requires you to focus in the center, but if i focus enough, I can, imagining a whole person with all their details and overlaying it with my POV is quite hard and usually requires way too much focus, but just overlaying the image of a person over the same person in front of you is easy, specially if you are just changing the body and hands and face are already visible, thus not needing change. Is a bit weird to explain, is not like an allucination in the sense that it literally replaces your normal vision, is like overlaying another vision on top of your vision, it requires focus and you can tell the imaginary overlay is distinct from your actual visual stimuli but like with some optical illusions you can force your brain to just accept it and you see people nude, even if the nude models are not very detailed. The easiest stuff to overlay are ruler thingies tho, for example to extime distance you imagine a line similar to the letter "I" with a base on top and at the bottom of your reference and then you can copy paste a bunch of times and count them it to measure stuff roughly. That is the most common day to day use for overlay imagination I use, the imagining people nude is not exactly a everyday stuff. When I was a kiddo I used to use this to play with things that are not toys as if they were, for example I could pick up a 2L bottle, overlay the image of a rocket and play with it, same with a lot of other stuff that had somewhat similar shapes to things interesting for a kid, I still can do it, sometimes do in the bathroom while taking a very long shit. For me this is normal and I tough most people were like that, like... the phrase about imagining people being nude is there for a reason... and kids do play with random stuff as if they were other things, people look at stuff and use it as a reference to visually measure stuff even if it is rough. I mean, there is not that much difference between imagining inside the black void and outside, you are just moving it, the only thing is that outside it is fighting with your actual visual stimuly for attention so it requires a bit of extra focus or to anchor it to something similar, you know the visual illusion were there are pink spots but when you look at the center a green spot appear and eats all the pink spots until it is blank but the moment you ever so slightly unfocus from the center the pink appear again, it feels like that, the illusion is named "Lilac chaser" for reference, it feels kinda like that in the sense that if you lose focus, the effect disappears but if you focus yo can keep it? IDK, as I said, I thought this was normal, so it is quite hard to explain? is not like imagining stuff in the black void, there one can easy mount a movie if they want, a crappy movie usually, but its possible, outside not so much, but it is still possible to imagine stuff there, just harder.
  - justanotherjoe 3y ago
    i mean, it's not that amazing when you think about it. If i have a ruler laying on the table and a computer screen on that same table, yeah, it's not hard to measure the width of the screen without moving the ruler.
    - neoberg 3y ago
      The way they described it was more akin to mentally "grabbing" it. Like they would be able to place imaginary things they grabbed from somewhere else in a real physical space accurately.
sparks1970 3y ago
Same here. This video was interesting to me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNQyubd9ARc&t=60s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNQyubd9ARc&t=60s in it you are asked to shout "I like crickets" <In your mind> and then to whisper "I like crickets" again, in your mind and not out loud. The presenter then claims, "The volume is the same because you can't change the volume of the voice in your head, only the tone and pitch." My experience of trying this is that I can produce the phrase "I like crickets" in my mind but I have no conception of what it means to "shout" or "whisper" this in my mind and the idea that there is tone or pitch to the representation is meaningless to me. I can think in words so that I can prepare to write something (like this) but there is no audio. I'd say it's more like a stream of words on a screen except that there is no screen, it feels more like a buffer. The experience is the same as reading to me, no audio, just a stream of words. My partner says she hears her own voice in her head and it's quite critical, prompting her to action. I feel motivation to do things but there is no voice. Can someone report on their experience with the crickets experiment above, do you hear a voice, can you change its volume or tone?
- scruple 3y ago
  I can't shout or whisper in my inner voice. Wild. It'd never occurred to me to even try. But I absolutely have an inner voice. In fact, it's very noisy and sometimes I wish it would shut the fuck up. It's also oftentimes critical and forces me to action. I also have aphantasia, so it's not words on a screen, it's literally me talking to myself in an internal dialogue.
- mandmandam 3y ago
  I can change volume and tone. There's something quite arrogant about groundless declarations of other's mental limitations. The other example that comes to mind is the notion that people only dream in black and white - so daft.
  - jcrites 3y ago
    I do think it is interesting to explore, compare, and contrast the operating modes and limitations of our minds. Like you, I can also vary volume and tone of an imagined voice. I can make it arbitrarily loud, but there does seem to be a limit on how quiet I can make it, unless I'm imagining hearing a voice from elsewhere. I don't think I dream in color, though, but I wouldn't call it black and white either. It's more like I'm dreaming of objects in an abstract space where color isn't relevant. I have memories of my dreams from time to time, and those memories aren't of a scene with color in them. I absolutely dream of conversations, and so perhaps I dream with audio, but I'm not exactly dreaming visually. I'm dreaming of circumstances. I can totally believe that other people might dream in color though.
justanotherjoe 3y ago
I'm pretty sure I have inner voice since i'm often occupied by it. But no, I won't mistake it for an actual sound. The way i take it is that it's very much like an LLM generated text. The mind just 'saying stuffs' for the sake of saying them, without much goal directed purpose. I have it but it's not really useful. Like an LLM, it can appear useful but not really. It's when I apply deliberateness to it that it becomes useful. But if i'm deliberate, i suppose that's when it would be just like how you do it.
netcan 3y ago
I think "hearing" the voice is the confusing part, or only. Hard to know if it's a difference in the phenomenon itself or in how people characterize and perceive it. To me the question is about thinking conversationally. Internal dialogue. Whether or not that dialogue is perceived as sound is perhaps interesting, it's not hard to imagine it working differently. Written language exists. Sign language. Non-auditory language is not a stretch. What is hard to conceive of is thought, especially intricate reasoning, without internal dialogue. Hard to conceive, but not hard to believe. We all do lots of non-dialogue thinking. The evidence of this is everywhere. We come to conclusions, find answers to questions without "verbal" reasoning all the time. Say you've been building software. You're considering changing something. As soon as its suggested, you realize a whole list of implications. User implications. Server implications. Testing process X will have Y issue. Advisor A will probably advise B. You didn't verbally reason your way to all these conclusions... yet they exist. That said... all this stuff is kinda "subconscious." You don't know where these reasoned conclusions came from. It feels like a "from the muse" thing. If I am consciously trying to reason... I'm most (only?) conscious of my verbal reasoning.
- sparks1970 3y ago
  What do you mean by "internal dialogue" here? To me a dialog would mean some back-and-forth, some difference of opinion or two individuals sharing ideas that one side doesn't have. Does your inner voice have autonomy, does it want things separate from what "you" want? Is it in any way "other" from you? Apologies if these seem like dumb questions. I have never heard a voice in my head so it's a bit like a monochromatic person discovering people see in color, it just seems very strange.
  - red1reaper 3y ago
    Im not netcan, but in my case... I am the inner voice, the inner voice is essentially the me in me, it is myself, the most basic and self, mind you, the conversation while 99% verbal can be non verbal, I can talk to myself in images and even concepts and have a dialogue/debate with that, its just kind of weird? But the inner voice, at least from my POV is essentially the self, if you want to experience, just go to a bathroom with a mirror and try to debate with your reflection, it is essentially the same thing, ofc to debate with yourself you have to be able to debate points you do not believe in, like a lawyer or a politic, there is only you only a single opinion, but you are putting your opinion to the test, so you try to defend and try to attack your opinion and your acts, is like playing devil's advocate against your own opinions while you defend them, there is not two people or two wills is like talking to the mirror, is only you. It can also be used to essentially praise yourself if you do something good, or console yourself if you are sad or insult yourself drill sargent style to get that extra adrenaline to run the extra meter to not lose the train, you can also sign to yourself with that, which is horrible, s you will distill any song to its most catchy part and repeat it ad infinitum every moment like a very crappy self-sountrack. Inner dialogue ofc can also be used for the obvious... simulate conversations with others if you know them well enough to have counterarguments against them available, is like thinking a comeback later but instead of later, before and instead of one, a lot of them, 99% never used. Another use is that you can use your inner voice to repeat a thing constantly to nor forget it short term, for example holding into a 4 digit code that you can only read for 1 second and you have to remember a minute later, you can just read it the first second in your head "one two there seven" and just keep repeating it over and over in your head "one two there seven,one two there seven,one two there seven,one two there seven,one two there seven" until you need it, that way you can store a bit of info very short term without memorizing anything, I remember doing exactly this with a multiplication table math test when i was a kiddo, I was not able to memorize the multiplications with 7, so 2 minutes before the test i just started chanting the results of 27 up to 29 and when i received the test i just wrote that on the side(we were allowed to write stuff on the side) and thus i used my inner voice to sneak a cheat sheet into the test, I did similar stuff all trough my school years.
taopai 3y ago
Are you unable to imagine any sound? Even a church bell or a drum rolling?
- sparks1970 3y ago
  I can imagine these sounds but they don't have any audio texture - no volume, no tone. At the same time, if I imagine a large bell and a small bell ringing then there is a difference but its like reading "BONG!" and "ting" (which for me also has no audio). Can you sing in your mind? I can represent the words and I can recall the tune so I can represent the words at the correct pace to match the tune but there is no audio so it's a bit like subtitles.
  - SuperHeavy256 3y ago
    Yes, I too can sing in my mind, but also I can hear the music. So sometimes, I sing a song in my head and it sounds great! But then I try to sing in real life, and since there's no music it's just my voice, and it doesn't sound that great.
- neoberg 3y ago
  I can imagine them conceptually but not the actual sounds themselves. Same for a song; I can't "hear" a song in my mind but I can imagine it. Hard to explain.
vidarh 3y ago
I don't believe I hear a voice, but some argue they do, up to and including hearing different voices, as well as hearing music with the correct instruments (I can "hear music", but it's always as if I'm singing or humming it). For my part, my "inner voice" feels to me like my real voice, but I have the sensation of "almost vocalizing" it, but cutting it off before producing any sound - whether in or out of my head. So I recognize it as "me", but can't say there is an actual sensation of hearing the sound.

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.
  - neoberg 3y ago
    I don't know what's normal anymore but most of your examples are not normal for me :D > 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. Do you imagine this visually? Like, do you mentally see them nude? I just imagine the idea of it without any visuals accompanying.
    - red1reaper 3y ago
      Yep, I mean, is a bit tricky, like an optical illusion that requires you to focus in the center, but if i focus enough, I can, imagining a whole person with all their details and overlaying it with my POV is quite hard and usually requires way too much focus, but just overlaying the image of a person over the same person in front of you is easy, specially if you are just changing the body and hands and face are already visible, thus not needing change. Is a bit weird to explain, is not like an allucination in the sense that it literally replaces your normal vision, is like overlaying another vision on top of your vision, it requires focus and you can tell the imaginary overlay is distinct from your actual visual stimuli but like with some optical illusions you can force your brain to just accept it and you see people nude, even if the nude models are not very detailed. The easiest stuff to overlay are ruler thingies tho, for example to extime distance you imagine a line similar to the letter "I" with a base on top and at the bottom of your reference and then you can copy paste a bunch of times and count them it to measure stuff roughly. That is the most common day to day use for overlay imagination I use, the imagining people nude is not exactly a everyday stuff. When I was a kiddo I used to use this to play with things that are not toys as if they were, for example I could pick up a 2L bottle, overlay the image of a rocket and play with it, same with a lot of other stuff that had somewhat similar shapes to things interesting for a kid, I still can do it, sometimes do in the bathroom while taking a very long shit. For me this is normal and I tough most people were like that, like... the phrase about imagining people being nude is there for a reason... and kids do play with random stuff as if they were other things, people look at stuff and use it as a reference to visually measure stuff even if it is rough. I mean, there is not that much difference between imagining inside the black void and outside, you are just moving it, the only thing is that outside it is fighting with your actual visual stimuly for attention so it requires a bit of extra focus or to anchor it to something similar, you know the visual illusion were there are pink spots but when you look at the center a green spot appear and eats all the pink spots until it is blank but the moment you ever so slightly unfocus from the center the pink appear again, it feels like that, the illusion is named "Lilac chaser" for reference, it feels kinda like that in the sense that if you lose focus, the effect disappears but if you focus yo can keep it? IDK, as I said, I thought this was normal, so it is quite hard to explain? is not like imagining stuff in the black void, there one can easy mount a movie if they want, a crappy movie usually, but its possible, outside not so much, but it is still possible to imagine stuff there, just harder.
- justanotherjoe 3y ago
  i mean, it's not that amazing when you think about it. If i have a ruler laying on the table and a computer screen on that same table, yeah, it's not hard to measure the width of the screen without moving the ruler.
  - neoberg 3y ago
    The way they described it was more akin to mentally "grabbing" it. Like they would be able to place imaginary things they grabbed from somewhere else in a real physical space accurately.

sparks1970 3y ago

Same here. This video was interesting to me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNQyubd9ARc&t=60s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNQyubd9ARc&t=60s in it you are asked to shout "I like crickets" <In your mind> and then to whisper "I like crickets" again, in your mind and not out loud. The presenter then claims, "The volume is the same because you can't change the volume of the voice in your head, only the tone and pitch." My experience of trying this is that I can produce the phrase "I like crickets" in my mind but I have no conception of what it means to "shout" or "whisper" this in my mind and the idea that there is tone or pitch to the representation is meaningless to me. I can think in words so that I can prepare to write something (like this) but there is no audio. I'd say it's more like a stream of words on a screen except that there is no screen, it feels more like a buffer. The experience is the same as reading to me, no audio, just a stream of words. My partner says she hears her own voice in her head and it's quite critical, prompting her to action. I feel motivation to do things but there is no voice. Can someone report on their experience with the crickets experiment above, do you hear a voice, can you change its volume or tone?

scruple 3y ago
I can't shout or whisper in my inner voice. Wild. It'd never occurred to me to even try. But I absolutely have an inner voice. In fact, it's very noisy and sometimes I wish it would shut the fuck up. It's also oftentimes critical and forces me to action. I also have aphantasia, so it's not words on a screen, it's literally me talking to myself in an internal dialogue.
mandmandam 3y ago
I can change volume and tone. There's something quite arrogant about groundless declarations of other's mental limitations. The other example that comes to mind is the notion that people only dream in black and white - so daft.
- jcrites 3y ago
  I do think it is interesting to explore, compare, and contrast the operating modes and limitations of our minds. Like you, I can also vary volume and tone of an imagined voice. I can make it arbitrarily loud, but there does seem to be a limit on how quiet I can make it, unless I'm imagining hearing a voice from elsewhere. I don't think I dream in color, though, but I wouldn't call it black and white either. It's more like I'm dreaming of objects in an abstract space where color isn't relevant. I have memories of my dreams from time to time, and those memories aren't of a scene with color in them. I absolutely dream of conversations, and so perhaps I dream with audio, but I'm not exactly dreaming visually. I'm dreaming of circumstances. I can totally believe that other people might dream in color though.

justanotherjoe 3y ago

I'm pretty sure I have inner voice since i'm often occupied by it. But no, I won't mistake it for an actual sound. The way i take it is that it's very much like an LLM generated text. The mind just 'saying stuffs' for the sake of saying them, without much goal directed purpose. I have it but it's not really useful. Like an LLM, it can appear useful but not really. It's when I apply deliberateness to it that it becomes useful. But if i'm deliberate, i suppose that's when it would be just like how you do it.

netcan 3y ago

I think "hearing" the voice is the confusing part, or only. Hard to know if it's a difference in the phenomenon itself or in how people characterize and perceive it. To me the question is about thinking conversationally. Internal dialogue. Whether or not that dialogue is perceived as sound is perhaps interesting, it's not hard to imagine it working differently. Written language exists. Sign language. Non-auditory language is not a stretch. What is hard to conceive of is thought, especially intricate reasoning, without internal dialogue. Hard to conceive, but not hard to believe. We all do lots of non-dialogue thinking. The evidence of this is everywhere. We come to conclusions, find answers to questions without "verbal" reasoning all the time. Say you've been building software. You're considering changing something. As soon as its suggested, you realize a whole list of implications. User implications. Server implications. Testing process X will have Y issue. Advisor A will probably advise B. You didn't verbally reason your way to all these conclusions... yet they exist. That said... all this stuff is kinda "subconscious." You don't know where these reasoned conclusions came from. It feels like a "from the muse" thing. If I am consciously trying to reason... I'm most (only?) conscious of my verbal reasoning.

sparks1970 3y ago
What do you mean by "internal dialogue" here? To me a dialog would mean some back-and-forth, some difference of opinion or two individuals sharing ideas that one side doesn't have. Does your inner voice have autonomy, does it want things separate from what "you" want? Is it in any way "other" from you? Apologies if these seem like dumb questions. I have never heard a voice in my head so it's a bit like a monochromatic person discovering people see in color, it just seems very strange.
- red1reaper 3y ago
  Im not netcan, but in my case... I am the inner voice, the inner voice is essentially the me in me, it is myself, the most basic and self, mind you, the conversation while 99% verbal can be non verbal, I can talk to myself in images and even concepts and have a dialogue/debate with that, its just kind of weird? But the inner voice, at least from my POV is essentially the self, if you want to experience, just go to a bathroom with a mirror and try to debate with your reflection, it is essentially the same thing, ofc to debate with yourself you have to be able to debate points you do not believe in, like a lawyer or a politic, there is only you only a single opinion, but you are putting your opinion to the test, so you try to defend and try to attack your opinion and your acts, is like playing devil's advocate against your own opinions while you defend them, there is not two people or two wills is like talking to the mirror, is only you. It can also be used to essentially praise yourself if you do something good, or console yourself if you are sad or insult yourself drill sargent style to get that extra adrenaline to run the extra meter to not lose the train, you can also sign to yourself with that, which is horrible, s you will distill any song to its most catchy part and repeat it ad infinitum every moment like a very crappy self-sountrack. Inner dialogue ofc can also be used for the obvious... simulate conversations with others if you know them well enough to have counterarguments against them available, is like thinking a comeback later but instead of later, before and instead of one, a lot of them, 99% never used. Another use is that you can use your inner voice to repeat a thing constantly to nor forget it short term, for example holding into a 4 digit code that you can only read for 1 second and you have to remember a minute later, you can just read it the first second in your head "one two there seven" and just keep repeating it over and over in your head "one two there seven,one two there seven,one two there seven,one two there seven,one two there seven" until you need it, that way you can store a bit of info very short term without memorizing anything, I remember doing exactly this with a multiplication table math test when i was a kiddo, I was not able to memorize the multiplications with 7, so 2 minutes before the test i just started chanting the results of 27 up to 29 and when i received the test i just wrote that on the side(we were allowed to write stuff on the side) and thus i used my inner voice to sneak a cheat sheet into the test, I did similar stuff all trough my school years.

taopai 3y ago

Are you unable to imagine any sound? Even a church bell or a drum rolling?

sparks1970 3y ago
I can imagine these sounds but they don't have any audio texture - no volume, no tone. At the same time, if I imagine a large bell and a small bell ringing then there is a difference but its like reading "BONG!" and "ting" (which for me also has no audio). Can you sing in your mind? I can represent the words and I can recall the tune so I can represent the words at the correct pace to match the tune but there is no audio so it's a bit like subtitles.
- SuperHeavy256 3y ago
  Yes, I too can sing in my mind, but also I can hear the music. So sometimes, I sing a song in my head and it sounds great! But then I try to sing in real life, and since there's no music it's just my voice, and it doesn't sound that great.
neoberg 3y ago
I can imagine them conceptually but not the actual sounds themselves. Same for a song; I can't "hear" a song in my mind but I can imagine it. Hard to explain.

vidarh 3y ago

I don't believe I hear a voice, but some argue they do, up to and including hearing different voices, as well as hearing music with the correct instruments (I can "hear music", but it's always as if I'm singing or humming it). For my part, my "inner voice" feels to me like my real voice, but I have the sensation of "almost vocalizing" it, but cutting it off before producing any sound - whether in or out of my head. So I recognize it as "me", but can't say there is an actual sensation of hearing the sound.