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What Is the Sound of Thought?

thereader.mitpress.mit.edu

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Re: What Is the Sound of Thought?

#31

Post by sradman »

henearkr wrote: post #27
sradman wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the article: > Yet we know that language can also be present in the absence of sound, when we read... or when we use words while thinking — in technical terms, when we engage in endophasic activity. > This simple fact immediately raises the following crucial question: What happens to the electric waves in our brain when we generate a linguistic expression without emitting any sound? "Endophasic activity" is our…

I think you misinterpreted the use of "endophasic activity" here, it just means that the speech is not real, that it is inner, or the brain not producing any real efferent output, just internal-bounded output. So, the study considers what happens when using linguistic thought without uttering words (aka inner speech), but it does not investigate the properties of the mind of people who do not experience inner speech.…

It was the first time that I encountered the word "endophasic" so I looked it up before my first reply. It isn't included in my local dictionary but the first Google search result defines it as:

> Being or pertaining to endophasia (internal, unvocalized speech).

I only mentioned it so people didn't have to look it up like I had to; I don't think our interpretation differs.

I quoted the first couple of sentences from the last three paragraphs of the article. Those paragraphs emphasize the exciting questions raised by this small study, including the important question you raised.

To be fair I only read the article and I didn't search for the study but I look forward to reading the book:

> This article is adapted from Andrea Moro’s book “Impossible Languages.”

Re: What Is the Sound of Thought?

#32

Post by dontcarethrow2 »

spurgu wrote: post #17
082349872349872 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wechseln even dans a fraza: http://www.europanto.be/cabillot1.html

Haha. Minä gör the same a menudo. Yo teen det samma often. I hago the same ofta. Jag do lo mismo usein. (FI/SV/EN/ES) :)

Belta loda! You sound like your speaking the Belter slang from the scifi series The Expanse. Set a few hundred yrs into the future, slang used by the working class out mining the asteroid belts.

Re: What Is the Sound of Thought?

#33

Post by dontcarethrow2 »

lethologica wrote: post #18
guram11 wrote: post #2

> Remarkably, we found that the shape of the electric waves recorded in a non-acoustic area of the brain when linguistic expressions are being read silently preserves the same structure as those of the mechanical sound waves of air that would have been produced if those words had actually been uttered the Rosetta stone idea to map thought from languages waves (sound and light) is an interesting field of research I ha…

>I have no idea how but since I was young I learned that I can read faster when I don't "voice" out the sound of thought Subvocalisation is the term for that voice in your head when you read. I've never been able to get rid of it, and trying to has always resulted in me feeling like I'm skimming rather than reading.

I think a way to practice it would be through math exercises. You don't really voice out '3 + 8' as much as 'three plus eight'. Also thinking further I think books directed at children would probably also help, I feel like complex terms keep me subvocalising when reading.

Re: What Is the Sound of Thought?

#34

Post by 082349872349872 »

dontcarethrow2 wrote: post #32
spurgu wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haha. Minä gör the same a menudo. Yo teen det samma often. I hago the same ofta. Jag do lo mismo usein. (FI/SV/EN/ES) :)

Belta loda! You sound like your speaking the Belter slang from the scifi series The Expanse. Set a few hundred yrs into the future, slang used by the working class out mining the asteroid belts.

Taki taki. TIL. Tolowda wanya pochuye fo walowda sowngit ke? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ULICEPpoLQ

Re: What Is the Sound of Thought?

#35

Post by supernihil »

Jugurtha wrote: post #9

When I'm in the zone, thought sounds like a jet turbine "ffffffffffff", or being underwater. Sight stops working, or at least I don't remember what I saw during these moments. Also hearing seems to stop working, at least for outside sounds. If I'm facing a screen, it is practically I see and I hear nothing. If I get interrupted when I'm in that kind of trance, as in someone getting in my view starting to make signs,…

I have the same. But in my case it lasts for hours after work. Not being able to comprehend the speech of my kids. For me i got some label to put on it after being diagnozed with Skizotypia

Re: What Is the Sound of Thought?

#36

Post by jointpdf »

spurgu wrote: post #17
082349872349872 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wechseln even dans a fraza: http://www.europanto.be/cabillot1.html

Haha. Minä gör the same a menudo. Yo teen det samma often. I hago the same ofta. Jag do lo mismo usein. (FI/SV/EN/ES) :)

Y’all, stop. You’re confusing the hell out of GPT-4.

Re: What Is the Sound of Thought?

#37

Post by spurgu »

082349872349872 wrote: post #22
spurgu wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haha. Minä gör the same a menudo. Yo teen det samma often. I hago the same ofta. Jag do lo mismo usein. (FI/SV/EN/ES) :)

Wow, closest I can get to that mix is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VqUiSdd3yM , an english band interpreting a finnish tango. Swedish will have to be separate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hdUKZLQIuQ (Are you a finland-swede or sweden finn? If either of those, I'm a fan of both Army of Lovers and Nightwish .)

Haha yes that Zappa gig is a classic!

"Swedish-speaking finn" or "Finland-swede" yes.

Re: What Is the Sound of Thought?

#38

Post by TeMPOraL »

jointpdf wrote: post #36
spurgu wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haha. Minä gör the same a menudo. Yo teen det samma often. I hago the same ofta. Jag do lo mismo usein. (FI/SV/EN/ES) :)

Y’all, stop. You’re confusing the hell out of GPT-4.

I hope they won't be training it on HN corpus, because I don't want an algorithm to spit out my own rants back at me...

Re: What Is the Sound of Thought?

#39

Post by TeMPOraL »

notdang wrote: post #24
TeMPOraL wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For me, some words and phrases sound better in one language than the other. So in my internal monologue, I often flip back and forth between Polish and English, sometimes multiple times in a single sentence. It feels like "the path of least resistance". I also do that sometimes when talking, when I know the other person is proficient in English. Not everyone appreciates this, but some of the best conversations in my…

Now try to imagine instead of English, it's Russian? Switching from Polish to Russian. Will it be the same?

I know a little bit of Russian so a random word or two sometimes sneak into my speech or thinking process. I imagine if I were fluent in Russian, I'd switch back and forth just as well. They're more similar to each other than Polish and English, but not that similar as to be bucketed as one language.

I've been thinking about this phenomenon a lot in the past and I've noticed that two main triggers are a) emotional payload of a phrase, and b) subtle differences in meaning of words. Some phrases sound better to me in English than in Polish, and it's probably driven by the context in which I've learned them. As for words, it's often the case that even if a word in Polish corresponds directly to a word in English by dictionary, their etymologies and general use patterns draw slightly different borders in thingspace. Sometimes that distinction is important, and I automatically pick the language in which the word is closer to what I mean.

Re: What Is the Sound of Thought?

#40

Post by filoeleven »

tsimionescu wrote: post #30
torben-friis wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if the same is true for languages where the writing system is not a representation of sounds, like written chinese.

My understanding was that written Chinese has a great deal of phonetic information (even though it is not exclusively phonetic like the alphabet or Japanese Hiragana/Katakana). I had understood that many ideograms essentially could be interpreted as topic + pronunciation: e.g. 驰 could be interpreted as "the word about 马 horses read as 也 chí".

At least one of the Chinese languages is tonal too, so the same sequence of vowel and consonant sounds can have totally different meanings when spoken at different pitches. (The humorous example is “grass mud horse,” which is a bit NSFW and a great act of someone thumbing their nose at censorship.)

I wonder if native speakers have a greater emphasis on subvocalized pitch, or if that’s even a part of subvocalizing? Paying attention to my own internal reading now, I suspect that it is.

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