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People who have unusual, or non-existent, inner voices

theguardian.com

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Re: People who have unusual, or non-existent, inner voices

#141

Post by vasco »

helaoban wrote: post #59
StreakyCobra wrote: post #21

> Many of the people I speak to learned late in life that their inner voices were not the norm. For years, Worrall thought that other people also had attics in their brains. I went through exactly the same situation around 10 years ago, but it was about mental imaging. Do you know people can actually visualize and see things when they close there eyes? You probably do, but it took me 25 years to figure out that for m…

I don't even have to close them, I can reproduce pictures of objects, people, scenery etc in my mind while my eyes are open and actively observing other things. As I type this comment I've got an image of a girl I saw yesterday fixed in my mind, as if looking at a picture of her. I also assumed this was the norm.

Same, I think this is normal. Having to close my eyes to visualize is like having to read out loud to parse the text. I assumed nobody needed to close their eyes and that they did this in movies so "you know" they are thinking.

Re: People who have unusual, or non-existent, inner voices

#142

Post by checkyoursudo »

ManuelKiessling wrote: post #137
pseudalopex wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When you are "visiting" each room in your house, I think you are walking through a recalled simulation that is created in your working memory, e.g. a visuo-spatial sketchpad, using the same type of information that is stored in my brain. It's an interesting idea. But I don't think most people remember faces for example like that.

I could swear I have read that there is a special place in our brain for remembering faces.

You probably did read it somewhere. Facial recognition is proposed as being in the fusiform gyrus based on fMRI scans.

E.g., https://brainblogger.com/2015/10/17/how-the-brain-recognizes... (with a few journal references)

Re: People who have unusual, or non-existent, inner voices

#143

Post by vasco »

garaetjjte wrote: post #127
boc wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So wait, if you close your eyes and picture Mount Everest, you can't see Mount Everest in your head? For me it's easy to "fly" around my neighborhood just by closing my eyes and remembering what the streets and trees and houses look like as I take a lap. I can see off into the distance, I can see the sidewalk cracks, I can see people... all of them are obviously fuzzed versions of reality but nonetheless they're rela…

>So wait, if you close your eyes Is this just figurative phrase or some people need to close their eyes to visualize images? I can imagine things, but they are not real visual stimuli that I see, they are more abstract going directly to the mind. Thus it doesn't matter whether my eyes are closed or what I'm looking at, it is independent from real sight.

I don't, closing your eyes is completely unnecessary for any of this stuff. I assume it's just a phrase.

Re: People who have unusual, or non-existent, inner voices

#144

Post by nivanson »

josephg wrote: post #118
chippy wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “Hah maybe I don’t have an inner critic” I thought. thats your inner voice!

Not quite ... there's (ironically) a language gap here. Those words are what I get when I lend my capacity for words to my thoughts, like I'm doing now. But thats a translation. The thoughts don't seem to start in language. Maybe another way to describe it is - I understand my thoughts before I know the right words to use to describe my thoughts out loud. In conversation I sometimes find I'll start explaining somethi…

I think it is the same for most people. Consider a child that is experiencing these ”thoughts” but do not have language for them. Anchoring your thoughts in words is a useful tool in order to prepare yourself to communicate them, possibly to yourself. How much you use that tool is what I believe is the variable here.

Re: People who have unusual, or non-existent, inner voices

#145

Post by sammalloy »

titusjohnson wrote: post #19

The broadcaster Jenni Murray lives in author Hannah Begbie’s brain. Well, not Murray exactly, but a facsimile of Murray, with the same kind but quizzical voice, and a scarf flung loosely over her shoulder. “My inner voice is a duologue, like I am in a constant state of interviewing myself,” says Begbie, who is 44 and lives in London. “The interviewing always happens in a plush radio studio,” she says. “There’s nice r…

> The very first thing I think of when reading this article is that everyone interviewed except Hopkins is having near-constant auditory hallucinations.

Agreed. The closest I’ve come to this kind of thing is when I take more than 400 mg of caffeine in a single day (I’m genetically sensitive to caffeine). If I do that, then yes, my inner voice will become quite strange.

Re: People who have unusual, or non-existent, inner voices

#147

Post by jraph »

helaoban wrote: post #59
StreakyCobra wrote: post #21

> Many of the people I speak to learned late in life that their inner voices were not the norm. For years, Worrall thought that other people also had attics in their brains. I went through exactly the same situation around 10 years ago, but it was about mental imaging. Do you know people can actually visualize and see things when they close there eyes? You probably do, but it took me 25 years to figure out that for m…

I don't even have to close them, I can reproduce pictures of objects, people, scenery etc in my mind while my eyes are open and actively observing other things. As I type this comment I've got an image of a girl I saw yesterday fixed in my mind, as if looking at a picture of her. I also assumed this was the norm.

I can't even picture my close friends very well, never mind some stranger I saw yesterday. I'll recognize people visually but their voice, their habits and their facial expressions help a lot if available, especially people new to me.

I have a quite good memory and will easily recall events but the image is not very precise. I might not remember how you were dressed just 10 minutes ago; hard to build precise pictures with such a visual memory.

Relatedly, if you tell me a story, I'll probably not have a precise picture of it in my mind. I noticed some people do have pictures very quickly and may take advantage of it when speaking to have some fun.

I still picture things in my mind. And I don't need to close my eyes. If you tell me about some event I'll probably locate it in my (not very precise) representation of the month / the year if you said when it happened / will happen. I will have some visual representation of what you are telling me or what I am reading, but do not ask me what colors are things or how people are dressed.

If you wonder how I manage to picture things without being able to tell the color they have, well, I can't figure it out neither.

Re: People who have unusual, or non-existent, inner voices

#148

Post by antman »

I never heard of inner voices, or have discussed such a thing with other people. Is that a cultural thing? I am totally surprised I thought it was a literal construct when I saw it in the movies etc

Anyway I had read that when you “vocalize” inside your head during e.g. reading you severely slow down. Isn’t that the same with any kind of thinking? Brain works with abstractions won’t involving your “voice” functions force you to early concreteness hampering, well, your heuristics? I have no idea

Re: People who have unusual, or non-existent, inner voices

#149

Post by shele »

clairity wrote: post #69
josephg wrote: post #15

I started doing improv comedy classes a few years ago. It’s terrifying. My friends would share stories of what their inner critics were saying about their performances. “You were rubbish and everyone was knows it!”. It was weird for me - my mind doesn’t have a voice like that. “Hah maybe I don’t have an inner critic” I thought. But I still felt crippling shame after bad scenes in class. In quiet moments my mind is fu…

yes, note that nearly all of our thoughts are subvocal/subconscious. some folks have a more active and/or efficient surfacing mechanism than others though. and a few folks have an overactive vocalization system where most of their subvocal thoughts actually come out of their mouths. i'm always partly fascinated by these folks (just walked past one today), since i tend to be relatively economical in my vocalized thoug…

I think this is about subvocal but conscious thoughts.

Re: People who have unusual, or non-existent, inner voices

#150

Post by 7952 »

josephg wrote: post #136
russelldjimmy wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought I didn’t have an inner voice for the longest time because I couldn’t hear it being vocalised. Then one day, while I was narrating how I reacted to an incident to my shrink, she exclaimed, “You have an inner critic!” I thought about it and tried to develop awareness, because I was aware that my mind generated feelings of guilt, shame, fear, etc. out of seemingly nowhere. Guess what. I found the inner voice.…

That reminds me of a saying I heard a few years ago: "Be careful how you talk to your children. In their darker moments, thats the voice they'll use to talk to themselves".

Some parents will constantly narrate the world as they imagine it from their babies perspective. Like they are standing in for consciousness that has not developed yet. Makes me wonder if the differences in how parents do this could effect inner voice later on.
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