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Inner Speech

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Re: Inner Speech

#41

Post by LesZedCB »

bhaak wrote: post #24
yetihehe wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have inner voice, it's very hard for me to comprehend how can you think, but it's possible. How I understand it: you just write what you think, without rehearsing it before inside your mind. We all do it to some extent when writing, it's not like I actually need to replay everything before I write. "I asked myself" by a person who has no inner voice sounds like a blind person saying "I see..." when he understands s…

Thinking doesn't need words. Thinking for me is a process of ideas and concepts coming from different directions, colliding, merging, splitting, transforming, and then going into other directions to interact with other thoughts. The translation between these concepts to words or sentences from my mouth or my fingers is effortless by the way. Which I myself find interesting. I think it should take some effort but it d…

> doesn't that slow down your thought process?

probably yes.

also, when being asked questions I rehearse and rephrase the answer in my head often stumbling or pausing uncomfortably long to actually get it out for fear of it sounding weird or wrong or dumb.

Re: Inner Speech

#42

Post by justanotherjoe »

neoberg wrote: post #19

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?

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.

Re: Inner Speech

#43

Post by [deleted] »

causi wrote: post #23

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 th…

[deleted]

Re: Inner Speech

#44

Post by red1reaper »

neoberg wrote: post #28
travisjungroth wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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.

Re: Inner Speech

#45

Post by netcan »

neoberg wrote: post #19

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?

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.

Re: Inner Speech

#46

Post by yetihehe »

cl3misch wrote: post #17
yetihehe wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have inner voice, it's very hard for me to comprehend how can you think, but it's possible. How I understand it: you just write what you think, without rehearsing it before inside your mind. We all do it to some extent when writing, it's not like I actually need to replay everything before I write. "I asked myself" by a person who has no inner voice sounds like a blind person saying "I see..." when he understands s…

This may be surprising, but I indeed can "ask myself" (aka. think about) things, without explicitely verbalizing the question in my head. "Thinking" is more abstract, but it can be faster that way.

I also don't always explicitly verbalize things. The whole problem seems to be more of disagreement about a definition of inner voice and what it means for different people.

Re: Inner Speech

#47

Post by taopai »

neoberg wrote: post #19

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?

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

Re: Inner Speech

#48

Post by Epholys »

thinkingemote wrote: post #37
Epholys wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

I got and adapted the questions from a survey about these issues but I've been trying to get the question right as we tend to use language which presupposes things. I like this one as it asks to form an image and asks about clarity. The image is about hearing. So it crosses both parts. Another example would be to form an image of a telemarketer on the telephone. Change the accent. Introduce line distortion. For me it…

Ha, interesting! I don't have the control you have on my inner hearing. For a song I love, I can like sing along with my mouth shut, not only the voices, but also the instruments. Strangely, it's hard to have the complete song at the same time (voice + instruments), but I suspect it's more of a skill issue, as I seem to be able to do it faintly.

I'm not envious of the people who have an inescapable inner voice. I think it would hinder my thoughts, the speed of it, and the ability to think abstractly. It's not totally baseless, because I can force myself to have an inner voice, but it's a conscious effort. Sometimes useful if I need to clarify my thoughts. On the same note, not having a inner voice makes it really difficult sometimes to put my emotions and thoughts into words.

But I'm really jealous about anyone that can clearly conjure images, "videos", and sounds in their mind, I feel like I have a big disadvantage if I want to learn to draw, 3D model, or play an instrument.

Re: Inner Speech

#49

Post by vidarh »

xwolfi wrote: post #4
cl3misch wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

But then, by which mean did you "ask yourself the same" ? Or is it that you cannot imagine a conversation ?

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.

Re: Inner Speech

#50

Post by jiggawatts »

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.

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