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Inner Speech

plato.stanford.edu

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Re: Inner Speech

#51

Post by justanotherjoe »

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.

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.

Re: Inner Speech

#52

Post by taopai »

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_elimin...

Re: Inner Speech

#53

Post by vidarh »

keiferski wrote: post #8
politelemon wrote: post #2

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/ I think for those of us who don't have an inner voice, section "3.2 The Semantic Content View"…

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…

I definitely have both inner speech and inner voice in the ways you're using them, but when I write I don't verbalize things and then write down what I verbalize.

Consider that you've created an infinite regress problem. One might just as well as how inner speech is possible without preceding inner speech - clearly it must be possible for speech, whether inner, outer, oral or written to be formed from a non-verbal antecedent some way or other.

If you accept that, then there's no particular reason to think that it must be inherently necessary for writing to have a verbal antecedent rather than "hooking right into" the same non-verbal antecedent.

Re: Inner Speech

#54

Post by neoberg »

justanotherjoe wrote: post #51
neoberg wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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.

Re: Inner Speech

#55

Post by vidarh »

keiferski wrote: post #39
boxed wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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? The conscious experience of inner voice/speece/eye/nose/whatever is not really saying something about how the rest of the brain functions. Almost everything anyone does is indeed not projected in inner mind before being executed. The subje…

I'm talking more about "thinking before you speak." As in, it seems to me that without some form of inner speech, it would be impossible to plan anything before vocalizing it, as you'd need to start talking/writing in order to actually think.

Why do you think that?

Re: Inner Speech

#56

Post by sparks1970 »

taopai wrote: post #47
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?

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.

Re: Inner Speech

#57

Post by neoberg »

taopai wrote: post #47
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?

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.

Re: Inner Speech

#58

Post by neoberg »

red1reaper wrote: post #44
neoberg wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 perce…

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.

Re: Inner Speech

#59

Post by keiferski »

vidarh wrote: post #55
keiferski wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm talking more about "thinking before you speak." As in, it seems to me that without some form of inner speech, it would be impossible to plan anything before vocalizing it, as you'd need to start talking/writing in order to actually think.

Why do you think that?

How could one "think about what they're going to say" without some level of prior inner speech or conceptualization? It may not be precisely the same as spoken speech, but it would still be a kind of speech.

Re: Inner Speech

#60

Post by stavros »

teamonkey wrote: post #35
bhaak wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is exactly how I would describe it, as someone without much of an inner eye or an inner voice. I can have an inner voice. I use it to practice how things sound in my head, or if I want to be very specific about wording, or when trying to parse some complex text, or to work out a sum. That’s how I know that most of the time I don’t use an inner voice to think. Most of the time it’s like I have thoughts without wo…

Same here, and the thought itself is basically instant, so why go through the long process of narrating the thought to myself? I just have the next one.
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