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Inner Speech

plato.stanford.edu

131–140 of 141 posts

Re: Inner Speech

#132
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.

In a normal conversation I certainly don't do that. There's no way in hell I would have TIME to do that. It's too fast.

And anyway, why would that make any more sense? How would you plan the internal voice in order to produce it? An inner-inner-voice? That would need an inner-inner-inner voice?

It sounds like you have the homunculus idea of how human brain works. But this idea is nonsensical...

Re: Inner Speech

#133
post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find if I listen closely to my inner voice, it starts going in a circle for exactly this reason. This makes me think maybe the actual order is backwards and the voice comes second, but it feels first because brains are weird.

Right, my point is there is some point at which our "generation" of dialogue transitions from subconscious to conscious. This is true for people with or without inner dialogs.

Agreed. I don't need to be convinced because I definitely do some language related tasks without using my normal, chatty inner monologue. For example, when I try to speak Japanese via an English inner monologue, it's extremely slow. To be fluent I need to just go straight to Japanese, preferably without thinking at all.

Re: Inner Speech

#134
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you 'randomly' replay memories?

Not more or less than someone who verbalizes their thoughts more. I would think it is orthogonal to inner voice. Do you think otherwise?

How would you know how frequently others do that?

I think people with an inner voice don't notice their 'random' memories as much because they don't fit the narrative. Like confirmation bias, the bits that don't fit get filtered out, yet visual narratives are more flexible than that.

When you dream, it's like a montage, right? Do you hear sound at all? The dream still makes sense when you're in it though. How is waking reality any different in that regard?

Re: Inner Speech

#135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, I'll bite. Pardon my ignorance, but this is a new concept to me. If you have no inner voice, how are you able to speak? Surely you formed those words in your mind before writing them. Is it that you only do so when speaking to others, and never to yourself?

There is a famously extensive and popular Reddit thread about this! Which I'm sure someone will link to :-)

can you link to it? I'm interested in reading it.

Re: Inner Speech

#136
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Luckily the text editor has been invented giving you the possibility of endlessly editing your sentence until it makes some sense. Only half joking. I'm always impressed by those ancient people who could write long letters by hand in beautiful orthography, composing complex texts and make them just flow linearly. I'm sure here and there there would be a rewriting step involved but that can't have been always the case…

Perhaps only the letters which were 'really good' were preserved by historians, and most of the average human writing was not as preserved .

Re: Inner Speech

#137
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?

Same here. This video was interesting to me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNQyubd9ARc&t=60s in it you are asked to shout "I like crickets" 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…

> "The volume is the same because you can't change the volume of the voice in your head, only the tone and pitch."

Huh? That's not true at all, I shouted "I like crickets" in my head so loudly I told myself to stop shouting it's giving me a headache. I said this sentence in my head too, of course.

Re: Inner Speech

#138
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

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.

Re: Inner Speech

#139

It's interesting that the paper mentions Andy Clark's work and hallucinations in separate threads but doesn't connect Anil Seth's introduction of controlled hallucinations and Andy Clark's work on that topic: https://www.technologyreview.com/2021/08/25/1032121/brains-c... I had always conceived of metacognition as genetic, given my own phenomenological experience dating to childhood. It wasn't until a colleague chall…

which makes sense, because this Anil Seth guy sounds really aloof and seems to have no problem making grandiose statements. Reads like a tabloid that's desperately trying to keep your attention by saying big things.
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