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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?

#21

Post by InfiniteRand »

I'm curious if anyone has studied if brain activity during "awake surgery" is different in some major ways from normal brain activity (I'm not sure how you would measure normal brain activity to a comparable degree though).

It seems like "awake surgery" is an often cited tool for understanding how the brain works, but it is a pretty extreme situation, so I could imagine for instance, maybe the stress of awake surgery has a tendency to make the mind suppress certain types of thought which might otherwise be prominent.

Not saying this is the case, but if we are going to rely on the conclusions of awake surgery for important things, we should double check the method to make sure we are not overlooking anything important.

Re: What Is the Sound of Thought?

#22

Post by 082349872349872 »

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) :)

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.)

Re: What Is the Sound of Thought?

#23

Post by mellavora »

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.

yes, that is the secret.

"reading" is not one activity, there are 100s of ways to read.

Re: What Is the Sound of Thought?

#24

Post by notdang »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #4
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…

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?

Re: What Is the Sound of Thought?

#26

Post by sradman »

henearkr wrote: post #19

This study assumes that everybody hear the sounds of words while thinking, and that's not the case. Many people (although I don't know the statistics) do not have this "inner speech".

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 "inner speech". A charitable interpretation of Andrea Moro's 16 person experiment is that they only included people with typical hearing. Experiments that target the atypical hearing cases may be crucial in understanding how the mind processes language. Indeed, the article goes on to state:

> Among the questions this discovery raises: What kind of electrical activity is elaborated in a language network (one that includes the Broca’s area) by persons who have never been able to hear any sound from birth?

Re: What Is the Sound of Thought?

#27

Post by henearkr »

sradman wrote: post #26
henearkr wrote: post #19

This study assumes that everybody hear the sounds of words while thinking, and that's not the case. Many people (although I don't know the statistics) do not have this "inner speech".

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.

For the second quote, it is maybe closer to the subject I raised, but there can be an homologous of "inner speech" for mute or deaf people (e.g. visualizing linguistic cues), so there is still the possibility of a category of people with and another without these cues.

Afaik, all these questions have been ignored by the study.

Not that it's bad, I mean, they have to restrict to some narrower question at first if they want to publish without spending decades on it.

Re: What Is the Sound of Thought?

#28

Post by red75prime »

henearkr wrote: post #19

This study assumes that everybody hear the sounds of words while thinking, and that's not the case. Many people (although I don't know the statistics) do not have this "inner speech".

The observable result "the subject reports a lack of inner speech" can correspond to "the subject lacks inner speech" or "the subject isn't aware of inner speech" or "the subject have a motivation to not report having inner speech" or "the subject can't report having inner speech" or "the subject doesn't recognize his/her subjective experiences as inner speech". And maybe more.

Re: What Is the Sound of Thought?

#29

Post by 082349872349872 »

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?

Polish/ukrainian song lyrics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7cxciyZEBkE (switching between stanzas, not phrases, however)

Amateur joint translation here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24101696

(any native speakers care to say how close we came?)

(and notdang, on the off chance you're from somewhere around Moldova, what would you say the ethnicity of the girl in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24406864 might be? I think a woman from Moldova is the normal reading, but apparently there's also an Odessa neighbourhood called Moldavanka...)

Re: What Is the Sound of Thought?

#30

Post by tsimionescu »

torben-friis wrote: post #16
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 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".
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