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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

#21

Post by StreakyCobra »

> 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 most people closing their eyes is not like closing a black curtain.

If that is a surprise to you that people can create and see mental images, you probably have aphantasia as well: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aphantasia

Since then I'm convinced that not two brains experience the world the same way. Inner voice and mental imaging are probably two of the many things we assume to be the norm.

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

#22

Post by bengale »

This is going to be like when I discovered I had aphantasia isn’t it. People are hearing actual voices inside their heads?

I can sometimes have a train of thought that I could vocalise if I wanted to but I don’t actually hear it as a voice.

Can you all hear things like music and other sounds too?

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

#23

Post by WJW »

renton_wal wrote: post #13
Bellend wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey! I don't know if I have the voice or not. I seen this on a video (Joe Scott maybe?) a couple of weeks ago and I wondered too. I don't know the difference between thinking and inner voice. Like if I am approaching a road, I don't recall an inner voice telling me to stop but I don't know if that is valid as an example. The question might be too broad but how do you know you have no inner voice?

Can you speak to yourself in your head? I also think there's a difference between involuntary and voluntary inner voice.

For me there is definitely a difference between voluntary and involuntary. I can imagine speaking to myself, for example. I do/did that when writing this very sentence. But if I'm not consciously generating language (ie speaking or writing, or thinking about either) then it's nice and quiet in my head :)

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

#24

Post by checkyoursudo »

A couple of years ago, I learned that other people see images in their minds. Now I learn that people hear voices in their minds in a way that is dramatically different to mine. When I am thinking, there is pure silence and blank-ness in my mind. I don't see anything in my blind mind's eye, and I don't hear anything in my deaf mind's ear.

It seems that I can create a monologue in my mind, but I have to be consciously thinking of the words and almost subvocalising them to get it to work how several of the examples are described in TFA.

This makes me wonder, if I'm not seeing images for my mental representations, and I am not hearing inner audio compositions, then what is my thinking consisting of?

When I sit here, just now, creating and solving math problems of moderate difficulty, it's like, there's nothing except maybe a feeling of some sort? A drive or desire? The closest maybe that it feels like is the abstract symbols, from the article, "Other people don’t have a voice at all, or they speak in abstract symbols that don’t involve language." Except they aren't image-symbols in any way. Just like, feeling symbols.

Anyway. I don't know.

Fascinating.

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

#26

Post by floatingatoll »

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 can barely do this, at a naturally-occurring rate of maybe one image a month or less. But I can pick up music instantly.

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

#27

Post by floatingatoll »

bengale wrote: post #22

This is going to be like when I discovered I had aphantasia isn’t it. People are hearing actual voices inside their heads? I can sometimes have a train of thought that I could vocalise if I wanted to but I don’t actually hear it as a voice. Can you all hear things like music and other sounds too?

Yes, yes it is.

Is your train of thought in the same order as the spoken/written words that it converts to?

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

#28

Post by BrianOnHN »

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…

Thanks for putting this into words. It made so much sense to me that I had to save it for future reference.

Might you have any additional takeaways since gaining that perspective?

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

#29

Post by xyzelement »

renton_wal wrote: post #10
xyzelement wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't read the article yet but since you're offering... how do you "think through" problems? Example, this was a dialogue I had in my head this morning: "Avenue X has a lot of stop signs which is annoying. But Avenue Y is narrow and it's garbage-pickup time, so I can get unlucky and really stuck behind a garbage truck. That's not worth the risk, I'd rather deal with the stop signs so I am taking avenue X" What is…

I don't always use my inner voice. I arrange all of the conditions in my head and then logically and rapidly resolve them. In your example, I wouldn't engage my inner voice for something that simple. If it was planning much more steps than that, I would separate them into blocks and use my inner voice to mentally arrange the inner blocks.

Yeah I think that's fair. I probably wouldn't actually use explicit inner voice to chose between two avenues either (unless this was something I apriori considered a very important decision I sat down to consciously think about)

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

#30

Post by Jtsummers »

bengale wrote: post #22

This is going to be like when I discovered I had aphantasia isn’t it. People are hearing actual voices inside their heads? I can sometimes have a train of thought that I could vocalise if I wanted to but I don’t actually hear it as a voice. Can you all hear things like music and other sounds too?

> Can you all hear things like music and other sounds too?

Yes. I do, at least. Not always, but I can imagine music and "hear" it in my head. It's not as though it actually sounds like music (that is, it is perceptually distinct from actually hearing something, I'd never confuse an imagined with a real sound), but I can hear it. It was very useful when I actually played musical instruments, imagining how a piece would sound and then trying it later.

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