You hear a voice in your head when you're reading, right?

If you think this is interesting, definitely read "Generalizing From One Example" at Less Wrong [1].

Turns out that people have varying degrees of ability to mentally imagine things, where the range seems to be from "purely abstract" to "number of stripes on a tiger".

Also; Feynman noted that people keep track of time in very different ways[2], either visual (imagining a clock) or symbolic (counting by talking to yourself inside your head).

And that whole internal monologue thing? Turns out that some people report not having that...

If anyone has more examples, please add them. This stuff is endlessly fascinating :)

[1]http://lesswrong.com/lw/dr/generalizing_from_one_example/

[2]http://generallythinking.com/richard-feynman-on-thinking-pro...

I do, and I don't. If you imagine there's some form of pipeline in your brain from sound to phonemes to words to concepts to comprehension, my reading probably comes in right at the "words" level. I "hear" the words like I hear them when real people are speaking them, but they do not really have "sounds" or "phonemes". When reading fiction, I may pick up accent if the author is spelling it out but I generally have no voice particularly in mind for a character. Not a "neutral" voice, it's really no voice whatsoever. Just words.

For one thing, if a real voice was speaking at the speed I normally read, it would be virtually incomprehensible. I can't be simply "sounding out words" for that reason.

I imagine people come in at different places in the pipeline and that probably explains the difference. There more phases of the pipeline than there are common words to try to explain our experience.

Interesting, I think I always subvocalise when reading and found it hard not to when I just tried. I just asked my wife and she says she never hears a voice or even music in her head like that and was a bit shocked when I said I could.

When I was a teenager I took elocution lessons, read poetry and acted in plays. I would read through a piece imagining where I would pause, where to put emphasis, etc. So I know I subvocalised then, but don't know if I did before or if that's when I learned to do it.

I know it takes me much longer to read a book than my brother or father or many of my friends. I can read a book once and remember small details from the story they have completely forgotten and sometimes they've read a book multiple times when I have far better recollection of it from a single much slower reading. I'm wondering if subvocalisation plays a part in that.

Edit: another factor is that I remember words from their sound, not their spelling, so have always had difficulty with spelling. I can't visualise the word, and often need to actualy write a word out before I can figure out how to spell it. Just spelling out words letter by letter vocally is very hard for me.

Ok this is very strange. When I read I hear the same inner voice or steady stream of consciousness I hear all the time. It's my own voice. The article says some people find it scary or distracting? So when they have normal thoughts and are not reading does that mean they don't hear their own voice like me? Is it scary and distracting when just having normal thoughts and not reading? This is amazing if this hasn't really been discussed much and studied before.

I'm really curious to hear other people's answers to this.

Perhaps we only perceive a "voice" when someone makes us direct our conscious mind towards analyzing, describing, or remembering the reading experience.

I mean, consider reflex actions in response to pain: Plenty of people will (quite honestly) tell you that "it hurt, so I pulled my hand back" but the lower-level neurological evidence suggests we're fooling ourselves.

"For people who only ever heard the same internal reading voice, this was usually their own voice, but it was often different in some way from their speaking voice, for example in terms of pitch or emotional tone."

I hear a voice when I read, and it's always the same one, but I don't think of it as my own voice. An interesting side effect of that is, even though I read posts from hundreds of people on the internet every week, they're all in the same voice, so I basically imagine all of you as, like, one person.

I listen to podcasts at 2.7x speed. There is a funny jump, from the speed where you still vocalize to something faster. It feels like it's pumping it directly in to your brain :)

2.7 is the speed I can jump in any time, if I speed up incrementally I can easily go to 3.2 or something.

(i use windows media player for the speed up, best real-time sound stretching I found)

Whenever I read anything, it's as if I'm actually have a conversation. Every single word is spoken in my head with the real tone and intonation that I would expect if somebody were telling me a story in a coffee shop.

I've always assumed that this is because I'm a very audible learner. When I'm paying attention to somebody who is talking, I tend to have a hard time focussing on anything else. For example, I'll miss turns driving if my wife is talking to me in the car unless I'm just actively ignoring her. As a result, she knows if we're following directions not to talk to me about anything because if I don't miss the turn, I wasn't listening to her. :-)

The side effect of this is that I don't read particularly quickly. I can if I make myself but it's like the voice in my head becomes the Micro Machine guy. I read at about the speed I'd expect somebody to talk.

I tend to write the same way. If it doesn't "sound right" I have to keep editing the sentence.

I assume this is the same as subvocalization, right?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subvocalization

Or is there a separate notion of hearing a voice over and apart from subvocalizing? (If I had to try to think about them as different concepts, I'd probably say that I never subvocalize, and usually don't hear a voice when reading quickly, but perhaps do hear a voice when reading slowly or focusing on individual words.)

People's subjective experiences vary considerably. Yvain's 2009 Less Wrong article on the subject is very good: http://lesswrong.com/lw/dr/generalizing_from_one_example/

For me, reading definitely doesn't involve any internal dialog. My eyes scan the page and the information passes directly into my consciousness. I guess that I'm a very fluent reader, however I don't remember any intermediate "translation" steps when I was young.

I think a good illustration of this internal dialog is learning a new language. At first you (verbally) translate each word in your head into your native language. But as you gain fluency, you begin to understand the new language directly.

Many decades ago I learnt Morse Code, and the process was similar. At first I mentally (and painstakingly) translated each letter. Later I translated each word. But eventually the information just flowed into my head without any intermediate steps.

Good news, Everyone! I'm sending you all on a mission into your inner subconscious. While there, you can read the rest of this comment in my voice.

I hear a voice when I read, but what's amazing is that I hear a British voice when I read The Economist. TE uses various britishisms, but even in the parts that don't, I always hear some brit reading to me. It's partly why I like reading it so much.

Not really. I do when writing/typing, but not when reading. I don't even really subvocalize, that I've ever been able to tell - I read too quickly to transform the words into sounds.

I have a slightly above average reading speed (with average to above-average retention), mostly because I don't spend as time converting the words to sounds.

Of course, this does mean that I don't always recognize words when said aloud that I've only seen in text before. Less of an issue as I grow older, but hearing some words vocalized was an interesting experience the first time (such as aileron or Qeynos (pronounced as kē-nōs, for those who never played Everquest))

Normally, I read slower and experience an internal voice. It is different from hearing a voice with my ears. Not just quieter, but different in a way I can't put into words. Yet also similar.

If I either speed up, or consciously suppress it, I can read without the internal voice, but comprehension goes way down. There's some comprehension, but it's pretty ineffective overall.

If I'm in a relatively quiet place, I don't move my lips or tongue. If I'm in a very noisy place, moving my lips/tongue seems to help.

I once knew someone who said she could not read at all without whispering the words to herself.

I thought it was common knowledge that some people do, some don't. I always thought the don't column was a learned skill... After all, unless your voice is one of the chipmunks, it's going to limit your reading speed.

If you want to turn the voice off (off the text), you can try counting in your head as you read.

If I know who wrote a piece and they have a distinctive manner of speaking, I sometimes "hear" the text colored by their voice. In most cases I don't experience anything like that, but I suppose it's possible that I do and just read so much that it gets filtered out.

I have an inner dialogue as well. Not always but it's generally there especially when writing.

The annoying thing is my inner dialogue is the same for writing and reading (Is this the same for others?). This is bad because my reading dialogue skips words and makes up pronunciations for words that are long or are just a pain to say. I imagine this evolved from the necessity to read faster. So when I write and even sometimes speak about complicated things I will skip words and maybe go lax on pronunciation (especially if its an emotional thing because well.. its hard for me to communicate emotions).

The other annoying thing with inner dialogue is I often screw up homonyms. As seen in this recent comment with brake and break: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11159104 . Its exceedingly embarrassing for me when this happens. Even trivial mistakes like "to", "too", "two", "your" and "you're". This doesn't happen on serious writing but it does on the internet and I feel like an idiot when it happens (as I do know how to use the words correctly).

EDIT: I just noticed I screwed up its and it's again.

I have an inner monologue when thinking and I hear an inner voice when reading (sometimes several if there are several characters in a text).

The voices differ. When reading something from a friend I will hear their voice, my own when reading my own, and my brain will try to create a auditory context if its by an unknown author. For example, Hacker News covers a lot of news from Silicon Valley/San Francisco so reading the comments here I mostly hear an American voice with an Californian accent, mixed together with my own voice.

My brain pairs this together with inner images. So if I read a book about exploding stars, for example, I will hear an inner voice narrating the topic while also seeing images of the things being explained. These voices and images are very weak compared to the real thing though. My inner voices lack clarity and my inner images have no color.

Obviously this is not great for my reading speed. I did a test a while ago and according to that test my reading speed was compared to that of a 5th grader, with high memory retention of general concepts and average memory retention of specific details. I read for several hours every day.

As for numbers, when doing maths in my head, I do it visually. I see the numbers as images. What is strange though, compared to other things I imagine, is that results to math problems manifest themselves as a gut feeling rather than as the logical result from a chain of continuous inner dialogues and imagery. If I try to calculate 5*5 I get a gut feeling to answer 25, often faster than I consciously understand how I arrived at the answer.

Needless to so say I have a very strong imagination, sometimes so strong that I stop paying attention to the real world for a little while.

How does this inner voice compare to a real voice?

Given that the scientists link that with auditory hallucinations, I'd expect that for at least some people it's indistinguishable from a real voice (one of the earliest known example would be Socrates' daimonion).

I hear a voice usually when I'm reading but it is of some kind of soundless intensity. I think different characters in books have slightly different voices but it's possible that my brain knows that different characters should have different voices and it just tricks me in believing it.

I only have an inner voice for my thoughts when I try to articulate something. Otherwise I only think in concepts, structures and visualisations.

This is also how I tackle programming or solving problems in general. I visualize the problem and build a "problem structure" and then try to make it collapse into a simpler structure.

I'm curious what this means with regards to someone who is deaf? Language comprehension and the auditory system are decoupled, with obvious empirical evidence (people who can't hear can still read, write, and speak). What is a 'voice in your head' for a deaf person?

I can read very quickly and not hear a voice, but usually I read slow enough that I can. The tone usually depends on what it is I'm reading (Hacker News sounds different to Harry Potter), but I think the actual voice is the same. I've never really thought about it before.

Sometimes I hear, sometimes not, depends on how much fantasy I unleash or if I use voice "recordings" to prevent me from making mistakes in writing a text in a foreign language. And I practiced fast reading as a kid (e.g. 1 page in 2-5s), and that was for sure without any distinctive voice. Now this helps me to spot a line in code I need to change extremely quickly ;-)

It's like with thinking - when you are a kid, you think in some proto-thoughts that aren't really based on a language (something like assembly language of mind) and the older you are and more languages you know, you tend to think in languages instead, except when you are in a creative flow when things just happen automagically.

When I read a fiction book I hear a general main narration voice, usually my own but it could be someone else if I know the author was American for example. Then I also hear accents for all the characters in the book, for example many of the characters in the book I'm reading atm are Scottish, and they all have Scottish accents and the women have women's voices while the men have men's.

To those who do not hear an inner voice: I'm really struggling to imagine how the information gets in, how are you actually aware of the information ?

I do not believe this has not been studied before. In psychology you talk about the inner monologue, in linguistic you have experiments measuring if silent reading activates muscles in the speech apparatus (as far as I remember, it does), speed reading is all about silencing the inner monologue.

A quick search brought this up on Google Scholar:

    Auditory imagery, D Reisberg - 2014 - 
    books.google.com
    
    "Psychologists have debated the role of inner 
    speech in silent reading, and clinicians ...."

So it's a study about what a 136 person described on a forum? hmm... Not sure we can jump on conclusion nor sure the population is big enough to user decimal points in the percentages.

There could be a "feed forward" mechanism in language processing, which gets involved in reading also. That is to say, when you hear speech, perhaps that same "reading voice" is also there: perhaps the speech that you're hearing is synthesized into a voice, and those voices are compared, which reinforces whether or not you "heard it right", and perhaps this takes place in a loop which clarifies the speech.

For me, the voice in my head is always there. My every thought manifests as a voice, both when I'm reading and when I'm not. The voice isn't mine and it's not the voice of anyone I know. It's just a voice, and is always the same. I can also imagine things in a decent amount of detail, but it's not always visual, it's as if the voice is describing the details to me.

I thought that was normal.

I wonder how this relates to how we learn our primary language in the first place. My parents put objects in front of me and gave me the word to associate with them, or talked around the meaning of abstract words. I learned English (my primary language) entirely verbally. Then, when I began to learn to read, I learned what sounds letters made, and verbalized these sounds when reading, and tried to parse those sounds into a word I recognized. Since I learned my language verbally, the process to comprehension included conversion to sound. This has continued to my adult life; I wonder if I can re-train my brain to associate text with meaning. I also wonder if I do this already, but every time I try to notice whether I'm internally verbalizing, I internally verbalize (because it's in the back of my mind), so I think I do regularly even though that may not be the case.

Experimenting with this idea would likely require teaching children with text, which may or may not be ethical. Sign language is different enough from English that it doesn't directly relate.

I hear a voice when I read, and I just need a few seconds of concentration to change it to another voice. I can choose voices that seem to fit the content in energy level, general way of speaking and accent and do that a lot. But they never speak to me when I am not reading.

I realized just now that it is my brain reading me a story and I listen to the voice that reads it to me like a fascinated kid.

I never have.

This may have something to do with why I can only appreciate poetry when read aloud.

> But as this is the first ever investigation into the question, and it used an unconventional methodology, it's fair to say the results are far from conclusive.

See also the Independent article here: http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/...

As I understand it (and I could be wrong) "hearing a voice" pretty much means you hear a voice as if someone was speaking but there's noone there. The paper talked about claimed that 80% of people "hear a voice" when they read.

I find that surprising, and I'd want to know what exactly is meant by "inner reading voices" - are these voices that people hear, or are they something else?

> Why hasn't this topic been studied before? Vilhauer's study hints at an answer because she found that many people assumed that their inner experiences when reading were shared by everyone. This worked both ways, so some of the people who had an inner reading voice were convinced of its normality: "We all hear our voices in our heads at times – even those of others we know – especially while reading," said one Yahoo contributor. Yet others who claimed to have no inner voice felt they were the normal ones. For example, in response to a question posted on the site about whether anyone else hears an inner voice while reading, one responder said "Nooo. You should get that checked out" and another wrote, in capitals: "NO, I'M NOT A FREAK".

The other reason is that until relatively recently everyone freaked the fuck out if you said you heard voices, and hearing voices was a sign of serious severe mental illness. We now know that's probably not true.

It depends on what I'm reading. Comments in a forum? I hear a voice in my head, with a certain character style based on either the text or if it's a known commenter.

Most books, especially good fiction, I visualize to a high degree which is why I often want to avoid movie adaptations because they cannot match what I experienced while reading.

I generally don't hear a voice when I read and find that when I do intentionally, it slows me down. I've found that I often miss puns and other plays on the sounds of words in written text due to not sounding out the words.

I find that this is happening most of all when I'm reading in a non native language. And when reading in native, the thought process is much faster and better that I don't get voices(:D) so much.

Has anyone found this affects memory? I 'see' thoughts but since words never completely describe an object, my brain seems to auto fill in the rest. And when asked later I can describe what I read along with what my brain auto filled in (and sometimes can't remember which I actually read and which my brain filled in). For instance I read about a tree, and I 'see' in my thoughts a pine tree. When asked later about the tree I might describe it as a pine even though that was never physically described.

I hear my own voice. It's only ever my own voice -- it's not modified by the speaking character or the writer. I also feel my tongue forming the words even though nothing's moving.

When I read a comment on HN from a voice I know (DHH, patio11, Rob Walling, etc) I usually hear their voice as I read it. (in DHH's case, inserting a few extra obscenities for good measure)

Never hear a voice. It just goes directly to symbols/images in my head. Exception when learning something difficult, at which time I slow down to words.

Not if I read fast enough. Which can be done by looking at 1/3X of the Line N, then looking at 2/3X of the line, then recurring with Line N+1.

This has >10x sped up my reading speed and improved comprehension as my brain takes in the whole picture (gestalt of the paragraph) more times total and more times per second. Try it!

Speed reading techniques often try to break written word streams down into visual chunks and let the wetware do the rest. Unsurprisingly, results vary widely. Ironically though, this sounds a bit like a very high level description of segmentation as in computer vision

When I'm typing or reading english or any other foreign language I hear a voice — now that I think about it. Not in Danish though, which is my native tongue. This never occurred to me before; very strange indeed.

"One hundred and sixty posts from [Yahoo Answers] were analyzed using a qualitative content analysis approach"

Cool tips on how 2 become a rsercher?

The discussion here on HN is interesting, though.

I don't hear a voice in my head. I read much faster than anyone can talk - I can't imagine what that would sound like.

Only when I want to, which isn't often because it slows me down. Sometimes it's fun to listen to the dialogue, though.

I also often see the words that are spoken by someone else.

As a result, I have a high-level ability to spell and be grammatically-correct.

on a side note, i heard its suggested that you don't have the audible voice if you want to achieve faster speeds at reading comprehension :)

I think 'hear' is the wrong word. It has nothing to do with hearing. No hearing is involved at all, it is an auditory imagination and recollection. Like a good song that keeps playing in your head. And most people can clearly distinguish this kind of sensation from actual hearing, and they'd never mistake the auditory imaginations for actual things that are heard.

Just wonder how the voice-hearing people skim or fast-read. Does it sound like a fast-forward with a funny voice to them?

What? No of course you don't "hear" the words. How could you? Reading is several times faster than speaking, and it's not like you look individually at every word and read them out, you see a larger area of text as a unit.

This makes no sense. If you mentally read out every word you are doing it wrong!