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Comment by saltvedt | Hacker News Reader

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...

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I don't generally hear an "audible" voice in my head, the thoughts just appear, as concepts, or at least as atomic words. I look at the words on the page and the shape of them manifests the meaning. I still kindof imagine speaking the word, but it's not like imagining any other sound.

In contrast, I can imagine music very vividly, with different instruments and their timbres fully defined. It's very close to the sensation of hearing music, to the point where I sometimes have to stop myself from dancing to music that only I can hear, definitely not something to do in public! (The music never has lyrics btw. Even if I'm imagining a real song that has words, they just end up as wordless vocalizations.)

The closer to being in the "flow" state I am, the less of an experience of inner speech I have. When I've been programming or doing music for an hour, I don't really think in words at all, the concepts just seem to flash past, going almost directly from the unconscious to motor actions. With art especially you don't have words for most of the things you're doing anyway, so how could you possibly think in a monologue?

However when I need to think carefully about what I'm doing, when I need to use deductive logic or it's very important that I make absolutely no mistakes, I do veer more towards inner speech. The other major one is rehearsing possible social interactions, or having hypothetical conversations, which is something I actually do quite a lot of (I think it's quite common) and obviously that involves speech.

Finally, at times of emotional stress or fear (but not panic), I'm forced into a consistent inner monologue. It's very similar to the way you can't deliberately give up conscious control of your breathing once you take hold of it, and I can easily see how it could be scary for some people. Sometimes it does feel like a step down the road towards madness, in comparison to my normal state. If I woke up one morning and was stuck like that, I would 100% be going to a psychiatrist.

Don't get any of that stuff about being able to see numbers unfortunately. I have very poor imaging ability. I can't really see pictures in my head at all.

Wow, this is word-for-word how my brain works. I don't hear words when I read and I tend not to see pictures in my head despite being a very spatial person. This is really neat! Thanks for articulating this!

Whenever the book turns into a movie, my friends all say, "Yeah, that casting is exactly who I imagined." That just never happens to me. I don't have preconceived notions of what characters look like, even if I read their descriptions. But I'm very spatial and good with layouts and furniture. I keep thinking that because I'm spatial I should be visual but... not so much.

EDIT: Oh, almost forgot! Despite all that, I'm great with faces. If we've met before I'm going to recognize you. But I'm embarrassingly bad at names, forgetting them almost instantly if I don't concentrate for a long time.

On the other side of things I've got great relative pitch. If I can get the first note on the piano I can pretty much just play the rest of the melody. And, same thing, music is pretty finely textured for me when I concentrate.

For me, it's the same, but I don't have memory for faces and my pitch is not that good, but I had no problem playing piano. I'm good at navigating with maps, but can't remember them easily, and I have a thing which is stereotypical for women: I can't remember which side is left and which is right, I mean calling them or parsing from a word which hand is which. I can show with hand on which side something is, but calling this side by name requires concentration.

> For me, it's the same, but I don't have memory for faces

This is something that has always concerned me in general. I was worried for the first year I dated my now-wife that I would not be able to recognize her when meeting her at a crowded place. I wouldn't go so far as to say she would turn around and I couldn't recognize her, but the permanence just wasn't there.

For the first couple of months of my most recent relationship I would meet my partner at the train station. I was always worried that I wouldn't recognize her in the crowd and she would somehow know. I also can't recall a person's name moments after I hear it. But I can do many other mental gymnastics that surprise my friends and family.

Thinking about it further it only affects one lookup direction. Name -> Face is incredibly difficult for me, but Face -> Name is a lot easier (and really the reason I didn't need to worry as much as I did).

For me, I think it depends on how closely I care about the words or (for fiction at least) whether the scene is people talking or a description of the area or some action.

With dialog, or a narrator's voice, I often imagine them speaking it or provide a voice for them in my own head. With action scenes, especially engrossing ones, I sort of just spend the extra mental energy trying to picture the scene rather than "hearing" the words. I have a very hard time paying attention to what the characters look like or are wearing. Usually imagine it briefly as it is being described and move on.

Oddly enough, when I'm reading aloud, sometimes I sort of stop imagining what is going on as I'm too busy trying to sort out how to speak the dialog (especially in some different voices) that I no longer pay complete attention to the scene.

For non-fiction, I generally spend more mental energy trying to visualize the concepts being described and stop "hearing" the words. Or if I'm merely skimming and want to get a sense of what is being said without the details.

So I think a "voice" is something I can and do switch on and off depending on whether my brain thinks it is important and probably on the difficulty of the text itself.

I have a similar experience. When browsing articles and blog posts online, I definitely don't hear a voice unless the author uses a noticeable conversational tone in their writing. Especially if I'm familiar with the writer's speaking voice.

In narrative fiction, I often hear the words spoken by distinct voices, though this too wanes as I focus on reading quickly or become tired.

I agree that the type of content is important. I personally experience reading as similar to a campfire story, hearing someone else describe a situation. My brain just isn't good at filling in the details of a scene. I am able to control the voice though. Reading textbooks became way more fun once I started reading them as documentaries narrated by Morgan Freeman! I have found the key is to read no faster than a person could speak the words, otherwise I just hear my own voice talking rapidly. I would guess this would be due to a lack of familiarity with the "templates" for the other voices talking quickly.

> In contrast, I can imagine music very vividly, with different instruments and their timbres fully defined. It's very close to the sensation of hearing music, to the point where I sometimes have to stop myself from dancing to music that only I can hear, definitely not something to do in public!

Why not?

Not everyone enjoys the attention it attracts.

When stuck in a procrastinating loop, I can almost feel the word bounce on my visual cortex. They're just packs of glyphs. Like a full queue, I have to carefully wait for more "room" occur and then swallow a few words, so on and so forth. And after a few runs likes this, all of a sudden my brain starts crunching again and I can run through a paragraph in logic-mode. It activates blood flow in deeper parts of my brain (a recent reduced cardio vascular capacity , "make me feel" where blood is going). It's also very emotionally linked. Whenever something valuable happens to me I don't struggle to get into the nice state.

Very similar here.

With re: music, I find I can go to full blown auditory hallucinations with a quiet room and relaxation - one moment you're imagining the orchestra, the next you're hearing it - and when I say hearing I mean it - indistinguishable from being in the pit. The moment you pay too much attention it slips away, like trying to look at a floater in your eye. I have absolute pitch, if it's on any way relevant.

For more reading on this topic I throughly recommend Musicophilia by Oliver Sacks.

I experience similar musical phenomenon, I can even create new, complete songs in my imagination. Though I don't think I have absolute pitch, I play guitar and I can't play what I hear. Or maybe it's because of lack of training, IDK, but I'd really like to bump into some scientific information about this.

I write music mentally all the time, it's incredibly frustrating that I can't transcribe or play anything close in the real world. I'm a guitarist also.

"The other major one is rehearsing possible social interactions, or having hypothetical conversations,..."

This week I started to experiment writing dialogs to untangle complicated situations where I don't know where to start from. It helps me to overcome mental blocks, when the situation becomes overwhelming.

One character is more logical, the other one is the one performing the actions. It's like a coach talking to a player. After a while coming back and forth fro the dialog and the code editor, I find myself in a deep flow, and then I don't need to write but I can "imagine" the conversation.

I was wondering if dialogues have a special properties for driving thinking, then I remembered Plato the philosopher, he use to write his "Plato dialogues" although I never read them.

Interesting.

When reading, I have an internal monologue. I find it hard to hold a definite train of though when walking, though, because there's too much too see.

So, I'll go for a walk to think about some algorithm, or whatnot, but can't really consciously thing through the algo because of all the visual input. The visual input does tend to drive visual or tactile thinking, but there are no words for this.

In the past, I've resorted to speaking out loud to think through concepts, carefully. Somehow spoken (not subvocalized) words are more concrete (and limiting) they don't flap and fray in the wind of my mental music video.

I lost the internal monologue during puberty. It was initially pretty scary when I noticed that -- it though I'm ceasing to exist, and in a few years the "me" will be gone from my shell, while everyone else around me will be none the wiser. Fortunately, it did not happen (yet).

I think the way it happened was that as I read lots of books, I realized I need to stop processing consciously every word if I want to read faster. Additionally, I started to spend lots of time interacting with English language (which is not my native), and I was sometimes thinking in English before I stopped thinking in words altogether.

I developed a speech impediment because of that: whenever I need to speak, I need to synchronize my mental state with the words coming from my mouth, which requires a little effort.

Yeah if I read aloud "in my head" my reading speed is like 50% of what it is if I don't do that. But for fiction and poetry its fun to "hear" the words in my head so for literature I definitely read differently than when I read for information or training.

I share your experience (lacking any inner voice), except when I'm staging words to be spoken (or written as a conversation). I'm a native English speaker, and I never remember having an inner voice. Until reading a page linked here, I had thought I had mental imagery, but it sounds like I don't have that as others do, either.

Until today, I didn't know one could read a text without the internal monologue voicing it as well. I certainly can't. It also seems to explain why I'm a slow reader and why I tend to retain with precision, text that I've only read once. Definitely helps with understanding tech specs and manuals. And also why I dislike reading fiction because I find the language too verbose and inefficient.

But I don't actually hear a voice when reading and hence no detectable accents or tone. However, if I try to remember a line from a movie or a visual, like a scene, I can actually hear and see it, as if temporarily my brain routes my memories through my visual and auditory path, and sometimes it's unsettling even though I'm expecting it. As for the visual, I seem to have two distinct sense of vision, one from my eyes, and the other one that is so called the "mind's eye". For me, it lacks color and even shades.

As for remembering things, I can instantly tell a movie by a single frame of it even if I've watched it once and I'm yet to come across someone who can do that.

I have the internal voice while reading but I also read faster than almost everyone I know. The "voice" is disembodied and doesn't "sound" like anyone I know. It doesn't sound like VoiceOver at high speed, but the sensation is more like my brain is fast-forwarding time so the voice and the understanding of the words are happening at an accelerated rate. I recognize word shapes while reading but that doesn't seem to affect the voice. If the real sound of the word differs from what I thought it was when I first learned the word it is extremely difficult to change the internal voice and consequently how I pronounce the word.

My internal thoughts also seem to be expressed this way, though not necessarily all the time. Doubts or alternate viewpoints are often alternate voices and I can "hear" the arguments.

> why I'm a slow reader

I can glance over text quite quickly to understand what it's saying, but can only "read" it is as fast as the voice can talk.

Typing prose is the same, even if I type text without looking at the screen the voice still speaks to me and I can only type as fast as it speaks.

That's interesting. Can you type while talking to someone else? (I mean actually engage in conversation, not just pretend to listen).

I've typed full emails while talking to others, I can't imagine doing that while sub-vocalizing what I'm writing.

>As for remembering things, I can instantly tell a movie by a single frame of it even if I've watched it once and I'm yet to come across someone who can do that.

hello friend, I can do that too. 1 frame will tell me if I've seen something before, though it sometimes takes several more to get a title. I like to call it cinematic memory, it's like photographic memory but shittier because if I try to reconstruct a photographic memory it comes out blurry :v)

I am like that for movies and similarly for music. Within a bar or two I can almost always tell you if I know the song. Sometimes it takes a few moments for the name to surface, but it's there.

Likewise "What Universal Human Experiences are you Missing Without Realizing it?" from SlateStarCodex.

http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/17/what-universal-human-ex...

Pedantically, I would contend that anything some people are missing out on fails the test for being a "universal experience", because it's not universal unless everyone has it, so the answer to the title of that post is "nothing".

And I would contend you do not experience humour.

Update: apologies if this came off as rude. One theory of humour is that comes about from a benign violation of expectations, known as the "benign violation theory"[1]. Using this model one can see the title as humourous.

[1]: http://humorresearchlab.org/

Rude? I thought you were joking.

I have no internal monologue unless I'm internally assembling bits of language for speech or writing (for example, putting my thoughts together for this sentence). If I get into a deep "flow state" while writing, or I'm in casual conversation with someone I'm comfortable with, that too goes away.

If I try to mentally visualize something I'm not looking at, even if I'm very familiar with it, it's usually impressionistic at best - rough outlines and swaths of color.

I have this with numbers (and consequently arithmetic). When I think of a number, in my mind I see its position in a never ending, wavy line of numbers that goes from left bottom to top right. This 'ribbon' of numbers kinda scales logarithmically and I can 'adjust my view' to 'look at' higher/lower numbers. Now that I think of it, I mostly use/see this ribbon when adding or subtracting numbers, not when multiplying or dividing.

Don't know if it's related but in one of my first classes as a kid (where we learned to count), we had some sort of banner on the wall that listed the number from 0 to 100. Maybe picked it up there.. Sometimes I also think this makes the more abstract math concepts harder for me to understand. If I can't visualize it, it won't stick (easily).

Asked some friends how they saw numbers, and they don't have anything like that. Wondering how this is for other people.

This is called a number form:

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

I can report a similar visual. Mine isn't wavy, it's straight line from bottom left to top right in which each unit has a sort of notch division.

Aaaaand having to actually explain it seems to have completely messed the whole visual up. At this point I feel like I'm inventing a system based on childhood memories...

It does stretch back to my childhood though. I have strong memories of visualizing numbers in class, even specific problems like when we were asked to add all the numbers from 1 to 100. A problem in which I mentally drew half circles from 99 to 1, 98 to 2 and so on. I solved it almost instantly and thinking back I'm a little disappointed my teacher didn't investigate this more and help me explore this skill.

Wow. This rung a bell for me. I wouldn't have known how to put it so concisely, but this is exactly how numbers automatically reveal themselves to me visually when I'm considering them.

If only that extended to the size estimation part of my brain. I've gotten pretty okay at eyeballing kitchen measurements, but I'm completely useless at determining what will fit in the back of my car when shopping at Home Depot without a tape measure.

Wow, did you actually hear a bell in your head??!

I've got a cursor in my head that I mentally move around and click and select things with. When I go insane, I'll probably experience somebody else moving my cursor around, instead of voices in my head.

I wonder if people used to think like typewriters, and heard a right margin bell as they thought, and then had to mentally hit carriage return every 87 characters before they could think any more...

My internal number line exists as a ribbon of squares laying flat (i.e roughly parallel to the ground plane, although they exist floating in an infinite black space). From zero, it goes right to left, then turns around at 10 and goes back behind that line from left to right and then loops around again at 20 in front of the first line. Also, at this point the "camera" turns around following the line, such that it is now viewed behind the first line, going left to right. From there it proceeds in a straight line, with a slight incline, and then plateaus at 100.

Ever since I was a kid, there are some things that, when I mentally picture them, have associated colors bound to them. Days of the week are pretty clear for me.

Monday is red, Tuesday and Thursday are green. Wednesday is a light blue, Friday is red (feels a bit warmer, maybe slightly orange than Monday). Saturday is yellow, Sunday is black (I always associated Sunday with church, and either dread of going or formal wear).

I do this with other things too but days of the week are the most obvious and have been with me my whole life (I'm 30 now).

Oh, I guess I do the inner monologue when estimating time. Something like "Lets see... is it 8 minutes? No that's too fast. 12 minutes? Maybe. Let's go with 11". Didn't even consider it as part of the process until your comment.

Sounds like synesthesia ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synesthesia ). People with synesthesia tend to associate colors with numbers or similar. Often it's extremely specific colors, like "deep electric purple with sparkles" for 125. These colors can be consistently identified and described across multiple tests, suggesting that the person actually maintains a consistent inner representation of numbers in terms of color.

Associating colors with days of the week is another well known example, described in the book "Wednesday is Indigo Blue" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wednesday_Is_Indigo_Blue ). You might find it interesting.

I only know about this because I had a friend in middle school who was a synesthete. We thought he was making it up until we gave him a list of (long) random numbers to describe the colors of. We then mixed up the order and gave them to him a week later and he provided consistent descriptions. It was pretty cool actually, I've always been a bit envious.

Yeah, that's fascinating. I didn't realize there was a name, or even that the colors and days of the week is a thing that other people experience. How weird is it that my Wednesday is blue too?

Thanks for sharing, I've got some reading to do.

As gh02t says, this sounds very much like synesthesia, which my wife also has. Her colours differ to yours, she sees Tuesday as blue. May I ask if it causes you problems reading, particularly coloured lettering? Words written in colours are difficult to recognise as the actual colours clash with how she sees them. "Rainbow" sentences like a child would write with different colours are almost impossible for her to decipher.

Hi Starwatcher. I had never even considered that this has a name, much less that it's common enough for other people to associate with it too. Cool.

I love to read, actually. As far as I know I haven't noticed any difficulty in colors. I can definitely see a word "red" that may have been written in blue color really screwing with me, but maybe not more than it would screw with any other person.

I take the claimed difference that are based purely on self report with a grain of salt. ("No, I can really see the tiger"....) Even when some people are better at recalling details of a visual scene, there are lots of confounding factors. Do they really have qualitatively different subjective experiences, or just worse memory over all? Or difficulty concentrating? Hard to disentangle these, or even know for sure if they are distinct things.

However, I found Feynman's example very compelling, where the self-report (visual vs. auditory counting) matched up with how visual or auditory side tasks interfered with time keeping.

When I'm thinking about how somebody feels, an image about that person assuming a particular bodily posture, comes up.

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