What's Up with Those Voices in Your Head? | Hacker News Reader

What's Up with Those Voices in Your Head?

nytimes.com

40 pointslermontov55 comments

I find when reading fiction, or certain kinds of literature (not including avant guard lit), using an inner voice is vital to get the full meter and rhythm. Then with slowing down my thoughts -- self talk -- rational thinking, having an inner voice helps too.

When reading non-fiction I can more easily drift into a sub-vocal whisper, to nothing at all speed read, skipping over to points I'm interested in, going back over points, etc. I suspect this is why a lot of non-fiction has standards and formats and certain clichés that make visual comprehension less intensive.

A friend of mine said she had no inner voice at all.

I've noticed when using Ketamine that I can do this sub-mental-vocal speed reading incredibly well for certain kinds of avant guard literature or philosophy lit, like Camus and David Foster Wallace, or Pyncheon, where the voice can change from chapter to chapter -- or rather the content is very info dense.

I had great trouble 'getting' Hunter S. Thompson before I'd ever heard him speak. When I heard his voice it suddenly all made sense. Same for William S Boroughs, for his more avant-guard lit works. Junky, on the other hand, has a more more straight forward voice and I was able to get into that quite easily without having heard his actual voice beforehand.

This is why I don't buy into the bicameral mind crap. Non-vocal thinking seems easier for more info dense material, wheras a voice is helpful for very emotive things like poetry or some kinds of lit.

Then again I could be simply confusing standard voice with non-standard. Hard to be objective.

Wait... Some people can't turn them off? Some people don't have them at all?

I've always been able to think without voices in my head, or deliberately use them to focus my thoughts. I never even considered that others might be stuck in one mode or the other.

Yeah. This is really interesting to think about. I can talk with myself in my head, when I'm internally debating something (having one perspective question another, then another question the questioner, etc, a kind of 'second thoughts' per Pratchett), or I can sort of...play out a script in my head, like a monologue, when I want to 'hear' how something will come across before saying it, or when writing (such as now), to try and sound it out, and I can think in non-verbal ways, where there's no voice, where I'm examining and abstracting and constructing patterns and etc, things that are innately non-verbal...but I never actually thought about those as being distinct methods of ~thinking~, and that some people might not be able to do it.

I can't think without vocalizing, and I can't control when thoughts flow in/out of my head (well I've been practicing, but I'm nowhere near there), so I can't really control my inner voice. They're so tied together for me, I can't really understand the idea of thinking without it, or even that the "thought" and "voice" are separate things.

For example, when reading, I need to vocalize everything, and I'm sure this contributes to me being a slow reader. I've tried speed reading techniques, or learning to read words in groups, and I can take in the words, but don't actually "process" them. By the time I've read the next sentence, I've forgotten what the previous one said. I can read much faster than I could physically talk (maybe 2-3x), but any faster than that and my inner-voice jumbles together, I can no longer comprehend it.

With speed reading tools that show you one word at a time very quickly, like Spritz [0], I can get over 600wpm and still read every word, but my inner voice sounds like one of those robotic voices that combine recorded samples together (like a subway announcement: "The next. BROOKLYN BOUND. train will. ARRIVE IN... TWO. minutes."). And I've found that anything above 200wpm, I couldn't tell you 5 minutes later what I had read.

[0] http://spritzinc.com/

Edit: There's a fun story by Richard Feynman about him and a friend trying to count in their heads while reading or speaking aloud. And Feynman found he could read and count, but not speak and count, and his friend was the opposite. It turns out it was because Feynman was verbalizing the counting, while his friend was visualizing it.

Couldn't find a link that wasn't a PDF filled with illustrations, but it's a short read.

http://calteches.library.caltech.edu/3591/

I can't turn off my internal voice at all, except in meditation, and even then it's difficult. I have to spend quite a lot of time where my internal voice is doing nothing but counting breaths, before eventually/sometimes, I can just observe the breaths without counting them. Otherwise, I have a continuous monologue, mostly in my own voice.

I can think in images, but the images are never completely without narration.

This is soooo much me, except that I've never had it during meditation. This actually caused me some problems trying to learn to meditate - I can't grasp focusing on something if I can't have the internal vocalisation with it. I finally settled on making inner sounds along with monotonous drumming - the vocalisation will kinda tune out or get quieter, at least.

Thanks for describing it for me, btw :)

I have that monologue as well - complete along with your description of images. If I narrate them, they are much better.

What about those of us who don't have internal voices?

I've identified a Philosophical Zombie. Someone contact the nobel committee, for I have refuted Physicalism. I knew your kind would finally let it slip. I jest!

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zombies/

Huh?

What does inner voices have to do consciousness or sentience?

I wonder if deaf-mute people have them.

not sure about deaf-mute people but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prosopagnosia is an area of interest for people who study philosophy of mind

Perhaps not quite the answer you're after, but I was deaf as a child, though I was able to hear as a toddler and had therefore been exposed to spoken language before going deaf. I absolutely had inner voices while I was deaf, to a practically debilitating degree. The isolation inherent to deafness caused me to have strong inner dialogues, to develop a full world inside my head. I would often "go away" in my head, to the point that I was completely detached from and unresponsive to the physical world. It's apparently very unsettling to people standing right by you.

My grandfather used to be fascinated by it, he'd say that I'd gone to my secret garden and that it was ok to leave me alone. Even after recovering my hearing years later, I kept this habit (whether it's good or bad is debatable). Over the years I developed a better hang of it and I can now trigger it mostly at will. The level of introspection that came with all this is rather hard to explain, though for all my quirks, I don't regret it one bit.

Hmm, that's interesting. Was it voice as we know it, i.e. sounds? Inner voices are usually "sounds" instead of, say, images, but if you were deaf, what sounds did you know? Or was it because you could hear as a toddler?

Rather than getting into dualism or non-intuitive philosophy/metaphysics, it's better to view humans as philosophical zombies from the get-go.

Consciousness is not something we possess from birth, but a self-model that gradually emerges as the organism's cybernetic interactions with the environment increase. It then follows that any process that could disrupt this would lead to people with a not fully-developed sense of self or in other words partial PZombies.

I strongly disagree that it's better since that's effectively implying solipsism and that there are no ethical considerations for doing bad things to people since they, well, don't really exist as agents-that-can-feel-things. Regardless of how hard it is to describe philosophically, and what kind of terms one tries to use, the fact that we process things we feel is the reality of our existence and it drastically modifies how we act.

Why do you think entities without consciousness are not worthy of ethical consideration? Most animals and even human babies don't have it but most people still make a big deal about their ethical treatment.

I don't. I think there's a conflation where "zombie" is interpreted as "lacking consciousness". But the description I'm seeing in the Encyclopedia, as well as LW's definition and my own definition is closer to "entity that doesn't process what they feel" (doesn't feel what they process? Sees blindly? Blargh).

> by definition there is ‘nothing it is like’ to be a zombie

Non-conscious animals are still often perceived as processing feelings and therefore capable of the concept of suffering. You could try imagining being a simple animal, even if it's as simple as a single signal that goes 1 and 0. Zombies don't process any feelings and ethical consideration in their address wouldn't make much sense, it's like being concerned with the ethics relating to a sun or a hydroelectric dam.

Suffering would not exist without consciousness. You people are all conflating self-awareness and consciousness.

Can't agree with you there. These terms are not exactly super solidly defined, but most uses of the term "consciousness" I've seen usually refer to something more advanced than basic signal processing. To quote Wikipedia:

> It has been defined as: sentience, awareness, subjectivity, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind.

It's a sufficiently vague term that I can't use it to describe what I mean because it will most likely be misinterpreted, and it conflicts a lot with modern views on what is or isn't aware enough that its experiences happen, i.e., the Turing test and the current trend of concern as to whether or not a given animal is intelligent enough.

I'm referring to consciousness as awareness, subjectivity, the ability to experience or to feel, not wakefulness, executive control, nor the sense of selfhood, since they all (except, arguably, executive control) depend on awareness. They're poorly defined because our culture has not thought a lot about this, IMO. Hindu philosophy has a much better conceptualization (like Inuit culture has a better conceptualization of the varying states of snow).

Animal and babies have consciousness. Self-awareness != consciousness. Consciousness is the stuff of subjective experience. Self-awareness is a particular flavour of it. I can have experiences without being aware that I'm a being who is having experiences.

Also: Self-awareness is a sliding scale, with babies possessing some but less than a full-grown adult. Consciousness is different: either an object has subjective experiences, or it does not.

You're conflating self-awareness and consciousness. See my post below.

I'm not conflating them, they're already conflated and not very well defined.

Consciousness implies "someone" that is conscious. A self-model in other words.

Babies, like most animals, do not possess consciousness in that sense, since in my view there is no self-model there to subjectively experience things.

A lot of us are simply assuming that there is but there is a lot of anecdotal evidence that shows otherwise. Temporary self-model annihilation can be triggered in many ways and guess what happens? Bits of subjective experience (tastes, smells even pleasure and pain) disappear. People who have been through such experiences (ego-death) report in-hindsight that the feeling of being a conscious agent in space-time completely disappears, and it is simply as if one is absorbed into the environment, no longer separate from it.

In that way one can even view the myth of The Fall, as the emergence of consciousness, one is no longer one with nature but now separate from it.

Metziger's book is a good overview of such investigations:

https://www.amazon.com/Ego-Tunnel-Science-Mind-Myth/dp/04650...

Again, you are describing a particular type of consciousness. Consciousness is simply subjective experience, or qualia.

There has to be something experiencing the feeling of either being a part of or separate from the environment. If there's a feeling, there is consciousness. Maybe this will help discernment: consciousness is the "space" where feelings/sensations/qualia arise. Any feeling of having a self or not arises in this space.

Voiceless people, represent!

I had a long discussion on this subject over on Lesswrong, back in the day. Suffice to say that a lot of people have trouble imagining it's even an option.

It would have to be. People didn't start out with language, but could undoubtedly think.

I'm fairly mixed, probably like the majority. Some things are images or words and occasionally just ideas (although I'm not certain how to describe that).

I know exactly what you mean. It's that process where an idea just forms, wordlessly, and you just "know" it now. Sometimes I start narrating it to myself, but then stop mid-way, realizing it's pointless, since I already know it.

Do you prefer non-fiction to fiction? I find non-fiction way easier to read without a voice, and certain kinds of fiction require a voice (somewhat).

Fiction. And yes, when reading fiction I can generally hear the characters' voices when they're speaking; this is somewhat deliberate, as I find it improves immersion.

But I don't really have one of my own.

It happens - though it is hard for me to imagine. Mine is pretty active - I think in words, and can get into an inner monologue that is basically narrating what I do.

But my spouse doesn't have that - it seems to be a foreign concept to him. I think some folks think more in pictures or sounds and other such things.

I can get into an inner monologue too, but, more often than not, I realize that it's going on, think "this is useless, I already know what I'm thinking" (wordlessly) and stop it.

Yeah. I have a lot of trouble imagining what it would be like to have what they're describing.

I used to have one when I was younger, it's just like talking to yourself all the time, only inside your head.

Same here, I think I had it too when I was a kid..I wonder if my excessive internet use drowned my internal voice or something else.

What I wouldn't give for a Mute button some days.

You know that Good Will Hunting scene, "It's not your fault"?

I wake up to my inner voice saying, "It's all your fault. It's all your fault."

I don't think in words that often, but when I do, it's usually just the word "Stupid." on repeat.

Can you speed read?

Yes, but that's a bit orthogonal (I don't think it has to do with not having/using an inner voice). I could since I was young, which made the teachers irritatedly think I was joking when I was done before the rest of the class were a third of the way into the text.

Which inevitably leads to additional questions probing your actual comprehension. Fortunately, after a few weeks in each grade, I found that teachers did tend to accept it. After sufficient probing attempts that felt like they were trying publicly disgrace me for claiming to have read the material but not actually doing so...

So, how did you learn to read or sight words?

Sight words were a new concept to me when I saw that's what they were using to teach my son, so I have to assume it was standard reading. I don't have a clear memory one way or the other though, so I can't be sure.

With me, they wouldn't even bother, they'd just say "stop joking around and read", so I just re-read the whole thing, more slowly.

That...is a fascinating question. Usually when dealing with verbal thought, it turns into voices in my head, unlike the OP. That might be why while I can read pretty fast, I still can only do so about carnival barker or auctioneer speed, rather than faster than speech. I could be automatically limited in my rate of comprehension due to how it's being processed, still as a 'voice', rather than visuals that map directly to concepts. I would -love- to see survey results on that, whether people had tried to speed read, if, having tried, they succeeded, and whether they tend to/ever have an 'internal voice' in their minds when thinking

You can train yourself to speed read (and shut down the subvocalization that gets in the way, at least temporarily) so I don't think it's totally dependent on not having an inner voice at all, though that might help. It's interesting. (To train: use a metronome and your finger. Scan each line with your finger on each beat, have your eyes follow your finger and try to understand what you're reading by sight. Eventually you'll get to a BPM faster than even your auctioneer speed so your subvocalization just won't be able to keep up with your finger, and so to understand you'll force yourself to stop subvocalizing. Increment the metronome. Occasionally do stretch goals where you increment by a large amount at the cost of comprehension, then go back down to a speed still above where you originally started, and that becomes your new base. Eventually you can wean yourself off both but you may still need one or both every now and again to power through something at full speed and full concentration. At some point you may start processing multiple lines at once.)

Yeah, I figured I could eventually teach myself; it's never been something I cared about enough. Even at my fastest, my recollection and enjoyment suffered. If it was fiction, appreciating the author's prose and word choice and flow was more important, and seemed best enjoyed by vocalizing it, and if it was non-fiction, then capping my speed helped me understand and consider and generally grok the concepts.

At my somewhat-below-fastest (which is still faster than my current normal, as I'm a lazy reader these days) my concentration, recollection, and enjoyment was the best -- plus I finished everything way faster. For anything serious (and I mean you seriously want to enjoy something or seriously want to grok something) you will have to slow down. But that doesn't mean you can't go faster than your current fastest and still get those other things out of reading that you want. It's all in the training. Don't train with William Faulkner.

I subvocalize when I read. I'm capable of recognizing written words without subvocalizing, but they don't have any meaning. There are two cases when I'm reading, though.

- For pleasure, when the goal is to enjoy the book, rather than to get through it quickly

- For information/knowledge, where it's useful to really slow down and think about what I'm reading. Even when I'm "subvocalizing" (an inaccurate term because it generally implies mouthing the words without making sound), I can read faster than I can understand, if the information is novel.

Here's an informal survey

https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/4wttu4/do_you_hear_a...

Get a wireless camera, wireless headset, big powerbank and even bigger data plan, and I'll happily narrate your life for you ;).

Haha, I might just take you up on that. I've always wanted a narrator, he wrote in the comment box.

Have you tried drinking way too much coffee?

There's an interesting Reddit thread that's somewhat related to this as it pertains to reading:

https://www.reddit.com/r/books/comments/4wttu4/do_you_hear_a...

This reminds me of Bicamealism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameralism_(psychology) his book is a free read http://s-f-walker.org.uk/pubsebooks/pdfs/Julian_Jaynes_The_O... A very interesting theory, not sure I agree with all of it but he raises some interesting questions for anyone who finds this topic fascinating.

SSC had a good piece about missing "universal" experiences a while back; lighter than his usual fare, with more anecdotal examples in the comments.

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com