Try counting without “talking.” That is, without saying the numbers in your head.
Try tapping on the desk or your lap an arbitrary number of times without going “1, 2, 3..” and see if you can still know how many times you tapped.
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Follow-up question: Is language necessary for thought?
Try forming thoughts without forming any words in your head.
You might notice that there’s a much faster “higher priority process” in the head that already “knows” what to say before you “hear” the words of that thought forming in your head..
But there WILL be words. It may seem almost impossible to suppress the formation of words while thinking.
Do “feral children” that grow up without any human contact have the ability to “think?”
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Also, during inner monologues or what have you, do you refer to yourself in the singular or plural?
e.g., do you go “I should [do that]” or “We should [do that]?”
As far as I can tell, the internal 'talking' I do when counting in my head (I was unable to disable it, though I could tap numbers on my fingers without talking just fine) is like a 'test activation' of my speech muscles. The same way you can.. Imagine moving an arm, say, and it feels like it involves a communication with the muscles in your arm but they don't actually fire. Counting feels like it's imagining activating the muscles to say the words for the numbers, without actually doing it.
For three years at University, I studied American sign language (ASL). It changed how I thought.
There's a spectrum of how people sign, from straight transliteration of English words to signs, to the other 'pure' side where ASL has a very different grammar and way of communicating. The school I went to taught the 'pure ASL' side, figuring we already know English grammar.
When signing, my internal voice was much quieter, or if I did hear it, it was using far fewer words and more ideas. Thinking felt different to me.
After I graduated, I moved cities and have rarely needed to sign much since then. But I still sometimes dream in it, strange as that sounds.
I have a reminiscence of a time when that did not occur, when I was a small child ideas would not be followed by the inner monologue. I guess that's a trade off : verbalising ideas help to flesh them out and detect inconsistencies but it comes at a price of inefficiency.
This is why I love playing soccer. You just allow your brain to express its ideas physically, there is no time for intermediation.
I've "meditated" with breathing control somewhat superficially for a few minutes at a time, but never experienced anything like that.
Any guides to this kind of meditation?
Hard part after that is drifting off into memories, which takes experience to lessen that. Effectively you get better at observation, which leaves the unconscious free to do as it likes and it can get up to all kinds of weird stuff. I've observed it playing a racing game and controlling the car and overtaking other cars. Or sometimes it'll jump me into a lucid dream state, (where you know you are dreaming). You are never quite sure what it'll do.
During the time when you drift from relaxed focus to memories -- try to just keep focusing on the heartbeat for a longer period of time instead?
the opposite seems more true, no? you're turning out the observee, not the observer ("the voice"). the voice takes over.
The effects were incredible and lasted for quite some time even after the course. It's hard to explain, but they teach you to be more empathetic and to listen to the "vibrations" in your body. Once the course was over and I was back in the real world my body was vibrating (not visibly of course) like crazy when I was interacting with other people, simply due to my happiness and love for everything, everyone and the whole universe. I know this sounds like some crazy new age foo, but it's really not.
All in all this was one of the hardest, but also best experiences in my life. Unfortunately once I got back home, daily life and stress took over and I stopped meditating. But I plan to visit another course again as soon as I can, and then I will try to stick with regular mediation. I can highly recommend this.
I guess the best way to describe it -- it's as if the surface of my palm was like a hundred fingertips rather than a single palm. When the sensation first happened it freaked me out. I didn't know what was going on and couldn't stop it because it was just scary. Then for a while I could flip it on and off like a switch.
Every once in a while that state of interpreting sensation from my hand will switch on randomly as I am falling asleep. I wonder if this is related to this type of meditation or a tactile rather than auditory sensory hallucination.
I never really succeeded, but I had a few, very short OOBEs. They only lasted a few seconds because I always got too excited the moment I realized it finally happened, and so I immediately woke up.
When you say this happens randomly when you are falling asleep, then this sounds to me a bit like the start of an OOBE.
Here is what I did and felt when I tried to experience an OOBE: lay down comfortably and try to let your body fall asleep. Take deep breaths, observe your body and look out for certain sensations, try to focus on the here and now so that the mind stays awake. Most of the time I just fell asleep and woke up in the morning, without remembering anything.
But if you stay focused enough, you may start to feel and hear some kind of vibrations in your body, which may intensify if you stay focused. This phase is usually referred to as the "separation of the mind from the body". Once the vibrations are over, and you stay focused, you may start to get the feeling of "floating" and other strange body sensations. Sometimes it felt like my feet started to float, then my legs, and finally my whole body. If you are really good at this then you can try to "open" your eyes and look around. It may be really dark at first, but with enough focus you can literally say "let there be light".
I was only once at this stage, my body started to float, and I "opened" my eyes after a while when I suddenly "saw" the ceiling right in front of my face. I got so excited that I immediately got "sucked" back into my body, and then I woke up.
Nothing really happens in the physical world, an observer will see you falling asleep, but the whole experience always feels so damn real, the beginning is almost always the same and many people can confirm this. It's incredible and fascinating. Unfortunately I never got really good at this and I lost motivation. I was around 17-18 back then and seeking for the meaning of life.
Another fascinating part is that there is no real scientific explanation for this phenomenon. Of course it's usually labeled as some kind of dream state, or just a chemical reaction in our brains.
It depends on who you ask, but for some people this is esoteric nonsense and just simple dreams, for others this is the gateway to a another reality/dimension/quantum world. Personally I have no idea and never figured it out, and I don't care anymore. I got older and I have other problems now, like paying my bills. But it's still fascinating stuff and I like to think back about it every now and then. The internet is full of information and reports about this topic, some serious, some less serious.
Anyway, thanks for making me remember about all of this, after a very long time. It was a fun experience.
Which... is actually most likely. A couple of times I've fallen asleep and still had knowledge of my surroundings -- I could tell what was a dream and what wasn't, and feel when my limbs were getting numb (Normally in sleep you'd move them, but I had to move them in this state. I also wasn't very happy to because that just wrests you out of the experience), but also feel when I stopped breathing (And spend a couple of minutes wresting myself awake in terror...).
What would make that explanation a 'real' explanation, exactly? If it is an actual out of body experience, what evidence would you expect from that? The most science will be able to tell us -- at best -- is that they noticed a change in so and so part of the brain or that our brainwaves go a little fuzzy, and oh, when we stimulate such and such part of the brain with a small electrical current we can duplicate the exact process.
To which people would just say that, while that is interesting and all, the ability to provoke it with electricity doesn't prove that it isn't an actual out of body experience (Of course, if we can do that, we can check for parity between what the subject experienced and what was actually happening -- but this will probably be met with limited success because they will probably ignore the fact that the brain can hear the surroundings...)
And I believe you immediately, without checking first, when you say that electricity can provoke such experience. In my youth I was also interested in brain wave states and how to "manipulate" them with binaural beats, for example. So it seems plausible to me that electricity can provoke a change in the current brain wave state, and thus induce OOBE like experiences. I think there was even a Kickstarter campaign or something for a device which was supposed to aid in experiencing lucid dreams. It also worked by inducing some electricity, as far as I remember.
They are seen as a sign of meditative intensity, but a potentially-disturbing distraction from the goal of clear insight into the nature of self and reality.
edit: personally, the fact that I don't have an intimate understanding of how my nervous system works doesn't make it creepier than anything else that exists.
I've had close contact with a paranoid schizophrenic relative, and from what I can tell they really experience intrusive "other" thoughts and perceptions. It's not always a voice talking in their head or over their shoulder, but sometimes a sense that ideas or beliefs have intruded from elsewhere with no clear sense of arrival or beginning. Like a glitch in the matrix.
Although, I am always very puzzled when I think about my speech, especially in conversation, and how the phrasing of words get put in order so quickly, almost unconsciously.