What Is the Sound of Thought?
thereader.mitpress.mit.edu
thereader.mitpress.mit.edu
the Rosetta stone idea to map thought from languages waves (sound and light) is an interesting field of research
I have no idea how but since I was young I learned that I can read faster when I don't "voice" out the sound of thought
I also learned that as a multilingual person the "language" of choice for my thought can be different at times, even though I have no actual fondness of using any specifically
(I've also found I can readily manipulate algebraic symbols without having any idea of how they should be pronounced. splodge?)
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/67/bc/35/67bc35746db0758b5ab4...
I also do that sometimes when talking, when I know the other person is proficient in English. Not everyone appreciates this, but some of the best conversations in my life were with a particular person who was like me in this regard; we'd just stream our thoughts to each other in this weird mix of Polish and English, that was hard to follow for anyone else.
> In linguistics, code-switching or language alternation occurs when a speaker alternates between two or more languages, or language varieties, in the context of a single conversation.
Minä gör the same a menudo.
Yo teen det samma often.
I hago the same ofta.
Jag do lo mismo usein.
(FI/SV/EN/ES) :)
Swedish will have to be separate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hdUKZLQIuQ
(Are you a finland-swede or sweden finn? If either of those, I'm a fan of both Army of Lovers and Nightwish.)
"Swedish-speaking finn" or "Finland-swede" yes.
Amateur joint translation here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24101696
(any native speakers care to say how close we came?)
(and notdang, on the off chance you're from somewhere around Moldova, what would you say the ethnicity of the girl in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24406864 might be? I think a woman from Moldova is the normal reading, but apparently there's also an Odessa neighbourhood called Moldavanka...)
I've been thinking about this phenomenon a lot in the past and I've noticed that two main triggers are a) emotional payload of a phrase, and b) subtle differences in meaning of words. Some phrases sound better to me in English than in Polish, and it's probably driven by the context in which I've learned them. As for words, it's often the case that even if a word in Polish corresponds directly to a word in English by dictionary, their etymologies and general use patterns draw slightly different borders in thingspace. Sometimes that distinction is important, and I automatically pick the language in which the word is closer to what I mean.
I wonder if native speakers have a greater emphasis on subvocalized pitch, or if that’s even a part of subvocalizing? Paying attention to my own internal reading now, I suspect that it is.
The intonations that give the characters their meaning are so engrained in the flow of the sentences it can feel monotone, as it is just the way it is said.
If I am reading a poem or idioms I usually like to over emphasize the tone like a classic theatrical reading because it’s fun and helps me remember what I read.
Subvocalisation is the term for that voice in your head when you read. I've never been able to get rid of it, and trying to has always resulted in me feeling like I'm skimming rather than reading.
"reading" is not one activity, there are 100s of ways to read.
Neat. I'm not a scientist and I could be very wrong however.
https://research.iusspavia.it/handle/20.500.12076/265
Or, despite being too recent to be in the book:
Many people (although I don't know the statistics) do not have this "inner speech".
> Yet we know that language can also be present in the absence of sound, when we read... or when we use words while thinking — in technical terms, when we engage in endophasic activity.
> This simple fact immediately raises the following crucial question: What happens to the electric waves in our brain when we generate a linguistic expression without emitting any sound?
"Endophasic activity" is our "inner speech". A charitable interpretation of Andrea Moro's 16 person experiment is that they only included people with typical hearing. Experiments that target the atypical hearing cases may be crucial in understanding how the mind processes language. Indeed, the article goes on to state:
> Among the questions this discovery raises: What kind of electrical activity is elaborated in a language network (one that includes the Broca’s area) by persons who have never been able to hear any sound from birth?
So, the study considers what happens when using linguistic thought without uttering words (aka inner speech), but it does not investigate the properties of the mind of people who do not experience inner speech.
For the second quote, it is maybe closer to the subject I raised, but there can be an homologous of "inner speech" for mute or deaf people (e.g. visualizing linguistic cues), so there is still the possibility of a category of people with and another without these cues.
Afaik, all these questions have been ignored by the study.
Not that it's bad, I mean, they have to restrict to some narrower question at first if they want to publish without spending decades on it.
> Being or pertaining to endophasia (internal, unvocalized speech).
I only mentioned it so people didn't have to look it up like I had to; I don't think our interpretation differs.
I quoted the first couple of sentences from the last three paragraphs of the article. Those paragraphs emphasize the exciting questions raised by this small study, including the important question you raised.
To be fair I only read the article and I didn't search for the study but I look forward to reading the book:
> This article is adapted from Andrea Moro’s book “Impossible Languages.”
Numerous testimonies are unambiguous, such as this one:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u69YSh-cFXY
Like, the interviewee is able to read extremely fast ("superhuman", according to the interviewer), as a consequence to the absence of inner speech.
This kind of details eliminate the possibility of the uncertainties you suggested.
It seems like "awake surgery" is an often cited tool for understanding how the brain works, but it is a pretty extreme situation, so I could imagine for instance, maybe the stress of awake surgery has a tendency to make the mind suppress certain types of thought which might otherwise be prominent.
Not saying this is the case, but if we are going to rely on the conclusions of awake surgery for important things, we should double check the method to make sure we are not overlooking anything important.
If I'm facing a screen, it is practically I see and I hear nothing.
If I get interrupted when I'm in that kind of trance, as in someone getting in my view starting to make signs, or poking me, I need a few moments to regain the ability to speak.
https://research.iusspavia.it/handle/20.500.12076/265
Or, despite being too recent to be in the book:
https://research.iusspavia.it/handle/20.500.12076/1463
(of the latter, I guess that this link: http://150.162.46.34:8080/embc-2015/papers/13891714.pdf is a summary)