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Comment by jinpa_zangpo | Hacker News Reader

The wider question is how the nature of consciousness has changed through time and what evidence do we have that it has. The example that has stuck with me is when St. Augustine marvels in his Confessions that Bishop Ambrose of Milan could read without moving his lips, suggesting that at one time all thought was subvocalized speech.

Owen Barfield thought that you could trace the evolution of consciousness through the history of language and made the argument in the book "History in English Words": "In our language alone, not to speak of its many companions, the past history of humanity is spread out in an imperishable map, just as the history of the mineral earth lies embedded in the layers of its outer crust.... Language has preserved for us the inner, living history of our soul. It reveals the evolution of consciousness"

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> The example that has stuck with me is when St. Augustine marvels in his Confessions that Bishop Ambrose of Milan could read without moving his lips, suggesting that at one time all thought was subvocalized speech

I would not read too much into that. That could also be the way he was taught to read. Also my wife said she had that same issue. She learned to read by reading out loud and having people read to her. She then could not contextualize anything unless she read it out loud. But she taught herself to read silently. Then add to that some people do not have an inner monolog. But function perfectly fine with everyone else. So trying to form fit a history onto that may not be a good idea.

I don't know when people quit vocalizing as they read to themselves, but I suspect it may have had a lot to do with the Carolingian renaissance that gave us spaces between words.

I recall an experience trying to read through a Latin text without spaces and punctuation. It was very slow going. But I decided to try just reading aloud, and OMG, how much easier it became to understand!

It was a little disorienting because even though I was reading and speaking the sounds I saw on the page, I had no interpretation of it until I heard my own voice speaking the text.

I hadn't considered that there is probably also a conditioning component to silent/aloud reading until you described what your wife went through.

Well, many people on Earth do still read languages without space between words. (Chinese for instance)

Their languages are adapted to it; Japanese is okay to read without spaces with kanji, but when written for children without kanji it typically uses spaces or else it is very hard to follow without reading aloud.

Then again, there are experiments conducted on silent-reading/fast-reading people (yes, those people being university students) that show that if they're asked to read aloud, they actually comprehend less of what they've just read than when they read silently.

Being a fast reader and a generally quite person myself, I can confirm that: in my case it happens, I believe, because my attention shifts to speaking.

This resonates for me. Reading for me started as a visual process; I could make it through entire novels without thinking about how to say the character's names out loud. Or quite a lot of other words.

It let me read much faster than others, but it had downsides. E.g., I'd miss puns and wordplay. Poetry meant nothing to me, and even now I find it much easier to appreciate it when read out loud.

Furthermore, books were much harder to read back in Ambrose's time. I think I would have a hard time dealing with handwriting on parchment without reading out loud.

... don't forget a lack of standardized spelling, sometimes requiring phonetic processing of the characters in order to figure out what is being spelled.

Also reminds me of experiment in the first half of the 20th century where people were asked to visually rotate images in their mind to find answers versus calculating them. Some of the researchers were skeptical that people actually visually rotated mental images. But it turns out there is measurable difference between rotating a mental image and just calculating an answer. The author of the text went on to wonder if some philosophers who were skeptical of consciousness were simply lacking mental visual capabilities. They were relying on the fallacy that everyone's mind works the same as theirs.

And then there's what Temple Grandin has to say about thinking in mental images, which is quite fascinating.

Thanks for this. I don’t use mental imagery at all, but can calculate what an object looks like rotated if I have a reference.

Augustine was reading manuscript without spaces, punctuation, or standardized spelling (though, granted, being Latin, a pretty regular orthography.) You can read such silently, but it really assumes you're reading it aloud, and is easier to handle that way.

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