Hacker News Reader

Comment by yakubin | Hacker News Reader

Same here. I'm curious if it has any correlation to having an internal voice. Do you have an internal voice for your thoughts?

View on HN

I don't really have a binary answer for that. Sometimes yes, depends on the type of thinking being done.

Wait, don't all people have that? If not, then how do they think?

I don’t have an internal voice. I mostly think in concepts or shapes.

I genuinely dont believe people who say this. You cant think in shapes when thinking about your personal relationships.

(Not the commenter you replied to.)

That's correct. But neither can you think in sentences in that case, unless your relationships are just calculated means to an end. Whether you want to continue a relationship is not a conclusion of a sentence, but something you know without words, just like you know without words whether you want to eat the dish that's on your plate.

I don't. I know a friend who doesn't as well. Both of us mainly think through an awareness of some kind of graph structure (non-visual).

But what's more interesting is that through talking with others we've discovered one interesting thing about what it's like for other people to hear a voice in their heads:

In most people's dreams, when someone talks, they can hear the voice, which has a specific pitch, rasp, etc. For me and my friend, in our dreams we can never characterize the voice. We just become aware of the sentence spoken and the time passed (even though in a way it feels immediate), but if we focus, it's clear that we cannot recall any sensation of hearing a voice in any way. It blew our minds off when we realized that other people's dreams are different in such a way.

I can think of sentences. But they are not spoken in my head. There is no voice, which would be male or female etc. And I only do that when the sentences are the goal. They are not the means.

That is amazing, I had no idea. It's not something I ever thought about, I just assumed that everyone thinks in the same way.

I’m the same. When I’m reading, it’s more like a silent with blurred shapes than me speaking in my head. A few friends say they can’t read subtitles while watching a movie. For me, they’re just an overlay to the scene until I grasp the meaning, kinda like you realized: This is a square and this is a circle. It makes reading more enjoyable as it feels like you’re in an holographic projection, but that can make some scenes quite disturbing.

> In most people's dreams, when someone talks, they can hear the voice, which has a specific pitch, rasp, etc. For me and my friend, in our dreams we can never characterize the voice.

I’m not sure that this is true. I think in terms of my dreams they are closer to what you describe as your experience; mostly visual, with speech something that’s more often understood than heard. I imagine most people have something similar, and not so analogous to real life.

I do have an inner monologue in my waking hours though, and it’s very interesting to think about what it would be like to not have one!

I have a strong internal voice and wondered what is was like to not have one. People describe reading and not hearing the voice and this sounded strange to me.

Then I noticed that I don't think with my internal voice when coding. I'm still thinking but not with sounds in my head. That blew my mind and made it easier for me to understand other's internal experience.

I wonder if people who rarely have an internal voice are less interested in things like podcasts, where the information in conveyed aurally.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com