Comment by dav_Oz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dav_Oz | Hacker News Reader

I wonder how "mind chatters" manifest in different people.

There seem to be some who really experience an inner voice talking in full-fledged sentences and others with no inner monologue at all. My "mind chatter" as I am writing this down resides somewhere in the middle and mostly fragmented: I kind of "autocomplete" on various levels (grammar, semamtics, form ...) and writing/talking just initiates the process to tie up those loose ends into a (forced) linear fashion. So, when I'm finished with a sentence I see/hear it also for the first time; sometimes in amazement (good and bad).

I find the evolution of human consciousness quite fascinating and the residues of that process still can be seen and infered from individual differences which can differ quite significantly/unexpectedly e.g. ranging from aphantasia to hyperphantasia.

The famous/controversial concept of Jayens' bicameral mentality[0] in which "hearing voices"/"hearing commands" is meant quite literally and only later gets consolidated (through e.g. reinfored cultural practices) to an own inner voice. In a similar vein it is conceivable that there exists a common (not pathological) spectrum between forms of clearly heard (inner) voices to faint unstructured (inner) monologue to no voice/monologue at all. [Of course to a degree open to modulation through different states of consciousness.]

[0]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicameral_mentality

I recently went through an upsetting few days in my life and noticed that my mental chatter could be broken down into four distinct voices, all talking about and questioning my situation in unique ways. I even started to label them to keep track. It was completely overwhelming at first, I could really feel like different parts of my brain were talking and arguing with each other, and that the "me" in my head was like a dinghy in a violent storm of other voices.

After a day or two, when I started to relax and calm down, the voices re-coalesced back into one normal inner monologue. It was the first time I had experienced something like that, I've always had an inner monologue that would engage in chatter in times of trauma as the article describes (and maybe I've also had multiple voices arguing before) but I've never noticed to the point of creating labels for them before.

Apparently there are some people who do not think at all using language which is extremely bizarre to me. Also makes me wonder what mind chatter for a dog looks like.

In terms of personal introspection I find it really interesting how ones "mind chatter" shifts when one is super tired or out of it or similar.

"Apparently there are some people who do not think at all using language"

Oliver Sacks wrote a great book about this: Seeing Voices[1]

In it he writes about all sorts of people who either never learned language or learned it late in life, and about what that transformation from a non-linguistic world to a linguistic world is like.

Highly recommended.

[1] - https://www.amazon.com/Seeing-Voices-Oliver-Sacks/dp/0375704...

It would be very high overhead if different brain regions used an encoded form of spoken language as the communication protocol. For most of us, most of the time, the introspective portions of the brain responsible for consciousness may be re-interpreting the messages they observe as something language-like, but these portions of the brain almost certainly don't duplicate all of the language processing wiring necessary for the language centers of the brain to produce and interpret language.

In short, I suspect that the "language" of thought is likely mostly a post-hoc rationalization/interpretation performed by some parts of the brain.

Learning to read Chinese, I've many times had the experience of recognizing and understanding a character, but momentarily being unable to remember either the corresponding English or Mandarin words. (This usually happens when studying written Chinese tired after a long day of work.)

I'm biased, but I think even more interesting than the inner voice of dogs would be the inner voice of infants and toddlers. My young son is too young to speak or walk, or even appear to understand even one word. (Though, it's hard to tell; maybe he understands a handful of words.) Yet, he's clearly very curious about the world and seems to understand social interactions.

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