I'm not sure if I have inner voice or not. Do you really "hear" a voice? I can imagine concepts as well as construct whole sentences in my mind but there is no actual voice that I'm hearing. Is this what's called inner voice?
This video was interesting to me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNQyubd9ARc&t=60s in it you are asked to shout "I like crickets" <In your mind> and then to whisper "I like crickets" again, in your mind and not out loud.
The presenter then claims, "The volume is the same because you can't change the volume of the voice in your head, only the tone and pitch."
My experience of trying this is that I can produce the phrase "I like crickets" in my mind but I have no conception of what it means to "shout" or "whisper" this in my mind and the idea that there is tone or pitch to the representation is meaningless to me.
I can think in words so that I can prepare to write something (like this) but there is no audio. I'd say it's more like a stream of words on a screen except that there is no screen, it feels more like a buffer. The experience is the same as reading to me, no audio, just a stream of words.
My partner says she hears her own voice in her head and it's quite critical, prompting her to action. I feel motivation to do things but there is no voice.
Can someone report on their experience with the crickets experiment above, do you hear a voice, can you change its volume or tone?
I also have aphantasia, so it's not words on a screen, it's literally me talking to myself in an internal dialogue.
There's something quite arrogant about groundless declarations of other's mental limitations. The other example that comes to mind is the notion that people only dream in black and white - so daft.
Like you, I can also vary volume and tone of an imagined voice. I can make it arbitrarily loud, but there does seem to be a limit on how quiet I can make it, unless I'm imagining hearing a voice from elsewhere.
I don't think I dream in color, though, but I wouldn't call it black and white either. It's more like I'm dreaming of objects in an abstract space where color isn't relevant. I have memories of my dreams from time to time, and those memories aren't of a scene with color in them. I absolutely dream of conversations, and so perhaps I dream with audio, but I'm not exactly dreaming visually. I'm dreaming of circumstances. I can totally believe that other people might dream in color though.
Very interesting, and not at all true for me. I can imagine shouting "I like crickets" with a near ear-splitting level of volume, tantamount to the force of a storm with a shockwave. Imagine an anime scene where a character is radiating power, arms raised into the air, like Saurman calling a storm down upon a mountain in LOTR. When I imagine this substantial level of volume, my muscles want to start to tense, like my body wants to brace itself for an impact.
I can also imagine whispering the same thing. It is actually difficult to reduce the volume of the whisper down as low as I'd like it to go (as low as I could hear), but it's substantially lower "volume" than the shout.
I can get the volume even lower if I imagine someone else, or a voice from somewhere else, whispering it.
> I can think in words so that I can prepare to write something (like this) but there is no audio.
I can do all of these. I can think as a sequence of abstract thoughts, with no audio component (this is most natural); I can think as a sequence of words, which are optionally rendered as audio (I would do this if sounding out an unfamiliar word), and I can render audio in the mind as a particular voice (i.e. my voice or someone else's, similar to a deepfake). I could imagine Barack Obama speaking any arbitrary words in his particular style of dictation. "My fellow Americans..."
My most common kinds of "inner voice", though, are not speaking actual words, but ideas. They are often critical, or perhaps playing devil's advocate in some way. In fact, thinking using actual words is uncommon for me, unless I specifically need language in some way, so the "inner voice(s)" appear as a kind of alternative narrative to whatever my primary thought process is.
Huh? That's not true at all, I shouted "I like crickets" in my head so loudly I told myself to stop shouting it's giving me a headache. I said this sentence in my head too, of course.
Hard to know if it's a difference in the phenomenon itself or in how people characterize and perceive it.
To me the question is about thinking conversationally. Internal dialogue. Whether or not that dialogue is perceived as sound is perhaps interesting, it's not hard to imagine it working differently. Written language exists. Sign language. Non-auditory language is not a stretch.
What is hard to conceive of is thought, especially intricate reasoning, without internal dialogue.
Hard to conceive, but not hard to believe. We all do lots of non-dialogue thinking. The evidence of this is everywhere. We come to conclusions, find answers to questions without "verbal" reasoning all the time.
Say you've been building software. You're considering changing something. As soon as its suggested, you realize a whole list of implications. User implications. Server implications. Testing process X will have Y issue. Advisor A will probably advise B. You didn't verbally reason your way to all these conclusions... yet they exist.
That said... all this stuff is kinda "subconscious." You don't know where these reasoned conclusions came from. It feels like a "from the muse" thing.
If I am consciously trying to reason... I'm most (only?) conscious of my verbal reasoning.
To me a dialog would mean some back-and-forth, some difference of opinion or two individuals sharing ideas that one side doesn't have.
Does your inner voice have autonomy, does it want things separate from what "you" want? Is it in any way "other" from you?
Apologies if these seem like dumb questions. I have never heard a voice in my head so it's a bit like a monochromatic person discovering people see in color, it just seems very strange.
But the inner voice, at least from my POV is essentially the self, if you want to experience, just go to a bathroom with a mirror and try to debate with your reflection, it is essentially the same thing, ofc to debate with yourself you have to be able to debate points you do not believe in, like a lawyer or a politic, there is only you only a single opinion, but you are putting your opinion to the test, so you try to defend and try to attack your opinion and your acts, is like playing devil's advocate against your own opinions while you defend them, there is not two people or two wills is like talking to the mirror, is only you. It can also be used to essentially praise yourself if you do something good, or console yourself if you are sad or insult yourself drill sargent style to get that extra adrenaline to run the extra meter to not lose the train, you can also sign to yourself with that, which is horrible, s you will distill any song to its most catchy part and repeat it ad infinitum every moment like a very crappy self-sountrack.
Inner dialogue ofc can also be used for the obvious... simulate conversations with others if you know them well enough to have counterarguments against them available, is like thinking a comeback later but instead of later, before and instead of one, a lot of them, 99% never used.
Another use is that you can use your inner voice to repeat a thing constantly to nor forget it short term, for example holding into a 4 digit code that you can only read for 1 second and you have to remember a minute later, you can just read it the first second in your head "one two there seven" and just keep repeating it over and over in your head "one two there seven,one two there seven,one two there seven,one two there seven,one two there seven" until you need it, that way you can store a bit of info very short term without memorizing anything, I remember doing exactly this with a multiplication table math test when i was a kiddo, I was not able to memorize the multiplications with 7, so 2 minutes before the test i just started chanting the results of 27 up to 29 and when i received the test i just wrote that on the side(we were allowed to write stuff on the side) and thus i used my inner voice to sneak a cheat sheet into the test, I did similar stuff all trough my school years.
A surprising number of people also have e.g. multiple voices speaking in their minds (again, the distinction between mental illnesses causing people to have intrusive voices they believe to be other entities vs "just" seeing them as thoughts/imagination playing out)
> Does your inner voice have autonomy, does it want things separate from what "you" want?
...Almost. I'm aware that it's all me. All my voice. By nature of dialogue, I cn sometimes feel like there's a "me" and a "voice" sometimes. But, it's quite fluid. Which one is which can reverse. I also try to use "me" or "I" instead of "you" or "we." Feels more sane... to me.
Just imagine a person having a conversation or debate with themselves out loud. It's similar to that.
1. Most people experience something similar to imagining themselves talk much of the time.
2. Most people do not hear voices, as in hearing a voice that you could easily mistake as coming into your awareness through your ears perceiving physical sound.
Your experience sounds like the “default”, for lack of a better term.
There is a person on r/hyperphantasia who says that they can look at a ruler, take that image and overlay it on something else to measure. Wild.
I mean, the whole phrase "imagine everyone else is nude" that is given to people that are going to do something with a public to reduce their awkwardness is based on this, you overlay your imagination of everyone nude with your vision.
> I mean, the whole phrase "imagine everyone else is nude" that is given to people that are going to do something with a public to reduce their awkwardness is based on this, you overlay your imagination of everyone nude with your vision.
Do you imagine this visually? Like, do you mentally see them nude? I just imagine the idea of it without any visuals accompanying.
For me this is normal and I tough most people were like that, like... the phrase about imagining people being nude is there for a reason... and kids do play with random stuff as if they were other things, people look at stuff and use it as a reference to visually measure stuff even if it is rough.
I mean, there is not that much difference between imagining inside the black void and outside, you are just moving it, the only thing is that outside it is fighting with your actual visual stimuly for attention so it requires a bit of extra focus or to anchor it to something similar, you know the visual illusion were there are pink spots but when you look at the center a green spot appear and eats all the pink spots until it is blank but the moment you ever so slightly unfocus from the center the pink appear again, it feels like that, the illusion is named "Lilac chaser" for reference, it feels kinda like that in the sense that if you lose focus, the effect disappears but if you focus yo can keep it?
IDK, as I said, I thought this was normal, so it is quite hard to explain? is not like imagining stuff in the black void, there one can easy mount a movie if they want, a crappy movie usually, but its possible, outside not so much, but it is still possible to imagine stuff there, just harder.
For my part, my "inner voice" feels to me like my real voice, but I have the sensation of "almost vocalizing" it, but cutting it off before producing any sound - whether in or out of my head.
So I recognize it as "me", but can't say there is an actual sensation of hearing the sound.
Can you sing in your mind? I can represent the words and I can recall the tune so I can represent the words at the correct pace to match the tune but there is no audio so it's a bit like subtitles.