Do You Have an Inner Voice?
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- Äas pĆidĂĄn 20. 08. 2024
- It's true, some people do not have an inner monologue! Here's more on the science behind it.
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How do you hear your inner voice? You know, that little person in your head... wait, is there a voice in YOUR head? Do YOU have an inner voice at all?
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REFERENCES đ
Inner reading voice:www.tandfonline...
More reading voice: digest.bps.org...
Inner monologue v. dialogue: www.ncbi.nlm.n...
Type of thinkers: www.ted.com/ta...
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@Begin Transformation I wonder if and how a lack of internal verbals might affect the ability to reason obtectively? Maybe people who lack internal verbalisation develop other methods to think critically, or if they don't then it explains why a lot of people simply accept the narratives they are most exposed to, which for many would be at school, college, uni, and via MSM.
I have noticed there are a quite a number of people who don't "get it' if you try and explain, but if you ask them "Do you remember when Tony Blair used a student's stolen thesis to illegally and savagely invade the unarmed citizens of Iraq? Well, the 'virus pandemic' is a thesis they had a computer simulate, then they told us it is real, the same as they lied that the student thesis was real evidence - when it wasn't". A lot of people have to have something they remember being put as a question. That seems to help them link it to a dirty trick they know was done. Then spelling it out step by step, you can literally see the understanding come into their minds. You can see their eyes light up and facial muscles change with the realisation. Now we know it isn't that they lack what we call common sense (as many are actually academically very intelligent), but that they simply don't have an internal dialogue/debate going on in their minds to sift, challenge and judge that info in a balanced way. I expect it is more nature than nurture.
I am certainly much less judgemental after listening to the video, as I know it means that to 'reach' a large proportion of people means taking a different approach. Asking a question, then pointing out the similarity.
@@angebrowne1730 i definitly agree with what you said.đ
And if i may, i would like to add that the people who hear more than one voice in there head, the so called " schitzophrenia " , are simply people that have multiple ways of thinking.
Multiple opinions. Multiple ways of interacting with others.
" multiple personality "
@@martf4701 In some cases maybe, although schizophrenia causes voices that are audible as if from outside the person, not inner. I have a close relative who suffers the disease and until on the best meds he had audible, visual and tactile hallucinations. None of the voices being 'inner'.
I also believe sometimes 'mental' illness can be spiritual, particularly when people or those around them dabbled or dabble in the dangerous side of spiritual things, although my relative didn't dabble.
Inner voices are not the same as in schizophrenia or bi-polar. Inner voices are a part of the thought process and reasoning things out and most people benefit from it.
Humanity and nation Colony and living animals and other creatures do having *problems about their own Inner voice..* some People visit to physical doctor about their *Inner voice problem.* And the Physical doctor report on Google about explaining this, *Inner voice problem.* So Thanks for teaching me and other countries people know About *their own Inner voice problem.*
I have aphantasia and have no inner voice or minds eye I can only think of it in a conceptual way and have always had problems reading fiction as I couldnât imagine what was happening
I don't know how I think when I'm not thinking about how I think. That kind of disturbs me.
Me either :D I am not sure which type of thinker I am because I can't remember how I think.
Kalliste then you're probably a pattern thinker. The things going through your head when you think are not strongly linked to sensory perception or words and hence are very hard to remember.
If I say "tall man in a trench coat" do you see anything in your head at all? If you read a book do you visualize anything happening?
I just have an abstract concept of what tall men in trench coats are, which I think means I'm a pattern thinker in terms of "inner dialogue". But I do habitually talk to myself because in order to be sure that those abstract concepts actually make logical sense they need to be put into full sentences. So I kinda do both of those. Very little (but not non-existent) in the perceptualizing field.
David Enrique "mentalese" has yet to be decoded đ
I usually think in full sentences, but sometimes I start to skip words, or half a thought, simply because I already know what I'm going to think. Of course I do, they're my thoughts.
You mean your "full" sentences contain ellipses. And when you try to speak the elliptical parts...you have difficulty.
I always think in full sentences, too, but I never skip words because then I feel like my thought is incomplete.
pokédude583 If you do that then you might end up having difficulties verbalizing your thoughts to other people
pokedude583 I do the same thing, and I can go through my train of thought quickly. Often though, if I slow down, and go through my thought process step by step I'll find missing links or illogical steps. So I try and take it slow if I really want to think more productively. Same if I get hang ups in my head, giving anxiety, taking things slow and working through the thoughts more often that not 'dissolves' the problem.
This is also exactly how I think. That's why I habitually talk to myself. Because the full sentences need to be completed in order to ensure logical consistency. But the power of using abstract thought to inspire those full sentences and link them to other ideas in ways that aren't immediately apparent I feel shouldn't be overlooked. Just always remember that forming them into actual sentences and reasons can't be overlooked either.
some people read without hearing any voices in their head?? woah. this video blew my mind.
Yeah! I didn't realize people read things with specific voices or images before. When people got mad at characters looking different than how they 'pictured' them, I never understand why.
It blew my mind that people hear voices in their minds. I haven't ever heard a voice in my head and have been really confused recently when someone mentions "inner voice"
@@parsastrife6629
Can you visualize things?
@@emmanuelgoldbergstein8769 I can imagine things but it's not a vivid and clear/detailed picture. I can't remember ever thinking in pictures tho.
@@ayesha36 dude wtf. I didn't even know not having an inner speech as a human even existed. I can't even comprehend it. How do you even read and comprehend language if words don't go thru ur head? It blew my mind, it's so weird. How do you "think" to yourself? Youre not speaking in a language in your head? Ahhh, this so sooo fucking crazy.
I'm a very verbal thinker, to the point I have conversations with myself in my mind to decide what to do, or debate the merits of anything. I actually am beginning to feel I have trouble relating to people who aren't verbal thinkers.
Emma Watkins same here
That's what you call conscience
@Amin same for me but I think up video game and movies or tv shows I have made many shows up in my head I thought I was the only one. One I like so much I might actually pitch it in the future
So different from myself people are so interesting
Do you feel that other people can also hear what you're saying in your mind? Thats in my case.. its hard because i cant control sometimes what to verbally think
Now the voices in my head are having a debate about crickets.......
Is one voice yelling and the other one whispering? Should be a one-sided debate.
I miss the Boosh
That might be schizophrenia
I only have one voice in my head .-. And it doesn't care about crickets
I've learnt to suppress them, now I can only hear a glimpse of words
I read in tons of different voices. Never knew this wasn't universal.
How can people make out words when they do not pronounce them either in real or their heads.
I wonder if these people are incapable of reading when forced to not use their mouths and only their heads.
Chinese I can understand, as every sign means a word, so you can just picture them. But languages that are written with letters that represent single sounds?
The words are read as wholes, not individual letters. So they most likely just read concepts instead of sounds.
Me too
Same, but one time I thought itâll be funny if a main character had a bad Southern accent and I couldnât stop it, I had to stop reading the book and comeback a month later đ
I can change it on command its fun
'Some people have no inner monologue'. That's a huge statement to make. I need to know more about just this. Wow!
Yeah that's me!
Well people who have never heard anything before aren't verbal thinkers because they never heard anything so they actually can't. That's why they think with other senses.
i dont lol
@@ayesha36 so you don't talk in your mind?
@@defiant18 I don't.
Can anyone else recall a song EXACTLY as you heard it? Like, it blows my mind how accurate and rich every detail is when I listen to it in my head and how autonomous it feels. I like hiking alone and can thoroughly entertain myself just listening to the music in my head as I walk. Sometimes I find myself smiling cause of how strong and present the sounds are. Is this weird?
No, it's probably not weird :) I do this as well every now and then.
I do this. Itâs like I have the worlds biggest jukebox in my head. It means when I listen to a song I know exactly what sound is coming when as Iâm playing it along in my head at the same time as listening!
I can also do that, but it need a lot of focus for me
@@hololivevirus4854 just happens for me. Can be hugely distracting too if it pops in at the wrong time!
dracukeo el empalador đ¶
i think in english while my native language is spanish. i dont know when this change happened. i cant recall a moment when i used to think in spanish. and even if i try to think in spanish it goes back to english.
Carlos Mc This is basically my whole life. I'm from India, my native tongue is Malayalam, but in my mind, I speak in English ALL the time. Interesting to note that this happens to people of other nationalities as well. I just presumed it happened to me because I'd grown up on English media and books.
My native lang is Malayalam too, but I realise that I speak in both languages (Eng and Mal) in my mind. But I automatically choose between one or the other depending on the type of thought. I've purposefully tried to think in the other language sometimes but have had to give up because I feel like I'm not expressing it the exact way I want it to be.
My native tongue is Greek but I think in English all the time. Glad to see that many people around the world do, too.
Same here. All we all need to get off the Internet.
I speak 5 languages at an almost equal level and I think in any one of them depending on which one I've been using most lately. Apart from recent use, another reason for switching the language of my thoughts might be a so-called "semantic gap", when there is no word for a certain concept in one of the languages that I use. Aaand another one could be remembering what someone said in a certain language - thinking a quote, so to say! Sometimes these trigger a switch, other times they just amount to a short "excursion" into another language and I then revert back to the one I've been using most lately.
I also have some knowledge of 3-4 other language and I basically never think in those, except when they are very strongly related to others (for example I can sorta think in Portuguese, but not really - I'm just thinking in Spanish and changing those words that I know into Portuguese; the ones that I don't know, I just revert to Spanish). Fascinating stuff!
Woah. This is one of those moments where you learn something that is sort of inconsequential, but feels like it changes everything.
Awareness is highly consequential! :) But I totally love the point you're making.
I can NOT think in full sentences. By the time I'm halfway into wording the sentence in my head I've already finished thinking the thought.
Anthony Khodanian That probably means you can think faster than you can speak (in your mind ofcourse)
chitown23 23 you mean speak before they think
ME TOO
Yeah same
me too lol
I've found that when thinking with my inner voice, I sometimes find myself "moving" my tongue automatically, without speaking, but moving it nonetheless. Does that happen to anyone else?
I can force my tongue not to do so, but it requires intent.
I do that too. Thinking with a voice slows me down so thatâs why Iâm, for example, reading a book, then I wonât use an inner voice, and instead simply just absorb the feelings/connections/images that the words give me.
When Iâm writing itâs super important for me to use that inner voice and I canât help my tongue/throat from moving slightly and changing my breathing as if saying the words silently
Yeah
I just make facial expressions..... though that just might be me daydreaming and making the faces not the inner voice.-.
No thats strange lol
Dude that's happening to me as I was reading that comment but I didn't realize I was doing that this whole time until I read your comment lol
It's incredible to think people actually think in different ways on such a fundamental level. Makes me wonder if we could ever build a thought to speech translator.
Lucas van Osenbruggen COUGH hawkins COUGH
Thats not a thought to speech tho, he uses subtle cheek muscle movements and a software that tries to recognize which words he wants to say.
It mostly just implies it'll need to be uniquely set up for each individual. Sort of like how we used to train speech recognition software (and sometimes still do) to be able to understand us better.
I suppose the FMRI is the start of this technology. We can see how the brain reacts to different stimulus and how our thoughts light up different areas of the brain. The more work we do, the more we can possibly predict thoughts based on what we have learnt.
Also as the technology improves, the resolution of the imagery will improve, to give us more accurate mapping of thoughts and reactions.
There's more than just that. The Emotiv Systems controller that was developed a while back reads electric impulses from the brain and basically translates them into input that a gaming console or PC game can understand (so long as the game was programmed to use it). But it does have issues with working way more easily for some people as opposed to others even though it does involve calibration meant to account for different thinking types. But it's still a relatively young technology.
I can't even picture visual thinking.
Artem Borisovskiy same
Artem Borisovskiy I do this my whole life, although t's fucked up. I can't speak aloud fluently, because i can't verbalize my thoughts. The worst of it is that i am a perfectionist so it is a real struggle at times. Oh how I wish i could spend my whole life visualizing dostoyevsy's stories.. It is very hard to be this way, from my personal experience.
Artem Borisovskiy Though i can daydream whenever i want. Srsly.^^
Same with me. Sometimes it gets overwhelming depending what I'm thinking about.
I like to draw as a passtime. When I was bored as a child I would replay my favorite cartoon episodes in my head by memory.
My inner monologue is almost always a kind of inner *dialogue* . I think in terms of having conversations with others, often the last person I spoke to. The other person doesn't say much, though, except when challenging my assertions.
Yes, I have that too. Long conversations where the other person just has to listen to me talk and talk and talk.
I usually don't think in words but if I do then it is a dialogue. Often the other person can start to argue with me too and then I get annoyed.
I have conversations in my head with people that I think I'm going to have to have some kind of confrontation with. I just think of what there rebuttal will be to my agrument and what I'll say back and that just continues till I actually have the conversation. Usually goes how I saw it in my head.
@@jdhitc very interesting. I work the same way. Probably why some people are better at debating etc than others.
Dude me too.
*Me trying to block internal monologing for a few seconds*
*Imagining a fireplace sound*
...
My internal monologue:
_Wow this is very calming_
_Goddamit! I swear I'm going to punch you in th-_
_Wait..._
_Great I'm just talking to myself again..._
Crackling crackling...damnit I'm saying it again. Barely seeing a picture
Me: Pictures a fire
My inner voice: "Bshshshsh crackle crackle"
My actual facial expression: :D
My inner voice: "I'm funny"
lol I visited your story
The same happend to me like 3 times.
Wait can you actually hear the sound of a fireplace in your head???
This is really interesting. Never thought about this. I'm clearly a visual thinker. I wouldn't say I have a voice inside my head, it's more like a dream, images and feelings. I always thought "inner voice" was an expression, meaning consciousness, not an actual voice.
I relate to this! I don't have a voice in my head either.
how to do know what to type on your keyboard?
â@@ezziesmash what!??... You are freaking me out..
So.. Like can you imagine your favourite song in your head?.. Or not?
Can you imagine your voice in your head(with your thoughts expressed verbally)
@@rammingspeed5217 If I think about it and force myself to hear my voice, I can. So yes, I can get a song stuck in my head if I like it. Haha. I typically just speak my thoughts out loud. So I tend to talk to myself a lot. Lol
@@ezziesmash okay.. So that IS an internal monologue.
You DO have one (but just don't use it as default)
I never heard this "voice" in my head,so I was confused when I first heard about it
I had the revelation that others don't think in sentences when I asked a friend from India whether he thinks in English or Punjabi and he just stared at me like it was crazy that I'd presume that anyone thinks in sentences.
Brainz is weird.
Ikr. I'm from india and am a malayali and i basically know 5 languages bt only 3 out of them can i speak very fluently and ofcourse I think with them alternatively. Like now thoughts are in English bt mostly it's in my mother tongue malayalam and sometimes in my national language that's hindi. I watch a lot of hindi movies and i think that's how this habit was formed bt at times some thoughts come to me in hindi
I also know multiple languages and Dutch and English are my primary languages. When I moved to Germany I was at a theater weekend packing up my stuff on a Sunday and softly summarizing to myself (I don't talk in my head, that is weird to me). Then a friend stared at me and asked if I spoke to myself in German. So I stopped, surprised that apparently I did. It was at that time not one of my best languages, but the immersion had probably done it. I usually think in silent sentences I guess.
I think in words sometimes... but mostly I just think in... concepts? Intuition? Just vague notions with tenuous connections that I can tug on and follow along to translate those feelings and other vagueries into coherent, logical chains of reasoning that can be expressed in words and communicated to others.
But before I do that translation process, the thoughts are just a sort of nebulous mess in my head. Usually problems require me to concentrate to crunch some numbers or use spatial reasoning to e.g. see if a shape could rotate a certain way in a given volume or which way a vector should point or something like that. But even before I do that I generally have a vague idea of what the right answer might be or where I should look for it, again in a fairly non-verbal form.
wow
I have to say. I believe this is how dyslexia works. I have fairly severe dyslexia. I find that an inner monologue is not required to figure something out, more so I have silent conversations about what what my brain is spitting out in order to convey the thought to someone else. But much the same way some people mouth the words while reading or use their tongue as if they are speaking, that is what I do to translate my thoughts into vocab. I see what I'm thinking about in connections I guess patterns and describe it to myself then I can explain my thoughts to others. It's why I find myself rambling alot. Lol
this so perfectly how i think. if i really think about it, i only feel my thoughts and can maybe put a shape to them, but most of the time i dont hear a voice in my head. its only when im reading or bored that i actually hear a voice in my head. if i hear that voice its usually because i want to hear it.
Omg same :O I always thought this was how people normally have thoughts. Itâs surprising that people actually think everything in words, like I canât imagine that
Could not identify with this more
Talk about noticing your nose once in a while and being annoyed by it by blocking your view, i get that once a week or two :P
LOL! Me too! :-)
WHYYY?! I CAN'T UNSEE IT!
Annoyed? Really? I notice it probably as often but I'm more intrigued by my eyes' scope.
Really, I'd be far more alarmed to check for it and find it wasn't there.
It doesn't annoy me as much to notice it though, it could be, maybe, because I use glasses and those are way easier to spot and after a while you just get used to have your vision restricted to a smaller area than what your eyes can cover.
Prepare for rant about my experiences: .......
Iâm naturally a pattern thinker because when I think, I donât translate my ideas into sentences and say them in my own head. My ideas just flow really fast and connect by themselves - visually, and sometimes there is no time to even make a visual connection. This happens when Iâm comfortable and zoned in, and not thinking about how others are perceiving me. I only ever get worried that people know what Iâm thinking when my inner monologue is running (which get flipped on by me being self aware). I feel exposed and paranoid that people can hear what Iâm thinking when Iâm in a public area or with people I know, but only when my inner monologue is set off by the stress. Iâm definitely an introvert, and thinking allowed in my head drains me and wears me out just as much as social situations do, and too much input does (I have Aspergers).
I can make myself aware of my thoughts and talk in my own head whilst interchanging voices, although this is not a practical method of thinking for me, it is static and does not spark any sort of flow. When Iâm not thinking about my inner monologue, I will not use it. I have the easy ability to twitch to my inner monologue (which can be distracting and can make me forget what I was thinking), but it takes me a while to be able to then pattern think again because I have to stop being aware of how I think for thoughts and images to flow naturally.
My inner monologue will occasionally occur by itself (usually in someoneâs voice Iâve been listening to a lot, eg. a youtuber or something) but this will only happen in social situations when Iâm aware of my own thoughts and actions.
When Iâm reading a book, I will read a page and then half way through, I will realise that I didnât take any of it in. This happens when Iâve been reading allowed in my head using my inner monologue. I suspect this is because when I make a point of sitting down to read, my reason for that is to receive information from a source and Iâm trying to hard to focus - and canât. Therefore my brain gets bored, canât thinking straight, and starts to monologue think.
I can only take in information when I am pattern thinking, and I cannot make connections between things when Iâm talking allowed in my head. It feels like brain fog and like Iâm going nowhere when I do.
I think that my Pattern thinking may be connected to my anxiety and me expecting the worst of a situation. My brain gets caught up in specific negative thought patterns which it gets used to and then repeats. Everything happens so fast sometimes that itâs stressful, other times, I am unaware.
Thatâs about it - you may be able to relate to some of this? I donât really know. But that was my mess of thoughts, me writing this was more a way of me picking apart my own thoughts and trying to figure things out because itâs always confused me and iâve always been curious to learn more about these things. The video was clarifying about the three different types of thinking.
Also, on a last note, I think you have to monologue think to be able to write things down because you first think a jumble of thoughts, then you translate them into a sentence, then you write them down/ say them allowed.
Everyoneâs lives, experiences, and thinking styles are different. It all depends on your communication, connections, mood, experiences, and environment.
Anyway bye :)
Omg everything u explained makes sense to me but idek how u out it into words like I canât identify how my thinking works but ur comment rlly helped so ty
The very same with me, oh hell thats crazy. I canât even translated this into words like you do. Same with my thoughts
I have a constant dialogue in my head, and I have my most creative thoughts while thinking like that, but it also makes me recollect and re-live memories more than I would like. And so, in order to fight my anxieties I try to think more in concepts and visualisations that keep me grounded in the present and make me less aware of the passage of time, which is very liberating.
Gosh I'm totally the same, I think in concepts/images/videos but every time I stumble upon this discussion and get reminded that other people have the inner voice as their default thinking mode, I switch to verbal thinking until I'm lucky enough to forget about the topic again. Sometimes I get paranoid this one will be the time when I finally become a monologue brain too and lose the ability to think in my usual abstract, faster way. It's like when someone reminds you that you're breathing and you switch to manual breathing for a few minutes, until you get distracted and go back to autopilot breath. Also I'm an extrovert and a BIG talker, which I attribute in part to the fact that my social battery isn't usually consumed by an imagined monologue/dialogue in my head.
I have entire conversations with myself in my head with every action I take.
I can visualise pretty well too. Especially if I'm trying to imagine colour (but my mind can't see colour. I picture everything in black and white)
When I read a book, I think in my own voice, until there's dialogue, when I'll think in the voice of the character that's speaking. By mid way through Metro, I had to consciously stop myself from speaking in a Russian accent.
I used to be a verbal thinker. I remember being shocked when talking to my brother about how babies must think in terms of images since they can't speak a language, which felt like an alien concept to me. Now, after 4 years studying physics, maths and chemistry in college, I clearly think in terms of concepts, patterns and relationships. I am much better at spotting gaps in arguments, anticipating consequences of actions, and understanding complex interrelated systems than I was several years. On the flip side I regularly get stuck mid-sentence as I cannot find the words to describe the idea I'm thinking of. It feels like articulating ideas in my head is an "extra step" that slows down my fluency.
If I was a betting man I would say 4 years specialising in analysing patterns in abstract notation has stimulated and reinforced the neural connections for visualising patterns, while the connections for articulating these ideas often went unused and slowly weakened over time. People who are natural verbal thinkers probably have very active streamlined neural pathways between idea generation and articulating language. When converting ideas into language is not the rate limiting step of speech it isn't obvious to the speaker that there was an "extra step" involved at all - it just feels like they think in words and sentences.
Yeah I mostly think in concepts, and sometimes I struggle with putting my thoughts into words. Like I know the feeling of words, things that I associate them with, sometimes the first letter, but not the exact word. It would be interesting to see how often verbal vs non-verbal thinkers have that experience. I also wonder if there is a significant difference between percentages of verbal thinkers vs non verbal thinkers in jobs that involve public speaking or articulating ideas clear and fast.
I so agree with the "extra step" thing.
But I can't picture your "patterns".
I think we need more research on this. all you're doing is unfounded speculation lol you should know better. do we even know if most people in stem fields have a inner monologue or not, I also find it hard to believe you could change decades of thinking in a few years, it's a very fundamental thing about ones self, I think you might just be confusing it with standard brain development, I don't think anything like how I did when I was in my late teens or early 20s.
I would tend to believe having a inner monologue would be more beneficial, you ask yourself questions and look for flaws in your own reasoning, it like having a second person to double check your ideas. It seems like thinking in imagine or ideas would be more similar to how an animal would think.
@@countofst.germain6417 I think youâre interpreting the inner voice more literally than I intended. Itâs not another person to talk to itâs just a different mode of thinking.
If I ask you âWhatâs orange and sounds like a parrot?â your brain probably (non verbally) goes through a catalogue of brightly coloured exotic birds to find an answer. When I tell you the answer is âA carrotâ your auditory/vocal thinking kicks in because it associates the words together but it wasnât the system you recruited to solve the problem originally.
Just blew my mind to know people don't give the character they read voices...
I am a person who is clearly a verbal thinker. I have a quite the inner monologue all the time, but... I tend to vocalize those thoughts. I don't wonder if my auditory cortex is highly active because of that.
brewski118sempire I have in inner dialogue, quite a lot actually but I like doing photography and I've been told repeatedly I'm a visual thinker so.. idk
When I am thinking to myself, trying to think about what I am doing I'll get a conversation between different voices discussing pros and cons. However when I am trying to think of myself and what is going on inside my mind, it ends up going to a pattern thinker. However then in a lot of other things, its somewhat visual. Added that when I am reading I give different voices, it continues to make me question myself further.
But how do you 'give' characters a voice when you read in silence? I do make up different accents and ways of speaking when I read to kids.
I'm definitely a Pattern Thinker! I can immediately form patterns in my mind and link abstract objects together. Ask me to explain it in words or draw a picture of it and I'm like :-|
Does anybody else feel exhausted when thinking verbally? It happens to me sometimes when I'm tired ,as if I was actually talking.
Me too
Come to think of it... I think you might be right...
It would be interesting to do a study on thsy
This channel is one of the best of CZcams . And also it's not on creepy side of CZcams. I hate that side of CZcams. But love BrainCraft.
I dunno. If you didn't have an inner voice, watching this video and finding out a lot of people have voices in their head, and not even their own or even multiple... might be a little more than just creepy.
BAGGAD BILLA Absolutely.
BAGGAD BILLA i
I find the creepiness really humorous...do I need help?
What is the creepy side?
When I was young, I occasionally had trouble with the volume of my thoughts. Sometimes not just distractingly loud, but disturbingly loud. The difference was like between a conversation spoken normally at a normal distance, and the same conversation spoken normally right at your ear.
My gecko yells "I like crickets" in her head all the time lol
WAIT I HAVE NEVER BEEN SO SHOOK I THOUGHT EVERYONE THOUGHT IT WORDS
I KNOW WTF THIS HAS BEEN THE MOST SHOCKING NEWS OF MY LIFE
@k polarblue What are the other methods to think then, in your case, if I may ask? Is it images without language?
polarblue can you hear songs in your head without listening to the songs?? Sometimes when I try to sleep at night my internal monologue is loud and sometimes I canât get songs out of my head and itâs hard to sleep
I find that verbal thinkings are the only ones that are "shook" by this. Doesn't shock me at all that there are people that think in words.
Aidan Cunningham do you ever think Iâm images without words?
The first time I learned people can have actual visual sensations when they think about things I was amazed
I always assumed that the picture this or imagine that talk was just metaphors
You're an aphantasiac? So is my mother. It feels so weird to me that someone can't see anything in their mind.
Same here, literally blew my mind.. I wonder how different variations and forms of thinking come about.. Genetic? Environment?
Tessiegril i think in a combo of everything, with words broken up by actions, pictures, and patterns
Surely you can picture things? Imagine an object? What about, say, a pebble? You've seen thousands of them, and know what one looks like...
I think mostly in imagery. I have an inner voice, but don't usually hear it while reading; reading is much faster that way. I can hear it now, while typing, though.
Back to pictures. I can even imagine things on top of what I'm seeing. It's how I can sing along to the radio at work while counting, I simply imagine a counter overlaid on my vision... Like a HUD. Sorta. Perfectly visible except never quite there.
When I do algebra in my head, I'll visualize the literal numbers and variables and solve the equations as if I was doing it on a whiteboard.
This "blew my mind" as well. I'm also a very dominantly verbal thinker and never gave thought to any alternative way of thinking. I wonder if it has to do with how much I read for entertainment. As for the actual voice, it always "sounds" like my own and with only one volume unless I'm reading something with which I can directly associate with a different voice (like a book that has a TV/movie version, at which point I'll instead hear the character's dialogue in the actor's voice). I also find that when reading conversations in a book, I tend to not process the non-dialogue parts as actively (eg: describing physical actions) but instead the inner voice just carries everything verbal and I'll get a bit of visual thinking kicking in.
It blows my mind that people donât have an inner voice. I donât even understand how you understand the world. I have full blown conversations and it never turns off.
Wow, I can't imagine not 'hearing' a voice while reading. This is so interesting!
I have two inner voices. No I have two. Excuse me, er us...nm... We have two inner voices.
Dissociative identity disorder
Dont let Tyler Durden take over
twodayoldbagel
Fight
Club
When I'm alone and just thinking out loud I refer to myself as "we". Like we gotta do this, we'll go there, or whatever. We also have weird fragmented conversations between the inner voice and the one talking out loud.
You may be eligible for The Borg. We think you guys will fit right in. You will join us. Resistance is futile.
Its a constant conversation, something I thought everybody else did too. Its always been there.
Wonderful video.
Our consciousness and our ability to self reflect is linked to language. Whether or not it is an inner dialogue, an inner monologue, or an actual listening experience (and included in listening experiences is the use of sign language)
Folks who were deaf from birth and were not taught sign language until they were in their teenage years experienced a profound 'awakening'.
When questioned about what it was like before they learned sign language they could not express their understanding of that state.
The closest they could come was to was to say (sign) that there was nothing. There was no thinking about how things were.
I think this leads to the conclusion that self reflection and self awareness is tightly coupled to language. No language no self awareness.
I think in hyperlinks
I want pizza for dinner!
HAHA i love this video. What a quirky thing I never thought about.
I love Physics đ
Me as a maladaptive daydreamer I can't even imagine living without an inner monologue and visuell thinking
I'm kind of surprised that "thinking in concepts" isn't among the listed ways of thinking.
Wouldnât that fit in with pattern thinking? I think I would mainly identify with pattern thinking, and I use the way that connections and concepts feel (not actually thinking the concepts in words, just feeling it, which is why I sometimes have difficulty explaining a concept in words to someone)
I wish I could give this video more than one like...â€ïžâ€ïžâ€ïž
a man has no name and can make multiple accounts
Luca Baldassi lol đđđ
I pressed like 9 times anyway đ
lol, good, just so long as it was an odd number of times.
it's weird, i can't really imagine pictures very clearly, but I do have a lot of different voices, sounds, sounds in my head are very clear? i dunno
I never noticed that when reading I have a narrator's voice and the different voices of the characters when they speak or think, thank you that's awesome to figure it out now !!
Plus the landscapes and objects appears clearly when they are well described.
And the emotions can be felt when well described.
reading is actually insane
my inner voice can tell me to think in images, i can say to myself âthink of a chairâ and instantly i think of a chair but, over the top of this image my train of thought still continues, and no matter how hard i try i cannot stop it. but i can tell myself to stop thinking of the image, but if i do that iâm constantly thinking of this chair because i keep telling myself âdo not think of the chairâ itâs a viscous cycle and now i canât stop thinking about chairs.
I can think in all 3 different ways. In the past I used to be much more of a visual and abstract thinker, and I think I was more intelligent back then too, but these days i've become a far more verbal thinker.
When I watch a lot of a TV show, my "inner voice" usually becomes one of the characters from the show.
Mostly visual thinker here! I read in multiple voices that change depending on what I am reading (language, style, topic, type of text -such as textbooks vs fiction novels-, and the length of text -really short text are mostly read in my "usual" inner voice.) and whether or not there are several characters in the dialog. I was just talking about this with a friend and it's great to see a video expanding my knowledge on this topic.
My thoughts are a mix of words and subconscious ideas, and it depends on what I am doing changes the type of thoughts. If I am reading, I mix an inner monologue and the subconscious creates pictures that I donât really not is unless I focus on them, if I am listening, I rely on patterns and use those to create pictures not really having an inner monologue
Something fun I like to do when reading is to suddenly focus on the voice in my head while reading. It gets clearer and almost seems louder, but when I don't focus on it its like this small distanced person standing at the other end of the corridor.
I also like to imagine other people or characters that have distinctly different voices saying something you wouldn't hear them say in my head. For example, I know this sounds random, but let the voice in your head say ''pineapple jam'' in goofy's voice (from mickey mouse).
>âĄ
Congratulations on making it to the center of the maze.
Finally, get out of my head Jeffrey Wright
I am very much in the verbal thought category. This sparked a discussion with myself and several of my close friends who who in a multitude of different fields and wildly different jobs. Hearing first hand how each of us thinks has been extremely fascinating. I've always known some people were more visual thinkers, I certainly am not in the slightest, but learning the details of how others think has been very eye opening. I study concepts such as quantum electrodynamics daily, but this blows my mind far more than those subjects. It's something I took for granted with how I think through my inner monologue vs how others think.
Thank you so much for the wonderful videos btw. I love your channel ^-^
when i think i legit have conversations with myself. Like sitting at a table with myself speaking and asking myself what do i think. yo its trippy
3:14 When I'm reading, every character has their own unique voice that I naturally assign to the character. Even after chapters of not reading about the character, the instant they show up I'm immediately able to assign to them the same voice they had since the beginning. My narrative voice is my own voice, or rather the way I want/assume my voice to sound.
I never knew any other way. It blows my mind that not everyone reads like this, I thought everyone did.
Vanessa, this was a fantastic video! Possibly one of my favourites from your channel. Totally blew my mind. I would be incredibly happy to see more videos on this topic, even if they end up overlapping to some degree.
This is so interesting. I always thought I was more of a verbal thinker but when you explained pattern thinkers I realised that that was exactly my thought process. I think in connections and abstract disjointed pieces of information, sometimes they're words and sometimes they're not, more just actions and vague shapes of the idea.
I can legitimately copy voices Iâve heard almost perfectly on my head, and I read Harry Potter, and I give each character a different voice in my head, so Iâm always hearing/saying voices which all sound different
My way of thinking wasn't part of the the major ways of thinking. I can think of how a sound sounds. Like I can play a whole song in my head, though the experience of hearing that song is much more pleasurable.
SubZero same, but i can only pay snippets of songs in my head because i usually end up forgetting all of the other parts of the song, creating an endless cycle of the snippet playing over and over and turning into an earworm. Also, i end up altering the song slightly in a way that makes it more catchy/enjoyable to listen too
same here, i can think sound and voices of others, i often "visualize" it but i rarely think in sentences or even words
Pepromene I can also think with other people's voices =D
Icyfire if I don't know the whole song by memory, I'll be able to still play it and âhearâ the pitch changes in the voice part, the only thing I can't do is have âphotographicâ (or musicaliphic) memory and remember the lyrics.
I can also make full original songs and remixes in my head and I catch myself someone's fast enough to write it down or hum the general idea, though a lot of them do slip through and I forget about them or important parts that could've been a cool song.
My tongue moves as if I was talking out loud when I am using my inner voice. Am I the only one?
Absolutely visual learner ; reading the main idea of a paragraph give me a vivid picture.
I have aphantasia. My inner monologue does not have tone nor pitch, it is not a voice, it's the same thought process as reading. I also have no sounds, smells, pictures, emotions or sensations in my mind.
Not everybody has an inner monologue?!??!!!!!!
hard to believe that a person who can speak doesn't do it. I wonder how they read. Don't they use their inner voice to read the words out loud
I only use my inner voice when reading, writing, or having a conversation. It essentially just translates thoughts into words (or vice versa) when needed. I can't even imagine narrating every random thought to myself in my head.
It's not so much narrating the thoughts you have, its discussing the thoughts to yourself to make a decision and or weigh each thought. I.E. Not: "I think that strawberry looks funny", but more so: "That strawberry is different... why?"
At least, this is my personal thinking process.
i have no inner monologue. if iâm reading i normally mouth the words or slightly whisper them, same thing goes when iâm doing maths or writing an essay, etc. if iâm thinking of a word i donât hear the word or say it in my head, i just picture what the word is. iâm a very strong visual thinker.
How about a Braincraft on why we think *paused people* look so strange (like pausing a video while someone is talking, and you catch them with a goofy look, and one eye mostly closed and the other mostly open) but when they're talking our brain ignores all of those seen things and just melds them all together into something "normal"?
Yeah it's almost impossible to freeze the frame and have them look normal
When I read a book, I often change up different characters voices. I fell in love with reading ever since I started to have lucid dreams, and my imaginative skill got enhanced.
I think back and forth like a argument with two voices that always take close to same side
I'm a verbal thinker. I just realized when I read something, I can feel my tongue prime itself in the areas where it would form the same words I am reading. Is that weird?
Also if I read fiction the dialogue is in a different voice.
Also I wonder if more fiction writers have verbal thinking?
When I read manga or comics with characters that donât have a voice yet, I make up a voice for that charter. It has led to disappointment sometimes when I hear a voice actor give them one for the first time.
Same
I didnât think that I thought in words and sentences. But after watching this video I began paying closer attention and found that I did.
This video is brain candy. I sometimes spend time thinking about situations during my day, future aspirations or reflection and I always thought it was what everyone experienced.
As a highly verbal thinker, I've always suspected this when reading other people's writing. It used to confuse me that intelligent people with good ideas who otherwise /spoke/ fairly well could struggle to /write/ very well, or even grammatically. I thought: surely writing is just a more refined form of thinking? I don't understand how this can be so difficult... just write what you think, edit it a bit, and you're done.
Eventually I began to suspect that maybe not everyone *does* think in words and sentences. Not even I do all the time. And if that's the case -- if you're not the type of person who is constantly translating your thoughts into words and vice versa -- then /of course/ you will struggle with writing. It's neat to see that there may be evidence to support my hunch!
Uhhh I donât really have an inner voice and Iâm way better at writing than math
@@mingaloo3 what is that like? I mean I hear myself think and can't imagine any other way. I even see visuals too.
@@mingaloo3 So your bad at both, yes?
I have migraine with aura, and when I have aura my speech center stops working. not only canât I speak word, I can't think with word. Its weird experience to go from being a verbal thinker to become a pattern thinker
I know the feeling. :o
Mooshroom fascinating. I have migraine with aura, too, but with visual disturbances. I usually get wild color spots before my eyes - sometimes even a white spot where I can't see anything.
I have heard of the speech center shut down before. Must be a.. wild experience.
Mooshroom
So you're basically saying that your brain gives up for a second
I feel like what you're describing is something I experience myself in certain situations. Essentially it's the result of the subconscious working overtime for some reason or another (be it productive or not) which takes all the normal processing power that the conscious mind is used to having at its disposal. Can cause meditative-like blissful states whilst dancing for instance since the brain is paying all its attention to the rhythm, or it can cause unreasonable frustration whilst trying to traverse a dense crowd of people in cases of the brain being hypersensitive to a perception like sound, so it's using all its power to try to pay attention to everything at once and leaving nothing for the whole behaving like a normal person bit.
that happens to me too!!
I read 'Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas' while doing a writing course once, and Hunter S. Thompson - or at Least Johnny Depp's portrayal of him in the film - hijacked my inner monologue for two months. I couldn't write without hearing his voice.
I had my volume off for this video and was reading the captions. Then I turned on the volume and my brain surprisingly got your voice spot on.
Sometimes when Iâm playing a song in my head Iâll like sniff to the Rhythm or like clack my teeth together lightly or breath to it without even thinking about doing that, like itâs almost part of my inner dialogue.
Unless I'm "rehearsing" for a confrontation or messing around, I don't really have an inner monologue. When I do speak in 'words' I still honestly don't know which language it is in, I'm not that self-aware (I speak about 6 languages.. it's probably something close to my best 2, but I think mostly it's still just something more basic than actual words. I find my thinking much faster when I eschew using concrete words and just let the thoughts flow by themselves.
So you're probably a visual thinker.
I'm an Italian native speaker, but because of all the English content i watch, I usually think in English without wanting to
My mom has a similar thought-language thing. She grew up speaking Dutch and learned English when my grandparents moved back to Canada when she was about 10 so is basically a native speaker in both. I asked her what language she thinks in and she said it depends on the situation but tends to be English because that's the one she uses the most in her daily life.
yeahhh me too
I have a similar experience and I'm definitely a visual thinker. I also know several languages, though not 6. I usually just automatically respond in the one spoken to me.
How do you dissect confusing non tangible concepts though if you only think in pictures ... ? Iâm so blown away by this!
my voice in my head literally doesnât shut up. ever.
Anybody notice how the PBS logo looks like an NPC Wojak?
Do visual thinkers think faster than monologue thinkers?
Could this be why my girlfriend reads so much faster than I do?
How does this relate to focused thinking vs. diffused thinking?
I tend to process thoughts and ideas emotionally, which is very slow, could this be another way of thinking as opposed to monologue, visual, or pattern?
Did you say pattern thinkers "feel like they think in actions and motions", or "actions and emotions?"
This is an exciting video for me! haha
I think in each of these ways in different situations, but I always find myself reading really slowly. I usually read an entire sentence and then realise I didn't absorb a single word, and have to reread it to actually understand what it said.
Can't acccount for my thinking speed but I tend to read faster than people who subvocalize (IE read with a voice in their heads). Def not a very focused way of thinking, since lacking the linearity of speech means I can open multiple Google chrome tabs in my head and also easily forget about them. Though this also could be due to suspected ADHD (currently being evaluated), which of course can present both in people with and without inner speech as their default thinking mode.
My first thought: _"wait do I actually like crickets? I never really played it, did I?"_
Guess that's inner voice confirmed.
For the longest time I assumed every individual had an inner voice, could read literary dialog/text messages with different voices for different characters/people, could visualize objects, events, faces, patterns, language, numbers, letters, and so on with their mindâs eye, and had a conscience to tell them whatâs right or wrong . . . boy, was I wrong. What surprised me most was the % of people in the world who donât have some of these functions. But then it made sense why the world is the way it is. Why people experience shared events so differently. Why no one seems to agree with one another . . . And why people are born with unique talents.
I'm a 70% verbal thinker and 30% a pattern thinker. People think I'm joking when I say that I can't picture things in my head. If only I could picture what it'd be like to be able to picture things...
There's a name for that *Googles it* aphantasia. There's some people online that'll talk about it on forums and such.
Yeah I've seen some of that talk. It's pretty interesting IMO. It's funny because I didn't realise I had it until a month ago when I learned about aphantasia in another video... >.>
Huh? I can alter volume with my... um... "mental noises" and such. That, or I'm crazy. Probably the latter. :D
Yeah, I thought that my inner shouting voice is louder. I mean, I could be just imagining that it is louder, even though it is just the same, but it doesn't seem that way.
After reflecting a bit on this, I'm concluding that she is just reciting what she learned from a Wikipedia page or a text book. It makes no sense that there would be only 1 volume.
Me too! It's more like my ears feel weird.
If ur inner voice got louder... it would vibrate your head.. and eventually people would hear ur "thoughts". "Volume" is literal in this case.
Well I yelled and whispered in my inner voice
Super weird thinking that other people think in images, or patterns. I think so exclusively in words, I have trouble imagining how you'd think like that.
Whenever I read a story, I give voices to all the characters and picture the environment that is being described in my head. I imagine their clothes, the era of the time period, but faces is kinda vague though.
If only they would depict telepaths reading Visual and Pattern Thinkers in media. That would be cool!
I can assign characters in a book voices and read the book as those voices for each characters dialogue ... I thought everyone could do this.. How do you guys read?
Bots and npcs are real
And I can visualize descriptions in books too, give characters voices and see the action play like a film in my mind... Apparently thatâs not normal for everyone either, like thatâs so hard for me to imagine. Iâm constantly talking to myself, sometimes in different voices. And when I read in a book âthe red apple tasted sweetâ I can almost imagine the taste, hear the crunch, see the red apple etc... What is reading like in the experience of someone with no inner monologue or visualization I wonder?
First, thank you for the fascinating video!
Something of a personal anecdote: I've met a lot of folks on the internet first, and then in person. We communicate online via text-only media. Often, after meeting someone, I will read their words online in their voice in my head, complete with any accent. Otherwise, what I read is generally in my voice. I should also point out that I am a strictly verbal thinker, and generally have problems visualizing things. Just wanted to share this in the hopes that someone might find it interesting.
Iâm definitely a visual thinker but I hear my voice in my head for sure. This is mind blowing!
When you asked me to say "I like cricket" do you mean cricket as in sport or cricket as in insect?
LolGuy thats why she said crickets.
Ha! I meant the insect. I feel like the sport would be singular and not plural.
For some reason I first parsed this as a singular, and thus the sport. Going back and re-playing that bit, yeah, there's a definite s there.
1:36 I think I am not really - or just very limited - capable of thinking in images. I can't even imagine something that is described in a novel.
I'm the same way. For example, if I close my eyes and try to picture a forest road, the best it's going to get is something like this: imgur.com/Ldaaruk
I also think in patterns maybe 90% of the time, so the question "what are you thinking about?" is the bane of my existence.
So it's really boring for you to read novels or is it still cool?
Donar
Same. It's very difficult for me to construct a scene I read. I mean, I can sometimes do it if I concentrate really, really hard, but no passively.
Well I can't speak for this guy, but I also can't visualize a scene from a novel but I still love reading them. I probably read differently than an average person though, I basically just skim through parts where they describe how things look and skip to the action and the plot.
Novels are rather boring to me, but if it features stuff like great humor that doesn't require imagination, it's still enjoyable. Reading screenplays would probably be enough for me though :D
I think in words and complete sentences and also see a nearly constant stream of accompanying concrete visuals along with the appropriate emotions. It's totally controllable and 95% positive. I thought everyone did this.
I tell the voices in my head to do things. Bad things. The voices are scared of me.
I usually think in English. I'm from Brazil. And I speak Portuguese.
Filipe Lima same
People who have Apantasia (me) cannot visualize and usually do not have an inner dialogue. I used to have these abilities but after developing Apantasia about 7 months ago , it's very strange to feel how my brain has changed. Actually kind of sad because I sense it's absence .
Developing aphantasia must be a really weird thing. How do you think now? A monotone voice? Because I can't imagine that all conscious thought is gone from your head.
That's so interesting, how did you develop apantasia?
I developed aphantasia after doing lsd back in January. I have no inner monologue or really any thoughts for that matter I cannot hear them. I feel like I've lost my ego or maybe am dissociated but it's really sad I feel like I have become the void.
How is it like to read?
Hey Kelly, I'd love to ask you some questions about this? Thinking about a second part to this episode exploring Apantasia. Can you message me on CZcams or reach out via Twitter, Instagram? I'm @nessyhill (couldn't message you via CZcams). Thank you!
That's pretty incredible - I had been arguing with a friend (who seems to construct his thoughts using inner monologue) about whether language is a necessity for constructing inner thought. Apparently it's a well-studied thing (although pretty recently if I understand correctly?), very interesting!
I think IF we were not raised with a language.. Humans would "MAKE" their own language
It's been like 3 weeks from the last BrainCraft video and I'm having withdrawal syndrome, please come back!