Something that I think trips people up when trying to understand what it’s like to have an inner monologue or to visualize things in your mind is that we don’t really have better words for the experience.
I have an inner monologue, and saying that I “hear” a voice in my head when I’m thinking about something isn’t exactly the way I would choose to describe it, there’s just no simpler way to really put it.
It’s sort of like there are words “happening” in my head. As I think through something my brain is putting the thoughts and concepts together with words describing those thoughts. If I’m, for example, deciding what color to paint something, while I’m thinking through the possibilities, my brain is just sort of conjuring up sentences that match my thoughts like “if I paint it red, it will look funny, so I’ll paint it blue instead, yeah, that’s what I’ll do, alright gotta go to the store for blue paint.” There’s not a literal voice making noises in my head that I hear the same way I hear someone standing in front of me talking, but I intuitively know what the voice speaking those imaginary words would sound like, and the thoughts and ideas I have that way kind of get processed in my brain in a similar way to how it would absorb ideas from someone explaining something to me verbally.
Similarly when I say I can “see” something in my head, if I picture, let’s say a car, there’s not a literal car floating in my visual field somewhere like some kind of voluntary hallucination. It’s sort of like having a complete intuitive understanding of exactly what that car looks like, you know what it looks like from all angles, with the doors open and closed, what it looks like in motion and parked, etc. without actually having to go look at it, open the doors, see it being driven around, etc. and all of that information is getting processed though the same or similar parts of my brain that would process actually looking at the car.
I like to use the analogy of your brain as a computer. When you’re actually hearing or seeing something it’s like you have a microphone or webcam pointed at something feeding into the computer, and having it output right to the monitor.
If, instead, you used your computer to run a super detailed 3d simulation of a car, the end result would look much the same with a car driving on your monitor and the accompanying sounds coming out of your speakers. Except your brain isn’t actually putting those images and sounds on-screen, it’s keeping that window minimized and sounds muted on that app. It’s still doing all of the processing, rendering, encoding, etc. it would have to do to output those images and sounds, it knows what the car is doing in that simulation as long as it’s running and what it would look and sound like, it’s just not outputting that information onto the screen. And since your brain is the computer that’s running the simulation, it’s not terribly important that it’s not being displayed anywhere because you still just know what that simulation looks and sounds like.
Everyone’s brain is wired a little differently and of course I can only try to explain my own personal experience with how my brain works, but overall I find that this sort of explanation tends to ring pretty true for people who do have an internal monologue and don’t have aphantasia.
And of course there’s probably a pretty wide spectrum of how people actually experience this, how detailed the images, sounds, and words in their head can be and what they’re able to do with them.
And like I touched on a little at the beginning, there’s the language aspect. I personally wouldn’t really choose to describe these things as “seeing” and “hearing,” I just don’t have a better word for them. Others may find that other terms to describe the same thing just feel better and make more sense to them.
Kind of like how we’ve collectively agreed that chili peppers are “hot” and “burn” your mouth. Eating some spicy food doesn’t really feel the same as if you burned your mouth drinking coffee that is too hot or something, but it does activate some similar kinds of nerves and parts of your brain and such and the experiences are somewhat similar, so we’ve just kind of decided that terms like “hot” and “burning” are close enough.
But if you got someone who had no prior knowledge of hot peppers and had them eat one, it’s possible that they might come up with different words to describe what they experience. Maybe instead of saying that it “burns” they might say that it “itches,” “tingles,” “hurts,” etc. and they wouldn’t be wrong, those words just felt the most right to them to describe their experience.
In the case of peppers, that’s something we can easily reach a common understanding of. We can just tell them “we call that sensation burning” and anyone who doesn’t know what it feels like can just take a bite of a jalapeno and then we’re all on the same page.
Unfortunately when we’re talking about how we think and process information, we can never really be sure if we’re experiencing the same thing. We can’t just have them take a bite out of our inner monologue like they can with a jalapeno so we can ask them “is this what thinking is like for you?” We just have to use our words to describe it, and hope that they also landed on “burning” to describe it instead of “itching”
I’m not saying that all people have what I would describe as an inner monologue, or the ability to picture things in their head and just don’t realize it, I’m quite certain that some people don’t experience the world that way. I think there’s probably some cases where people do and don’t realize it because of how others explain it, but mostly I think there’s just a gap in our language that makes it hard to explain what we’re experiencing to people whose brains don’t work that way. I’m kind of curious if there’s another language that does make a better distinction between actually hearing/seeing things and having an internal monologue or “hearing”/“seeing” things in your mind and how that affects these sorts of conversations among those people.
Wow. I was just thinking how best to describe my “inner monologue,” and the fact that it’s not really seeing and hearing. But now I don’t have to because you nailed it. I want to subscribe to your blog. Also, instead of “burning” I say we change the word for jalapeño taste to “spicification.” “OMG this pepper! My mouth is spicified!”
instead, you used your computer to run a super detailed 3d simulation of a car, the end result would look much the same with a car driving on your monitor and the accompanying sounds coming out of your speakers. Except your brain isn’t actually putting those images and sounds on-screen, it’s keeping that window minimized and sounds muted on that app
I’m curious, what is your experience with sound generally? Because I do not identify with my brain muting apps but it’s mainly music so I don’t really mind. If a song is in your head are you aware of the song or is it closer to hearing artists’ voice/instruments?
Sorry, meant to reply sooner but it’s been a crazy week and it slipped my mind
Sound, especially music, is a bit more vivid for me, but it’s still very much happening in its own little sandbox separate from the real world that I’m actually hearing with my ears. I’m not going to confuse the music in my head with actual music coming from a radio or something, and it wouldn’t drown out other sounds I’m hearing but it might distract me from them.
My computer analogy is a little clunky and not quite perfect, but it’s the best I’ve come up with. Whatever I’m imagining in my head is happening in sort of a separate space from my normal hearing and vision, but it has all of the bells and whistles of the things I’m actually seeing (and maybe more in some respects) and is getting processed by more or less the same parts of my brain as the real deal.
Instead of muting the sound and minimizing the windows, I could also describe it as they’re going to a separate monitor and set of speakers, neither quite fully describes the experience for me, like I said, the analogy isn’t perfect.
Regardless of if I think of it as being muted or going to a separate speaker or headset or monitor or whatever, the core is that my brain is the computer, and it’s processing both audio and/or video streams, crunching all of the numbers and doing all of the same kind of encoding, decoding, rendering, etc. for both of them whether or not the volume is turned up or which device they’re outputting to, both media players are running at the same time with different things playing. It just happens that one is a live stream from the world outside my skull, and the other is something that’s being created and rendered on the fly by the OG neural network.
Apparently some people actually hear a voice and see things in their mind.
Something that I think trips people up when trying to understand what it’s like to have an inner monologue or to visualize things in your mind is that we don’t really have better words for the experience.
I have an inner monologue, and saying that I “hear” a voice in my head when I’m thinking about something isn’t exactly the way I would choose to describe it, there’s just no simpler way to really put it.
It’s sort of like there are words “happening” in my head. As I think through something my brain is putting the thoughts and concepts together with words describing those thoughts. If I’m, for example, deciding what color to paint something, while I’m thinking through the possibilities, my brain is just sort of conjuring up sentences that match my thoughts like “if I paint it red, it will look funny, so I’ll paint it blue instead, yeah, that’s what I’ll do, alright gotta go to the store for blue paint.” There’s not a literal voice making noises in my head that I hear the same way I hear someone standing in front of me talking, but I intuitively know what the voice speaking those imaginary words would sound like, and the thoughts and ideas I have that way kind of get processed in my brain in a similar way to how it would absorb ideas from someone explaining something to me verbally.
Similarly when I say I can “see” something in my head, if I picture, let’s say a car, there’s not a literal car floating in my visual field somewhere like some kind of voluntary hallucination. It’s sort of like having a complete intuitive understanding of exactly what that car looks like, you know what it looks like from all angles, with the doors open and closed, what it looks like in motion and parked, etc. without actually having to go look at it, open the doors, see it being driven around, etc. and all of that information is getting processed though the same or similar parts of my brain that would process actually looking at the car.
I like to use the analogy of your brain as a computer. When you’re actually hearing or seeing something it’s like you have a microphone or webcam pointed at something feeding into the computer, and having it output right to the monitor.
If, instead, you used your computer to run a super detailed 3d simulation of a car, the end result would look much the same with a car driving on your monitor and the accompanying sounds coming out of your speakers. Except your brain isn’t actually putting those images and sounds on-screen, it’s keeping that window minimized and sounds muted on that app. It’s still doing all of the processing, rendering, encoding, etc. it would have to do to output those images and sounds, it knows what the car is doing in that simulation as long as it’s running and what it would look and sound like, it’s just not outputting that information onto the screen. And since your brain is the computer that’s running the simulation, it’s not terribly important that it’s not being displayed anywhere because you still just know what that simulation looks and sounds like.
Everyone’s brain is wired a little differently and of course I can only try to explain my own personal experience with how my brain works, but overall I find that this sort of explanation tends to ring pretty true for people who do have an internal monologue and don’t have aphantasia.
And of course there’s probably a pretty wide spectrum of how people actually experience this, how detailed the images, sounds, and words in their head can be and what they’re able to do with them.
And like I touched on a little at the beginning, there’s the language aspect. I personally wouldn’t really choose to describe these things as “seeing” and “hearing,” I just don’t have a better word for them. Others may find that other terms to describe the same thing just feel better and make more sense to them.
Kind of like how we’ve collectively agreed that chili peppers are “hot” and “burn” your mouth. Eating some spicy food doesn’t really feel the same as if you burned your mouth drinking coffee that is too hot or something, but it does activate some similar kinds of nerves and parts of your brain and such and the experiences are somewhat similar, so we’ve just kind of decided that terms like “hot” and “burning” are close enough.
But if you got someone who had no prior knowledge of hot peppers and had them eat one, it’s possible that they might come up with different words to describe what they experience. Maybe instead of saying that it “burns” they might say that it “itches,” “tingles,” “hurts,” etc. and they wouldn’t be wrong, those words just felt the most right to them to describe their experience.
In the case of peppers, that’s something we can easily reach a common understanding of. We can just tell them “we call that sensation burning” and anyone who doesn’t know what it feels like can just take a bite of a jalapeno and then we’re all on the same page.
Unfortunately when we’re talking about how we think and process information, we can never really be sure if we’re experiencing the same thing. We can’t just have them take a bite out of our inner monologue like they can with a jalapeno so we can ask them “is this what thinking is like for you?” We just have to use our words to describe it, and hope that they also landed on “burning” to describe it instead of “itching”
I’m not saying that all people have what I would describe as an inner monologue, or the ability to picture things in their head and just don’t realize it, I’m quite certain that some people don’t experience the world that way. I think there’s probably some cases where people do and don’t realize it because of how others explain it, but mostly I think there’s just a gap in our language that makes it hard to explain what we’re experiencing to people whose brains don’t work that way. I’m kind of curious if there’s another language that does make a better distinction between actually hearing/seeing things and having an internal monologue or “hearing”/“seeing” things in your mind and how that affects these sorts of conversations among those people.
Wow. I was just thinking how best to describe my “inner monologue,” and the fact that it’s not really seeing and hearing. But now I don’t have to because you nailed it. I want to subscribe to your blog. Also, instead of “burning” I say we change the word for jalapeño taste to “spicification.” “OMG this pepper! My mouth is spicified!”
I’m curious, what is your experience with sound generally? Because I do not identify with my brain muting apps but it’s mainly music so I don’t really mind. If a song is in your head are you aware of the song or is it closer to hearing artists’ voice/instruments?
Sorry, meant to reply sooner but it’s been a crazy week and it slipped my mind
Sound, especially music, is a bit more vivid for me, but it’s still very much happening in its own little sandbox separate from the real world that I’m actually hearing with my ears. I’m not going to confuse the music in my head with actual music coming from a radio or something, and it wouldn’t drown out other sounds I’m hearing but it might distract me from them.
My computer analogy is a little clunky and not quite perfect, but it’s the best I’ve come up with. Whatever I’m imagining in my head is happening in sort of a separate space from my normal hearing and vision, but it has all of the bells and whistles of the things I’m actually seeing (and maybe more in some respects) and is getting processed by more or less the same parts of my brain as the real deal.
Instead of muting the sound and minimizing the windows, I could also describe it as they’re going to a separate monitor and set of speakers, neither quite fully describes the experience for me, like I said, the analogy isn’t perfect.
Regardless of if I think of it as being muted or going to a separate speaker or headset or monitor or whatever, the core is that my brain is the computer, and it’s processing both audio and/or video streams, crunching all of the numbers and doing all of the same kind of encoding, decoding, rendering, etc. for both of them whether or not the volume is turned up or which device they’re outputting to, both media players are running at the same time with different things playing. It just happens that one is a live stream from the world outside my skull, and the other is something that’s being created and rendered on the fly by the OG neural network.
Your comment seems to imply that you don’t believe this is the default?
I don’t remember the numbers I’ve read in studies, but i recall thinking it was around 50/50.