Why can't science explain that voice in my head that I control?

quora.com/Does-someone-who-was-born-with-a-hearing-loss-hear-an-inner-voice
> The answer is yes, but not necessarily in the way you are thinking. While Hearing people do hear their "inner voice" as speech, since this is the modality you are used to, Deaf people may experience their inner voice as "signs in their head". However, other Deaf people, who were raised "Orally" and developed spoken language, may experience their thoughts as speech, much as Hearing people do. While I (raised Orally) do often experience my "inner voice" as speech, since I am now bilingual, immersed in the culturally Deaf community, I will at times experience my "inner voice" as "signs in my head", especially when I am thinking about Deaf people or sign language.

Science doesn't fully understand the cause and mechanics of the "inner monologue"

Everybody describes it in their own way.
I do remember the early moment in my life where I either a) first began having an inner monologue or b) I became self-aware of my inner monologue.

I was very young, just barely old enough to eventually tug open the sliding back door of the house in the early early pre-dawn of summer, go out to the metal slide on the playground set and sit down on it and get my ass wet.

That voice in my head "that was stupid". I looked up at the stars in the sky, trying to understand the source of the voice. "No, that's stupid." "I'm talking to me" "but not loud"

I felt(rather than monologued) that this quiet talking head thing in MINE was so smart.

This is all anyone really offers on the subject, anecdotal stories, other than
>internal monologue is in a communication medium you are familiar with
>usually your most known language, and this can change
>with accent/dialect to match your own
>your internal monologue is only roughly associated with your actual intelligence and decision making: your monologue says 2+2 = potato but another part of you has already predicted 4
>difficulty in self-identifying with your own internal monologue may be the symptom of some mental disorders
>sometimes people monologue with pictures, not phrases

Animals don't even have an inner voice, haha.

>inner voice
Is this actually a beneficial adaptation?

I suspect (though I could be wrong) that an internal monologue is just a quirk of memory. You just recall words (and their associated meanings) in rapid succession to assemble a meaning more efficiently than if you were to just barrage yourself with random associated images. (Alternatively, it might not be more efficient, could just be that the training to speak is carried over even when you're not using the ol' voice box as a matter of instinct).

Just a random personal theory, though.

It can, but philosophy fags wont listen and keep trying to invent new "problems of consciousness" that don't exist.

Inner voice is literally just your brain simulating speech through the auditory regions of your brain.

When you think visually it's the same thing just with the visual region.

Also when you have the more "voiceless" inner speech where you get the words, but "spoken" as if without any voice (typically for less prominent thoughts like when you aren't concentrating on your inner voice), this is your brain simulating but instead of sending the signals to the lower audio region, it sends them straight to a higher language region.

it's an alien mutation, which is what all human language is. We call it human language but it might as well be an alien virus.

Thinking is clearly using the human species as a carrier for it's end goal (seems to be technologically driven, as that's the only productive thinking we see, theology and governance and philosophy is still stuck 5000 years in the past, zero progress).

It's foolish to think you are you that's a self-referential construct. You cannot remember who you were before you attained what we call consciousness.

It's a parasite, living inside a structure in your head it modified to blend in. It clearly does not use the human reproductive system or the genetic code to transmit itself because language only develops in a human child that is surrounded by already speaking adults who teach it indirectly. Which means it exploits human brain plasticity to embed itself into an infant through the five senses, we know it exploits all the senses because of the historical case study of Helen Keller who taught herself to read and write to full fluency by touching people's faces and vocal chords.

This is exactly what a virus does, it mutates, it adapts to survive, it attempts to keep the host alive for as long as possible until it can replicate itself into an empty/uninfected host.

I would like to see some studies comparing infant human brains with other animals and how imprinting works. Clearly language as thought does not infect the other animal species of the planet, which means it probably needs some bare minimum threshold to take root, if people weren't such pussies we could experiment with downey babies and the severely retarded to see what the controlling factor in language acquisition is.

Note a LOT of human interaction is non-language based. A lot of instinctual and reflexive behavior, which is then later rationalized and re-interpreted by the language centers of your conscious brain. Example: Mathematics is a separate language.

It's a key aspect of language. You can't have one without the other.

As an addendum, if we could take a newly born infant into a primitive environment and teach it to survive through mimicry and no verbal interaction, we could definitely test my hypothesis. The child should never develop language or ability to utilize it's intelligence above animal cunning as a hunter-gatherer apex predator.

If it spontaneously became creative, drew on rock walls, developed rituals for itself that can be interpreted as proto-shamanic or religious (tracking the passage of time, studying the stars, decorated itself spontaneously), buried it's parents once they died, we could show that while the origins of language are obscured to us, perhaps they could have developed out of a glowingly complex social structure, something that humans would drift towards over many generations.

Using robots to raise it would be ideal, as they could follow the strict parameters of the experiment. If picture related already had a rich language structure and heritage then language is far older than human civilization. And you need to create inhuman experiments to try and discover it's emergence.

IF language leads to an inner voice then I suspect at least a handful of species to have a rudimentary inner voice.

I think that is a definite possibility in dolphins and other intelligent cetaceans.

humans develop language whenever they come into contact with eachother, even if they hadn't learned it in their childhood. see Nicaraguan SL

Apparently the problem with dyslexics is that they don't have the voice

Why can't science explain why it keeps yelling at me when I do nothing wrong?

Completely wrong.

The problem with dyslexics is that their minicolumns are larger than normal and have a larger inhibitory range around them leading to over-generalization.
Autism, which is the functional opposite of dyslexia, means smaller minicolumns with very small inhibitory ranges which causes over-discrimination and is the reason autists pay too much attention to small details and suffer hypersensitivity.

Ok, I shouldn't say completely wrong, because lack of inner voice or at least an auditory inner voice could be a byproduct of that.

But to say that is the cause of dyslexia is wrong.

its imagination. just like you can imagine a number or your hand moving and picking something up. Action is controlled by a different part of the brain, but the thing is that we are so intelligent that we can imagine or plan what to do first and then act. Same with thoughts. We listen to someone and think of a reply and take action by actively speaking. So why should science not be able to explain the inner monolog?
I often find that my inner monolog often just tries to figure out how to deal with certain life situations or tries to sum up my feelings in very creative ways but in the end it actually comes back to resolution findings.

I find this fascinating actually. It has to be a really high brain function assembling it and furthermore it has to be deeply connected with the concept of 'you'. Reason why I believe this is when I take acid my inner voice gets broken into more than one piece. When you have no solid concept of 'you' that voice isn't yours, but it's still there, but now you can have a dialogue with it.

Shame you started the thread with a gorilla, this is an interesting question.

>It has to be a really high brain function assembling it
It is the highest brain regions telling it what to say, but the actual manifestation of it takes place in lower regions. If you have a fully auditory inner voice then it takes place (starts) in the same auditory region where you would be hearing actual sound from your ears. If it's an "inner voice" without sound but just the disembodied words then it's happening higher up at the language level.
If you are thinking purely in concepts, without individual words at all, that's happening yet higher, above the language level.
But fundamentally they are all the same. It's essentially the highest, executive, level of your brain running "simulations".

I have a similar head voice

>when your braindude speaks in foreign language

that's how i got fluent in english

Learning a new language should always be by using your inner voice to think mundane thoughts.

I wonder if singing can be improved by practising with just the inner voice.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoicism
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meditation

>made this thread as a shit-gorilla post
>actually discussion ensued

never change Veeky Forums

Fantasic scum, i'll genocide you one day.
Being inferior to me when you got such a wonderful tool for permanent training, no matter your location and setting, is inexcusable.

The inner voice is the method that the demiurge uses to control your actions. Only by ignoring your monologue and acting on instinct or turning inward through wordless transcendental meditation can you achieve enlightenment

What is Veeky Forums's opinion of Julian Jaynes?

Superstitious cuck.

...

It is entirely possible to get rid of the inner voice altogether. Those who can speed read do not have an inner voice at all.

Sounds like bullshit to me.

"Speed reading" is a myth.

Do you guys really hear thoughts and things you are reading as if a voice is speaking to you? That sounds incredibly weird to me.

Are you autism?

Prove it.

m.mentalfloss.com/article.php?id=73990
>The researchers say the experience of reading is composed of two main elements: taking in words and making sense of them. They found that while speed-reading programs can teach faster word absorption, they can’t speed up reading comprehension. And without comprehension, readers won’t retain what they’ve read, which essentially renders their speed meaningless.

You're a gullible brainlet.

Serious question, it's hard to imagine not "hearing" my internal voice.

>(((researchers)))

Are you also unable to recall music in your head?

We'll, where is your proof it's real then, brainlet?

Don't think so. I also have next to no minds-eye but that's not very uncommon (e.g. lesswrong.com/lw/gq6/visual_mental_imagery_training/), might have something to do with it I guess.

No its not possible

No I can recall music perfectly fine. But I don't really hear it in my head when I think of it, I just sorta remember how it goes.
I sometimes have auditory hallucinations when in a hypnagogic state, I imagine it's sort of like that for you internal voice fags?

Wow. That's interesting.

I wonder if there is some sort of cost/benefit to having imagination vs being a robot.

>I sometimes have auditory hallucinations when in a hypnagogic state, I imagine it's sort of like that for you internal voice fags?
Not exactly, for most people it's somewhere in between what you experience and what would be a vivid auditory hallucination.

What it means is that your internal voice is just operating further up the brain's hierarchy.
Most people's internal voice operates higher up when they aren't concentrating on it, but becomes more vivid when they are.
With practice anyone should be able to make it more vivid, just like they can make their visual imagination more vivid.
If not it may indicate low connectivity between regions of the cortex, a commonly associated symptom with dyslexia.

independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/most-people-hear-voices-when-they-read-normal-psychological-study-finds-a6890766.html

Shit source, I know, but 80% of people from a small online poll hear a voice while reading. 11% hear nothing.

Holy shit I could not even fathom what it would be like to just hear nothing.
My inner monologue just never stops, it is a constant thing.

In your case though calling it an internal 'voice' would be a bit of a stretch, although they are the same mechanism.
"Temporal language imagination", would be more accurate.

Interesting
Yea, I obviously do have some representation of language in my mind. Also when I read I do subvocalize, in the sense of making very faint speech movements.
With visual imagination I'm pretty sure I do have mental images, but they're just not consciously accessible.

>
meant 4

It sounds like you may just have unrealistic expectations of just how vivid other people's mind's eyes and internal voice are.

While there are some people who have extremely vivid audio and visual imaginations, don't get the impression that for most people it is as if they are actually hearing and seeing.

It's very difficult for people to convey exactly how they perceive the activities within their own mind, even though what's happening in everyone's mind may be the same in the physical and information theoretical sense.

I'm the same way. When there's nothing else to do, it sings me songs.

I feel like not having it would be seriously missing out on the "human experience."

Hell I honestly do not feel anything really exists aside from my inner monologue.
That is the core of my consciousness

You can quiet it down with meditation if it annoys you.

I'm curious if you would consider yourselves to be much more "audio thinker" than "visual thinker"?

Both honestly
I have really good visualization ability as well as auditory rationality.

I feel like my inner monologue is half me and half someone else. It does what I ask it to do, but it also does a lot that I don't ask it to do. Like two pilots working together to operate the human machine.

I would say I lean more towards visual, but I scored high in both on those bullshit tests they gave us in grade school.

Could be.
There's nothing about the brain that prevents the existence of pseudo-independent agencies.

I think we might find that it is even normal.

I probably smope too much weef, but excessive contemplation of it has lead me to the conclusion that the thing I think of as "I" or "Me" doesn't really exist. It's more of a concept than a reality. The different parts of my consciousness/personality do things for reasons that are outside my thinking mind, and a different part of me wraps it all together into a story. The story "Me; what I did and why I did it."

It's analogous to a nation state. There is an idea of the country England, there is a land that we call England, and a people that live there we call English. But if you try and find the physical manifestation of England, it doesn't really exist.

I guess what I'm trying to say is, much like gender, existence is a social construct.

Humans are animals.

I agree.

The philosophers toiling away at the "problems of consciousness" are tilting at windmills.

Idk. People can read entire sentences like they do words by reading sideways, almost like Chinese symbols.

>my inner voice while reading Veeky Forums posts is modulated by the reaction images

explain that, science

>tfw I can't hear the rolled "r" in my head without doing it with my tongue
It's really frustrating

Actually reading in your head is what makes you read slower

wat das dis one sound likein?

What good is reading fast if you don't understand any of it?

that's actually really interesting

Are you a native or non native speaker?

prove it exists

What good is reading if you're dumb?

kind of related to the thread-

anyone else feel weirded out when they hear their own voice in a recording? What you imagine your voice to sound like isn't what it actually sounds like.

A lot of your voice you heard due to sound being conducted through your bones/body. So your voice doesn't actually sound like what you hear when you talk.

Gross penis eyes.

Thanks bro

It's because your mind has its own representation of your voice that it "hears" both when you are imagining your voice as well as when you are actually speaking that "plays" over top and drowns out the actual sound signals of your voice coming from your ears.

While your mind's default voice remains constant, your actual voice changes depending on the room you are in and other factors. So when you hear it played back without your internal representation over top, you actually get to hear these variations.

>Temporal language imagination

Can't think of any other way to label it.
Everyone has an internal voice that they use to think about language, but some people don't experience the actual "voice" part.

Language qualia :^)

Ehh, that has some philosophical connotations that might mislead.

What are you talking about? The dude was an atheist with an interesting theory about how our inner monologue integrated with our consciousness over time. Julian Jaynes argued his thesis after reading a bunch of ancient literature and recent breakthroughs in neuroscience through the 1970s, and as far as I can tell, further research has yet to disprove him.

I had to take a psychology course for gen eds, and I was surprised to see his descriptions of consciousness cited in the textbook. He's pretty influential, even if his theories are... out there.

>be me
>comedy central always played on television as a young kid
>inner monologue is gilbert gottfried's voice
>learning to read was torture, almost didn't make it
>never EVER want to read again

lol

check out “Ghost in The Machine” its pretty much that topic. Tulpas are real mayne

Almost an entire year and this picture is still passed around hahaha

your mum raised me orally

Yea I thought about that but from people's descriptions of these things I don't really think so. For example I can't identify my inner "voice" as myself, some other person, or a non-existent person, it simply doesn't have such qualities. Also the concept of daydreaming is totally foreign to me.