You must log in or register to comment.
“Is being blind like being in a room with no light?”
To be fair, I was young and stupid and inexperienced and I said stupid things… I’ll give you a pass one time. I’m not blind or deaf and I don’t speak on behalf of anyone who isn’t me.
A/S/L?
294,749/Unknowable/Everywhere and nowhere at once
17/f/cali u?
18/m/nevada… can I buy you a bus ticket?
Wait wat? You remember that far back? I have literally two memories before I was 10…
My first memory is one of my four-year-old self hearing a voice in my head say “Huh, this must be that self-talk Mom was telling me about. That’s neat.”
Kinda spotty since then. I barely remember anything else prior to 5th grade.
I have known a some deaf people and from what they and their family told me, mos of them thought on images until they learned some kind of language.
Am I taking a meme to serious? Perhaps lol
I once saw a deaf patient fingerspelling off to the side to “feel out” the word they were trying to write the same way you might “sound out” a word. Blew my mind. Also the time we had a schizophrenic where the translator couldn’t make heads or tails of their signing so we tried BSL etc with similar results but eventually they got medicated and it turned out it was ASL just the ASL version of “word salad” (common symptom of psychosis). Like I know it’s just a language like any other but it’s always cool to see the different ways it can manifest the same functions and dysfunctions.
No, this is actually a really interesting topic regarding cognitive development, neuroscience, and ‘what even is consciousness?’
Like, apparently, around a 1/3 to 1/2 of ‘normal’ people… don’t have an inner monologue.
They don’t have an experience of their own inner thoughts as … semantic sentences, an inner voice.
Presumably, such people would literally not be capable of thinking in detail about what they say, before they say it.
Or, maybe there is some… other kind of inner langauge of some other form?
???
I have no inner monologue and I have aphantasia (can’t see images in my mind without tremendous effort).
I can think in detail about what I’m going to say, but at least for me it feels more like “motion” in my brain. When it comes to things like calculations or decisions, it’s like waiting for an old browser to load - there’s something going on in the back but I only have access to that information after a decision is made.
I used to be in therapy and “what was your line of thought in that moment?” Is a difficult question for two different reasons depending on the situation. In some cases, I may literally not know why I did something. In other cases, the level of consideration was so deep that putting into words is a Herculean task.
I’ve read online that it’s possible to force an inner monologue by training your brain to work more slowly and intentionally, but I have no interest in that
Genuienly, thank you for explaining to me what … it is like.
I didn’t mean to be rude, putting things the way that I did, but, in retrospect, … seems like I was.
So for that, I apologize.
Does… like what I am doing right now, typing out a sentence before hitting ‘post’… does that I guess ‘feel’ different than this kind of “motion” you describe?
Of course, the physical act of engaging your digits to actually type is one thing, as would be literally writing down a note…
Sorry, I am just… at a total loss to attempt to comprehend this at a level beyond … well the closest analogy I can think of is martial arts.
I trained for 10 years, got a black belt, and somewhere around year 7ish… it stopped being somewhat like RD Jr Sherlock Holmes logically narrating his own plan in his head… and became much more ‘instinct’, maybe like the ‘motion’ you describe… processing is going on, I could maybe give you a description of 30 seconds or a minute after a very short bout, but … semantic processing is simply too slow, at a certain point, ‘instinct’ takes over.
Now I don’t know if that sounds crazy or not, but that’s my … closest thing I can think of to what you are describing.
Another possible comparison is myself taking 3 years of Spanish.
By year 3, I was actually ‘thinking’ in Spanish, when hearing or trying to formulate Spanish. Whereas before that, English. Now that I’m significantly out of practice of that, I no longer ‘think’ in Spanish.
Maybe that is somewhat analagous to the effort you would have to undertake to have an inner monologue in any language?
I don’t have an inner monolog and I am still able to think about words. My thoughts are not comprised of words, but this does not hinder my ability to decide which ones to say before I say them.
same. my thoughts, when they have any form, are more tactile than anything else. i can’t visualize (have aphantasia), but still can move things around to ‘feel’ the shape of things internally, especially when trying to figure something out. it’s like doing a 3d puzzle but in the dark.
most of the time it is silent in here and the tactile stuff doesn’t happen, though.
Hey I just posted about my head empty experience too.
I wonder if it’s like this for you too - when you forcibly visualize something like you described, does it “disable” your eyes?
For me, when I have to consciously imagine something it effectively replaces my actual vision whether my eyes are open or not
that’s interesting. i don’t think i ever noticed this before, but yes. my eyes unfocus and i don’t see externally, when i am forcing an internal thought process to be ‘visible’. huh.
I used to think in images when I was really little (as well as a vocal inner monologue.) Certain words would elicit pictures in my head, sometimes of the thing itself, sometimes metaphorically as something else, or sometimes by picturing something that rhymed with or had a similar sound to the word it represented.
The images faded away as I learned to read, being replaced with images of written words. For a while it was like there were subtitles in my head whenever people talked.
Then, by about my teenage years, even the written words started to fade and my thinking became primarily “inner monologue.” I can remember a handful of the images I used to picture, but most of them have faded from my memory entirely. It makes me wonder if the images were like some kind of mental scaffolding to help me make sense of language when I was young, that my brain didn’t need anymore as it started to mature and understand the world better.
I think I had that too. I remember it caused some kind of strange associations, like books were inherently green because when i thought about them I saw a green book. Then I had like a super strong internal monologue for a while but it got less intense and now everything’s more fuzzy
Do most people not, then?
Chads like myself remember thinking in the original language before that whole tower nonsense. Then two idiots kept speaking to me in English and I forgot the first language
Can’t be mad about bad copper if you can’t remember Sumerian.
Heh heh heh.
I’m just a layman, but from the little I’ve read, the way people think is incredibly diverse. Vast majority of people think in some combination of words, images, speech and concepts but most people have a “primary” thinking method. Some people think only in speech, some only in text, some only in images, etc but they’re the minority.
I’ve had a voice babbling away in my head since I was four. Most of the time it says the stupidest stuff and then calls itself stupid for saying that stuff
There was this one time as a teenager I meditated so hard I somehow shut off my inner monologue and got to experience my thoughts directly, at least until I realized what I was seeing and got excited enough to disrupt the precarious meditative state that got me there. Never managed to replicate it since then.
I recall sitting still for a while at one point and momentarily loosing the ability to make out anything but a patchwork of colors from my vision. It’s fascinating, what the mind’s processing tells us about the world compared to the either low granularity or low field of view provided by each input. I’m pretty sure I was only able to process my peripheral vision during that experience, maybe due to the amount of detail?
What if you are deaf and have aphantasia?
My 18 year old cat has gone deaf over the past year and I still tell her I love her. I also tell her to fuck off when she gets on the table and tries to eat from our plates but she no can hear.
The saddest thing about one of my old dogs going deaf was that she stopped doing this characteristic playful “bark.” It wasn’t really a bark, more of a cute little howl that came out sounding like, “Roooooo.” I used to “talk” with her by making that sound and she’d “roo” back at me. But when she lost her sense of hearing, she couldn’t respond to my “roo” anymore and stopped making the sound entirely. :(
She can probably still feel the vibrations if you’re close enough or loud enough. She might just ignore you when she’s stealing your food though.
i think the last one depends on whether the person had the ability to hear before
But how do you hear smells?
you taste em, just like farts
I’m not deaf, but I also can’t hear my thoughts. In my case it’s because of aphantasia.
Interesting. Is it still called aphantasia for that? I also have it, but the picturing kind. Can’t picture anything in my mind, but can definitely ‘hear’
I have it for multiple things. I don’t know if there is a term specifically for other senses.
Aphantasia as a whole seems to not have a lot known about it yet.
I don’t have any hearing issues, and I wouldn’t say that I hear, or perceive, my thoughts as voices, just words without any voice or connection.
I am as deaf as they go and I can ‘hear’ my thoughts. It’s like the feeling of an unspoken whisper in your head. A whisper without sound, if you will.
I also don’t have any hearing issues. I’ve known folks who were hard of hearing but never anyone deaf.
The last one is the only one I might ask - and that only of someone I’d gotten to know. I can hear my own thoughts, sort of, but mostly feel emotions as some form of pressure.
