Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Please don't post about US Politics. If you need to do this, try [email protected]
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either [email protected] or [email protected].
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email [email protected]. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
I don't understand what it is. I read a blurb about it, but i don't really get it. I can remember what my house, car, dog, etc. generally look like, but i can't think of a time i tried to imagine a picture or visualize an item. I'm terrible with faces and intruduce myself to the same people repeatedly. Off topic, i just learned that some people hear a voice in their head when they're thinking or reading.
I don't think that's off topic, it sounds as if you don't have an internal voice which is the audio-form of aphantasia. My inner monologue is ever-present, and often takes the voice of whoever I've been talking to recently, especially if I've been bingeing a series or just watched a film. Having Morgan Freeman as my inner narrator was awesome, but as you can prob guess it's a curse as often as it's a blessing. When I get an earworm it can last for days.
It is hard trying to imagine the absence of something that you have. Like trying to think up a new colour.
You really hear a voice? Like it's someone with you? I cannot get my brain around the idea of having a voice inside my head and i just think of old cartoons where there was an angel and a devil on someone's shoulders. It would be crazy to have Morgan Freeman narrating my life - like that funny penguin movie he did. I do frequently get songs stuck in my head that keep me awake. I don't hear them, i just can't stop trying to get all the words in the right order.
If you neither hear nor see the words in your head, how do you experience them to reorder them?
Reorder them?
Oh, with a song. I dunno, i just think of the words and try to get the verses right and feel like i want to sing it. What's it like when you get a song stuck?
Yes but my question is that if you say you neither hear nor see the words, what experience does "I just think of the words" mean?
For me if I think of the words in a song I experience that as an auditory thought that may have some more abstract or emotional types of thinking attached to those words (ie, if I'm think of the word "cold" I might hear the word cold in my head and also feel the idea of coldness, or if I think of the word "angry" I'll hear the word angry in my head and angry associations will come up. Note, this hearing of sounds inside the mind is not the same as experiencing an auditory halicination where you perceive you have heard an external noise with your ears.)
I don't know. The thought is just there. Like if you think about world war 2, you don't see it or hear it...you just ponder the causes, casualties, etc.
But, for you to put the words in "in the right order" they must take some sort of descreet experiential form.
I can think words or practice a speech in my head, but i don't see or hear anything. Like how when you're counting things, you don't see or hear numbers in your head, you just count. I don't know. I just learned in the last few weeks that some people do see and hear stuff.
I did write a lengthy (nice) response to try to better articulate my own subjective experience for comparison so we could continue to try to better understand one another but then I kinda just lost faith in the idea...
Do you possibly speak more than one language to any degree? If you think of the words "yes" and "oui" (yes in French), there must be some difference in what you experience inside your mind despite the meaning being the same. So what is different between the two subjective experiences for you?
Some Spanish and a little Italian, but I don't use it enough, so I still normally still think in English and then translate. I don't really know how to describe what that feels like but I don't think it's auditory. Maybe there is a flash of a visual memory of the written words? Brains are so weird! This all started for me a few weeks ago when a co-worker was talking about something and said, ".... your inner voice." I got irritated because I thought she had just told me to use my indoor voice and the conversation went on around our office about who does and doesn't have an inner voice. Since then I've been asking everyone if they hear a voice or see pictures. It's really interesting how some people have one or the other or none or both. I think the 3 to 5% no-image thing is very under reported.