My impression had always been that most people heard their thoughts only metaphorically, with the exception of psychotic people who literally hear them as voices. But given Galton et al’s findings on the visual imagination, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if some (non-psychotic) people literally heard them.
As for psychotic people, it can be anything from a whisper to a loud scream.
For me, the experience of thinking is usually much like the experience of talking to myself, minus moving my vocal parts. The exception is if I make a conscious effort to think in pictures. And I think Ozy sees their thoughts as text?
I don’t think sees is the right word? My thoughts are, like, the platonic ideal of text.
my thoughts arise from the murky depths through a series of filters. at the beginning, they aren’t even noticeable to my conscious mind, but the second-to-last layer is something like the platonic ideal of text and the last layer feels like speaking without the moving my lips part. i get most of my actual thinking done at the second-to-last level, and this is the level at which i am actually thinking when i speak or type, although when i type i also “hear” the words in my head at the last level and when i plan what im going to say i also “hear” the thoughts at the last level, but not while i am actually speaking. i “hear” thoughts on the last level when i am reading but i can shut it off with significant effort and then my reading speed goes way up. when i am trying to actually think at the last level, what im going to “say” is already planned out the second-to-last level, and i get annoyed with how slow the last level is. the murky depths are something like a graph of associations, with nodes connected with various strength to other nodes and connections being invoked causing sparks.
when i was little i would draw diagrams of this process and try to make philosophical conclusions from it (i remember drawing when i was like eight or ten of a set of partially shaded concentric circles, with labels for each layer of thought (the last two were labeled properly, below that i said that i didn’t know how many there were because they weren’t observable, and the center was labeled something like “me? what is here?”—i didn’t have a model of the association net thing until a couple years later))
i also have a separate mode of thinking dedicated to mathematics, but it isn’t actually all that good for things beyond like arithmetic and some geometry (construction problems) and spatial reasoning problems and plotting derivatives and antiderivatives in my head and i do real math in my normal mode of thinking. it looks like a grey space where everything happens visually though.
i can actually see things in my head, but i dont generally generate sounds that aren’t in Default Mental Voice and it’s hard to although i can sometimes do it. i can’t hear music on command, but i can sometimes hear music (this is very enjoyable when it is music i can control and annoying when it’s music that’s just stuck in my head).
i have smelled things, felt pain, tasted things, felt non-pain sensations, seen color, had thought processes, etc in dreams. i haven’t practiced lucid dreaming but it happens rarely but regularly on its own (as in, i realize that i am dreaming)
Your thought layers sound very much like mine! There is the possible exception of the “without the moving my lips part”. While I generally don’t *actually* move my lips for the last layer, it is often accompanied by the *imagined* sensation of the appropriate mouth movements. This has either been happening more lately or I’m just noticing it more.
My mind’s eye is not all that detailed, but it is there and, under normal circumstances, in frequent use. (I say “under normal circumstances” because when I’m in a novel environment–museums, campsites, family reunions, etc–my ability to visualise pretty much shuts down. I presume this is to encourage me to devote more attention to the here and now when it is in particular need of attention.)
My mind’s ear is distinctly less detailed than the real thing (also distinctly internal, to be clear), but maybe not to as great an extent as with vision. I’ve noticed that the level of detail on an imagined song goes up when I’ve heard that song earlier in the same day (increasing more sharply on songs I haven’t heard very many times), with sleeping resetting the level of detail and sometimes which song is playing by default. (I woke up this morning to Poets of the Fall’s “Dreaming Wide Awake”. I don’t know why; I haven’t listened to it in a couple of weeks.) I can’t control the volume of music, silent reading voices*, or any other sound-based thought: it’s always at a neutral volume, not particularly loud or soft. I share aguycalledjohn‘s tendency to end up thinking in other people’s voices for a short while after listening to them a lot.
On nitrous oxide (100% legal dental anesthetic, ftr), I found that my thoughts didn’t reach the last layer or two (I didn’t distinguish between the last two back then, though I think the distinction was there) automatically. It took a small-but-noticeable amount of effort to think in voice, and when I did the voice sounded flat. (Note: I get the impression from the anecdotes I’ve seen that there are two basic types of reaction to nitrous, and that I respond in the characteristically autistic manner.)
*Other branches of this thread indicate that this is the technical term.
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#reply via reblog #is the blue I see the same as the blue you see #stuff about thought processes is fascinating
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