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TIL that some people do not have an inner voice and think in different nonverbal ways.
(humanities.ku.dk)
this post was submitted on 15 May 2024
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I recently learned that some people do hear a voice in their head. Some see pictures too.
So, if you study a map of a building, noticing that it has a kitchen at a certain place, then in go inside the building (without the map), and someone says "go to the kitchen," how do you know where the kitchen is? How do you imagine the paths, rooms, hallways to follow?
If I told you "a pink and brown dog," you can't "see" that dog in your mind at all?
The map would be tough. If someone showed me the map and said, go to the kitchen, I would try remember, turn left then right then its around to the left. I would remember it in words, not visually.
Brown and pink dog...in my mind I see a hazy face of a poodle with fluffy pink ears. I can't see the full dog. I can't walk around the image and explore it more. Its just a hazy partial visual that flashes in my mind for a moment.
Not op, but I have a very weak ability to visualise. The data is more abstracted. A map is a set of spacial connections that define an area. My brain has learnt to pull that from a map. What I can't do is recall the map to figure out additional information. If my brain didn't think it was relevant when I looked at it, the information is likely gone.
There are definitely pros and cons to it. I'm not limited to what I could visualise, when thinking. This lets me dig deeper into more complex ideas and patterns. It also makes other tasks a lot harder. I struggle a lot with faces and appearances.
As for the dogs, I have an abstracted "model" in my mind. The size and breed of the dogs is undefined. There are 2 dog entities in my mind. 1 brown, which is quite generic, the other has pink attached to it, that cross links it with poodles etc.
I can personally push it to a visualisation, but it takes significant mental effort, and the results are unstable.
So you basically visualize maps as graphs? You’re the human equivalent of the A* algorithm!
It's spacially based. It makes more sense in 3D. It's just as compatible with echolocation as visual data. (The soundscape of a room tells you a LOT about your surroundings). I believe it's based within my visual system, just stripped of the superfluous visualisations. Interestingly, I can actually map mathematics into the same structures.
I'm doing a piss poor job of explaining it. Language lacks the nuance to describe it well, and I lack the skill to bend it into shape.
I'm not the OP either but my brain seems to work the same way that yours and theirs do. I'd say you did a good job of describing how it works for people like us.
One difference though is that you don't seem to have the visual recall that I do. I don't have a "photographic" memory but I could probably recall the hypothetical map as a visual object and examine it for additional information that I didn't notice the first time.
You may actually be better at this than I am. Describing my results as "unstable" would charitable. I also don't get dog breeds, just amorphous and blurry blobs with rorsarch like colors slapped on them.
That's akin to what I get. The core structure is there, but it's almost a sense of what should be there. It's akin to seeing things out of the corner of your eye, while overtired. Your brain tells you what it is, and you accept it, it doesn't necessarily match what you are actually 'seeing'.
I 'know' how dogs move, I 'know' their body structure. I can force that down to a single image, but it wants to be so much more. All the senses of 'dogness' compressed into a single entity.
I definitely have both. I can even visualize things with my eyes open. I switch back and forth between modes depending on the content I'm working on in my head.
Are you able to build complex visualizations while maintaining eye contact with someone? Once the concept becomes complex enough, I have to break eye contact with them (usually staring at nothing above their heads) and unfocus my eyes. Once I do that, the sky's the limit on how complex the mental visual can get and be abstracted, but something about staring at a face (reading realtime facial reactions?) consumes the part of my brain I need for the very complex visuals.
That sounds pretty similar to me. I have to really be focusing to do it, if I were looking at someone and trying to do it, there would be a lot of competing sensory information. I could do something but it would keep getting broken up by distraction. It definitely works best just in a nice quiet room.
Same. I thought it was that way for everyone. I can have a full conversation in my head while visually building something in a 3D mental image.
So kind of like Werner Herzog then, who once stated that he never, ever dreams. But he keeps having visions with his eyes wide open, in broad daylight, all the time. He describes them in his terrific book "Of Walking in Ice."
His thing sounds different. I do dream (often prolifically), and when I visualize with my eyes open it tends to be something I'm trying to visualize such as a new paint color, furniture placement. I'm pretty good at it, my visions usually work out pretty well when taken to action. I'm imagining them more than really seeing them, but I'm able to do it well enough to accomplish the tasks I need to visualize.
I'm so bad at furniture arranging and color matching. But I'm excellent at stacking boxes or other items in a small space.
I know this isn’t true of everybody with alphantasia, but what I do in this situation is I get lost. I can’t visualize walking through the space while I study the map, and I can’t bring the map to mind when I'm actually there. Some people with aphantasia have no trouble finding their way around, so I think in my case it must be that I’m missing some innate sense of direction as well that visualization might have helped me to compensate for, if only I could.
Correct. I’m not 100% on the aphantasia spectrum, so if I think about it then I might get the briefest flash of some dog, like an afterimage at best, and I can’t hold it in my mind, or manipulate it, or see any details or color. It’s not even really a complete outline or anything either that flashes for that quarter-second.
When I read a book, I don’t know what the characters or places look like. But I have always been able to draw really well. So it’s really a mystery how this all works.
For me it's even weirder than that. Those pictures exist in my mind and I can "feel" them there but the conscious part of me that's supposed to see them can't see shit. I can describe to you the things that are in them or even draw them out as they exist in my mind, but I can't see them. The part of me that's giving directions? It can "see" the map of the building and my position in it just fine like it's staring straight at a live minimap, but the conscious part of me that should be able to visualize that stuff? Nothing. I close my eyes and try to visualize that dog and I see nothing but black. But I can feel the presence of the image that the part of me that does the mental conjuring of images is making.
It's like turning the monitor off on a computer. Everything is still running even though you can't see it.
Very interesting. Thanks for sharing!
There's a kitchen off the hallway just past the bathroom on the left. No magic path to follow. I hate those video games where you just wander around! I can't see a dog - i don't know what kind of dog, size/shape of its parts, what parts are brown, what parts are pink, ... If you said poodle or German shepherd, and i focused hard i could get sort of a loose wire frame outline.
If I told you "a pink and brown dog," you can't "see" that dog in your mind at all?
Jim Pickens's cat popped into my head. Sigh.
for me some reason a pitbull
For the longest time I assumed it was just a literary device, not an actual thing anyone really does.
So, if I tell you "I'll give you $10,000 for you to spend in 24 hours. Spend 20 seconds to think about it," what goes through your head? Don't you hear anything like "shit, that's a lot of money?! Where to start, where to start..."?
Don't you "have words" in your head to form thoughts?
Babies can think before they can talk 🤷♂️
But they can understand you before they can talk too.
No words here at all. I generally don't use words for thinking unless I'm trying to think of a sentence or something like that.
I wish we could swap brains for five minutes. But what is "thinking" for you? Can you picture things in your mind? Moving objects? Suppose that you're looking for a spoon and open your silverware drawer, and it's unexpectedly filled with cotton candy. And you live alone! What goes through your head?! Because the first thing that goes through my head is surprise, followed by the phrase "what the fuck?!?!?!?!"
I also can't picture anything in my mind either. It's like a different language that is based on feelings instead of words. You know when you move next to a fire and you feel hot? You don't need any words to feel hot, right? It's kinda like that. I would open the drawer and feel a "this isn't right" feeling.
It's like I "know" all the options (pros and cons and obstacles and things to think about) all at once, any time I have is then spent on the emotional consequences of them. But more time doesn't usually mean discovering more options.
So like… how do you think through ideas? Philosophize? You don’t bounce ideas around in your head and deeply weigh multiple options? It’s just… empty?
@laughterlaughter
No and it's amazing to me that you'd even be able to think of it in 20 seconds with all that chatter in your brain.
As I was reading your comment I could sort of hear parts of that, because it's you "speaking" to me, but as soon as I saw it the $10,000 imediately became a sort of conceptual bundle located in front of me, the 24h was like a moving spatial cycle thing and my brain was plotting possibilities based on how far I would have to travel (the ones falling inside the cycle are the do-able ones) and locating a whole lot of stuff branching out from my computer with short action times.
Also my brain had immediately reached to the right hand middle distance which is where it "keeps" investment advice. It had a quick dart to the far away centre-left and I had a flash/photorealistic image of home furnishings out there but rejected instantly as the tangled sense of moving parts between me and it meant the process toward them is complex and would take up too much of the 20 second processing time to even see if they would fit in the 24h cycle.
Fantastic! Thank you for answering, and I have a similar process going on in my brain as well - but it's combined with "me talking" as well. For example, if I become aware of that "right hand side" investment section you described, I'd probably say' "ooh investing, maybe?"
Thanks, that makes sense! But I don't understand how that could fit in temporally? Like, wouldn't you have already got halfway through the possible investment overview while you were still talking? Or is it more that you're doing both at once?
Correct, at once. Like a teacher who is writing on something on the whiteboard while speaking.
Or that scene in Minority Report in which Tom Cruise is going through videos/scenes/etc with his hands while saying things loud to himself.
@southsamurai did the above comment make sense?
It's hard because we have to translate it to get it across -for me it feels a bit like being asked how do you know where your arms are relative to your body.
about the arms. spacial awareness.. and a surprising number of ppl don't have that
I didn't express it very well - I meant basic proprioception, which most people have. We need it for things like walking or lifting a cup to our mouths.
Not op, but I'm curious if anyone will help me understand my own reality. I immediately close my eyes to make the experience authentic.
"I have to spend 10 grand in 24 hours" as a imaginary verbal statement. (internal monologue?). Then I "lookup" spending money memories and create an object in my head without any attributes. I can tell it has emotional attachment from the memories, best described as a label. (I determine to go online shopping without much thought).
"most likely buy raw materials like gold". [Pause]. But what's unique about this situation that I can take advantage of? 24 hours [trail off]. Bonds would be easy and just postpone payment. Is laundering an option? Why is this person giving away 10k? What damage can it do?"
As the passenger, it feels like large derivitive stuff is silent. The inner dialogue is mostly probing. But here is a significant amount of silence betweens questions. I don't have a visual canvas.
Are others answering these questions? Frequently, I have a silent mind but pondering takes probing.
Interesting! In my case, if I remember all of a sudden that I have to do laundry tomorrow, but there's a conflict, then I'll "speak" in my mind, with my own voice, saying "oh shit, tomorrow I have Bob's party and I haven't done laundry yet - all my clothes are dirty!!" Well, maybe with not that many words. Maybe more like "Oh shit, I forgot! How do I solve this...?"
It sort of sounds like yoi do it as a way of externalizing the questions, like it's a different part of your brain or your brain wants to make it clear to you that the question process is different from the answer process.
To me a question feels like knowing there's something behind my occipital bone and sensing it moving forward towards my eyes. So it's not verbalised but it's definitely a separate feeling.
Only 1-3% of people lack the ability to visualize images in their head.
Somewhat related, I recently realized I can't really remember the taste of food at all. I can remember the texture of the food, and whether I liked it or not, but not how it actually tastes. For example, I know I like chocolate but I have no desire to eat it most of the time because I can't remember anything about the taste except for the texture. But once I start eating chocolate and have the taste lingering in my mouth, I find myself craving more of it until the taste fades and I forget what it tasted like again.
Oh man! That is a perfect example! I have not able to understand the voice or the picture... Like you actually hear a voice or you see an image??.. But I totally understand the taste - almost like the shadow of a taste in your mouth for something that sounds good. I guess that's why what people say, "what do you have a taste for"?)
When I first learned that other people see and hear, I started asking around. From My polling, about 30% of people either don't hear or don't see. I've only found a handful of people who don't do either. I read some articles that say you can train the visual.
I have some very loud voices in my head. One is intentional, like when I read or write things out I hear my own voice in my head. At least one of them just talks shit to me all the time. It's not like schizophrenia "I hear voices", it's just a thought that I'm not actively having. When my depression gets bad it's gets really loud so I drown it out with music and books.
I can't see pictures in my head.
On another note, I'm pretty sure religious nutjobs really hear their own inner monologue and think it's a god talking to them. That's why their god always agrees with them.
The mind of an artist perhaps? I can see vivid film grade depictions of whatever I want in any style I can imagine.
Its quite frustrating when I know my hands could never produce what I see in my mind.