10 years ago, I’d have put my ability to visualise at 0 out of 10. Practice and occasional halucinogen use has got me to 2 out of 10. It causes no end of problems in day to day life, so I’m interested to hear if anyone has tips or just experiences to share so it doesn’t feel such a lonely frustrating issue.
edit informative comment from @Gwaer@lemm.ee about image streaming, I did a bit of digging on the broken links, the Dr isn’t giving the info away for free anymore without buying their (expensive) book, but I found some further info on additional techniques here, pages 2/3: https://nlpcourses.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Image-Streaming-Mode-of-Thinking.pdf
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.
It’s not a voice in one’s head like there’s someone else there. It’s like you talking aloud to yourself, but in your head.
The voice in my head is me. Sometimes if I watched a movie or talked to someone, the voice might sound different but it’s still me. It doesn’t talk to me, I talk with it. It’s as if I was speaking out loud, but only I can hear it. Look up subvocalization. This voice in your head is so much like talking that you make some larynx movements to match the words.
Visualization, or seeing things with your mind’s eye is similar. The closest metaphor I can come up with is if your regular perception was the main monitor of your computer, subvocalization and visualization would be the monitor and speakers on the side. It’s doing its own thing without taking away from the main monitor, and you can focus on it (zoning out), and for some people it’s higher res or higher quality than others. For you, there is only the main monitor and set of speakers. In this metaphor, there is nothing outside of the monitors and speakers in terms of perception.
Some examples of what my stuff works like: When I remember something I saw, it “plays on the second monitor”. Having a song stuck in my head is like having the “second set of speakers” play the song on repeat. If I say “this sentence is narrated by Morgan Freeman”, then my inner voice now sounds like Morgan Freeman. If I want to visualize anything, I “turn to my second monitor” and the thing is there. It can be still or animated, black and white, 2d or 3d, I can do it. I can’t do 4d or anything like that.
After that sentence, I read the rest of your comment in his voice, always a win when the inner narrator switches to such a velvety-rich voice.
Not the person you’re responding to, but yeah, the voice-in-my-head CAN (but does not always) sound just like actually hearing someone.
I have a caveat there because the “voice” that is “me” (that is to say, I don’t perceive it as someone else talking, but me talking/thinking to myself–it does not have the feeling of an outsider or stranger talking to me) does not always hold all the “information” of an actual audio voice.
Like, I don’t normally carry the same “pitch” as my real-life voice, it’s usually without pitch, but can still contain emotional prosody? It’s a shifting mix of soundless but verbal (as opposed to nonverbal) thought and sound-markers that indicate emotion in real life when spoken out loud.
However, I’m also a writer, and when I write dialogue of a character, it usually carries “sound information” much more distinctly in my head, like listening to a radio narrator or watching an actor. Like, a male character will have a lower voice, a female higher. A flamboyant character might pronounce and say things with a lot of drama and theatrics, where a stoic bored character might be closer to a monotone. It’s all controlled by me, by the way–it’s not schizophrenia where I perceive it as an outside person or force talking to me. But it is very “audible”. (But there’s still some mental filter where I know it’s thought and don’t mistake it for real in-the-present sound.)
…I did have musical training as a child which might play into my ability to have strongly imagined sound in my head. When I get songs stuck in my head, I actually do “hear” them. I hear the singer singing, but also the unique tones of the various instruments. So if a song has a guitar I hear that, but if it’s a piano I hear a piano playing it in my memory and not a guitar.
…these things don’t always have 100% fidelity though, it’s not like playing a file on a computer. It’s a fuzzy in-and-out-of-focus thing. But when it’s “in focus” it’s definitely something tagged by my mind as “sound”.
It’s pretty wild how we never think about other people having different methods of thought. When i learned that some people can hear in their heads i googled a bit and found some interesting articles about thinking in words, pictures, and patterns. There’s a Temple Grandin book about it - haven’t read it yet.
What’s it like when you try think through a math problem? Like do you just follow your feelings and intuitively get to the answer?
For me it’s definitely a clearly defined voice in my head. “First I do this, add those together…” etc
I don’t know. I just think about the idea of it i guess? If i want to build a flower bed and I need to know the area, I just measure and multiply.
That’s super interesting, thanks. Figure describing thoughts is pretty hard haha
Here is a well-done podcast about this: https://www.20k.org/episodes/voiceinside.
I have really strong audio imagination (if that’s a sensible term) and if i’m in a quiet area and relax sufficiently i can literally play music in my mind like an mp3 file, it’s precisely as wild to experience as you’d think it is. Obviously i’m probably not actually remembering all the details of the audio but to my subjective experience it’s like 95% identical to just listening to a pair of headphones.
But when i’m not relaxing and in a noisy environment it’s much less extreme, i definitely hear what i imagine but it’s like… in the background and on a separate channel so there’s no way i’d think i’m actually hearing it with my ears, and it’s significantly lower fidelity, more like how those AI tools tended to spit out things that are sensible on a surface level but when you look at the detail it’s nonsense.
I can totally make morgan freeman narrate my life so long as i remember what his voice sounds like, so if it’s been a while i’ll need to look it up online first to refresh.
And for reference i think? i have visual aphantasia, and my visual imagination works the same except that it’s like 20% as vivid unless i’m just about to fall asleep, and when i dream it’s fully vivid like real life.
Not the person you responded to, but yeah, I hear a voice as an inner monologue. It’s just my voice though… or rather, how I hear my voice when I talk. I don’t have other voices in my head as a general monologue.
Like, I can think of other voices and what they sound like, but it’s very much not ‘me’, if that makes sense.
Hard to describe but I’ll try. Not sure if you’ve played Baldur’s Gate 3, but it’s a lot like that; announcing things other people are doing, commenting on what I’m doing, or sometimes a choice phrase that my brain seemed to find amusing might repeat a few times. Sometimes it creates a full-on musical number, like a song from American Dad, based around some fairly-banal incident. I’ve spent around 30 years writing various types of music so not sure if it’s the chicken or the egg there.
I would think I’m insane if I hadn’t been assured by many people (and a psychologist) that having an internal narrator is perfectly normal. It’s when the voice starts talking directly to you and issuing commands that it becomes a problem, which fortunately I’ve never had. My stepbro is schizophrenic and from what he describes it’s nothing like my inner voice, his is quite malevolent and conspiratorial when he’s off the meds.
Is that how you write songs - by hearing then in your head first? I’ve wondered how musicians, artists, etc. produce art. I’ve started asking people if they have voice or images and most have the same reaction of shock that other people do or don’t.
AFAIK whilst some creatives do fully conceptualise the work in their heads then set out to externally reproduce it, the more normal approach is to have a less complete notion and then create something via the process. IE, a musician might have a melody in their head but then they will play it on the instrument and experiment with different variations and accompaniments to see what sounds good and build on it that way, rather than sit and think of an entire piece based on that, then play it out loud.
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.