I can sometimes imagine and blend flavours in my head with some degree of reliability. It doesn’t always work out exactly as I imagined, and sometimes it defies me and I just have to try it for real, but for example I imagined the flavour of pears combined with star anise and it did work exactly as I had hoped (and it was very good)
I’m not good at meditation. I’ve tried, but my mind really resists quieting itself in that way. However, if I am truly immersed in an activity, I am focused on that activity without extraneous thoughts.
The same, though I would amend “most of the time” to all of the time in my case.
Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban had something to say about consciousness:
Lorna said to me, “You know Riddley theres some thing in us it dont have no name.”
I said, “What thing is that?”
She said, “Its some kynd of thing it aint us but yet its in us. Its looking out thru our eye hoals. May be you dont take no noatis of it only some times. Say you get woak up suddn in the middl of the nite. 1 minim youre a sleap and the nex youre on your feet with a spear in your han. Wel it wernt you put that spear in your han it wer that other thing whats looking out thru your eye hoals. It aint you nor it dont even know your name. Its in us lorn and loan and sheltering how it can.”
I can call up smells in my mind, but not vividly. It’s like looking at them through a sheet of glass. I can discern them, but I can’t touch them (if you’ll pardon the synesthesia) with my mind. Much like what Thorny Locust describes:
When I imagine pulling the wild chamomile or harvesting mint, I’m not smelling their scent; but I know the experience of smelling their scent, and the differences of their scents, if that means anything.
Not me. The inner voice is always the hyper-rational executive override. Sometimes that’s to not eat the chocolate cake. But often enough it’s the opposite kind of thing. An annoying part of my lizard brain almost universally tries to make me feel bad when I’m about to go on a trip or significant activity of some kind–even when I’ve done that activity a bunch of times previously and enjoyed myself. There are no words, just a depressed mood, and an obvious attempt at emotional manipulation. The inner voice has to come in and say the trip is still happening, I’m going to enjoy it no matter how you make me feel now, and I’m still going to pack and do all the other required prep regardless. So just quit it. It never does, but I’ve managed to override it most of the time.
I don’t agree. That is me, not something else looking out of my eyes. It’s just not the part of me that uses words.
In a lot of people the part that uses words seems to want to deny that the rest of the self is part of the self. I don’t know whether that’s cultural.
(And much of that would be pronounced exactly the same if spelled in standard English; and it’s dialogue, not the character’s writing. Is the author trying to make some sort of huge repetitive point of the character being semiliterate, as if that would guarantee their spoken language would be weird? I find that sort of thing annoying.)
I think for me imagined smells are even vaguer than that; but maybe it’s just a matter of different types of descriptions.
Something else occurs to me: We have people in this thread who can visualize things as if they were seeing them with their eyes; and people who can hear things in their minds as if they were hearing them with their ears; and people who can’t do one or either of those things. We have, I think, some people who can imagine smells, not quite that clearly, but almost as if they were smelling them; and others who can’t.
Can anybody (or everybody) else imagine proprioception? Feel the movement and position of your muscles as you imagine doing something, even though you’re not actually moving at all, or not moving in that fashion? Because that I can do quite vividly.
I think I’ve pretty well eliminated the inner voice I had when younger. On the theory that it’s the subconscious talking to the conscious mind, a sort of code-switching by putting it into words the conscious mind can easily understand. I’ve lived so much life of the inner mind over the years, what with yoga meditation, shamanic trances, and psychedelic experiences, that the subconscious is familiar enough territory to my conscious mind that they interact directly without needing that code-switching go-between to put it into words.
This is why I have inner music. Without the chattery voice, only music remains. My mind has always been keyed to music, probably since before birth as the daughter of a musician and then growing up a musician in my own right. I can’t shut it off, and I don’t want to. It’s integral to who I am.
When I do talk to myself, I make it consciously deliberate and even vocal. It’s usually along the lines of “Whoa. Girl. What are you doing?” or “Girl. Be careful!” But this is outer voice as opposed to inner.
As a linguist long absorbed in learning the phonologies of many languages, I’ve gone a bit batty in that my Broca’s area now spontaneously generates random syllables, usually with no meaning. With no more inner voice to buffer them, these random syllables often spill out vocally à la Tourette’s. If someone overhears it, for all they know I’m speaking in some real but obscure foreign language. If they ask “What does that mean?” I have to answer “Words of unknown meaning in a language that doesn’t exist.”
I can do that, but not at all vividly. Better than I can visualize.
So far I have:
mind’s ear: as good as a regular ear
mind’s eye: clearly defective
mind’s nose (and tongue): non-existent
mind’s body: functional but not vivid
mind’s fingers (sense of touch): can think clearly about, but can’t feel mentally
I should add that I can turn on an inner voice at will. I use it for doing linguistics in my head. But I use it more as a virtual audio file than as discourse.
Another use for it is preparing an argument or discourse intended for later use, in my head without a notepad. A notepad is probably better for the purpose, but I don’t always have one to hand.
For me:
mind’s ear: close to nonexistent
mind’s eye: also close to nonexistent
mind’s nose (and tongue): slightly but not much more functional than eye and ear
mind’s body: vivid
mind’s fingers (sense of touch): not as vivid as mind’s body, but better than the others
It’s not specifically with “badly written dialogue” but more when I’m reading something written in a specific dialect, say, Cockney. I have to read that dialogue “out loud” in my head to get the meaning. My normal reading style renders it mostly as gibberish.
Returning to this to add a data point: My wife says she doesn’t sound out words while reading, suggesting that not having that inner voice while reading does/can lead to faster reading.
I remember as a little kid being very disappointed that I couldn’t taste the food I’d eat in dreams. I must have worked on it, because I gradually I was able to taste it while I was dreaming. I also can completely call up the smells, tastes, and textures from a meal I especially enjoyed. I can also imagine tastes when I read a recipe or a menu description. Always a surprise with my imagination was wrong!
I’d agree with heavy dialects (where just parsing the words is difficult), but light accents actually help. The problem I have is with long chains of vague-sounding dialogue where the author hasn’t given the characters a unique way of speaking and hasn’t thrown in the occasional “he said”, “she said.” I lose track of who is saying what. So I give the characters a male/female voice or an accent or some other quirk and play out the conversation in my head that way.
Mind’s ear: I acquired perfect pitch by memorizing the pitch of C one octave above middle C. I hit upon this while playing Mozart’s piano sonata in C major K. 309. The first note is a C major grace note arpeggio with a strong emphasis on the C. All I had to do was recall the opening bar of that sonata and I had C in my mind; then I could find all the other notes from there by modulation.
Heh, yeah. I do have an inner voice. It’s normally just me chattering away with myself, or me sounding out the words I’m reading or writing in my head. Sometimes it gets ahold of the lungs and mouth, and it gets to let everyone know what I’m thinking. The most recent time that happened when someone was around to hear it was when I got a particularly demanding email from someone named Raphael. I exclaimed, “I don’t even know who the fuck you are, Raphael!”, in the middle of my office. Fortunately my co-workers are used to it, and the burst out laughing.
I am able to visualize things really pretty well, but I don’t do it by default. So, I can think about and talk about horrible stuff without visualizing it. When I do that, it is kind of distressing to people who visualize everything. I do have non-textural thoughts about things that do happen in text, though. When debugging something I’ve written, I’ll often visualize the objects or variables I’m working with in a non-textual way.
I can imagine proprioception. I’ll refresh my memory of guitar and bass parts by imagining what my hands do when I would be playing them.
I can also mentally recall tastes and smells pretty easily. The smell of leaded gas isn’t coming back anytime soon outside of an airport, but it’s never leaving my mind.
And if I’m not actively reading, writing or thinking about something; the jukebox starts up. I’ve spent days trying to figure out where the instrumental part that’s been repeatedly running through my head came from.
I have an inner voice, but I try to tune it out because it sounds like Daffy Duck and it annoys me.
Did you really write that!?! You’re dethpicable!
See what I mean!
It looks to me like trying to represent some kind of dialect sounds like, with the vowel combos and such, but then there is the digit 1 thrown in, so yeah, that’s a bit annoying.
Riddley Walker is an experimental novel written in what future English will become a few hundred years after the nuclear holocaust wipes out civilization. It opens up many possibilities for Joycean wordplay. It got good reviews. It reminded me of Huckleberry Finn’s use of nonstandard English.
A lot of my “inner voice” is non-syntactical or in “the language of thought.” Thought, whatever it is, has this strange penchant for delivering entire memories and complicated feelings all at once, often without words. I can recall an entire complicated event in a millisecond and it all appears and gets processed instantaneously. It can be jarring. Most of our thoughts and inner cranial workings seem to take this form.
As to an inner voice, I do have one, but only when I’m reading something particularly difficult, or when I lose concentration and need to get back on track. I have talked to myself with my inner voice, which I seem to able to do at will. I can also mostly ignore it, but sometimes it shouts too loudly to ignore. It’s bizarre. Are such things emergent properties of grey matter? It seems entirely non-physical, but it could have physical roots as well. Kind of like the self itself (there’s a nice sentence). There doesn’t appear to be anything inside of us that we could call “a self,” but the multifarious workings of numerous mental processes appear to create the appearance of one. These processes all seem to share a focus and we call this thing “a self.” So who do I have inner conversations with? Myself? Some mental process? Some amalgam of nerves and neurons? I don’t know.
A very interesting book. Seems almost unique: Russel Hoban himself did not write anything else at all similar as far as I know.
Well worth a read.