Thoughts on thoughts

[ralphmelton]

One of the concepts I got from Ted Chiang was the term of thoughts being "phonologically coded". This is the way I experience my own thoughts--I experience my thoughts as a voice in my head narrating my existence.

But giving this experience a name emphasizes that it's not universal.

How do y'all experience your thoughts?


There have been times when I've lost that voice in my head of continuous narration. Those are fuzzy times for me--it's hard to really remember those times, so much so that I more easily remember the moments afterward when I said, "Wow, I lost my internal voice for a moment there."

Comments

[mg4h.livejournal.com]

I don't hear my internal voice like that. I acutally tend to talk to myself a lot. It's odd, not quite like there's another me, just like I have a constant devil's advocate around. Sometimes when I'm tired it's just me here and I can't think outside my own head like that.

I also tend to talk alot. I have that whole problem with "inside voice, outside voice" :)

[mrpeck.livejournal.com]

I've wondered about this in the past as well. My thoughts generally seem like a narration to me. Although audio input definitely does not work best for me. Visual input gets in faster and stays better. I don't really see pictures in my head though.

[beegle.livejournal.com]

Spatial token manipulation.

I have no inner narrator. People, emotions, ideas, places, etc. have an abstract token in my mind. I make associations between things by considering nearby tokens. If my opinion of something changes, I move the token to a more appropriate area.

The tokens don't really have an appearance or sound or feel or anything that corresponds to meatspace. They're just ideas.

For the longest time, I thought this was how everyone thought.

[laurabee.livejournal.com]

I also hear thoughts but am a visual learner.

The times when I've lost the running narrative are when I'm completely into something physical, the two examples I have are dancing and sex. If I lose it at other times, I don't really notice.

Having a beer seems to lower the threshhold from "inside voice" to "outside voice". Suddenly, more of my thoughts get verbalized, which is why I'm so talkative.

[cellio]

I think in a combination of words and visual images (mostly words), but it's not narration or auditory so much as "just words/phrases" -- maybe the internal half of a dialogue at times, but definitely not as all-encompassing as the word "narration" implies to me. And it doesn't really have the auditory component of an internal "voice" most of the time. (Sometimes it does, but I don't yet know what distinguishes those times.)

I guess I've never really noticed the absence of thoughts (though would I?). So, if you'll pardon the expression, I've really had to think about this in order to answer your question.

Me too, mostly

[(Anonymous)]

I somtimes experience an internal narration, but it's not continual. Often, perhaps, but not always. Is our internal narration reinforced by reading a lot? Is it a kind of rehearsed-conversation thing? Is it that we make sense of the world by telling stories, and so we continually tell stories to ourselves about what we experience, in order to understand and remember them (though, unfortunately distorting the experience in the process)?

Other times I experience things in other ways. I can't particularly say I have noticed, but I could easily believe that I don't remember those so well. I do seem to have a couple of blurred almost-totally-visual memories from before I could talk. I sometimes wonder if they are real memories, or constructed long after the fact. I suspect there's at least an element of a real memory in there.

Glen