Your internal "voice"

Wow, there's some deep thought being going on here! Respect to those who have shared their 'inner world'.

I've never really got that deep into it, but I don't have an internal 'voice', and I totally think in pictures:

When I meet someone for the second time, I always remember their face, but rarely their name.

When someone asks me to spell something, I see 'scrabble' tiles shuffling around.

I work in IT, and visualise software constructs as physical things, like boxes with plugs and sockets hanging out of them, or those shape-balls that kids have with the different shape holes in them.

I have never been clinically depressed, as far as I know. Been p!ssed off about stuff, and occasionally miserable some days, but that's not the same thing. I tend to be generally positive in outlook, and always try to see the best in situations and people (that last bit is getting to be a struggle, in recent times...)

I rarely remember my dreams.

My wife is convinced that I probably fit on 'some spectrum or other' - partly in jest.

Am I weird? Not to myself anyway...life kinda works OK.

 

My inner world may be quieter than some.
I was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes at age 21. This has given me a certain way of looking at the world.
Injecting insulin every day has been part of my life for almost fifty years.
I've found a well structured life works best for me. Eat/sleep/exercise/insulin on a schedule makes life soooo much easier.
I think of this disease management sort of like a layer of system overhead. Think about processes running in the background on a computer. I have to think about
diabetes all the time, planning for any and all contingencies.
What would be a minor event for someone else will land me in the hospital.
This constant vigilance gets old and its just hard to think about the things I need to do, year after year.
Being relatively risk adverse serves me well.
With a well structured life I am able to some extent to put parts of my life on auto-pilot.
After all this time I don't actively think about my diabetes management. It is just part of who I am.

Markrk

 

I think I have a combination of verbalization and non-verbal thought. Rational and sub-rational.

At the rational level, I verbalize needs, desires, arguments, parameters, opinions, conditions, priorities, etc. in a form I could easily speak if I chose.

At the sub rational level, I visualize a little Beast in my gut that is just watching all this analysis go on. It integrates all it observes. The thing is the beast is strictly nonverbal. It can't join the argument. Many is the time I have approached a problem that had some uncertainties involved, talked it out with smart people familiar with the issue, and reached a conclusion where we all agreed on a course of action. Meanwhile, the Beast is just screaming, "No! Don't do that". It can't articulate an argument, it just says no. I learned the hard way that it is extremely risky to ignore the Beast.

Some of that spills over into playing, particularly when I am jamming with talented players. Initially, you are explicitly directing thing. Play this, then this, then that, and so on. If the magic starts, it's like a channel opens. The notes and rhythms are suddenly already there waiting to be played, and I just relax and let it flow through me. Doesn't happen much anymore, I'm not playing enough.

 

I usually try to let me mind kind of go blank then if something comes to me I try to remember it. I do not really think in words but I do try to imagine funny situations and the like

 

just farts, old man and sometimes stinky dog.... I wonder what that means?

 

Your wit is not wasted on me.

 

My wife has stopped asking me what I'm thinking about. But honestly, I'll have to think about whether my thoughts are in words or impulses. I do know the there is a lot of music in there. Maybe all three at once.

 

Science reveals much about the brain, but the mind remains obscure. Functional MRI indicates which regions of the brain are activated in response to stimuli of various kinds, and from this data we learn about the similarities of individuals, as well as differences. We also know that the brain has great plasticity.

But our instrument for gaining information about our thoughts involves our own minds, and language is one of the highly irregular cultural tools that we have for expressing our thoughts. Making non-verbal sounds, such as music, is another way of expression and communication.

The joy of playing music with others is profound when it works, whether improvised or not. There is no joy when our musical collaboration doesn’t work. Musical notes and harmonies are not verbal, but are perhaps nonverbal analogues for thoughts or feelings. Like verbal language, music is largely cultural.

 

I think in both words and images, depending on what I think about. I would say that I mostly think in words though. I have noticed that when I have visited the US, after about a week I start thinking in english. It also seems that I think slightly different then. Like my persona changes a little when I switch wich language I think in.

On a tanget, once while having a few beers with a friend who's born deaf, it struck me... I had to ask him this; When I think, I think in words. I hear them, I hear my thought in my head. How do you think? What is a thought for you?

His answer was that he sees written words. He sees his thoughts instead of hearing them. Apparently we must think slightly differently then.

Can we call him a mind reader?

 

I frequently have internal conversations / discussions with myself, visualise / imagine / see things in my head, and waken up in the morning with solutions to problems.
I’m highly numerate and cursed with a high IQ and Have long been aware that I think my way through problems rather differently.
I’m glad now to know I’m not on my own!

 

I'm actually not sure. For a period of a few years I was writing a software program as a hobby and was totally obsessed with it and would think about it while driving, etc. etc. but what was I really thinking? Code, structures, concepts? Then one day it more or less stopped, and I felt as though part of my brain actually had burned itself out.

Sometimes I dream in French, which I studied in Jr. High and High school, but not much beyond other than a few visits to France - maybe two weeks in my entire adult life. In these dreams, the conversations exceed my actual French skills.

I also have a musical soundtrack going frequently, often a song I am working on or completed recently. Those are like audio playbacks, often of just a small section.

I just tried thinking about what I have to do this weekend and visualized a pickup truck, not the words "pickup truck". I guess that answers it, I have to get a pickup truck and take some stuff to the dump.

 

So, this isn’t a topic that comes up every day on your average guitar forum. And thanks to all for such interesting, informed, and insightful commentary.

My thought process (as far as I can tell) is almost exclusively verbal. Most of my problem solving occurs as an imagined dialogue between me and someone I know—the cast of characters changes, depending on the subject and the nature of the problem.

So, yes, I hear voices in my head, and they’re not always mine. I don’t seem to control who it is at any given moment. Having said that, I’m always hoping for a conversation with Philip Marlowe (as played by Humphrey Bogart in “The Big Sleep”).

 

What I learned from meditation is that when my attention is not directed to an external stimulus my thoughts spring from impulses that emerge from some deep, unconscious area. If my mind enters a realm where I don't want to be, I simply move to a place where I have no thoughts (similar to introducing a mantra), and usually other thought impulses arise. If I can't extricate myself from destructive thought patterns, I have to move to some activity which diverts that part of my attention... like talking to my wife, playing guitar, painting, watching a movie, reading a book, whatever...

Idle minds are the devil's workshop.

 

Upon more thoughts and observations going into this train of thinking. I should also add that there are occasional instances where I have the pictures or internal movies thing going on. Often from a third person point of view. However, that occurs much less often than the guitar riff thing.

When I write or type I hear my voice speaking the words I write. That is probably why I get the complaint that I write like I'm talking when I turn in papers to my professors.

 

My thoughts are usually a mix of verbal and visual. And I'm sort of addicted to considering challenges or problem-solving in three and then four dimensions. This is a little hard to verbalize, but I have a habit of mind where I form a sort of three-dimensional abstract 'vision' of the challenge/problem and then consider it from all angles in seeking the best solution - and then I test my ideas/proposals by applying Time. Will the solution work short-term? Long-term? Does it hold up to scrutiny?

This may sound really inefficient, and maybe it is, but most times it happens really fast, almost instantly and unconsciously, though I'm aware that I might be considering many more possibilities than might be necessary. For larger challenges, like strategic planning at work or in my life (or in the arc of a guitar solo) it feels like a kind of play, an experimental construct in my head where I can consider or test a course of action without risk.

This isn't quite the same thing, but a few years ago I wrote an essay about how I experience a place, and how I try to capture that experience in landscape painting. The gist is that instead of showing just the distance, like a photograph, I try to capture slices of the foreground, middle distance, horizon... all the elements that show what it's like to be there, rather than just what it "looks like". This fragmented but knit-together notion is akin to the thought process I was trying to describe above. http://fivehundredmonkeys.blogspot.com/2014/01/horizons.html

This is a really interesting thread. Thanks to all who've thrown some thoughts down.

 

I spent a large part of my career designing and writing software. My thoughts are always a discussion with myself and mostly logically trying to resolve whatever triggered the discussion. I seldom think emotionally I only react.

I have to admit that over the years, my wife has assumed most of my decision making.

 

"Life is too short to have anything but delusional notions about yourself."
-Gene Simmons

 

I'm actually on an invalidity pension because of a mixture of psoriatic arthritis and autism. Officially it's asbergers, but I think it's just me somewhere on 'the spectrum', so-called.

My sensory perception can be a bit odd and sometimes....it happens almost like 'episodes'...it's like the volume and sensitivity controls in my head get turned up. Way up. So my fight or flight response is often on. Apparently this has always been so and has been my 'normal' since childhood. Looking back now I can see it. It makes you very tired, but I could 'muscle thru' and just try harder most of the time, but getting older and developing the arthritis (which is an immune system thing affecting all of me, not just joints) made it too hard....which is why it got recognised finally.

Anyway....part of it is something almost like what they call synesthesia. I 'see' words, and if I don't see it I often can't say it out loud. It can be my sister's name....but I can't say it if I don't 'see' it. That's just one aspect. Numbers have associated colours. The best bit is that I can sometimes 'see' music and can often play something cold...perfectly. So long as I have a memory or I know how it goes it just happens. Often band mates would say 'how do you do that?' I'll look down at my hands and say, 'I don't know'. Funny thing is, if I try to call out chords to the bass player, for instance.....words will not come out. I'll see my hand on a G chord but I can't say it....and if I try hard the wrong word comes out. I'll say F or D. If I do manage to say G....I then lose the rest of the song and stop playing.

This ****e doesn't always happen...as I said, it's like having episodes...but when it does it's now fun to observe myself.

Another side issue is getting sensory overload after driving a few hours and finding left and right difficult to remember....and which colours at lights mean stop and go.
I make sure not to drive too long at a time now...

 

Reading this post again it occurs to me that frustrated parents and later the police might ask similar questions!