IIRC there were some interesting posts on this website about people who don’t hear their own inner voice. The topic took me by surprise at the time–I guess I just took it for granted that everybody had an inner voice.
Anyway, today I came across an interesting video about the nature of the inner voice (for those of us who do hear voices in our head), so I thought I would share it.
Without further ado:
By “hear” does it mean that most people actually hear sounds? Some of my thoughts are done with words, but I don’t hear anything. I’m going to pay more attention to it now.
In my experience, it is as if I hear my own voice much of the time, although I might also at times “hear” the voice of someone else, as when imagining a dialogue.
Yeah, this seems to match my experience.
It sounds like you have put some time and effort into understanding your own inner voice. Although I have contemplated mine many times, I did not reach many important conclusions. Now I will pay closer attention.
I would also like to mention that I do not always enjoy hearing my inner voice. It can be annoyingly persistent or repetitious at times. In some cases I employ strategies to simply drown it out—like reciting a mantra I learned when I was a teenager. At times I just want to quiet it down.
I still remember the first time I took a yoga class. As I was returning home I was shocked to realize the inner chatter had quieted right down. It came as a complete surprise to me that such a thing was possible: until that time, I fully equated the inner voice with thinking.
Actually, yeah. Earworms.
I found a very helpful trick. For me, earworms usually are a repetition of the most catchy part of the song. (Is that what is called the chorus?) They are the worst for songs where I have misheard the lyrics and have substituted my own.
It seems to help if I learn the entire lyrics correctly. Then each time the tune pops into my head I insist on singing the lyrics all the way through, from start to finish—instead of just the verse or two that my brain gets stuck on.
After a few rounds of the full song, my brain usually switches to a less annoying activity.
Very sorry to hear that. Perhaps I can suggest one other tactic:
Try forcing yourself to recast the lyrics (of your earworm song) into the tune of Oh My Darling, Clementine.
MY DARLING CLEMENTINE - YouTube 
I have done this a few times to deal with extreme cases. I originally came across this trick as a goofy game, but found it also comes in handy for getting rid of earworms.
O! The hazards of having a very powerful brain.
In the long run your current methods will definitely bring the best results.
That’s interesting. I get music stuck in my head, but I don’t think I have conversations in my head with actual voices. I can imagine voices if I consciously try, but there doesn’t seem to be any sound when I’m thinking with words. (A lot of my thoughts don’t use words.) The mental voice seems more like moving my mouth without any sound — producing words without the sound component.
Personal experiences here.
YES. I have TONS and TONS of voices in my head. In fact, I can almost name who’s talking to me. It’s like, often a version of people who I know. I also talk to them too, which is interesting.
A couple of other interesting things. When I talk to myself, I can also identify which person I remind myself of. So like, alright I listen to myself and, wow I feel like I’m talking/acting like my mom or something.
Other thing is, you can imagine people. There’s almost always a purpose. It’s not a random conversation for fun. Maybe I’m afraid to cook a new kind of food, so I imagine someone very friendly encouraging me and teaching me how to cook. Maybe they show me how to cut the cucumbers in the right way and I follow them.
Sometimes you can imagine someone doing something they way you wished you could do it. Like I want to start going to the gym so you imagine people going to the gym and doing it in a way which is, focused or admirable or peaceful. I think it can be encouraging.
Another thing are debates. Say I have no idea what to do or what to choose. Sometimes you can get the voices of different kind of people you know telling you their opinion. Suppose you do something you think was not smart – now you may certainly be called out by one of those voices. Also, I’m slightly pretending not to lie? Well, one of those voices might call me out and tell me I’m lying. Am I exaggerating something? Well, I might be called out on exaggerating. It’s actually quite nice and I don’t feel alone at all. You can also imagine them debating with each other. Suppose one of the voices wants you to do something, but then another voice doesn’t want you to do that, and then yet another voice wants all the voices to stop fighting – just like a movie seen.
Just reflecting
My Inner speech is my friend, who appreciates me for the tasks that I complete, I share my experiences to his, sometimes he is my best critic, he motivates me as well as hold me on the ground. I have shaped him over the years. I made him what I wanted him to be.
I “hear” the words, but also not actually hear them; similar to how when I think of an apple, I “see” an apple, yet also not actually see it.
My experiences and conclusions have been exactly the same. That “abstract event” I once used to refer to as “primordial thought-soup” in my private language. Recently, however, I found out there is a pre-existing term for it: unsymbolized thinking.
With the practice of Zazen meditation, I have over time become better at choosing when to employ unsymbolized thinking and when to think in words. I have found thinking in words to be more suitable when trying to derive elaborate/convoluted logical conclusions or while practising for a speech/interview/conversation. Unsymbolized thinking, on the other hand, is much more efficient and swift, almost like a reflex reaction, and more suitable for calculations and for a tranquil state of mind.
I try everyday to sort of remain in a perpetual state of meditation, wherein I perform everything through unsymbolized thinking solely. The reason behind this endeavour of mine is that I have found thinking in words to be much more taxing on my “internal energies” and that if I think in words for too long and too often, I tend to be more prone to daydreaming and imaginary conversations and experiencing flashbacks to the past. It is also hard to differentiate the internal voice and external influences while thinking in words; such has been my experience.
Perhaps surprisingly, thinking in words also makes me more prone to
and I, too, overcame them through
except that in my case, one of the superpowers bestowed upon me through zazen is the ability to fill my mind at will with dense nothingness (as paradoxical as it sounds) and decimate all pesky earworms.
Note that it is nigh impossible to think in words while simultaneously having an earworm stuck in your head. This made me wonder if earworms were actually “played” by the same part of the mind that “plays” the inner voice, and the earworm is actually your inner voice singing the music. I then noted that almost every track that got stuck in my head was one that had lyrics, and not instrumental and electronic works. Since then, I have cut the consumption of all music that has lyrics, reduced my frequency of listening to non-lyric music in general and what earworms that I get now are easily quenched using the zazen superpower I mentioned earlier, granting me back the reigns of my concentration immediately.
This line reminded me of how I stop hiccups and made me realize of how similar that process is to how I get rid of a earworm. Remember that one scene from Inception:
“If I ask you to not think of an elephant, what are you thinking of?”
“An elephant.”
You have to enter that meditative, identitiless, formless state wherein your body and mind are absolutely relaxed and your irritated diaphragm in the case of hiccups (or the irritated part-of-the-brain-responsible-for-thinking-with-voices, in case of thinking) revert to normal. If you keep thinking internally “I must not let that earworm in my head, I must not let that earworm in my head, I must not let that earworm in my head” you will not be able to get rid of it.
You make it sound as if we are schizophrenic haha. That is not the case, the voice(s) are us ourselves. They are just our thoughts spoken IN loud (as opposed to being spoken OUT loud).
Yes, it is the same for me as I mentioned above. Perhaps I and some of the others in this thread simply tend to think more with words than you do and have thus contemplated it more.
(Funny, though, how one can think about thinking. Funny how in my previous sentence, I think about thinking about thinking. And so on.)
I think it is a risky business to personify the voice(s) this way, lest one end up with some sort of multiple personality disorder. The voice is simply you, or parts of you. The creative ideas that seem novel just arose from the undetectable region of your subconscious to the detectable region of your conscious.
I see that @tarnation is an INTJ, and so am I. Though I dislike giving much weight to personality tests, perhaps those of us that tend to think frequently in words have similar MBTIs? Are you an INTJ or something close too, @user_7e ?
This was a very interesting thread. Thank you everyone for your inputs.
One day, hopefully. Contemporary limits of language constrain me.
Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent.
I should be able to put it into words once I understand it better.
Perhaps it is just a lack of training in my case, then, that I feel severe interference to thinking-in-words due to earworms.
Neat!
I did say “almost” for a reason. Instrumental ones don’t bother me as much as lyrics do.
I actually fear the effect of extremely catchy songs with shoddy, dangerous lyrics on myself, and more so on the self-unaware general population. There have been times when I accidentally heard a snippet of some popular song and went to sleep after a while and the first thing that I noticed in my “thoughtspace” after waking up after a full 8 hours of sleep was that catchy song thrown back at me. If music that is specifically engineered to be catchy goes into the subconscious so easily and stays there for so long, could it not be misused to mass-reprogram a populace? I was wondering if I should just buy industrial-grade earmuffs to protect myself from unwanted music exposure, but perhaps that would be a little too paranoid.
Sounds very interesting. I will mull over this for a while.
I can replay some words and phrases uttered by known voices from memory but not make them say whatever I want to. But then I’ve never tried that either.
Anyway, the important thing here again is that you are well aware that you are the one who’s having those voices speak to you, as opposed to them speaking of their own accord. That is what I was trying to say in that reply of mine to Josh.
Very interesting. I’ll try this sometime too.
In that case, I suppose being cognizant of the difference between one’s thinking patterns is all a matter of how self-aware one is and how much efforts one has made towards observing internal matters.
MBTIs seem to be just another label that people like acquiring to base their life around and feel a part of some community. They don’t classify true mental outliers well.
Thank you for your response.
Siddharth