Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either [email protected] or [email protected].
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email [email protected]. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
6) No US Politics.
Please don't post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try [email protected] or [email protected]
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
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.