[sparks1970]

Same here.

This video was interesting to me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dNQyubd9ARc&t=60s in it you are asked to shout "I like crickets" <In your mind> and then to whisper "I like crickets" again, in your mind and not out loud.

The presenter then claims, "The volume is the same because you can't change the volume of the voice in your head, only the tone and pitch."

My experience of trying this is that I can produce the phrase "I like crickets" in my mind but I have no conception of what it means to "shout" or "whisper" this in my mind and the idea that there is tone or pitch to the representation is meaningless to me.

I can think in words so that I can prepare to write something (like this) but there is no audio. I'd say it's more like a stream of words on a screen except that there is no screen, it feels more like a buffer. The experience is the same as reading to me, no audio, just a stream of words.

My partner says she hears her own voice in her head and it's quite critical, prompting her to action. I feel motivation to do things but there is no voice.

Can someone report on their experience with the crickets experiment above, do you hear a voice, can you change its volume or tone?

[jcrites]

> The presenter then claims, "The volume is the same because you can't change the volume of the voice in your head, only the tone and pitch."

Very interesting, and not at all true for me. I can imagine shouting "I like crickets" with a near ear-splitting level of volume, tantamount to the force of a storm with a shockwave. Imagine an anime scene where a character is radiating power, arms raised into the air, like Saurman calling a storm down upon a mountain in LOTR. When I imagine this substantial level of volume, my muscles want to start to tense, like my body wants to brace itself for an impact.

I can also imagine whispering the same thing. It is actually difficult to reduce the volume of the whisper down as low as I'd like it to go (as low as I could hear), but it's substantially lower "volume" than the shout.

I can get the volume even lower if I imagine someone else, or a voice from somewhere else, whispering it.

> I can think in words so that I can prepare to write something (like this) but there is no audio.

I can do all of these. I can think as a sequence of abstract thoughts, with no audio component (this is most natural); I can think as a sequence of words, which are optionally rendered as audio (I would do this if sounding out an unfamiliar word), and I can render audio in the mind as a particular voice (i.e. my voice or someone else's, similar to a deepfake). I could imagine Barack Obama speaking any arbitrary words in his particular style of dictation. "My fellow Americans..."

My most common kinds of "inner voice", though, are not speaking actual words, but ideas. They are often critical, or perhaps playing devil's advocate in some way. In fact, thinking using actual words is uncommon for me, unless I specifically need language in some way, so the "inner voice(s)" appear as a kind of alternative narrative to whatever my primary thought process is.

[pilgrim0]

I pretty much share the same capacities which you’ve described. Regarding the last part, about the inner voice not defaulting to verbal projections, when I reflect about what form such pattern takes, I can only interpret it as sort of “semantic impulses”. Explaining: we know very well the feeling of hunger (impulse to eat), but we can’t emulate it at will, because it’s tied to physiological state. The scope of impulses, however, is much broader than those extreme feelings, such as sadness, happiness, etc. There’s an infinite number of feelings, and new ones are created upon experiencing novel situations, and they’re unique to you. Those finer feelings, differently from the physiologically-bounded ones, you can summon upon recalling mental imagery which are anchored with the feelings and thus able to trigger them. Most people know cringe, nostalgia, etc, which comes when recalling past events; those, again are very crude and broad impulses. If we make an analogy with colors, strong (common) feelings are like primary hues, sitting at the extremes of luminance and saturation. Finer feelings are everything else and all the possible mixtures/overlays. Thus, I can conceive my mind to be a multidimensional canvas, and as the painter I can mix and match whatever colors I have at my disposal to conjure a complex sensation which progresses over time, and that I can make use of to manifest ideas, arguments, scenes, whatever I like. In this context, there’s absolutely no active verbalization (perhaps I need to repeat some phrase mentally to invoke the color I want, but this is just for the lookup process, what I am interested in is the yield, i.e what it will trigger). Then, when I’m satisfied with the general piece, and since it’s so unstable by nature, the finishing process involves piecing together the words which will index it. If it’s something of material use in the physical reality then it becomes a note. Of course I could use any other kind of graphics as the index, it’s just that language provides all these shared, easy to remember, stereo (picture and sound), malleable, composable symbols called the alphabet. It’s the most basic yet the most powerful tool we have at our disposal. The cool thing is that all of the experience of crafting these mental pieces has also increased my repertoire/palette, beyond the final product. Sort like all products can also be ingredients, or phrased differently: ending points become starting points for new explorations.

[scruple]

I can't shout or whisper in my inner voice. Wild. It'd never occurred to me to even try. But I absolutely have an inner voice. In fact, it's very noisy and sometimes I wish it would shut the fuck up. It's also oftentimes critical and forces me to action.

I also have aphantasia, so it's not words on a screen, it's literally me talking to myself in an internal dialogue.

[mandmandam]

I can change volume and tone.

There's something quite arrogant about groundless declarations of other's mental limitations. The other example that comes to mind is the notion that people only dream in black and white - so daft.

[jcrites]

I do think it is interesting to explore, compare, and contrast the operating modes and limitations of our minds.

Like you, I can also vary volume and tone of an imagined voice. I can make it arbitrarily loud, but there does seem to be a limit on how quiet I can make it, unless I'm imagining hearing a voice from elsewhere.

I don't think I dream in color, though, but I wouldn't call it black and white either. It's more like I'm dreaming of objects in an abstract space where color isn't relevant. I have memories of my dreams from time to time, and those memories aren't of a scene with color in them. I absolutely dream of conversations, and so perhaps I dream with audio, but I'm not exactly dreaming visually. I'm dreaming of circumstances. I can totally believe that other people might dream in color though.

[vidarh]

I think to some it's easy to assume because how you think feels so natural that it's hard to imagine how it could be different, and so much easier to assume it's just misunderstandings.

[SuperHeavy256]

> "The volume is the same because you can't change the volume of the voice in your head, only the tone and pitch."

Huh? That's not true at all, I shouted "I like crickets" in my head so loudly I told myself to stop shouting it's giving me a headache. I said this sentence in my head too, of course.