[meat_machine]

there's probably quite a lot we unconsciously pick up from others, even things we think are uniquely "ours"

For example, when I first heard a deaf person laughing or talking, I probably internally noticed how... different the sound was. I'm guessing most hearing-abled people have a similar experience. It's very... unfiltered? It made me wonder how much even my own laugh was sculpted by my environment. If I relax my voice, I notice my voice becoming much more booming and obnoxious than my "normal" speaking voice.

Anecdotally, I've noticed Japanese people are much more likely to have a sort of stifled, raspy, restrained laugh, even when they're in a situation I might expect an American to have a belly laugh.

A lot of cultural values are encoded in language too, and in turn, the languages we speak can affect how we think or interact. Anecdotally, my personality is a bit different depending on what language I speak. I think the concept of what's actually encoded in language is being explored with regards to how/why LLMs "feel" smarter than they really ought to, or seem to show intelligence beyond simple "stochastic parroting"

Somewhat more obviously, most people will "code switch" not only their language, but vocal tone or even demeanor, depending on our current "persona" or our audience. Recently, Paris Hilton entertainingly demonstrated this: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/g9pal1ConNU

And this is more of a half-baked personal speculation based on a scattering of theories and case studies, but the environments we live in, the narratives we expose ourselves to, the people we surround ourselves with all probably very heavily define a lot of our values, beliefs, and even personal preferences, to an extent that would disturb a lot of people. Self-serving biases, post-hoc justifications, and confabulations give us convenient and creative ways to validate our own free will, volition, and independence, but I often wonder how much of our supposedly great human intelligence is an uncomfortably thin veneer on a largely automatic pattern-absorbing sponge.