Inner Voices
I came across this article last year and it sparked a fun discussion amongst my friends.
Do you have an inner voice streaming through your head?
I never really hear my thoughts. They just kind of “happen” in my head. When I speak, I never really rehearse it with an inner voice.
It turns out, most of my friends have an inner voice that they talk to all the time.
We were mutually stunned.
To me, it feels like an inner voice is inefficient. You have to translate your thoughts into words once into this inner voice, and then re-translate it back into thought.
But maybe an inner voice is helpful for writing. When I think about writing something, I feel great about a sentence until I read it back to myself on paper. Maybe this discrepancy has to do with the lack of an inner voice.
I don’t think I have “aphantasia” though. I can definitely create mental imagery. I just don’t speak or discuss with a voice.
I think the closest I get to a voice is when I read. I’m somewhat a slow reader though because it takes me a second to fully understand what I read into thought-space.
Maybe there is some chain-of-thought-like process happening in the background without a voice. I’ve always enjoyed solving difficult puzzles and math problems.