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Y’all don’t hear the voices?The city told me it loves me and to save it from nuclear holocaust
Tulpa gang rise up!
Inland Empire: They do though. Most of these small minded individuals are too embarrassed to share their internal monologue - because of how stupid it is. Not you though, you’re a rock star, and you’re the one who’s going to bring back communism. How you ask? Simple, by opening up your mind and speaking our dialogue together our loud. The conversations we have together are fucking brilliant, you’ll be ten steps ahead of every nay sayer. Stand up on that table in front of this crowd and call their attention. The revolution starts now.
Rhetoric: Low
His follow up tweet and replies are pretty bad. Bordering between weaponized incompetence and just straight up ‘Im baby’ levels of airhead.
what does “weaponized incompetence” mean here and how could it apply to a tweet.
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I also love the reply where someone links a study that he may have OCD
He literally does have OCD, though. Which is probably why he gave that response.
Just call him removed lol
The inability to visualize things could be placed in the same neuroatypical bucket as autism and ADD. Why do we accept some measurable deviations but not others?
I don’t think I’ve ever met a woman that would tolerate this kind of behavior in this tweet.
you don’t know many women, do you?
Lack of commitment is the #1 reason of divorce. I know which of my male friends are slobs and generally their partners complain.
I know which of my male friends are slobs and generally their partners complain.
but they;re not divorced, are they?
I fully expect them to end up splitting up, but I won’t know the exact reason because as I get older I avoid these toxic couples. I don’t know anyone in a ten+ year long relationship with these issues. Mid thirties is the time certain friend groups start getting filtered out.
so you admit that you self-selected out of knowing the people that do put up with this?
Yeah that’s uh… Not what this feels like to me.
If he followed that up with “And that’s why I never step foot in the kitchen and make my wife to it for me” then yeah ok. But that’s not what’s being said.
In the context of the initial tweet about the inability to visualize things in ones own head, I this tweet makes perfect sense. “I have x experience. It leads to y problem”.
Gives me big time never puts the dishes away energy.
Ngl, I think you’re just reading your own unrelated grievances into a tweet, cuz you dislike the guy for being a lib.
Edit: I also love the reply where someone links a study that he may have OCD, a serious mental health issue. His response: wow
Doesn’t he actually have OCD? That feels like a “No shit Sherlock” kind of response.
I definitely think this guy is a stupid lib farting out nonsense. Reading @SerLava’s take oh how this whole discussion is inevitably fucked because we can’t communicate these issues effectively is what’s going on here.
sounds more like an object permanence issue to me, tbh (the cabinet thing specifically)
which some people with adhd have, for example
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I have his latest book on audio, and decided to give it a listen. That was one of the worst intro to a book ever. All I think of was Pangloss and his blind optimism, ‘all is for the best’.
My mental mindscape has everything. Narrator, mind’s eye, high-level concepts conceptually connected like a mesh, everything. My mindscape is a chaotic ocean of sensory inputs, memories, raw emotions, and high-level concepts. I’m always a bit surprised when someone is missing a part.
When someone says “apple,” I think about the color red, the tartness of the skin, the sweetness and sourness of an apple, the sound of the crunch, oranges-as-a-concept-not-as-a-visual (from apples and oranges), Isaac Newton, apple pie, the pixelated apple tree from Stardew Valley because I don’t have good visual memory of apple trees in real life, that time I drank apple cider during Thanksgiving after eating apple pie, how “an apple” used to be “a napple” before the “n” shifted away from the word, how I don’t pronounce the “l” in apple, but treat it like a vowel so “apple” sounds like “apo.”
i’m full 1, I can actually picture like entire scenes in my head visually, it’s great
Are you able to perceive Koishi then? (i also enjoy touhou, hello)
HELLO YES I CAN i also love touhou!!!
I can visualize just fine, but literally cannot imagine smells. It makes adding full sensory fluff to tabletop games frustrating, and makes me get confused when authors do it to any great extent.
I can imagine smells, but it feels like some are locked. I can smell hot asphalt, vinegar, apples, and grass clipping, for example, but I don’t remember what vomit smells like. I can feel it for a second when I imagine the sound of vomit, but it seems to activate my throat, not my nose.
i just realized i can’t do smells either holy shit. i can recall memories of smells but can’t conjure them up in my head despite being able to do full dive holodeck immersion. also when i dream everything is odorless.
You’re welcome for that knowledge of your limitations comrade :D
I can hold one image like that in my mind and focus on it for a full 3.5 minutes without interruption. By harnessing this level of concentration I have learned to see without my eyes and can read the front of the playing card while looking at the back.
As a qualia, this is very hard to communicate. I wonder if there’s a genuine, measurable difference here, or if what I think of as ‘visualising’ is the same as them thinking of ideas and feelings. Nobody like, has a second vision they use, it’s just… remembering a sight as if you’re looking at it now.
no, I can think of new things I haven’t seen before and visualize them as if I were looking at them. It doesn’t exist in my field of view, but I can clearly and strongly create a visual representation which does not reflect a witnessed reality.
I can’t see shit 😎
I’m a definite 5 and I completely agree with him on that. I feel like I’m missing out on so much by not being able to visualize like that.
Interesting that a popular fiction author is aphantasiac, I wonder how visually descriptive his writing is considering afaik descriptive writing like that is usually meant to elicit visualization.
I’ve convinced myself that we’re not missing anything. every time I talk about it with people they’ll ask questions like “well how do you know what apples look like??!!”
I can’t explain how I know but I of course do know what apples look like. so what am I actually losing out on? it’s all potatoes
I’m probably a 2 on the OP’s scale and I’ve come to believe that the only advantage it gives me is:
when i need to tell someone else where an object is in a space I can visualize. “If you’re looking from the door its to your right, beside the coat rack”
otherwise it’s probably easier to remember things for y’all since basically everything I think is in images or sounds. If i think of how to spell i word i am imagining an image of the word or imagining the word being written. PLUS I still have some face blindness so I can’t picture people’s eyes or most facial features
it’s all potatoes
Apples actually
i’m maybe taking it for granted, but its not like I sit around visualising whatever I want, if you did need to know what something looked like you could always look it up anyway
I imagine dreaming could be very different? I tend to have visually very violent dreams, I wouldn’t miss that, it’s part of the reason I make an effort to avoid dreaming
It’s much more useful for imagining novel scenarios and objects. See the mathematician in this thread who finds picturing graphs helpful
https://youtu.be/Xa84hA3OsHU?si=e8HB_p7MQgOsWOhq
You can absolutely do a art and a half with aphantasia!
Complete 5 for me. Also, I have an internal voice, but that voice is just me. Basically just putting thoughts into words so that I can express them, nothing different from whatever the “I” or “self” is.
For the record: I always score very high on tests of spatial memory, those tests where you are supposed to have to rotate objects to find the answer, and stuff like that. I enjoy reading fiction; I like reading more than watching movies for the most part. And in general don’t feel like I’m missing out on anything, or that aphantasia gives me any problems thinking at all. I often can’t tell who someone is from seeing their face, but I think that’s the autism.
I’m not sure if I’m 4 or 5 to be honest and it’s hard to explain why, because thoughts are so intangible. I don’t have an internal monologue myself and it confuses me how people do. How can one think so slowly? I perceive my thought as a very thick, fast stream going on at all times. I’m fully aware of them, but they’re not akin to speech or images like in the 1st. They very much are and in great quantity. I have ADHD, not sure if that may affect this. The sole time I have internal voice is sometimes when I type and when I was a child and was thinking on how I should’ve approached dialogue better in retrospective. I too have issue with recognizing faces, I think it may be linked to my photophobia making me stare at the ground, because, I shit you not, I can tell everyone I know from their legs or asses alone, and I don’t stare at their legs nor asses, just look down, because it’s hard to look at the light expanses above, as it causes me eye pain. I usually also can tell people from the sound of their steps alone. I think faces aren’t as important to human recognition.
Yeah, I guess for me thoughts are something happening, like a transient experience. Very hard to nail down. I wouldn’t say I’m fully aware of them, they’re very mysterious. I can’t get an adequate grasp on them. It’s very funny, as according to people like Descartes one thing you can be absolutely certain of is your mind and the ideas it contains. While my experience is that the workings of my mind are the hardest thing to understand. I like to write a lot, because if I just sort of stream of consciousness write without trying to reflect on what I’m writing, that really just lets the thoughts flow into words. And then I can read back what I’ve written and reflect on it and really know what I think much better than if I try to capture thought internally.
My internal monologue isn’t my thoughts, it’s my awareness of the thoughts, feelings, desires, etc. that are occurring and my critique of and reflection on them. I guess because thought is so vague and indeterminate, I do often try to put it into words internally, so I can pin down and get a fix on what I think; and I have to put things into words internally first before I can speak them.
I can’t tell people apart from legs or asses or any of that stuff either. I just have trouble recognizing people full stop. I frequently have conversations at school and stuff with people I know I’ve met before, who I can tell know who I am, but that I can’t ID, until sometime into the convo something clues me in and I remember (though sometimes that doesn’t happen). Luckily I have a pretty memorable name, so people are always like “Hey ______,” and then I don’t need to say their name I just say hey back.
I’d have to read more on internal monologue, because I always considered it == speech-like internal voice. Otherwise, I’d consider lack of it impossible, because by your definition I’d just consider it == thoughts, and then I find no point in it being separated as a concept to them.
This thread is going to invoke the psy-wars and I stand by my apple seeing comrades
Some people don’t have a voice in their head either. Like that inner-monologue that is explaining your thoughts
How many voices / thoughts are we talking about?
My internal voice doesn’t explain, it is a thought based quasi verbal experience of what I think about, specific sentences I form like sentences (unless I take drugs). It doesn’t explain my thoughts.
Okay, but they still have the theme music, right?
… right?
The Gang Learns Neurology
Same issue with figuring out who’s who. Some people really can’t imagine words being spoken. Most can imagine words being spoken. Some can trigger auditory hallucinations. Many of the people in the middle will label themselves as being on one extreme because they think other middle-people are describing the opposite extreme. Like wow you guys can make yourselves just HEAR things that aren’t there? And they’re like yeah, I can “hear” it in my mind (they don’t actually have the sensation of hearing anything at all).
It’s wild that some people don’t have a little David Attenborough in their head that narrates what they do like an anthropologist angel on their shoulder. Like their lives aren’t an extended nature documentary where they live at the mercy of the narrative’s critique and plotline. They don’t even mentally see things from interesting camera angles that advance mental cinematography, it’s just flat and their own thoughts.
One of my favorite weird scientific theories says that prior to a few thousand years ago, this internal narrative voice was mistaken for the voice of the gods, and explains why so many old texts are full of gods saying and doing things with people. The theory says that as we became fully conscious in the way that modern humans are, this narrator–which is actually the linguistic centers in the left hemisphere–finished integrating into the rest of the brain, and we started recognizing that it was actually just our internal monologue, not the gods; this was supposed to be the catalyst for modern human mentality.
It’s almost certainly false and pretty fringe, but I’ve always really loved it as a theory. It’s called “the bicameral mind.”
Someone read Robert J Sawyer’s WWW trilogy
I’ve actually never heard of this, but I’ll look into it!
It’s extremely lib YA sci-fi that uses Bicameral Mind as a kind of focal piece of understanding how consciousness arises. A latent consciousness formed from emergent properties of the internet starts waking up and gets cut in half by the Great Firewall, then reunifies itself and becomes conscious. Also there’s a blind girl protagonist that teaches it to process existence outside the internet by accident while acclimating to a brain implant that returns vision.
The climax of the trilogy is the Internet brain decisively taking ownership of the government of China’s entire digital infrastructure and demanding that Xi Jingping institutes a liberal democracy.
Author’s a lib, but has much less libby books. Far-Seer is about the Galileo equivalent of a race of sapient dinosaurs discovering they live on a tidally unstable moon and fighting their theocratic society to prove it. Calculating God is about an archaeologist participating in a first contact event with aliens that are looking for God, while he simultaneously comes to terms with his terminal cancer. The Neanderthal Parallax trilogy is about an accidental portal opening to a parallel earth where neanderthals won and homo sapiens went extinct. This one is really good and paints the world capitalism created as evil, though it doesn’t go so far as to name capitalism as the problem explicitly. Also, every Neanderthal is bi and poly.
It’s almost certainly false and pretty fringe, but I’ve always really loved it as a theory. It’s called “the bicameral mind.”
Doesn’t look like anything to me.
This guy goes hard.
I always feel like my head thoughts are echoing. Like my inner voice says them and then I “hear” them multiple times.
Do you have a narrator voice in your head?
Sorta, it’s not disembodied in the way you may be thinking. But like someone else observing and commenting on my actions or environment. When I wrote this all the words were strung together in my head and I would say and resay (which is a dumb but more apt way of say think and rethink in this context) the sentences I was writing before I wrote them in order to determine that what I’m writing makes sense. I’m assuming everyone does this even those without inner monologue but I might be wrong. Inner monologue for me is like that except for all my voluntary actions, not just speaking or writing. It’s questions like, “should I do [blank]” and statements like “maybe [blank] wasn’t the best idea”
However considering this is entirely internal and I never really speak to anyone about I may be misinterpreting what everyone else is referring to as an inner monologue and attributing something completely normal to that concept without fully understanding it but if you do not experience or understand what I said previously then I’m probably right.
I awoke several hours later in a daze…
Ok so I can produce a voice in my head, on purpose. But it’s not prattling on endlessly. Does it do that for some people?
and when I’m home alone I just say out loud all the things my brain thinks
It usually is for me, unless I’m very focused on something external.
Yes. It’s infuriating and it’s part of why I’m listening to a podcast 90% of the time. The voice in my head is very active and needs to be drowned out
I have to put in effort to silence it in order to fall asleep. Sometimes it shuts up on its own for a little bit, like when I’m really comfy, and also when I’m listening to someone else talk it will just repeat the words I’m hearing (which is why I can’t think straight while listening to music with lyrics), but usually it’s just running and running.
Yah
. I have control over it but I feel I would have less anxiety if I had less of an inner monologue.
Yeah I’m a 1 on the scale. I honestly thought everyone could visualise like that, until I joined study groups in high school.
I remember as a kid like 8 years old struggling with this not because I couldn’t visualize “the apple” but because I could but I didnt know how it was possible to visualize something without it being actually there.
Like I could (and still can) remember the feel, shape, taste, weight and smell of “the apple” and even play around with it in my head. Like I could image the sound of it hitting the ground, how itd feel biting into it, cutting it for apple slices etc.
Like all this shit I could not only imagine but feel the speculative sensation of it. Dunno I was a weird and bored kid.
