SIO227: Do You Have an Internal Monologue?

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:29 Thomas: Hello, and welcome to Serious Inquiries Only, this is episode 227, I'm Thomas Smith, that's Jamie Lombardi, how are you doing, Jamie?

0:00:35 Jamie: I am doing alright, Thomas, how are you?

0:00:37 Thomas: Well, I am excited, because we are going to take a break from politics right now, that is exciting, not terribly excited about politics, but excited that we not going to talk about politics. Sound good? Good deal?

0:00:53 Jamie: Yeah, hard, hard same, I um, really cannot handle the, the nightmare timeline anymore, um so I am really looking forward to this non-political diversion from It. Yeah.

0:01:04 Thomas: Okay, so, Iowa, okay, let's talk about it, so we got, no, I kidding, we are But, yeah, at least what can be said about the timeline is that it finds new ways.

0:01:17 Thomas: It finds new and ever better ways to F with us. It's amazing. That.

0:01:23 Jamie: All I'm saying is, uh, you know, the idea that like an evil genius is, uh, evil demon is screwing with us about the nature of reality doesn't seem so far-fetched anymore, and I think we need to give that a little bit more consideration than we previously have. Yeah.

0:01:37 Thomas: I, for one, welcome our demon overlords. All right. But, you know, we're going to talk about something that is, from my understanding, actually kind of a topic of philosophy these days, which is perfect for a philosopher and Jamie Lombardi. And it's also just super interesting to a lot of people. Something made the rounds the other month and it's kind of come in a few waves, but it went a bit viral that some people have an inner monologue. Probably, I think most people, is my understanding, have an intermonologue, but some people don't. And I don't know how this came up between you and I, Jamie. Maybe I just saw you tweet about it on Twitter or something. I can't remember. But we instantly figured out that one of us has an internal monologue and one of those doesn't.

0:02:25 Thomas: And we thought it would be so fun to talk that through. And also, Jamie's got done some research on it and can speak about it from a more educated perspective, perspective, but hold on, we'll let people guess who has the internal monologue and then who doesn't, and then I think, I wonder if people would know just from, just from knowing us, I don't know, probably, what do you think?

0:02:46 Jamie: I don't, I don't know, that that's, that's interesting, and that's something that I want to look into more, if they've done research into the different, the neuro differences in people who have an inner voice and and who don't, but you're right. This came up between us because I had tweeted about it. The original tweet was from someone working at MIT's Language Lab, and they were working on language, and they tweeted that they were absolutely shocked to discover that some people's sense of their inner voice or their inner monologue is experienced as having some sort of sound-like component, opponent, that they hear, and I'm using that in quotation marks, obviously, their own voice or the voice of their grandma when they think of something their grandma said inside of their own head when they're thinking to themselves.

0:03:37 Jamie: And this person at MIT was absolutely shocked to discover that people had internal monologues. And it was like a poll, right? It was like, like, do you have an internal monologue? Do you hear yourself when you think? And my first reaction to this was like, well, that's obviously absurd. Nobody has an auditory component when they think to themselves. That's not what thinking is like. And so I clicked it to answer no, because obviously that's ridiculous. And it's not how thought works. And I saw that 95% of people actually did have this inner monologue. And I had this moment where, oh shit, I'm the weirdo.

0:04:16 Thomas: Yeah. You are.

0:04:18 Jamie: And this has shaken

0:04:18 Thomas: The weirdo. Reveal, big reveal. On this show, everybody, Jamie is the weirdo in this respect.

0:04:26 Jamie: Me to my core. I think I would fling myself off a bridge if there was noise and voices inside of my head all of the time. I literally cannot even fathom the horror show that that must be like. Like, and then this, yeah, no, I'm just so shaken by it. I thought, like, this has to be wrong, this Twitter sample, right? Just, it can't be right. It's Twitter, it's not scientific. So I sent the screenshot to a friend of mine, and I was like, this is crazy, right, nobody has an inner voice, that's not real. And they immediately responded, like, what the fuck? And I'm like, I know, right. Like, this is completely made up. And they were like, no, lunatic, what do you mean that you don't have this? So it's been, it's been Really disorienting For Me to Realize All of you are aliens.

0:05:08 Thomas: That Is That Must Be that Must

0:05:12 Jamie: So

0:05:12 Thomas: Be really, okay, well, before we get into talking about some of the philosophy and the science or whatever, I just have to, now we need to know things about you, Jamie, the me and the audience, I'm sure, are wondering. I have several questions because I am the, I couldn't be more opposite, and part of it, it is also, I'm baffled on two counts. One, well, okay, I baffle on a thousand counts, but a couple that come to mind. One, all my thoughts are in language, and I, you know, I, there's some things that people will say that I don't quite agree with, and I'm sure there's variance in how people's inner monologues are. Like, I don't talk to myself exactly, I know some people do, but I do constantly, my thoughts are in the form of language and all that, and when I read, that's in the, you know, I essentially hear it in my mind.

0:05:59 Thomas: And I think that's, I'm speaking for the 85, 90, 95% of people, I think. But another part of this for me is I'm also a musician and I have songs in my head 24 hours a day, all the time. Literally do not ever not have a song in my hand. Now, I think I'm, you know, a little more musically inclined than the average person. So I don't know how, how, you know, frequent that is, like how common that is. But I want to know first question for you, Jamie, talking to a philosophical zombie here, apparently, who doesn't have a monologue. What is what is don't you get songs stuck in your head or and or if you don't, how have you gone this long hearing people talk about earworms and songs stuck stuck in their head and, Oh, I can't get on the Macarena. God damn it. It's playing in my head all the time. You mean? How did What you not think something was up or

0:06:53 Jamie: Like, I generally struggle with metaphor, like poetry is also not accessible to me, and I just thought that they weren't meaning that literally, like the idea of hearing like a song in my head is like conceptually incoherent to me, even songs that I know all of the words to, once I hear the music, I cannot in any, I can't even really make sense of the description of it, hear the sound of it in my head, and I can, you know, do the lyrics, especially if I start with any of the Hamilton lyrics, which I know isn't supposed to be cool anymore, but, you know, whatever, I still love Hamilton, I can do all of the lyrics, but I can't hear it In my head. I didn't think people actually meant that literally. And,

0:07:44 Thomas: No, I, now I'm literally hearing the Macarina. Now that I did that to myself.

0:07:48 Jamie: I I actually can't even think of what the Macarena sounds like right now, despite knowing that it's a very popular song. And as soon as it came on within three seconds, I would very quickly identify it, know what it is, know the words, know, the dance moves.

0:08:01 Thomas: Uh, my gosh. But like, if you try to sing a song on your own, like you're just sitting here, no music playing you you're able to do that or no.

0:08:05 Jamie: If my life, no, that would be really hard for me. It would be, it would for my life. Do without music because there's no sound in my head to ground it.

0:08:20 Thomas: So interesting. OK, I have another question, which I can't. OK, I'm going to send you something. I need you to see this and react. Don't worry, it'll become clear to everybody. I just want your reaction to this because this is another thing that has baffled me about this is you have not been able to get this the following meme. So please read and react, to it.

0:08:42 Thomas: So, I just sent Jamie a meme that you've probably seen, people probably seen, which is Morgan Freeman's face and then the text, usually, I mean, there's a couple of them, but like usually the point is, hey, you know, a happy birthday or something, and then it says, you you just read that in my voice. Uh, because when you see Morgan Freeman, uh, 90 to 95% of the world hears this stuff in his voice. And I've now, my, like one of the first things I've wondered is like, wait, so did Jamie ever see that meme? What, what, what did you, had you ever seen that before? What did you think about

0:08:42 Jamie: Yeah, I can't hear his voice.

0:09:15 Thomas: It?

0:09:15 Jamie: So I'd seen it before. And so I know that he has a distinctive voice that I would be able to recognize if people played a series of voices. I would be able to pick out his voice as distinctive. And different voices have different cadences. Like Barack Obama, for example, has a very particular way of speaking, as does Bernie Sanders, although they're very different, right? And so when people say I can hear things in their voice, I take that to mean they can sort of imagine the cadence that they're using, the sort of linguistic tics, and not that they actually meant they could hear their voices in their head, because that's clearly impossible.

0:09:53 Thomas: So it's just so amazing. Oh, this

0:09:59 Jamie: So like, which just would never occur to me that anybody could mean that literally, because Because it's so foreign to my experience of the world that it just was outside anything that I considered was literally possible. And then I brought this up in all of my classes because I needed to take stock. I was like, am I just the weirdo on the internet?

0:09:59 Thomas: Is the best.

0:10:19 Thomas: I can imagine this is a like

0:10:21 Jamie: Am I just, yeah,

0:10:21 Thomas: A very interesting thing to go through, like, you must really, all joking aside, this must have been pretty shocking, right? Wow.

0:10:29 Jamie: Because apparently the overwhelming majority of people are having a conscious experience that I completely lack. And you joke about calling me a philosophical zombie, but I had a moment where I was like, oh shit, is this evidence that like I'm one of the robots from Westworld, like, I don't, I don't hear voices, and then I was, you know, I talked to a couple of different friends about this because this really made me uncomfortable that there was this whole realm of conscious experience that was just foreclosed to me, and there were these like obvious things apparently that I had just just overlooked and missed completely, because I just thought was, you know, metaphor that I didn't quite get. But apparently the movie Inside Out, which I thought was delightful and wonderful and I loved, was meant to represent like the different voices people literally hear in their heads,

0:10:47 Thomas: Maybe I wouldn't

0:11:25 Jamie: Encourage them to go to like different directions.

0:11:26 Thomas: Go that far hold on hold on let's not, I want to help you out, let's not get too carried away. I, I don't really think that's very literal. I mean, part of that movie is like, it's more your emotions, you know, like you, you feel a certain, like, I don't, I don't have, and I imagine this is most people, I know, it's not like I have an anger emotion in my head that's like, "Thomas, you should be mad at that," you know, like you don't hear that, that's, some of those are just feelings, and then I think most of that in the movie is just feelings. So I only say this because it seems clear that this is information that you have no access to, given that you don't experience things in the same way, and it's so interesting to me. Anyway, oh, I, I was just going to say one, one more thing before I want to hear about the, you know, the reading you've done on this, but I can kind of relate to you slightly because I had an experience on Twitter sort of similarly, I don't know, a year ago.

0:12:21 Thomas: Actually, no, I think I remember Arlo had just been born. So yeah, like eight, nine months ago, but anyway, um, somebody had talked about whether or not you have a mind's eye. Have you seen that one too? Have you looked into that at all?

0:12:34 Jamie: Yeah. So is this where you can visualize images in your head where if I were to tell you, like, imagine a red triangle, Could you literally see, or not literally, but have an experience of a red triangle that could be coherently understood as seeing a red triangle? Yeah,

0:12:37 Thomas: Right. Yeah.

0:12:50 Thomas: And for a minute I was like kind of legitimately scared that I didn't have this ability, um, but then after going through, like, I, I did a sort of similar thing to you where I was like, oh my god, this is a thing people can do, and I looked all into it, and then after, like, kind of trying to do it and doing some of these tests online just to see, like, yeah, this is what people, you know, report of doing. I concluded that I, I do have a mind's eye. It's just really weak on color. Like, and I've always wondered why I'm so bad with color of any kind. If I can't, if someone says, like, oh, imagine a, you know, a green triangle or whatever it might be, I, my, I kind of do a thing where my brain labels it as green, but I don't really see it. But then the more I realized that I do have a mind's eye for like faces and stuff, like, so I don't not have it, but I just think on the spectrum of how vivid mine is, I think mine's pretty low.

0:13:43 Thomas: And also I'm really bad with colors and like the information doesn't stay. Like I can't really, I can't really keep an image in my mind very well. Um, like, I've, I remember speaking to people who would, you know, for example, in school trying to memorize stuff for tests and they would say like, Oh yeah, I do flashcards and I can kind of see the flashcard, like where, you know where where the information was and how I wrote it or whatever. And I was always thinking like, I can't do that at all. I just, I still use flashcards, but I just remember the information. Like I don't, I don't see it at all, so I can kind of relate. Now, now I'm curious. Do you have a mind's eye? Is there any correlation between those two things, do you think?

0:14:19 Jamie: So this is really interesting. I do have a mind's eye, and one of the ways that I have studied in the past is with flash cards, and similar to the story that you're relating, I've been able to recall where that information was located on flash cards.

And it's in fact a big part of the reason I can't make the transition from physical books to digital books, because I can see sort of in my mind's eye where a passage is in the book, or where my notes are, or the underlining, and I can identify, I can find the passages in physical books much faster because I have some sort of visual memory of the shape of the paragraph or the size of the margin or something.

So I do, I do have that, and so it was really interesting, before this thing about the inner voice blew up on Twitter, this, I can't pronounce it correctly, but like it's called aphantasia or something like that, a phan, when you can't see. So that had sort of made the rounds on philosophy Twitter maybe a couple of weeks or a couple months before that, and that was really really interesting to watch, because in that scenario, I was in the majority, where I

0:15:12 Thomas: Oh yeah, that's right. Yeah, I remember that.

0:15:29 Thomas: Yeah.

0:15:29 Jamie: Had vivid visual imagery that I was capable of producing. It's one of the reasons I enjoy novels so much, because I can sort of see the setting and the characters in my head. And it was really interesting. And the back and forth between people who didn't have this experience, and then people who did. So then the inner voice thing blows up, and I'm missing this aspect of phenomenological consciousness, and a philosopher that I follow who's at Georgetown who doesn't have either of these things weighed in about how funny it was to now see somebody who had once, but on the other side, have this similar experience of realizing that there's components of perceptual consciousness that aren't consistent across humans, and just how unnerving that is. So,

0:15:38 Thomas: Yeah, it's one thing for it to not be consistent. It's another for it be so astronomically different. Like, I just can't even imagine what it, and I'm sure similarly, you can't imagine what it's like to be the other way. And now I, okay, can we both agree that if somebody has neither a mind's eye nor the ability to hear anything in their mind, they're definitely a philosophical zombie. Like we can just go ahead and settle that now.

0:16:41 Jamie: I have to disagree, agree. Bryce Hubner, I think is how you pronounce his last name, who's at Georgetown, he has neither of these things. And he clearly is, you know, demonstrating, Don't know, but he seems to me to be clearly demonstrating that he's engaged in complex novel thought. I find his Twitter feed to to be particularly interesting. I've met him in person, and he certainly passed the Turing test. Like, I absolutely believed that there was an intelligent consciousness behind the skin suit and

0:16:45 Thomas: Zombie. You mean zombies. Yeah. Is one of the machines from the matrix.

0:17:20 Thomas: But how does he think? So he's not he doesn't see anything. He doesn't hear anything. What has he got? Have you gotten any insight into what his thought process is like for him?

0:17:23 Jamie: Well, So I would imagine, given that I also don't Hear an inner voice, that it's sort of dissimilar. Like, I would describe my thinking process as language-y. Like, it seems to me that when I'm thinking, I'm thinking in thoughts that I would describe as verbal. They're just not voiced in any way that makes sense to describe them as having an auditory component.

0:17:34 Thomas: Right.

0:17:59 Jamie: My thoughts are silent.

0:17:58 Thomas: Right. But I guess I was interpreting that as still having some sort of visual component. But do you think that's not true? Is it more like some unseen, unheard, languagey?

0:18:09 Jamie: So if I'm currently, I'm trying to write a couple of pieces on Camus that got picked up, for example. And it's requiring a lot of of thought. I spend much more time thinking about what I'm going to write than I actually spend at the computer writing anything. And those thoughts are language-y. They feel verbal. I feel like I'm wrestling with ideas, but there's nothing that could be conceivably described as auditory or or visual. And because I can get the sense of what it means to, quote unquote, see things with my mind's eye that I'm not literally seeing, I can understand the analogy that people are making when they say they can hear something when they have inner voice or thoughts to themselves, or they read something from Denzel Washington.

0:19:04 Jamie: But to say that my experience has an auditory component would just make no sense to me at all.

0:19:11 Thomas: It's just amazing.

0:19:12 Jamie: It actually sounds horrifying to me.

0:19:12 Thomas: I- Oh. It's the, well, but I'll tell you where, so when I do um, like, god awful movies or any other, any other, the comedy podcasts that I guest on from time to time, and just, I guess, when I'm writing any comedy, which I do from time and time, I don't know, most of my stuff is just BS, but whenever I actually work on something, I, my mind, or or for example, when I gave, I gave a a talk on the Bible. It was like a humorous talk about my experience of reading, all that kind of stuff. Whenever I do any of that, when I'm planning to give a, any sort of performance, I am obsessively in my mind. And for that matter, actually, when I do theater, I'm obsessively running the lines in my mind and hearing how they are and like how I would say them and how I would deliver them.

0:20:01 Thomas: When I, when I'm writing jokes, I'm thinking of the joke. I'm thinking of how I, I would say it, where the emphasis is, and I, like, I hear all of it and I run it through my head a lot and I change it, and it's so, just, amazing to imagine not doing that. I don't know how that would work.

0:20:22 Jamie: Yeah, so this is amazing to me, so when I write, for example, I can't have any sort of auditory component to my thinking inside of my head, I just don't have it, but I do read all of my papers out loud to myself to get a sense of how the words sound like, I guess precisely because I can't do that with inner speech. So I will, even if I'm completely alone, I will read it out loud to get sense of what it sounds like, because I cannot make any sense of hearing my own voice. So

0:20:38 Thomas: Interesting.

0:21:00 Thomas: Yeah. Oh, that's so interesting. So why don't you at long last, why don't tell us about some of the scientific and or philosophical reading you've done on this and uh, tell us what what you uh, what you've learned.

0:21:13 Jamie: Not as much as I wish I had. So there is a new anthology coming out, it's sort of an interdisciplinary anthology, so it includes works from cognitive scientists, psychologists, as well as neuroscientists and philosophers trying to get at the different aspects of inner speech. It's literally called "Inner Speech: New Voices," and it's edited by Augustin Vicente and Peter Langland Hassan, and that's out now, that's being published by Oxford University Press or publishing, and there are a number of different theories, and as is generally the case with philosophers, philosophers, no clear consensus. So one of the big questions, for example, is, is inner speech reflective of thought, is it, or is it a type of thought, are these a meaningful distinction?

So that's one of the big questions. Another question is, how do we understand the way that this is represented, right? Because we tend to think that our inner speech is functioning in the same areas of the brain as are responsible for processing the sort of speech we say out loud, or outer speech. But how do we make these distinctions? Because when we're using speech to communicate to others, there's an engagement, there's a person we're communicating to, and so does it really make sense to say we're communicating to ourselves when we're thinking to ourselves or having this sort of internal dialogue.

0:22:56 Jamie: And in fairness, a lot of this is sort of difficult for me to unpack and make sense of, because they're talking about something that may as well be from an alien planet, as far as I can tell. Yeah,

0:23:07 Thomas: Yeah. I, it, it wouldn't surprise me, obviously I'm not a scientist, but like it wouldn't be surprised me if it was some form of like your brain talking to itself, or my, not you, anybody, but you, uh, my brain talking to itself, you know, like, uh, some language, you know, the language center speaking to the others. Yeah, it wouldn't surprise me if that's how it worked, because it, it can kind of feel like that sometimes, I

0:23:32 Jamie: And so that's what this anthology is trying to unpack. So So different philosophers or different neuroscientists are working on different components of it, right? So for example, is the inner narrative or the inner thought a kind of speech in a way that's similar to top-down processing? Is it our way of making conscious what our subconscious desires are? Or is inner speech a function of self-knowledge? Is it helping us understand our desires? Is it helping us get a sense of who we are? Is it dialogic in the sense that it's just helping us navigate our experience?

0:24:18 Jamie: Or is it part of a tool to aid in reasoning? So there are all of these different theories about where it comes from, why it comes from, if it's communicating with ourselves, is it doing it as a way, is it sort of bootstrapping consciousness, right, is it the result of different parts of the brain kind of talking to each other, and what's really bonkers is, A, nobody has any idea And B, they're talking about something that clearly doesn't exist and is entirely made up And makes it really weird to Follow

0:24:43 Thomas: You Got Us This was An elaborate prank that I pulled on you, Jamie, uh, you, you figured it out, I mean, I thought it would be funny to just make it seem like you didn't have a thing that 95 of humans have, but you caught me, all right, everybody, we can, we can stop pretending.

0:24:51 Jamie: Yeah So that I would, I would totally believe that, because it is so weird to me that people have voices that they can hear in their head. One thing that I found was, was, was really interesting while looking through this anthology is that contrary to common opinion, the inner voice is not as omnipresent as some people had assumed that it was. So even I would say, without having this conscious experience of hearing myself, which is obviously made up, I would still say that my thoughts are, are sort of with me all of the time, that I'm very frequently engaged, gauged in my thoughts.

0:25:42 Thomas: Yeah.

0:25:43 Jamie: I'm not really sure what that means, given that you understand that to have an auditory component that I don't. But one group of psychologists, they did beeper studies, which is basically they give beepers to the study participants and they beep them at random times. And whenever the beeper goes off, the participants of the study have to jot down what their experiences were. And in that experiment, they found that there's only the presence of this inner or voice at 39% of the time. So roughly less than half the time people are accompanied by this experience of auditory-ish thinking.

0:26:13 Thomas: Hmm.

0:26:22 Thomas: Yeah, okay, interesting. A couple thoughts that scream loudly in my mind, it's not as though, and I'm just saying this because now I don't know, like, what your idea of people like me's thinking process is.

It's not as though like all my thoughts are auditory or anything, and in fact, I'm constantly amazed, the human mind is impossible, and I don't believe any of this exists, it's all fake, because like I'm amazed how often things will occur to me, and it could be anything, could be, oh, you forgot to do something, or, oh, blah blah blah, or whatever, for no reason, we're like just going about my business, and then my brain just goes bop, and it's either a, fully, sometimes it's like a, like a detailed, detailed, thoughtful thing that has several components that I wasn't consciously thinking of, but then just comes to me, and then like, but somewhere in my brain, it was being worked on, you know, like we, I think that, uh, a lot of the stuff I've read indicates that, you know, most, Most of our thought process is unconscious, right?

It's not as though we're monitoring all of our brain's activity all the time, it's a small subset. And actually, those experiments, the, that show that you can scan the brain and kind of tell what decision people are going to make between left and right or whatever, it is a little bit ahead of time, would indicate that, you know, these processes take place on a subconscious level before we even are aware of a lot of them.

And it's just so amazing to me. So like, it's not as though all my thoughts are auditory or anything, but it's, to me, it feels like, for me, it feels like a last step. Like I'm trying to describe it. It feels like I, it's the same thinking that I would do as I'm right, right now, as I'm talking to you, like my, the words are coming, I don't really know exactly how the words are going to come out.

0:28:08 Thomas: Like, I don't, you know, when, when humans are talking, it's not as though so you're consciously forming every single syllable and sound. Like a lot of that is automatic. Some of it, you don't really entirely know what you're going to say or how you're going to see it. But for me, a lot, a little of is just like, okay, it's that, but quiet. Like, I'm not going to, I anything. I just hear that same thing in my brain, you know?

0:28:31 Jamie: Yeah, so I'm with you on this being all made up and a simulation, and I think that's right. I don't think we've given that as much consideration as it deserves, deserves, so yeah, I'm with you on the Loki god theory of the universe, but you know, as it relates to inner voice, and, and also the Loci god, one of the contributions to this anthology that I thought was interesting was by Keith Frankish, who is a philosopher who does work on the philosophy of mind, and one of his background assumptions that he has in trying to make sense of these claims about an inner voice is that consciousness itself is an illusion, and consciousness isn't actually anything real, it's just sort of this experience the brain tricks us into having in Order to, you know, provide a narrative for this, all of these things that we do that we decide on doing sort of subconsciously, consciousness is this sort of like post hoc interpretation of what's happening, functioning, and what he had, what he's talking about is wondering to the extent that this inner speech is a functioning, is a function of our ability to reason, and is the result of us trying to make sense of the way different areas of our brain sort of communicate to enable decisions that we then go on to describe as our own, and he uses the example of getting invited to a party that, that you're sort of ambivalent about attending. And he talks about the way that inner speech can function is like, oh, well, you know, it's been maybe a while since I've gone out.

0:29:20 Thomas: Yeah.

0:30:09 Jamie: But ooh, Henry's gonna be at this party. And I don't really like Henry. And being with Henry would be an unpleasant experience. And so I'm going to stay in instead. Right? And so the inner speech in that point helps us to make sense of the different values, I Guess, our brain is making in trying to come to a decision about whether or not to go out to this party or to not go out to this body. And one of the really interesting questions that this raises is the extent to which inner speech correlates with reasoning ability. And at least as far as I know, I don't think there, there have been any studies yet to do any empirical work on whether people with inner speech on average are better reasoners than those people without it. And that would be particularly interesting to me, as someone who's interested in philosophy, because I sort of have as, like, part of my identity, the ability to reason well. And so it'd be really weird for that to be kind of chipped away.

0:30:29 Thomas: Yeah.

0:31:06 Thomas: I don'T think anyone would say you Can't reason. Yeah. That, that would be weird. I would be so curious if they ever end up doing any studies of, like, trying to find correlations of what leads to this difference. You know, I really wonder if it's like environmental factors or if it is genetic factors or what, you know. It is so interesting because on one hand, I am trying to think to myself, like, well, I was a pretty quiet kid, you know, and like I did, didn't, but by the same token, I, I wonder if there's any correlation, like, is it, you know, the adults in your life early on, if they talk to you a lot, does that then kind of, you know, that turn into your, your inner voice that you have going, or something like that? Like, I wondering if we'll ever have a theory of what, what would make this be different, or if it's just some random genetic, you Know, or otherwise environmental trigger or whatever it might be. I'd be so interested to know if there is any correlations there.

0:32:04 Jamie: Yeah, I'm absolutely fascinated by this. Like, I wasn't joking. I was, as the kids say, shook when I made this discovery that the overwhelming majority of people are having an experience of consciousness that is just so bananas to me that I can't even imagine. In addition to posting about it on Twitter, I've even posted on Facebook that this had happened, and that, oh my God, all of you weirdos are experiencing an inner voice and I'm not, and what is going on, and this world is insane.

And a number of people weighed in on the comments trying to make sense of this, and, like, you, some people said, you know, I was a very quiet child, I read a lot, and I think that's what led to my development of an inner voice, because I was constantly imagining the voices of the characters and the books that I would read, and I'm like, well, you know, I read as a kid, it was sort of my primary coping mechanism, I spent far more time with books than people, so that seems not likely to be it, or at least if it is the explanation, I'm the exception. I don't know. And then someone else had waited and I thought this was really funny, and they had said, well, I guess maybe people who just spend more time thinking and with their thoughts have an

0:32:09 Thomas: Yeah. Hmm. Yeah.

0:33:23 Jamie: Inner voice, and those people, people who don't think very much or very deeply about things, don't. And I was like, oh, that must be it.

0:33:30 Jamie: That totally explains. Well, I just, I don't know. They meant it offensively. I just don't thing people tend, ironically in this case, I don't think this person had thought very deeply about what they were saying and to whom they were saying it. But, you know, I just went back and I like, oh that must be why I went into philosophy because I don't, I'm not often in the habit of thinking too much. So I'm not, I'm not sure. Sure. And like you, I'm really interested about why that is. Because as people were asking me, as this came out, people were as bewildered that I don't have this experience as I am bewilder

0:33:30 Thomas: Well, that's offensive. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

0:34:03 Thomas: Right.

0:34:03 Jamie: That they claim to. And so they would, they would ask things like, well, when you read a book, like don't, don't the characters have voices? When you go back to Harry Potter, can you not hear Dumbledore's voice? And I would never read again. Part of the reason I enjoy reading so much is that it's quiet activity.

0:34:21 Thomas: You know, one thing that I'm not fully understanding here is I know you've referred to time from time to time that, you know, things you have certain issues with noise, noise, and I wonder if that's at all related. I mean, like, okay, for example, part of me thinks, okay, if you're, if your reading process isn't auditory in your mind, you ought to be able to like read with music or people talking or anything, and it wouldn't really distract you because it's like a separate thing. Part of Mead thinks that, then on the other hand, I know that you, I don't know, you frequently seem to be bothered by noise. So maybe that's not true. Is that, is there anything there? What are your thoughts on that?

0:35:05 Jamie: Yeah, so noise definitely bothers me. And I will have a physiological stress response to noise, especially random noise, makes me crazy. I just don't, I should take that back. That's probably ableist and not appropriate. But it does result in maladaptive coping mechanisms. I get very stressed out, I get very angry, I can very upset. Today, for example, I went to Barnes and Noble to try to get some writing done. And I sat in the cafe where a number of people are working, and I brought noise cancelling headphones with me, in which I can usually work, and I know there's some background noise, but with the noise cancelled headphones, it usually does a good enough job that I can just zone in and get my work done. And there was this pair of older gentlemen sitting in the cafe. And, I guess, I'm going to assume they both both had had some substantial hearing loss because they were talking on the top of their lungs about the differences between like cranberry juice and drinking grape juice.

0:35:09 Thomas: Hmm. Yeah.

0:36:06 Jamie: And I was trying to write my Camus paper, and I had noise canceling headphones on, and I was as far from them in the cafe as I could be. And just my blood pressure started spiking. My heart started racing. I was getting angry and annoyed and thinking of all of these terrible things I would say to these old men, when I finally remembered the line from Epictetus, that if the smoke bothers you, you can get up and move. At which point I packed up my stuff and I completely left because I just couldn't deal with the noise. So yes, noise bothers me. It definitely is something that I can't just filter out. But that said, I can get so immersed in reading that if I'm immersed in it, and there, there have been times where like my children have called out for me and it just like doesn't resonate in my brain. I don't hear them. So it's weird.

0:36:56 Thomas: You know, yeah, I don't know how to make sense of that. It's so interesting. On one hand, this is very interesting to hear about, and it's hard, you know, similarly as how you think this is all a hoax, it, it's very hard to imagine not being this way, but on the other hand, for people like me who have this inner voice thing, now that I think about it, like I've always known that Helen Keller existed, and she, you know, and she was deaf and blind from, you know, a very early dad, from when she was a baby, I think, and how must her thought process have been, you know, she's not hearing anything, she's not seeing anything, and yet she was still an amazing thinker and like was able to learn to communicate and and learn all these these things that you just would think would be just impossible from that perspective, and yet she found a way.

So it's just amazing, like how flexible the human mind is and and how it just like differently people must be thinking, like different, our internal experiences must just be so vastly different and variable, you know, that it's, it's just mind-boggling to even consider, bitter.

0:38:06 Jamie: So that's interesting that you mentioned that, because within the anthology, there are two papers that discuss specifically language use and inner narrative, inner monologue among sign language users. And so one paper, they're arguing that inner voice has to always be auditory, which is really kind of unsettling to read as someone who does not have an auditory inner voice. And they go through this sort of weird argument for why it has to be auditory. Because they say, you know, premise one, we can identify that language is an inner speech utterance.

And because there's, it's not possible to identify it through the use of semantics, because different utterances can have the same meaning, so semantics can't be what we're tracking when we're listening to our inner voice. And it can't because of syntax, because different languages can have the same syntactic structure. So therefore the only possibility is it has to be the phonemic structure, which I probably mispronounced, and I apologized. And so as I was reading about this, it sort of struck me as like, like, oh, that's really weird. That seems to sort of dismiss sign language users. And they're only interested in sort of intact hearing.

And it's setting off this other experience of thinking as somehow being not thinking enough. And then true enough, there's another paper by Jose Luis Bermudez, where he thinks specifically about the way that inner narrative and sign language can be different, and the implications this has for understanding of just what purpose this is serving.

0:39:47 Jamie: And the way that he asks us to imagine this is he says, you know, when we're talking, our experience of what we say is relatively the same of our experience of hearing what we say. That being on the receiving or the giving end of speech itself, we can understand that as being experienced similarly, right? The same. But if you imagine yourself sign languaging or signing, your perception of that, your visual perception, he says, is going to look very different than the person who's receiving what you're signing. And so he wonders if maybe different areas of the brain are involved, or if these are serving different purposes, or if there are like distinct pathways for thinking that we haven't begun to unpack yet. Yeah,

0:40:33 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, that's really interesting. So I wonder, are they trying to differentiate? Could there be, so someone who communicates via sign language, are they trying to say, on on one theory, by definition, they wouldn't have an inner voice, because, like, assuming they, you know, have been unable to hear since birth, for example, on one, on one definition, you would think that would mean definitionally they couldn't have have an inner voice because they, you know, there wouldn't be an auditory component or something. But on the other hand, if you define it a different way, to where the the inner voice is just a version of the speaking that you do, but that you due in your mind to yourself, then by that definition, it would seem like you could have someone who only communicates via sign language who has an inner voice, or maybe doesn't, like maybe they were like the Jamie equivalent of people who have, you know, never heard human speech. I don't, is it, does that, is that kind of where they're going or is that distinction make sense to you?

0:41:40 Jamie: No, that does. That's exactly right. Really what's at play here is we don't understand why we do this. And so when you don't understand why this is possible, it makes it very complicated to make sense of the fact that different people are experiencing this differently. And it's an attempt to sort of, I think, reverse engineer the different systems that are involved to get at the why this this is happening. Is this our way of communicating with ourselves? Is just this the post-talk interpretation our brain is providing us for how it got to where it got, to make us feel like we decided something instead of just being sort of strapped into the roller coaster and along for the ride?

0:41:46 Thomas: Yeah.

0:42:30 Thomas: Interesting. Okay. Well, um, what else is, is there a more to be said on this? I guess we're nearing the end of our usual time.

0:42:39 Jamie: Yeah, there's so much to be said on this. There's, yeah, no, so I mean we've covered the basics, and I don't want to sort of like overload anybody. But really, this is kind of brand new in terms of, you know, this interdisciplinary crossover between philosophers and neuroscientists and psychologists. So a lot of the work is still being done. It's still unfolding. This anthology is relatively new. So people are, you know, trying to make sense of which areas of the brain are involved? Is this taking place in the same lobes of the brain that are responsible for processing auditory speech? Is it taking place in the parts of the body that are responsible for memory retrieval? What's the relationship between them? Are different areas involved for those people who have an inner voice versus those people who don't?

0:42:41 Thomas: I'll keep going,

0:43:32 Jamie: What are the implications for consciousness and free will. There's just, there's so much here that I'm not going to be able to do it justice, but there's, there is a lot. There is a law.

0:43:44 Thomas: It's so cool that it's like kind of a new area of study. That's exciting. I mean, it sucks that we don't have more, you know, answers, but on the other hand, it's pretty exciting that it's a, it's cool new thing to look into. Um, I would just be so curious. So if anybody's listening and they're like Jamie, I personally am just so curious about music because it's such a big thing for me. I am curious if there are any like musicians who don't, can't like, would I wonder like Like without being able to hear stuff in your head, I just, I can't even imagine writing music because I, you know, like so much of writing music for me is hearing it in my head and kind of, oftentimes it just kind of does its own thing in my mind. And then later on, it'll just turn into a different thing.

0:44:30 Thomas: And sometimes I won't even have consciously worked on something, but it'll be, it will be like a lot, a chunk of a song that I didn't even consciously work on that, that is playing in my hand. And it's like, I just can't, I'm very curious if there's a way that people would write music, you know, maybe they have to do it all out, kind of like you were saying, you read your words to yourself to, you know, check how they sound and that kind of thing. I wonder if there is that equivalent, if you want to be, yeah, I sure, odds wise, there has got to be somewhere musicians who don't have an inner voice and don't hear things in their head but are able to be competent musicians. I'd just be very curious to hear if anybody is that or knows anyone like that because it's so mind-blowing to me.

0:45:16 Thomas: But maybe it's the kind of thing where you kind of have to do it out loud. You've got to play everything out loud and hear it out loud, and you could still kind of get by that way.

0:45:24 Jamie: Yeah. So this is, this is fascinating to me. Like hearing you talk about how the music just sort of plays itself out in your head. I am just irrepressibly envious of this experience. I feel like every sentence I write is a hard-fought battle of trying to force these words onto the page and into existence and like deeply envious of this ability of it to just sort of manifest in your head and capture it and put it down so

0:45:52 Thomas: But it sounds like you – yeah, I do not have that with language, though. I think there are people who do, though, and especially throughout history you hear about the great orators who are able to like compose speeches in their heads and, and be able to like deliver them, you know, that kind of thing. I, I do not have that same skill for language at all. I, personally feel like I have a lot of skill with music in that way, but I don't know, I can't, I really tell what anyone else's inner experience is obviously. So, but anyway, it is, I like it. It's, it's nice, but, but you did say earlier, like you, you, you are still thinking about and doing something that has a language component. You just don't hear it. Right. So do you, would you say that, like, let's say you're just Jamie, you're trapped on a bus or something and you got nothing, no phone, no, no pen or pencil, nothing.

0:46:42 Thomas: You could still work on something in your head, right? Could you work on a paper kind of in different ways to throw around the ideas? I'm sure I would imagine that has to be true, right?

0:46:52 Jamie: I would say yes but I'm not sure that that would be yes in the way that you mean. So there used to be this professor at Rutgers who would talk about writing papers in his head while he walked. And I took that to mean that he was really kind of writing them out in his head, literally, and he would get home and they would just sort of spill out of his head onto the paper in the way that he had thought about it. And that's not my experience of how the ideas work in my head.

The other day, I went for a walk trying to wrestle with some of these ideas that I'm dealing with for something I'm trying to write. And it definitely feels much more like a wrestling match in my mind. And then it does this sort of flowing writing sense, that would not be how I'm thinking about it. I'm thinking about what I want to say, I'm speaking about what the objections would be, I'm thinking about how to frame it. But to say that I'm thinking about it in a way that would be similar to how I would write it in a paper is not at all right. That

0:47:26 Thomas: Hmm. Hmm. Yeah.

0:48:07 Thomas: That's so interesting. But I would also say that in trying to relate, I feel like there's definitely still a component of my thinking that is nonverbal, I think, because, or maybe it's just unconscious and I don't know if they're, what the dividing line would be or how you'd determine that. Cause I, I do have the experience of when I do try to write something, words, I'm talking words now, not music, but like just, you know, right? If I'm ever writing, which rarely happens.

But if I'm writing a talk or if I'm writing a, you know, a blog post or something, which I've done a couple of times, it's really, I don't enjoy doing. It's really difficult for me. I just have it's just hard. But anyway, I do have the experience, though, of kind of not realizing what I think about something until I start writing.

And then a lot of thoughts will come to me that must have been stewing somewhere, you know, and I wonder if that's like a nonverbal thing or if that is an unconscious thing or and or both, you know, like what do you think about that? Does that sound like the wrestling you're doing might be that in your head a little bit?

0:49:14 Jamie: Sounds similar to what my experience of writing is like. Yeah. In order to really get the words to fit, though, I have to not just physically put them on paper, type them up. I will then have to read them out loud to myself.

0:49:30 Thomas: I imagine that a lot of people do that though. Like I think that even people, you know, people who have an inner voice, I'm pretty sure I've had friends or I've, you know, talked to people and, you know, somewhere along the line, I have, I have that experience. I think people read stuff out loud to themselves. I, you know, I think I remember doing that from time to time. If I ever had to give a, give a speech in class or something, you might practice it orally, but I don't know. Maybe it's, maybe it's just a matter of degree. Like I don't have to do that with, with everything. Does it, is that something like you kind of feel like you have to deal with every sentence or it's Just, yeah.

0:50:06 Jamie: Yeah, I absolutely have to do it. There's nothing I've ever written that I haven't read out loud either to myself or someone else in order to get a sense of it. I've never written anything that I just read to myself and was like, yeah, that works. I have to read it out loud to get a chance of how it sounds.

0:50:07 Thomas: Okay. Oh, wow. Okay, Okay.

0:50:25 Thomas: That's so fascinating. I hope that listeners have found this as interesting as I do, because it is really just so unbelievably fascinating to me. And I hope we hear from people who are like you, Jamie, who are, or maybe their minds will be blown about this. That would be super cool. I have to say, I feel like you do have a superpower though, in that you are immune from the Macarena, aren't you? Like there's no, or whatever the equivalent is.

0:50:50 Thomas: Yeah. That is I am saying. Like no matter how many times, like there is those Those song, those earworm songs that just, oh, you shouldn't have, how dare you? Exactly. So now I'm baby shark forever, or it'll be me with frozen with, you know, now that I hear that 40 times a day for my daughter, like that'll just be in my head all the time. Like, oh my gosh, it's in my hand. All it's, it gets to the point where it gets harmful. Like it's too much and you're immune from that. So that's nice.

0:50:49 Jamie: Still can't hear it in my head. Yeah. Like I could say baby shark right now and I'm fine I'm like, yeah.

0:51:22 Jamie: Yeah,

0:51:22 Thomas: Just trying to put a bright side on it.

0:51:22 Jamie: So that's that's cool I guess, yeah.

0:51:27 Thomas: Oh gosh, yeah. So you don't, you haven't had to have the Frozen songs just in your head anyway? All

0:51:32 Jamie: No, I can say let it go right now.

0:51:33 Thomas: Delightful. Yeah.

0:51:34 Jamie: Or do the next right thing. And when I get off this podcast, I'm not going to think about it again. I'll be done. My brain gets stuck.

0:51:41 Thomas: Yeah. Just Just, just pulling the pin on that grenade and leaving, huh? Is that what you're, uh-huh?

0:51:44 Jamie: Yeah. Baby sharks, but I can like sort of do it along, like, baby shark, do do do, like, I know it goes like that, um, so apologies, um, to everybody.

0:51:53 Thomas: That that sounded pretty Accurate. It wasn't like, I, I didn't get the indication from that that, like, you're completely tone deaf or anything, so that's interesting. So it sounds like you, you know, you're able to, set yeah, okay, this is, sorry, it's just so fascinating. It's

0:52:08 Jamie: Yeah. But it's like not in my head now. It's gone.

0:52:10 Thomas: Not in your head It's

0:52:10 Jamie: It's It's not like it won't.

0:52:10 Thomas: Gone. I could sit here silently and just Do a whole album in my head. Like, I've, you know, actually I've done that sometimes when I have to do something unpleasant, or I've had been stuck somewhere or whatever, I'll just like kind of press play in my hand and can pretty much get through, through, like, a whole album if I've listened to it enough. It's fun. Yeah.

0:52:14 Jamie: Yeah.

0:52:29 Jamie: So this is, I mentioned this earlier, I know if the music is on, I know every single word to the Hamilton soundtrack. In fact, is the only thing that has ever impressed either of my children, all of the things that I've done in my life. And the only thing they find impressive is that I can keep up with Lafayette in the rap battles in Hamilton. That is the only things they think I've ever done that is cool. But without hearing the music, I'm lost. Like, I can think of a couple of different lines and or lyrics, but I can't do the whole thing. But if the music is on in the background, I legit know every single word to it.

0:52:36 Thomas: Oh Okay, I'm trying to, we're, we're at time, so I was trying to go, but now I had another thought, and apologies, listeners, this is just such a novel, interesting thing that I, that maybe some of these thoughts I'm having are, are dumb, apologies, but, like, now I'm thinking, so I have a pro, I have a, um, a very actually difficult time with lyrics, and I wonder if there's any, anything going on there, because I can hear, I hear everything in my head really well, but I can also play a song in my head and not know the lyrics, and, like, I'll just kind of hear either what the words sound like, but I, I don't, unless I like put my mind to it, it can kind of just exist as a sound but without me knowing exactly what the lyrics are saying, it's, it's weird. But It sounds like you would have to, to know the words to be able to kind of, you know, sing along to anything, because you're not really hearing it at all. You're just, you, right? Or is that right?

0:53:52 Jamie: Oh, that's interesting.

0:54:06 Jamie: Yeah, so I know all of the words, obviously, but without the music in the background, I guess, because I can't produce the music in my own head, it's hard for me to sort of do it acapella or whatever on my own and just generate it. I need that background because I can't get it in my head, but then once the context is there, I know all of the words without a problem. I

0:54:07 Thomas: Yeah.

0:54:31 Thomas: Well, anyway, so fascinating. All right. I, I, I can't wait to hear from listeners about this. So please feel free to write in, call in, do whatever, and let us know your, your experiences, because it's just so cool. And Jamie, thanks for doing the reading. And I hope, I hope your life isn't too shaken by this news. Hope you're able to carry on yeah, all Right, thanks as always, and, uh, thanks for listening, everybody. We will see you next time. This was a nice break from the nothing that's going on in politics right now. Absolutely nothing happening. So, uh, this was good.

0:54:50 Jamie: I mean, I'm dealing I'm I'm dealing, nope.

0:55:04 Jamie: Nope.

0:55:04 Thomas: Just a just a nice philosophy science break Yeah, we will, I'm sure, speak to you next week. Maybe we, since there will be another politics, politics contest happening, I'm trying to not go into detail because, to detail because it's our break, but maybe next week we talk about the results of the politic that is happening that we're not going to talk about right now because there's another one. Sound good?

0:55:04 Jamie: Everything is fine, democracy is fine. All Right, I'll make sure to have extra wine for that, for that episode deal bye guys

0:55:32 Thomas: All right. We'll see you then, folks.

0:55:44 Clip: Thank you so much for listening to Serious Inquiries Only. If you like the show, the absolute best thing you can do is support us at patreon.com slash SeriousPod. The second best thing you can do is please share it on social media or by word of mouth. Speaking of social media, if you'd like to follow Jamie on Twitter, she's at Euthyphro. And follow me at SeriousPod. If you'd like to be Facebook friends, send me a request at facebook.com slash ThomasPodcast. If you're not up for that level of intimacy, that's fine. Maybe you want to join the discussion at facebook.com/groups/SIO members. Thank you again for listening. We'll see you next time.