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.”
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.
This is somewhat the premise of an old nutty book book called The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes.
The book has a section towards the end called The Auguries of Science that is very dear to me.
Yeah, Jaynes is the one I was talking about. The theory is certainly nutty, but I enjoy it from an aesthetic perspective. It’s a fun story to think about.
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.
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).
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.
Some people don’t have a voice in their head either. Like that inner-monologue that is explaining your thoughts
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.
Doesn’t look like anything to me.
This is somewhat the premise of an old nutty book book called The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes. The book has a section towards the end called The Auguries of Science that is very dear to me.
Yeah, Jaynes is the one I was talking about. The theory is certainly nutty, but I enjoy it from an aesthetic perspective. It’s a fun story to think about.
This guy goes hard.
Do you have a narrator voice in your head?
I awoke several hours later in a daze…
Narrator: They don’t
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.
Okay, but they still have the theme music, right?
… right?
The Gang Learns Neurology
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?
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Yah
. I have control over it but I feel I would have less anxiety if I had less of an inner monologue.
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
It usually is for me, unless I’m very focused on something external.
and when I’m home alone I just say out loud all the things my brain thinks
That’s me! I experience thought in pictures (opposite of the post) and emotions.
I have to translate into words for external /internal speech. One of the reasons I often “monologue out loud” much to my spouses chagrin.
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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).
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.