
You hear a voice in your head when you're reading, right? - DanBC
http://digest.bps.org.uk/2016/02/you-hear-voice-in-your-head-when-youre.html?m=1
======
saltvedt
If you think this is interesting, definitely read "Generalizing From One
Example" at Less Wrong [1].

Turns out that people have varying degrees of ability to mentally imagine
things, where the range seems to be from "purely abstract" to "number of
stripes on a tiger".

Also; Feynman noted that people keep track of time in very different ways[2],
either visual (imagining a clock) or symbolic (counting by talking to yourself
inside your head).

And that whole internal monologue thing? Turns out that some people report not
having that...

If anyone has more examples, please add them. This stuff is endlessly
fascinating :)

[1][http://lesswrong.com/lw/dr/generalizing_from_one_example/](http://lesswrong.com/lw/dr/generalizing_from_one_example/)

[2][http://generallythinking.com/richard-feynman-on-thinking-
pro...](http://generallythinking.com/richard-feynman-on-thinking-processes-
did-he-know-nothing-about-psychology-v/)

~~~
JonnieCache
I don't generally hear an "audible" voice in my head, the thoughts just
appear, as concepts, or at least as atomic words. I look at the words on the
page and the shape of them manifests the meaning. I still kindof imagine
speaking the word, but it's not like imagining any other sound.

In contrast, I can imagine music very vividly, with different instruments and
their timbres fully defined. It's very close to the sensation of hearing
music, to the point where I sometimes have to stop myself from dancing to
music that only I can hear, definitely not something to do in public! (The
music never has lyrics btw. Even if I'm imagining a real song that has words,
they just end up as wordless vocalizations.)

The closer to being in the "flow" state I am, the less of an experience of
inner speech I have. When I've been programming or doing music for an hour, I
don't really think in words at all, the concepts just seem to flash past,
going almost directly from the unconscious to motor actions. With art
especially you don't have words for most of the things you're doing anyway, so
how could you possibly think in a monologue?

However when I need to think carefully about what I'm doing, when I need to
use deductive logic or it's very important that I make absolutely no mistakes,
I do veer more towards inner speech. The other major one is rehearsing
possible social interactions, or having hypothetical conversations, which is
something I actually do quite a lot of (I think it's quite common) and
obviously that involves speech.

Finally, at times of emotional stress or fear (but not panic), I'm forced into
a consistent inner monologue. It's very similar to the way you can't
deliberately give up conscious control of your breathing once you take hold of
it, and I can easily see how it could be scary for some people. Sometimes it
does feel like a step down the road towards madness, in comparison to my
normal state. If I woke up one morning and was stuck like that, I would 100%
be going to a psychiatrist.

Don't get any of that stuff about being able to see numbers unfortunately. I
have very poor imaging ability. I can't really see pictures in my head at all.

~~~
nikdaheratik
For me, I think it depends on how closely I care about the words or (for
fiction at least) whether the scene is people talking or a description of the
area or some action.

With dialog, or a narrator's voice, I often imagine them speaking it or
provide a voice for them in my own head. With action scenes, especially
engrossing ones, I sort of just spend the extra mental energy trying to
picture the scene rather than "hearing" the words. I have a very hard time
paying attention to what the characters look like or are wearing. Usually
imagine it briefly as it is being described and move on.

Oddly enough, when I'm reading aloud, sometimes I sort of stop imagining what
is going on as I'm too busy trying to sort out how to speak the dialog
(especially in some different voices) that I no longer pay complete attention
to the scene.

For non-fiction, I generally spend more mental energy trying to visualize the
concepts being described and stop "hearing" the words. Or if I'm merely
skimming and want to get a sense of what is being said without the details.

So I think a "voice" is something I can and do switch on and off depending on
whether my brain thinks it is important and probably on the difficulty of the
text itself.

~~~
Abraln
I agree that the type of content is important. I personally experience reading
as similar to a campfire story, hearing someone else describe a situation. My
brain just isn't good at filling in the details of a scene. I am able to
control the voice though. Reading textbooks became way more fun once I started
reading them as documentaries narrated by Morgan Freeman! I have found the key
is to read no faster than a person could speak the words, otherwise I just
hear my own voice talking rapidly. I would guess this would be due to a lack
of familiarity with the "templates" for the other voices talking quickly.

------
jerf
I do, and I don't. If you imagine there's some form of pipeline in your brain
from sound to phonemes to words to concepts to comprehension, my reading
probably comes in right at the "words" level. I "hear" the words like I hear
them when real people are speaking them, but they do not really have "sounds"
or "phonemes". When reading fiction, I may pick up accent if the author is
spelling it out but I generally have no voice particularly in mind for a
character. Not a "neutral" voice, it's really _no_ voice whatsoever. Just
words.

For one thing, if a real voice was speaking at the speed I normally read, it
would be virtually incomprehensible. I can't be simply "sounding out words"
for that reason.

I imagine people come in at different places in the pipeline and that probably
explains the difference. There more phases of the pipeline than there are
common words to try to explain our experience.

~~~
normac
Count me in on this as well. It's very strange because it's not a voice, but
in some sense there is sound--I can "hear" when there's a rhyme, for instance.

I've heard it claimed that the reason some people think they dream in black
and white is that there wasn't any color content at all (not even grayscale).
They think back and can't remember any colors, and assume it must have been
grayscale, because their waking consciousness can't imagine what it would be
like to see something without color.

Similarly, it's hard to imagine how you could hear words with no voice
speaking them (at least it's hard for me) even though we're experiencing it
right now!

------
simonh
Interesting, I think I always subvocalise when reading and found it hard not
to when I just tried. I just asked my wife and she says she never hears a
voice or even music in her head like that and was a bit shocked when I said I
could.

When I was a teenager I took elocution lessons, read poetry and acted in
plays. I would read through a piece imagining where I would pause, where to
put emphasis, etc. So I know I subvocalised then, but don't know if I did
before or if that's when I learned to do it.

I know it takes me much longer to read a book than my brother or father or
many of my friends. I can read a book once and remember small details from the
story they have completely forgotten and sometimes they've read a book
multiple times when I have far better recollection of it from a single much
slower reading. I'm wondering if subvocalisation plays a part in that.

Edit: another factor is that I remember words from their sound, not their
spelling, so have always had difficulty with spelling. I can't visualise the
word, and often need to actualy write a word out before I can figure out how
to spell it. Just spelling out words letter by letter vocally is very hard for
me.

~~~
newman314
Interesting. I do subvocalize but my memory is terrible. The best way I can
describe it is that I have a inaccurate lookup table so I can kind of remember
things but recalling specific things is hard particularly when I need the
information. I don't usually have issues with spelling though.

So I end up using a ton of Google and obsessively taking notes/making lists.
Quip has been a lifesaver.

~~~
djKianoosh
I'm the exact same. I prefer to "hear" the voice in the writing as it helps me
understand (but not necessarily remember every detail).

How do you use quip?

~~~
newman314
I like Quip because it's multi platform shared note taking. I use it to
generate todos (different notes for different subjects), lists and scratch for
developing ideas/documents.

For example, I've been working on a security primer for internal consumption.
The output will get turned into a presentation eventually. Quip makes it easy
to invite a colleague to collaborate.

------
dsmithatx
Ok this is very strange. When I read I hear the same inner voice or steady
stream of consciousness I hear all the time. It's my own voice. The article
says some people find it scary or distracting? So when they have normal
thoughts and are not reading does that mean they don't hear their own voice
like me? Is it scary and distracting when just having normal thoughts and not
reading? This is amazing if this hasn't really been discussed much and studied
before.

I'm really curious to hear other people's answers to this.

~~~
finnh
The majority of the time when I'm reading, I don't hear anything at all. So,
you'll probably be unsurprised by my answer to your second question - I
generally don't hear my voice (or any voice) when I'm thinking. That does
happen sometime, but only when my task is particularly language-focused, like
when I'm writing.

When I'm writing _english_, that is. No voices, no language when coding.

~~~
odonnellryan
That's interesting, because I was wondering "what must it be like to not hear
a voice when reading?" and until you said the bit about coding, I didn't know.

Then I realized the same thing. I don't hear a voice when I'm coding or
reading code. Odd.

~~~
eidorb
Ah-ha! This was a great insight for me. I can't not subvocalise when reading.
But I too certainly don't subvocalise when reading code. Now I know what it's
like.

------
Terr_
Perhaps we only perceive a "voice" when someone makes us direct our conscious
mind towards analyzing, describing, or _remembering_ the reading experience.

I mean, consider reflex actions in response to pain: Plenty of people will
(quite honestly) tell you that "it hurt, so I pulled my hand back" but the
lower-level neurological evidence suggests we're fooling ourselves.

~~~
rdancer
The report (I don't even want to call it "research") is not quite scientific.
However, I have a lot of faith in my fellow HN readers.

What would be a good experiment to test your hypothesis?

------
13of40
"For people who only ever heard the same internal reading voice, this was
usually their own voice, but it was often different in some way from their
speaking voice, for example in terms of pitch or emotional tone."

I hear a voice when I read, and it's always the same one, but I don't think of
it as my own voice. An interesting side effect of that is, even though I read
posts from hundreds of people on the internet every week, they're all in the
same voice, so I basically imagine all of you as, like, one person.

~~~
fixermark
Why is that person such a jerk all the time, right? What's their problem? ;)

I have the "voice when I read" thing too; I've actually always thought of it
as some kind of "true voice." I haven't perceived that it's changed since
kindergarten (though, of course, change could be so slow that I don't notice
it, since it's not like I have any external recordings to compare it against).

~~~
13of40
Funny about kindergarten: You just reminded me that when I was growing up, the
voice would get mushy and garbled when I was reading cursive writing.

------
anotheryou
I listen to podcasts at 2.7x speed. There is a funny jump, from the speed
where you still vocalize to something faster. It feels like it's pumping it
directly in to your brain :)

2.7 is the speed I can jump in any time, if I speed up incrementally I can
easily go to 3.2 or something.

(i use windows media player for the speed up, best real-time sound stretching
I found)

~~~
jessriedel
By "sound stretching", do you you just mean increased audio speed, or
something more complicated? I'm generally stuck at about 1.7x or 1.8x because
I stop being able to make out the words even though I'm not having a problem
processing them. It's hard for me to imagine 2.7x being remotely intelligible.
(Can you do this for any sort of speech, or only speech where you can fill in
half the words mentally?)

I've been dying for a audio/video playback program that would speed up faster
between pauses (breaths, breaks, etc.) while slowing down to ~1.6 speed for
words. I don't even really know what search terms to use. Here's my SE
question:

[http://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/questions/27175/video-...](http://softwarerecs.stackexchange.com/questions/27175/video-
playback-that-smooths-speech-at-high-speeds)

Would love more info here.

~~~
msthomaa
As the other comment said, PocketCast does this for podcasts, you can set it
to cut the silence. Also I believe Overcast on iOS.

For audiobooks, Listen Audiobook Player on Android does the same, though for
some reason I find it distracting for audiobooks.

~~~
jessriedel
Unfortunately, PocketCast isn't very aggressive about clipping short pauses in
speech, probably because it would tend to mangle things unless done carefully.
(I suspect it would require a lot more software sophistication with human
speech to appreciably change the average playback speed.) It cut out less than
a second over the first few minutes of a conversation I used as an example, so
it essentially does nothing.

Thanks for the suggestion, though. I never tried Overcast since I'm on an
android, but I suspect it's similar to Pocketcast.

I really wants something that ups the average speed to ~2.5 while maintaining
intelligibility.

------
brightball
Whenever I read anything, it's as if I'm actually have a conversation. Every
single word is spoken in my head with the real tone and intonation that I
would expect if somebody were telling me a story in a coffee shop.

I've always assumed that this is because I'm a very audible learner. When I'm
paying attention to somebody who is talking, I tend to have a hard time
focussing on anything else. For example, I'll miss turns driving if my wife is
talking to me in the car unless I'm just actively ignoring her. As a result,
she knows if we're following directions not to talk to me about anything
because if I don't miss the turn, I wasn't listening to her. :-)

The side effect of this is that I don't read particularly quickly. I can if I
make myself but it's like the voice in my head becomes the Micro Machine guy.
I read at about the speed I'd expect somebody to talk.

I tend to write the same way. If it doesn't "sound right" I have to keep
editing the sentence.

~~~
fixermark
I have the same thing. If I try to over-read my head-voice speed, I can do it
but it's exhausting and I don't retain the information nearly as well.

I've also always been a pretty good speller; at some point, my brain started
caching two copies of each word---how it sounds, and how it should sound based
on how it's spelled.

~~~
bobwaycott
> _my brain started caching two copies of each word---how it sounds, and how
> it should sound based on how it 's spelled._

Oh, man. This happens to me all the time. Glad to hear I'm not alone.

------
schoen
I assume this is the same as subvocalization, right?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subvocalization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subvocalization)

Or is there a separate notion of hearing a voice over and apart from
subvocalizing? (If I had to try to think about them as different concepts, I'd
probably say that I never subvocalize, and usually don't hear a voice when
reading quickly, but perhaps do hear a voice when reading slowly or focusing
on individual words.)

~~~
dragonwriter
As your Wikipedia link discusses, the "internal voice" is a _component_ of
subvocalization, but subvocalization also includes other things that happen at
the same time (involuntary muscle movements.)

> If I had to try to think about them as different concepts, I'd probably say
> that I never subvocalize, and usually don't hear a voice when reading
> quickly, but perhaps do hear a voice when reading slowly or focusing on
> individual words.

Since the involuntary muscle movements that are the other part of
subvocalization are generally _undetectable to the person doing the reading_ ,
what is your basis for saying that you _never_ subvocalize, even though you do
hear a voice when reading slowly?

~~~
schoen
> Since the involuntary muscle movements that are the other part of
> subvocalization are generally undetectable to the person doing the reading,
> what is your basis for saying that you _never_ subvocalize, even though you
> do hear a voice when reading slowly?

I guess that's a totally unsubstantiated intuition. Can I test it effectively
with an EMG?

------
Sharlin
People's subjective experiences vary considerably. Yvain's 2009 Less Wrong
article on the subject is very good:
[http://lesswrong.com/lw/dr/generalizing_from_one_example/](http://lesswrong.com/lw/dr/generalizing_from_one_example/)

------
Johnythree
For me, reading definitely doesn't involve any internal dialog. My eyes scan
the page and the information passes directly into my consciousness. I guess
that I'm a very fluent reader, however I don't remember any intermediate
"translation" steps when I was young.

I think a good illustration of this internal dialog is learning a new
language. At first you (verbally) translate each word in your head into your
native language. But as you gain fluency, you begin to understand the new
language directly.

Many decades ago I learnt Morse Code, and the process was similar. At first I
mentally (and painstakingly) translated each letter. Later I translated each
word. But eventually the information just flowed into my head without any
intermediate steps.

------
ProfFarnsworth
Good news, Everyone! I'm sending you all on a mission into your inner
subconscious. While there, you can read the rest of this comment in my voice.

~~~
mutagen
I don't usually have an inner voice when I read. Now I do, thank you!

Seriously though, I don't really have an inner voice, unless it is maybe
something like this where I'm expressing myself and I read in my voice the
thoughts I'm trying to express. I was just trying to image accents as I read
and this comment sealed it that yes, I can hear accents and a separate voice
when I read something.

------
seibelj
I hear a voice when I read, but what's amazing is that I hear a British voice
when I read The Economist. TE uses various britishisms, but even in the parts
that don't, I always hear some brit reading to me. It's partly why I like
reading it so much.

------
falcolas
Not really. I do when writing/typing, but not when reading. I don't even
really subvocalize, that I've ever been able to tell - I read too quickly to
transform the words into sounds.

I have a slightly above average reading speed (with average to above-average
retention), mostly because I don't spend as time converting the words to
sounds.

Of course, this does mean that I don't always recognize words when said aloud
that I've only seen in text before. Less of an issue as I grow older, but
hearing some words vocalized was an interesting experience the first time
(such as aileron or Qeynos (pronounced as kē-nōs, for those who never played
Everquest))

------
andywood
Normally, I read slower and experience an internal voice. It is different from
hearing a voice with my ears. Not just quieter, but different in a way I can't
put into words. Yet also similar.

If I either speed up, or consciously suppress it, I can read without the
internal voice, but comprehension goes way down. There's some comprehension,
but it's pretty ineffective overall.

If I'm in a relatively quiet place, I don't move my lips or tongue. If I'm in
a very noisy place, moving my lips/tongue seems to help.

I once knew someone who said she could not read at all without whispering the
words to herself.

------
DigitalJack
I thought it was common knowledge that some people do, some don't. I always
thought the don't column was a learned skill... After all, unless your voice
is one of the chipmunks, it's going to limit your reading speed.

If you want to turn the voice off (off the text), you can try counting in your
head as you read.

~~~
rprospero
I just tried your counting trick and all I wound up with was two simultaneous
voices going through my head.

On the reverse side, for anyone who doesn't hear text as they read, I'm really
curious how your mind handles the following paragraph. I can't imagine
processing it in any way besides taking it one word at a time, but that is
likely a limit of my own imagination.

> During winter, and touring the humor, poignant observation to Hobbes, as if
> to created as an outside action—you can be found him for examples aliens
> typically The Family Circus, criticized him is the thing through Saturday,
> December 16, 1995. Mom's first appeared in some newspaper chapeaux during
> nature is the only babysitter are characters in another.

Source:
[http://projects.haykranen.nl/markov/demo/](http://projects.haykranen.nl/markov/demo/)

~~~
rgejman
I don't hear a voice in my head when I read. When I try to read that
paragraph, I can't get past the 4th word without an uncomfortable mental
pause. In order to continue reading I do have to "hear" it as I'm reading it.
How did you come up with this?

~~~
rprospero
It's a random Markov chain based on the Calvin and Hobbes wikipedia. I can't
really take credit - the source I listed was the generator I used.

My (completely unsupported) suspicion is that individuals who don't
subvocalize tend to take advantage of common structures in texts to process
everything at the sentence level, instead of the word level. The catch is that
sentences which don't match their common expected structure tend to get lost
in the shuffle. For example, when reading that "the man who hunts ducks out on
weekends", individuals who don't sub-vocalize would be more likely to miss the
"out" and believe that the hunter hunts ducks.

As part of my hypothesis, I would suspect that the following example, which
isn't a Markov chain, but rather a quote from Finnegan's Wake, will also force
people to switch to "hearing" when they read, simply because of the unusual
sentence structure.

> In the ignorance that implies the impression that knits knowledge that finds
> the nameform that whets the wits that convey contacts that sweeten sensation
> that drives desire that adheres to attachment that dogs death that bitches
> birth that entails the ensuance of existentiality

~~~
bobwaycott
I knew it had to be _Calvin and Hobbes_!

------
mc808
If I know who wrote a piece and they have a distinctive manner of speaking, I
sometimes "hear" the text colored by their voice. In most cases I don't
experience anything like that, but I suppose it's possible that I do and just
read so much that it gets filtered out.

------
agentgt
I have an inner dialogue as well. Not always but it's generally there
especially when writing.

The annoying thing is my inner dialogue is the same for writing and reading
(Is this the same for others?). This is bad because my reading dialogue skips
words and makes up pronunciations for words that are long or are just a pain
to say. I imagine this evolved from the necessity to read faster. So when I
write and even sometimes speak about complicated things I will skip words and
maybe go lax on pronunciation (especially if its an emotional thing because
well.. its hard for me to communicate emotions).

The other annoying thing with inner dialogue is I often screw up homonyms. As
seen in this recent comment with brake and break:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11159104](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11159104)
. Its exceedingly embarrassing for me when this happens. Even trivial mistakes
like "to", "too", "two", "your" and "you're". This doesn't happen on serious
writing but it does on the internet and I feel like an idiot when it happens
(as I do know how to use the words correctly).

EDIT: I just noticed I screwed up its and it's again.

~~~
gkya
I guess you intended to say inner _dialogue_ , and you didn't mistakenly use
it instead of inner _monologue_. I couln't be sure because I've mostly seen
inner _monologue_ until now.

I do have an inner _dialogue_ too (I guess I've an inner Socrates which
doesn't know to shut up for a second and to stop bothering me with stupid
questions), I usually think in a dialectical manner. I haven't experienced
your ortographic mistakes, or I haven't recognised yet that I do make them
too. But sometimes I think of typing one word and I end up typing a completely
different one: I want to type _baboon_ and I end up typing, sth. like
_trumpet_ (made up example). This only happens with english though, so maybe
it's because english is slowly becoming a sinaitic language with an
iconographic ortography.

That said I use my inner dialogue to study languages, and I've succeeded with
English and Italian, my L2 and L3. I've perfect english reading writing
skills, and in italian high reading skills and good listening comprehension
(and I studied it for one and a half year, without native speakers to talk to
except for scarce weekly lessons at the uni). What I do is I do my daily
thinking in the target language. And if I have to speak in one of the
languages (including my mother tongue, turkish), I have to do a context
switch, which takes some seconds. If I had to switch from one language to
another in the middle of the phrase, my pronunciation will be very very bad,
with a very strong turkish accent, whereas if I were in _context_ , I
articulate way way better.

One thing is, this method is hard to share, when someone asks me how I study
languages, I have to talk about self immersion etc., because I don't want to
make people think that I'm nuts.

~~~
agentgt
It is often a dialogue and I did mean it but you are right monologue would
have been the better word choice given what I explained.

That is I do have conflicting conversations. I meant to discuss that as well.
Basically there is a narrator/actor and pundit on the side when reading. It is
sort of annoying at times as I will get distracted reading and fixate on some
topic with a long drawn out debate in my head.

~~~
gkya
I experience very similar phenomenon, and I've found some research with
relevant content, from the related reading list at the bottom of the original
post:

[http://digest.bps.org.uk/2013/12/the-science-of-how-we-
talk-...](http://digest.bps.org.uk/2013/12/the-science-of-how-we-talk-to-
ourselves.html)

It seems that you were actually right in using dialogue.

------
lilcarlyung
I have an inner monologue when thinking and I hear an inner voice when reading
(sometimes several if there are several characters in a text).

The voices differ. When reading something from a friend I will hear their
voice, my own when reading my own, and my brain will try to create a auditory
context if its by an unknown author. For example, Hacker News covers a lot of
news from Silicon Valley/San Francisco so reading the comments here I mostly
hear an American voice with an Californian accent, mixed together with my own
voice.

My brain pairs this together with inner images. So if I read a book about
exploding stars, for example, I will hear an inner voice narrating the topic
while also seeing images of the things being explained. These voices and
images are very weak compared to the real thing though. My inner voices lack
clarity and my inner images have no color.

Obviously this is not great for my reading speed. I did a test a while ago and
according to that test my reading speed was compared to that of a 5th grader,
with high memory retention of general concepts and average memory retention of
specific details. I read for several hours every day.

As for numbers, when doing maths in my head, I do it visually. I see the
numbers as images. What is strange though, compared to other things I imagine,
is that results to math problems manifest themselves as a gut feeling rather
than as the logical result from a chain of continuous inner dialogues and
imagery. If I try to calculate 5*5 I get a gut feeling to answer 25, often
faster than I consciously understand how I arrived at the answer.

Needless to so say I have a very strong imagination, sometimes so strong that
I stop paying attention to the real world for a little while.

~~~
normac
On the off chance you haven't heard of him, you might want to check out Daniel
Tammet [1]. He's a high-functioning savant who has number-related synesthesia,
can do calculations by juxtaposing images as you describe, and he's cultivated
these abilities to the point that he can perform incredible feats of
calculation and memorization.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Tammet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Tammet)

------
bhaak
How does this inner voice compare to a real voice?

Given that the scientists link that with auditory hallucinations, I'd expect
that for at least some people it's indistinguishable from a real voice (one of
the earliest known example would be Socrates' daimonion).

I hear a voice usually when I'm reading but it is of some kind of soundless
intensity. I think different characters in books have slightly different
voices but it's possible that my brain knows that different characters should
have different voices and it just tricks me in believing it.

I only have an inner voice for my thoughts when I try to articulate something.
Otherwise I only think in concepts, structures and visualisations.

This is also how I tackle programming or solving problems in general. I
visualize the problem and build a "problem structure" and then try to make it
collapse into a simpler structure.

~~~
wodenokoto
I think you answered your own question several times:

> I hear a voice usually when I'm reading but it is of some kind of soundless
> intensity.

and

> I only have an inner voice for my thoughts when I try to articulate
> something.

I'm sure just like some people see colours when they hear sounds, other people
experience their inner voice as very, very real.

------
santaclaus
I'm curious what this means with regards to someone who is deaf? Language
comprehension and the auditory system are decoupled, with obvious empirical
evidence (people who can't hear can still read, write, and speak). What is a
'voice in your head' for a deaf person?

~~~
DanBC
Not deafness, but there's a visual hallucination that affects people with
deteriorating eyesight.

It's called "Charles Bonnet Syndrome".
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_release_hallucinations](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Visual_release_hallucinations)

You can hear about it here:
[http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b071fs79](http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b071fs79)

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bananaoomarang
I can read very quickly and not hear a voice, but usually I read slow enough
that I can. The tone usually depends on what it is I'm reading (Hacker News
sounds different to Harry Potter), but I think the actual voice is the same.
I've never really thought about it before.

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bitL
Sometimes I hear, sometimes not, depends on how much fantasy I unleash or if I
use voice "recordings" to prevent me from making mistakes in writing a text in
a foreign language. And I practiced fast reading as a kid (e.g. 1 page in
2-5s), and that was for sure without any distinctive voice. Now this helps me
to spot a line in code I need to change extremely quickly ;-)

It's like with thinking - when you are a kid, you think in some proto-thoughts
that aren't really based on a language (something like assembly language of
mind) and the older you are and more languages you know, you tend to think in
languages instead, except when you are in a creative flow when things just
happen automagically.

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hendekagon
When I read a fiction book I hear a general main narration voice, usually my
own but it could be someone else if I know the author was American for
example. Then I also hear accents for all the characters in the book, for
example many of the characters in the book I'm reading atm are Scottish, and
they all have Scottish accents and the women have women's voices while the men
have men's.

To those who do not hear an inner voice: I'm really struggling to imagine how
the information gets in, how are you actually aware of the information ?

~~~
taejo
Do you struggle to imagine that people born deaf can read at all?

~~~
hendekagon
no, I don't struggle to imagine _that they can read_ , I struggle to imagine
what it feels like to them

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wodenokoto
I do not believe this has not been studied before. In psychology you talk
about the inner monologue, in linguistic you have experiments measuring if
silent reading activates muscles in the speech apparatus (as far as I
remember, it does), speed reading is all about silencing the inner monologue.

A quick search brought this up on Google Scholar:

    
    
        Auditory imagery, D Reisberg - 2014 - 
        books.google.com
        
        "Psychologists have debated the role of inner 
        speech in silent reading, and clinicians ...."

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alex_duf
So it's a study about what a 136 person described on a forum? hmm... Not sure
we can jump on conclusion nor sure the population is big enough to user
decimal points in the percentages.

~~~
vitd
Yeah, I was thinking that, too. And it's not just any forum, either. It's the
notorious Yahoo Answers where people regularly troll each other as both
question askers and answerers. See, for example:
[http://memebase.cheezburger.com/artoftrolling/tag/yahoo-
answ...](http://memebase.cheezburger.com/artoftrolling/tag/yahoo-answer-fails)

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kazinator
There could be a "feed forward" mechanism in language processing, which gets
involved in reading also. That is to say, when you hear speech, perhaps that
same "reading voice" is _also_ there: perhaps the speech that you're hearing
is synthesized into a voice, and those voices are compared, which reinforces
whether or not you "heard it right", and perhaps this takes place in a loop
which clarifies the speech.

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libeclipse
For me, the voice in my head is always there. My every thought manifests as a
voice, both when I'm reading and when I'm not. The voice isn't mine and it's
not the voice of anyone I know. It's just a voice, and is always the same. I
can also imagine things in a decent amount of detail, but it's not always
visual, it's as if the voice is describing the details to me.

I thought that was normal.

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_archon_
I wonder how this relates to how we learn our primary language in the first
place. My parents put objects in front of me and gave me the word to associate
with them, or talked around the meaning of abstract words. I learned English
(my primary language) entirely verbally. Then, when I began to learn to read,
I learned what sounds letters made, and verbalized these sounds when reading,
and tried to parse those sounds into a word I recognized. Since I learned my
language verbally, the process to comprehension included conversion to sound.
This has continued to my adult life; I wonder if I can re-train my brain to
associate text with meaning. I also wonder if I do this already, but every
time I try to notice whether I'm internally verbalizing, I internally
verbalize (because it's in the back of my mind), so I think I do regularly
even though that may not be the case.

Experimenting with this idea would likely require teaching children with text,
which may or may not be ethical. Sign language is different enough from
English that it doesn't directly relate.

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king_phil
I hear a voice when I read, and I just need a few seconds of concentration to
change it to another voice. I can choose voices that seem to fit the content
in energy level, general way of speaking and accent and do that a lot. But
they never speak to me when I am not reading.

I realized just now that it is my brain reading me a story and I listen to the
voice that reads it to me like a fascinated kid.

------
Semiapies
I never have.

This may have something to do with why I can only appreciate poetry when read
aloud.

~~~
dibujante
I had this problem with Shakespeare, as well. No internal voice. He's very
hard to read unless spoken aloud, probably because it lets you experiment with
intonation and emphasis.

~~~
hosh
That's what I heard about JRR Tolkien's Silmarillion too. I tried reading it
when I was younger, and when I tend to drop sound conversion when I read. It
seemed impenetrable. Years later, when someone told me it was meant to be
heard, not to be read, I gave that a try, reading it aloud in my head. It was
a much different experience. Reading Silmarillion felt like reading a magical
book of creation, where the speaking of the words themselves create the world.

------
fallous
It depends on what I'm reading. Comments in a forum? I hear a voice in my
head, with a certain character style based on either the text or if it's a
known commenter.

Most books, especially good fiction, I visualize to a high degree which is why
I often want to avoid movie adaptations because they cannot match what I
experienced while reading.

------
DanBC
> But as this is the first ever investigation into the question, and it used
> an unconventional methodology, it's fair to say the results are far from
> conclusive.

See also the Independent article here: [http://www.independent.co.uk/life-
style/health-and-families/...](http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-
and-families/health-news/most-people-hear-voices-when-they-read-normal-
psychological-study-finds-a6890766.html)

As I understand it (and I could be wrong) "hearing a voice" pretty much means
you hear a voice as if someone was speaking but there's noone there. The paper
talked about claimed that 80% of people "hear a voice" when they read.

I find that surprising, and I'd want to know what exactly is meant by "inner
reading voices" \- are these voices that people hear, or are they something
else?

> Why hasn't this topic been studied before? Vilhauer's study hints at an
> answer because she found that many people assumed that their inner
> experiences when reading were shared by everyone. This worked both ways, so
> some of the people who had an inner reading voice were convinced of its
> normality: "We all hear our voices in our heads at times – even those of
> others we know – especially while reading," said one Yahoo contributor. Yet
> others who claimed to have no inner voice felt they were the normal ones.
> For example, in response to a question posted on the site about whether
> anyone else hears an inner voice while reading, one responder said "Nooo.
> You should get that checked out" and another wrote, in capitals: "NO, I'M
> NOT A FREAK".

The other reason is that until relatively recently everyone freaked the fuck
out if you said you heard voices, and hearing voices was a sign of serious
severe mental illness. We now know that's probably not true.

~~~
azeirah
Can you "hear" something in your head when you try remember a sentence someone
said?

~~~
DanBC
Me? I have my normal internal thoughts. I don't think I can hear it in their
voice, no.

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mcculley
I generally don't hear a voice when I read and find that when I do
intentionally, it slows me down. I've found that I often miss puns and other
plays on the sounds of words in written text due to not sounding out the
words.

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Burr1805
Has anyone found this affects memory? I 'see' thoughts but since words never
completely describe an object, my brain seems to auto fill in the rest. And
when asked later I can describe what I read along with what my brain auto
filled in (and sometimes can't remember which I actually read and which my
brain filled in). For instance I read about a tree, and I 'see' in my thoughts
a pine tree. When asked later about the tree I might describe it as a pine
even though that was never physically described.

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Lennu
I find that this is happening most of all when I'm reading in a non native
language. And when reading in native, the thought process is much faster and
better that I don't get voices(:D) so much.

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JabavuAdams
I hear my own voice. It's only ever my own voice -- it's not modified by the
speaking character or the writer. I also feel my tongue forming the words even
though nothing's moving.

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bdcravens
When I read a comment on HN from a voice I know (DHH, patio11, Rob Walling,
etc) I usually hear their voice as I read it. (in DHH's case, inserting a few
extra obscenities for good measure)

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tomcam
Never hear a voice. It just goes directly to symbols/images in my head.
Exception when learning something difficult, at which time I slow down to
words.

~~~
mirimir
This can be learned. Basically you force yourself to scan the visible area,
looking for structure. And then focus on the key areas. So reading becomes a
very nonlinear process.

TL;DR Speed reading :)

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Kenji
I think 'hear' is the wrong word. It has nothing to do with hearing. No
hearing is involved at all, it is an auditory imagination and recollection.
Like a good song that keeps playing in your head. And most people can clearly
distinguish this kind of sensation from actual hearing, and they'd never
mistake the auditory imaginations for actual things that are heard.

------
hellbanner
Not if I read fast enough. Which can be done by looking at 1/3X of the Line N,
then looking at 2/3X of the line, then recurring with Line N+1.

This has >10x sped up my reading speed and improved comprehension as my brain
takes in the whole picture (gestalt of the paragraph) more times total and
more times per second. Try it!

------
sklogic
Just wonder how the voice-hearing people skim or fast-read. Does it sound like
a fast-forward with a funny voice to them?

~~~
jobigoud
Most speed reading techniques start by encouraging you to suppress the inner
voice hearing and just consume the words visually. (Which is also why I don't
understand why they are saying it's the first investigation in the subject
matter).

------
bchjam
Speed reading techniques often try to break written word streams down into
visual chunks and let the wetware do the rest. Unsurprisingly, results vary
widely. Ironically though, this sounds a bit like a very high level
description of segmentation as in computer vision

------
kalms
When I'm typing or reading english or any other foreign language I hear a
voice — now that I think about it. Not in Danish though, which is my native
tongue. This never occurred to me before; very strange indeed.

------
rdancer
"One hundred and sixty posts from [ _Yahoo Answers_ ] were analyzed using a
qualitative content analysis approach"

Cool tips on how 2 become a rsercher?

The discussion here on HN is interesting, though.

------
RUG3Y
I don't hear a voice in my head. I read much faster than anyone can talk - I
can't imagine what that would sound like.

------
throwanem
Only when I want to, which isn't often because it slows me down. Sometimes
it's fun to listen to the dialogue, though.

------
pmarreck
I also often see the words that are spoken by someone else.

As a result, I have a high-level ability to spell and be grammatically-
correct.

------
deeteecee
on a side note, i heard its suggested that you don't have the audible voice if
you want to achieve faster speeds at reading comprehension :)

------
jbb555
What? No of course you don't "hear" the words. How could you? Reading is
several times faster than speaking, and it's not like you look individually at
every word and read them out, you see a larger area of text as a unit.

This makes no sense. If you mentally read out every word you are doing it
wrong!

~~~
libeclipse
I get what you mean, but it's not as if you're reading it out. I'd say I read
pretty fast: my eyes skim quickly across the page and I understand what is
written there, but it's as if the voice in my head is reading it out to me at
the same speed as I'm reading. It doesn't slow anything down.

~~~
onion2k
_It doesn 't slow anything down._

That depends.

Some readers do what is known as "subvocalization"[1], where they literally
speak the words they're reading, but silently, actuating the muscles in their
tongue and throat as if they were speaking aloud. If you're doing that then it
_does_ slow you down.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subvocalization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subvocalization)

~~~
libeclipse
Nope. It's solely in my head. I don't subvocalize.

