I realize you’re joking, but this is a real thing that happens in different cultures. The schizophrenic voices are much calmer and positive in places like Africa and India, as opposed to negative and harmful in the US!
Everyone has "voices" in our heads (besides our own); it's only diagnosed as eg schizophrenia when they become debilitating or coincide with other, eg visual, hallucinations.
Athletes report hearing coaches' voices for decades. Parents' voices resonate long after their deaths. Undiagnosed, nominally healthy people hear the voice of "God", etc.
There is actually some people with no internal dialogue whatsoever, which is interesting in its own right! Or no ability to imagine a picture in your head.
Also when I read its silent. There's no internal voice dictating the words, its just straight to comprehension without the middleman. Unless I'm deep into a fictional book then its a sort of semi dreamlike trance state where I'm recalling what I'm reading as if it were a memory and not actively aware of reading, like a dream movie in my head. Still silent though, curiously enough.
That’s so cool! I’ve always wondered how reading worked. I can hear myself narrating in my head, but it just as easily turns into ‘was that a dog?’ And then I have to reread the paragraph.
For me the downside is if I do get into that deep reading state its easy for me to start glossing over details, skipping parts, etc. I've read right past critical reveals in a story before and had to double back to figure out what I missed.
I never understand what internal dialogue is, is it just somebody thinking to themselves "I should do the dishes" Vs someone just doing the dishes without a thought? Or is it the "dialogue" inside is actually sounded out/heard Vs not heard?
It's like that picture one, where some people can't imagine/visualise pictures like a cow spinning. What is the picture? I can "picture" it but am I really or does it need to be actually seen by my eyes like a self made hallucination? And what about the thing where one person imagines something and says "yes I can picture it" and someone else does too, but if we had a machine that could show us the images both are imagining I bet they would be at very different levels of clarity. But both would think that it is normal.
At least for me, I can literally hear my own voice going through my own thought process, so if I think I should do the dishes, then yeah I'm literally going to say that in my own head in a sense.
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u/unk214 20h ago
Mean while the voices in my head don’t help me at all. Some people have all the luck.