What Is the Sound of Thought?

https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/the-sound-of-thought/

by the-enemy • 6 years ago

68 44 6 years ago

thereader.mitpress.mit.edu

guram11• 6 years ago

Remarkably, we found that the shape of the electric waves recorded in a non-acoustic area of the brain when linguistic expressions are being read silently preserves the same structure as those of the mechanical sound waves of air that would have been produced if those words had actually been uttered

the Rosetta stone idea to map thought from languages waves (sound and light) is an interesting field of research

I have no idea how but since I was young I learned that I can read faster when I don't "voice" out the sound of thought

I also learned that as a multilingual person the "language" of choice for my thought can be different at times, even though I have no actual fondness of using any specifically

0823498723498726• 6 years ago

The obvious follow up experiment is to have the subjects read silently first, then read aloud.

(I've also found I can readily manipulate algebraic symbols without having any idea of how they should be pronounced. splodge?)

https://i.pinimg.com/originals/67/bc/35/67bc35746db0758b5ab4...

TeMPOraL4• 6 years ago

For me, some words and phrases sound better in one language than the other. So in my internal monologue, I often flip back and forth between Polish and English, sometimes multiple times in a single sentence. It feels like "the path of least resistance".

I also do that sometimes when talking, when I know the other person is proficient in English. Not everyone appreciates this, but some of the best conversations in my life were with a particular person who was like me in this regard; we'd just stream our thoughts to each other in this weird mix of Polish and English, that was hard to follow for anyone else.

sebmellen• 6 years ago

I know the same feeling with English and German. It really is a wonderful thing. I think this would be called Code-switching [0].

In linguistics, code-switching or language alternation occurs when a speaker alternates between two or more languages, or language varieties, in the context of a single conversation.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code-switching

notdang2• 6 years ago

Now try to imagine instead of English, it's Russian? Switching from Polish to Russian. Will it be the same?

fsflover• 6 years ago

I have no idea how but since I was young I learned that I can read faster when I don't "voice" out the sound of thought

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_reading

torben-friis• 6 years ago

I wonder if the same is true for languages where the writing system is not a representation of sounds, like written chinese.

tsimionescu• 6 years ago

My understanding was that written Chinese has a great deal of phonetic information (even though it is not exclusively phonetic like the alphabet or Japanese Hiragana/Katakana). I had understood that many ideograms essentially could be interpreted as topic + pronunciation: e.g. 驰 could be interpreted as "the word about 马 horses read as 也 chí".

lethologica• 6 years ago

I have no idea how but since I was young I learned that I can read faster when I don't "voice" out the sound of thought

Subvocalisation is the term for that voice in your head when you read. I've never been able to get rid of it, and trying to has always resulted in me feeling like I'm skimming rather than reading.

mellavora• 6 years ago

yes, that is the secret.

"reading" is not one activity, there are 100s of ways to read.

dontcarethrow22• 6 years ago

I think a way to practice it would be through math exercises. You don't really voice out '3 + 8' as much as 'three plus eight'. Also thinking further I think books directed at children would probably also help, I feel like complex terms keep me subvocalising when reading.

drenvuk• 6 years ago

I assume the reason for this is that speech is encoded as an internal meaning and the visible text is also encoded as meaning. When the circuit for the internal meaning fires up then the rest of the circuits are sympathetically fired as well. It also makes me assume that's why PTSD is a thing - some trigger hits the specific circuit that causes the rest of the stress response. With PTSD the process is debilitating, but in the normal course of life the process makes retrieval of information and the expression of appropriate actions easier.

Neat. I'm not a scientist and I could be very wrong however.

ggrrhh_ta3• 6 years ago

Show me data, the signals. Except for maybe short pauses between phonological clusters, I need extraordinary proof to accept such extraordinary claims.

ggrrhh_ta3• 6 years ago

I attach some references that could be related:

https://research.iusspavia.it/handle/20.500.12076/265

Or, despite being too recent to be in the book:

https://research.iusspavia.it/handle/20.500.12076/1463

m0zg• 6 years ago

The article contains no examples of the "sound of thought". Epic fail.

ggrrhh_ta3• 6 years ago

I don't understand the downvoting; the MIT Press release could at least point to the research backing the claims, which I guess could be:

https://research.iusspavia.it/handle/20.500.12076/265

Or, despite being too recent to be in the book:

https://research.iusspavia.it/handle/20.500.12076/1463

(of the latter, I guess that this link: http://150.162.46.34:8080/embc-2015/papers/13891714.pdf is a summary)

Jugurtha• 6 years ago

When I'm in the zone, thought sounds like a jet turbine "ffffffffffff", or being underwater. Sight stops working, or at least I don't remember what I saw during these moments. Also hearing seems to stop working, at least for outside sounds.

If I'm facing a screen, it is practically I see and I hear nothing.

If I get interrupted when I'm in that kind of trance, as in someone getting in my view starting to make signs, or poking me, I need a few moments to regain the ability to speak.

supernihil• 6 years ago

I have the same. But in my case it lasts for hours after work. Not being able to comprehend the speech of my kids. For me i got some label to put on it after being diagnozed with Skizotypia

klvnpaul• 6 years ago

Fail

henearkr3• 6 years ago

This study assumes that everybody hear the sounds of words while thinking, and that's not the case.

Many people (although I don't know the statistics) do not have this "inner speech".

sradman2• 6 years ago

From the article:

Yet we know that language can also be present in the absence of sound, when we read... or when we use words while thinking — in technical terms, when we engage in endophasic activity.
This simple fact immediately raises the following crucial question: What happens to the electric waves in our brain when we generate a linguistic expression without emitting any sound?

"Endophasic activity" is our "inner speech". A charitable interpretation of Andrea Moro's 16 person experiment is that they only included people with typical hearing. Experiments that target the atypical hearing cases may be crucial in understanding how the mind processes language. Indeed, the article goes on to state:

Among the questions this discovery raises: What kind of electrical activity is elaborated in a language network (one that includes the Broca’s area) by persons who have never been able to hear any sound from birth?

henearkr3• 6 years ago

I think you misinterpreted the use of "endophasic activity" here, it just means that the speech is not real, that it is inner, or the brain not producing any real efferent output, just internal-bounded output.

So, the study considers what happens when using linguistic thought without uttering words (aka inner speech), but it does not investigate the properties of the mind of people who do not experience inner speech.

For the second quote, it is maybe closer to the subject I raised, but there can be an homologous of "inner speech" for mute or deaf people (e.g. visualizing linguistic cues), so there is still the possibility of a category of people with and another without these cues.

Afaik, all these questions have been ignored by the study.

Not that it's bad, I mean, they have to restrict to some narrower question at first if they want to publish without spending decades on it.

red75prime• 6 years ago

The observable result "the subject reports a lack of inner speech" can correspond to "the subject lacks inner speech" or "the subject isn't aware of inner speech" or "the subject have a motivation to not report having inner speech" or "the subject can't report having inner speech" or "the subject doesn't recognize his/her subjective experiences as inner speech". And maybe more.

henearkr3• 6 years ago

I get that you are in disbelief, but this is actually a thing.

Numerous testimonies are unambiguous, such as this one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u69YSh-cFXY

Like, the interviewee is able to read extremely fast ("superhuman", according to the interviewer), as a consequence to the absence of inner speech.

This kind of details eliminate the possibility of the uncertainties you suggested.

InfiniteRand• 6 years ago

I'm curious if anyone has studied if brain activity during "awake surgery" is different in some major ways from normal brain activity (I'm not sure how you would measure normal brain activity to a comparable degree though).

It seems like "awake surgery" is an often cited tool for understanding how the brain works, but it is a pretty extreme situation, so I could imagine for instance, maybe the stress of awake surgery has a tendency to make the mind suppress certain types of thought which might otherwise be prominent.

Not saying this is the case, but if we are going to rely on the conclusions of awake surgery for important things, we should double check the method to make sure we are not overlooking anything important.

ShradhaSingh• 6 years ago

Its same as the dreams are colorful or black and white

aaron-santos• 6 years ago

If the subject's thoughts are then converted to audio and played back to the subject I wonder what fixed points would emerge.

What Is the Sound of Thought?

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