Topics Mind

Question How can I hear my voice in my head without speaking?

Accepted:
October 15, 2005

Comments

My first reaction was that you must be rather different from me, because I sure don't hear my voice when I'm not speaking. But on inspection I find that I can of course imagine myself speaking (actually I find it works better for singing), which is at least a lot like hearing my voice in my head without speaking. But this is no more mysterious than the fact that I can imagine other sounds without actually hearing them, or that I can remember sounds without hearing them at that time. Just what the relationship is between the neurophysiology of imagined or recalled sound and the neuorphysiology of hearing is an interesting question for the scientists to answer.

"How can I hear my voice when I'm not speaking?" is your question. If we reserve the word "hearing" for what the ears do, and "the voice" for what the mouth speaks - not unreasonable, I think - then your question becomes, "How can I "hear" my "voice" when I'm not speaking?" i.e. "How can I undergo something which seems rather like hearing ("hear", in an extended or perhaps metaphorical sense) something which seems rather like my voice ("my voice", taken in an extended or perhaps metaphorical sense)? The important thing is to try to get clear about what the metaphors are metaphors on, if I can put it this way. ("The sun" is a metaphor on Juliet.) It is more than just imagination, because I can imagine a voice speaking, and hear it, without imagining that I hear it. That is, the minute the voice "speaks", I "hear" it, without an added act of imagination of the auditory (or rather, "atidory") kind. That is a puzzle: direct realism about inner "voices"! To the wider question, though, it is helpful to consider how astonishingly varied and numerous the metaphors are, even for one little subject. "He is de-spirited, rat-ty, a clown, a lounge lizard, a drag" and so on and on and on. Do we feel the "drag"? Do we feel the "rattiness"? Or do we judge it? Each of these metaphors trails its own distinctive cloud of epistemology. And so it is with the mind. Talk about the mind is often highly metaphorical, though not, on that account, by itself, false. If he is said to be ratty, the fact that we use a metaphor does not mean that what we mean is not true. Nor is it just metaphorically true, if this is taken to mean that "true" here is a metaphor.

Question How can I hear my voice in my head without speaking? Accepted:October 15, 2005

Question How can I hear my voice in my head without speaking?

Accepted:
October 15, 2005