{"id":6772,"date":"2021-11-18T06:57:51","date_gmt":"2021-11-18T11:57:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.silvercentury.org\/?p=6772"},"modified":"2021-11-18T06:57:51","modified_gmt":"2021-11-18T11:57:51","slug":"inner-voices","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/78.142.243.82\/~silvercentury\/2021\/11\/inner-voices\/","title":{"rendered":"Inner Voices"},"content":{"rendered":"

If nothing is going on around you and your thoughts are wandering, what do those thoughts sound like\u2014or look like\u2014inside your mind? <\/span><\/p>\n

Everybody\u2019s answer to that is probably different. According to <\/span>an article in the <\/a><\/span>Guardian<\/span><\/i>, <\/span><\/i>some deaf people don\u2019t hear voices at all. Instead, they visualize a pair of hands, commenting in sign language, or a face whose lips they can read. A British author<\/span> carries on a mental dialogue with a radio interviewer, who sometimes asks her cogent questions about decisions she needs to make. Another woman thinks in images on a TV screen in an attic inside her head. <\/span><\/p>\n

I always assumed everyone\u2019s thoughts expressed themselves as an inner voice because mine do, but after reading the article, I began to ask around. One friend thinks mostly in images, but several others do \u201chear\u201d voices. Since I live in a retirement community, the question came up: Does an inner voice \u201csound\u201d the same at 85 as it did at 25, or does it age, the way our public voices do? Women\u2019s become deeper in later life, and men\u2019s become slightly higher. And do inner sentences become less organized or more fragmentary? <\/span><\/p>\n

If researchers have answers to these questions, I haven\u2019t been able to find them online\u2014though I did find people on one website wondering about them and sharing their own experiences. My search confirmed that everybody\u2019s mindscape is different, and I learned that some people aren\u2019t aware of any inner goings-on. <\/span><\/p>\n

I suspect that what occurs in our minds does change over time\u2014I know it has for me. When I was younger, if I listened in on my own thoughts, I was aware that they were happening on several levels. Beneath the strong, upper stream of consciousness, other, fainter voices\u2014their messages less clear, more chaotic\u2014were competing for my attention with occasional, fleeting images. <\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019m 86 now, and these days when I listen, I hear only one voice. It\u2019s my own and it has aged along with me. It\u2019s also very quiet, which is probably why I often think out loud. I know what I\u2019m thinking once I hear what I\u2019m saying. <\/span><\/p>\n

My inner voice addresses me by my last name, as in \u201cDavis, what do you think you\u2019re doing?\u201d She scolds me sometimes, though she always sounds patient and understanding. She gives me instructions and reminds me of things I need to do. Sometimes she gets into a loop, telling me stories I\u2019ve heard many times about things that happened in the past. She goes on and on, and it\u2019s hard to shut her up, but she does that much less often now than she used to. <\/span><\/p>\n

She also dictates what I write. I mutter her words out loud a beat before my flying fingers type them onto my screen. <\/span><\/p>\n

Even when I\u2019m not working, I do a lot of muttering. I\u2019m lucky I live in a time and place where a woman, talking to herself in the supermarket or out on the street, is assumed to be on her phone\u2014not out of her mind. <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If nothing is going on around you and your thoughts are wandering, what do those thoughts sound like\u2014or look like\u2014inside your mind?  Everybody\u2019s answer to that is probably different. According to an article in the Guardian, some deaf people don\u2019t…<\/span><\/p>\n

Read more Inner Voices<\/span> ›<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":6773,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_FSMCFIC_featured_image_caption":"","_FSMCFIC_featured_image_nocaption":null,"_FSMCFIC_featured_image_hide":null,"footnotes":""},"categories":[79,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6772","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog","category-voices-views"],"cc_featured_image_caption":{"caption_text":"","source_text":"","source_url":""},"wps_subtitle":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/78.142.243.82\/~silvercentury\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6772","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/78.142.243.82\/~silvercentury\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/78.142.243.82\/~silvercentury\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/78.142.243.82\/~silvercentury\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/78.142.243.82\/~silvercentury\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6772"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/78.142.243.82\/~silvercentury\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6772\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6774,"href":"http:\/\/78.142.243.82\/~silvercentury\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6772\/revisions\/6774"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/78.142.243.82\/~silvercentury\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6773"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/78.142.243.82\/~silvercentury\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6772"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/78.142.243.82\/~silvercentury\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6772"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/78.142.243.82\/~silvercentury\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6772"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}