10 years ago, I’d have put my ability to visualise at 0 out of 10. Practice and occasional halucinogen use has got me to 2 out of 10. It causes no end of problems in day to day life, so I’m interested to hear if anyone has tips or just experiences to share so it doesn’t feel such a lonely frustrating issue.
edit informative comment from @Gwaer@lemm.ee about image streaming, I did a bit of digging on the broken links, the Dr isn’t giving the info away for free anymore without buying their (expensive) book, but I found some further info on additional techniques here, pages 2/3: https://nlpcourses.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Image-Streaming-Mode-of-Thinking.pdf
Yes but my question is that if you say you neither hear nor see the words, what experience does “I just think of the words” mean?
For me if I think of the words in a song I experience that as an auditory thought that may have some more abstract or emotional types of thinking attached to those words (ie, if I’m think of the word “cold” I might hear the word cold in my head and also feel the idea of coldness, or if I think of the word “angry” I’ll hear the word angry in my head and angry associations will come up. Note, this hearing of sounds inside the mind is not the same as experiencing an auditory halicination where you perceive you have heard an external noise with your ears.)
I don’t know. The thought is just there. Like if you think about world war 2, you don’t see it or hear it…you just ponder the causes, casualties, etc.
But, for you to put the words in “in the right order” they must take some sort of descreet experiential form.
I can think words or practice a speech in my head, but i don’t see or hear anything. Like how when you’re counting things, you don’t see or hear numbers in your head, you just count. I don’t know. I just learned in the last few weeks that some people do see and hear stuff.
I did write a lengthy (nice) response to try to better articulate my own subjective experience for comparison so we could continue to try to better understand one another but then I kinda just lost faith in the idea…
Do you possibly speak more than one language to any degree? If you think of the words “yes” and “oui” (yes in French), there must be some difference in what you experience inside your mind despite the meaning being the same. So what is different between the two subjective experiences for you?
Some Spanish and a little Italian, but I don’t use it enough, so I still normally still think in English and then translate. I don’t really know how to describe what that feels like but I don’t think it’s auditory. Maybe there is a flash of a visual memory of the written words? Brains are so weird! This all started for me a few weeks ago when a co-worker was talking about something and said, “… your inner voice.” I got irritated because I thought she had just told me to use my indoor voice and the conversation went on around our office about who does and doesn’t have an inner voice. Since then I’ve been asking everyone if they hear a voice or see pictures. It’s really interesting how some people have one or the other or none or both. I think the 3 to 5% no-image thing is very under reported.