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Comment by tigerlily | Hacker News Reader

I don’t have any mind chatter, but I have strong phantasia. To emulate an inner voice, I actually have to talk out loud, to myself. I’ve quite enjoyed this ever since I was a kid. Anyone else do anything similar?

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Talking out loud or writing significantly potentiate my otherwise weak inner voice. The question is: yes talking out loud is a very potent increase in inner voice quality of the thought and velocity. But how universal is that? Does everyone actually has a weak inner voice that has a hard time forming rich thought associations and rich sentences? Because it makes sense that talking out loud or writing leverage more neurons and therefore has more bandwidth. It even has some proof of universality for neurotypicals, see e.g rubber duck debugging.

I think it has reasonably high bandwidth, but it depends on the mode. A lot of the time I’m speaking to an acquaintance who is not present, and it’s a little like rubber duck debugging what I am going to say when I next meet them. Sometimes I sound completely over the top, or too fantastical, so it’s a good way for me to check my state of mind. The bandwidth starts to roll off once topics become circular, or there are too many repeats. Then I either just shut up or move onto another topic.

Man I’m making myself sound insane. I hope I don’t accidentally dox myself one day.

I liked your mention of rubber duck debugging, I think it’s the closest way to describe it :)

This seems common in children when learning to read. Most can initially only read out loud and have to later to learn to do so in their head.

Same in terms of not having a strong inner voice and using Otter.AI or writing down on paper to emulate an inner voice; phantasia doesn't seem to show much in Google so maybe there is a different term

Yeah I was using “phantasia” as an antonym for aphantasia, so just a placeholder term. I guess I mean I readily conjure images in my mind.

I'm opposite. Aphantasia but can hear nearly perfectly in my mind's ear

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