How do you perceive your thoughts?

[Nerys Ghemor]

I am doing a little unscientific survey for a fanfic piece I started working on about a species that turns out to have a very different mode of thought than humanity (and by extension a number of the other Trek humanoid species), and I wanted to check the validity of my conclusion here.

The question is this. When you think, how do you perceive your own thoughts? Please mark whichever one of these options is the FIRST way in which you register your own thoughts. (If there is a second way, though, please post that in a written answer.)

I'll be coming along with my vote shortly, but I don't want to potentially affect the poll results, until a trend starts setting in.

 

[Amaris]

Images are how I first perceive my own thoughts, followed by music and animations.
When I am recalling something that someone said, it is vocal with emphasized text.


J.

 

[RoJoHen]

I really don't know how I perceive my own thoughts. Sometimes I see pictures. Sometimes I see words. Sometimes I speak to myself in Spanish. Other times I sing my thought to myself. It varies quite a bit.

 

[thestrangequark]

Always images and sounds together.

 

[JustKate]

Gosh, it really is hard to say. I am fairly sure that I get images first, but words - I can hear the voices in my head, bwahahaha! Really - come pretty soon thereafter.

 

[Goji]

A mix of images and spoken word, but usually the latter, so I went with that.

 

[trampledamage]

Spoken words for me. Usually my voice, sometimes other peoples.

 

[Tribbles]

I would say spoken words. When I was younger, I had a running narration in my mind; I'd mentally "write" everything that was happening around me. (I have an MA in creative writing now, if that's at all relevant or helpful to your research.) It was very exhausting and frustrated me as a child, but I had a difficult time controlling it.

I don't have quite the same problem now (for which I am very thankful), but I do tend to process things I hear as dialogue. It's no longer a running narration, but I still think in words and sentences. Sometimes, I dream in written text, but I think that's due to being glued to the computer screen all day.

 

[Rii]

Most of my thoughts are expressed in terms of language, however I don't believe the mode of expression corresponds directly to either the written or spoken forms, in that whilst there is no accompanying visual imagery as characteristic of the written word, my thoughts also have no particular voice as characteristic of the spoken word.

My thoughts also encompass sensory impressions - visual, auditory, olfactory, etc. - as currently experienced or retrieved from memory, but those icons are processed and integrated into the thought-stream using the syntactics of language.

Off-the-cuff hypothesis: meditation and other forms of 'altered consciousness' involve, in part, dampening the role of symbols (incl. language) and strengthening that of icons (i.e. sensory data) in our consciousness.

 

[Nerys Ghemor]

My thoughts begin life as text--always. I can't remember not knowing how to read (I think I learned at 2 1/2, or started to, anyway), and anything I think always appears first as a flash of words in the back of my mind, WAY faster than I could ever type or speak. This sometimes means I have an annoying catch-up time as my mental "voice" catches up to it, and the images and other things come in; it kind of makes it feel like there's an echo in my head.

I'd say I do have a mental voice, but it's not as well defined as the text (a white Times New Roman-looking font on a black background. And I don't even LIKE Times New Roman!), and it really just reads what's written. Sometimes it's my own voice...though a rather weak version of it, not all that well-defined (sometimes there's a soft voice, other times it feels like a whisper, other times like it's just...a feeling of what it would be like to just mouth the words silently--and that might actually be the most frequent way it feels), other times it's other people's voices, which are better-defined, but what my mental voice says always comes from the written word--never the other way around.

And Tribbles--I sure understand what you mean about mentally writing everything that happens to you! I found an outlet for that ability, too...fanfic.

 

[sidious618]

Words.

 

[iguana_tonante]

Mostly spoken words. My head is always blathering to me. Often I get text too, and I need to have text if it's something that I need to remember: my memory is visual. Sometimes I get tridimensional images, especially when I'm thinking physics or math, but they are not my usual way of thinking.

 

[Nerys Ghemor]

Good Lord...looking at this, I am apparently quite the anomaly!

 

[Kelthaz]

Images. I sometimes see words as images, but that isn't the same thing as text.

 

[T'Baio]

Naked chicks. Hot naked chicks saying...something. I never know what they're saying, I'm revelling in their hotness. Blondes, brunettes...mainly redheads.

What was the question again?

 

[Wrongway Janeway]

Vocal. I do a lot of talking!

Another thing about myself that I found was unusual (after telling other people about it) is that I almost always have music running through my head. The only time this is not the case is when I'm focused on doing something important, such as teaching a lesson.

 

[AstroSmurf]

My thoughts are a mix of images and sounds, but mostly images. I do like to have these internal conversations with myself and they are always mentally vocalized. I hear a lot of music too.

 

[Amaris]

Vocal. I do a lot of talking!

Another thing about myself that I found was unusual (after telling other people about it) is that I almost always have music running through my head. The only time this is not the case is when I'm focused on doing something important, such as teaching a lesson.

I know how you feel about the music in your head. Sometimes I realize that I have been breathing the chorus. Not singing, but actually breathing it as if I were. This would explain my occasional dizzy spells.

J.

 

[Mallory]

Almost always spoken words.

 

[AstroSmurf]

Vocal. I do a lot of talking!

Another thing about myself that I found was unusual (after telling other people about it) is that I almost always have music running through my head. The only time this is not the case is when I'm focused on doing something important, such as teaching a lesson.

I know how you feel about the music in your head. Sometimes I realize that I have been breathing the chorus. Not singing, but actually breathing it as if I were. This would explain my occasional dizzy spells.

J.

Do either of you wake up in the morning with a song already playing in your heads? I do. And sometimes I wake up and will find myself actually singing out loud before I am even really awake. I always think to myself "Is that the radio?" before I am cognitive enough to realize it is coming from me.