My inner world

In recent years, some new insights and research about the brain and mind have been making their way around the Internet and words like "aphantasia" have started being discussed on social media and elsewhere.

Apparently, not every human mind is the same in the way that we experience our inner worlds, and people from both ends of these spectrums have been surprised in recent years to learn that other people can have totally opposite experiences, and yet we all think our own minds are "normal" and we all coexist and function in the world regardless.

So, I thought I would write a blog post and document how my inner world is, to add my own data points to the discussion. For science.

Specifically I want to talk about the following aspects of the mind:

• The Aphantasia spectrum, which concerns how clearly we can "visually imagine" a picture in our mind's eye.
• The Anendophasia spectrum, which concerns your "internal monologue" or "inner speech."

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Aphantasia, or Visual Imagination

The first of these topics that I heard about in recent years was Aphantasia. Strictly speaking, the definition of the word is as follows:

Aphantasia is the inability to voluntarily create mental images in your mind's eye. People with this trait can recall facts, concepts, and memories, but experience a blank screen when asked to "visualize" an object or scene. It is a natural cognitive variation, not a medical disorder or disability.

Aphantasia is a spectrum, and people with full aphantasia report being surprised to learn that some people actually can visually picture things in their head. They'll say that, when doing a guided meditation for example, and the guide says to visualize sitting at a beach during a calm day, or whatever, they thought it was metaphorical and were surprised to learn that some people actually can visualize such things in their mind's eye.

For me: I have a rich and vivid imagination where I can 'see' things in full color detail. However, in my experiences I have found that my imagination is like a muscle, and if I don't use it, I could lose it, so I have experienced different stages of the aphantasia spectrum myself.

Back when I was a child, I basically lived in my imagination, I definitely had what they would call "maladaptive daydreaming." I was day dreaming all the time, and I had whole entire persistent universes in my head that I would 'log on' to and go on fantastical adventures in. This was back in the 1990's, so we didn't have the Internet to distract us yet, and I had loads of free time and this was how I filled it. My imagination was sharp and vivid.

The way I would describe it at the time was: if I was day dreaming with my eyes open, my visual imagination might be less saturated and more 'black and white' as my mind's eye was competing with my physical eyes for stimulation, but if I closed my eyes I could see my imagined worlds in full-color fidelity.

At a certain point, though, my imagination had atrophied. It might have happened in my late teens or early 20's, I'm not really sure. I think it's because I stopped using my imagination so much, and multiple factors could've contributed to that, the least of which was maybe becoming a busy adult with many more important things to do. But when I learned about what Aphantasia was and took a look at how my own wakeful imagination behaved, it wasn't nearly as sharp anymore as it was when I was a kid.

The way I would've described my imagination then was: I could see the basic shape and 3D structure of objects in my mind, but without any color or detail, and everything looked sort of like red and white TV static. I used ChatGPT to help me generate a visual aid to describe what I was seeing, and this was a pretty accurate depiction:

An approximation of how I would visualize things, courtesy of ChatGPT.

From the Aphantasia Wikipedia page, this would have put me at about a 3 on the Aphantasia spectrum.

Anyway, I was not happy to discover that my imagination had atrophied so much and so I decided to practice and sharpen it back up again. And: I have restored my imagination back to its full-color vividness that I remember once having as a child.

For people who have full Aphantasia and don't have any experiences with visual imagination, I'm not sure if anything can be done about that. But if you're anywhere else on the spectrum, from my experiences anyway, it may be something that can be improved upon with practice.

Dreams and other visualizations

While I'm on the topic of Aphantasia, I want to put a couple other data points out there from my subjective internal experiences.

Dreams: for all of my life, even during the period when my visual imagination was weakened, my dreams at night have always been full color, vivid and fully realistic. Even moreso than my waking imagination ever was. I have heard that some people with full Aphantasia still report also having realistic and visual dreams. Though, dreams in general can be fickle things to self-report on: our brains have a way of immediately forgetting our dreams, especially if an alarm clock jostles us awake every morning, and some people report having never had a dream even if brain scans and research would suggest otherwise.

The other data point I want to add is about psychedelic visuals. I had sometimes written about these topics before. For me, I see the classic visuals and fractal geometry from psychedelics but I have heard from people with Aphantasia that they don't see any such things when they've tripped. I have also been able to induce the same 'psychedelic visuals' in my mind while sober, purely by meditating while staring up at my ceiling in bed. I would be curious about if people with Aphantasia don't see any such visuals doing it that way, either, but I suspect that if psychedelics don't induce those visuals then meditation might not either.

Anendophasia, or Internal Monologue

Anendophasia is a much newer word in the public lexicon and it is to inner speech what Aphantasia is to visual imagination.

There are some people who do not have an internal monologue or a "voice in their head" that narrates their thoughts to them, and they are often surprised to find out that some other people literally do have inner speech! Similar to the example above about guided meditations and visualization, they report having a similar epiphany about those scenes in movies or TV shows where a character is thinking to themselves with their voice narrating out loud for the audience to hear. Some of us really do narrate to ourselves like that!

And like Aphantasia, this one seems to be a spectrum as well. Some people have no internal monologue and instead they might think in terms of pictures or feelings or a sort of vague 'knowing-ness' that is hard for them to describe, while people on the other end of the spectrum have an inner voice that speaks in full and complete sentences with words all lined up in a row just as if they were speaking out loud. People in the middle of the spectrum report that they have an internal monologue that speaks in words, but not in complete sentences and instead mixed with a handful of other forms of thought including images, feelings or vague abstract concepts.

A while ago I saw this interview on YouTube from a leading expert in inner experiences where he ran a study about inner speech. He would randomly poll his test subjects and have them report on what was going on in their heads just then, and whether their thoughts were in complete sentences or what was going on. He concluded that most people who have inner speech do not speak in complete sentences to themselves, even while they would have self-reported that they do. Apparently though, something like 10% of people do speak to themselves in full and complete sentences.

For myself: I definitely do narrate to myself in full sentences. It may be due to my anxieties as a child or my being neurodivergent, but I would fully have practice conversations in my head all the time, and still today, my mind is always going on about something or other.

When I am plotting out a blog post I want to write about or a YouTube video, I'll be practicing what I want to say for days leading up, or in my head I'm acting like I'm giving a lecture about a topic that I am passionate about like I am teaching it to an audience that isn't familiar with it and breaking it down from first principles.

What does my inner voice sound like?

The main voice that I narrate to myself with sounds the same as how I hear my actual voice when I talk (that is, the voice that vibrates thru my skull and not the outward voice that other people normally hear or what I hear when I play back a recording of myself).

At will, though, I can conjure any other voice I want, so if I feel like narrating to myself in the voice of Morgan Freeman or Professor Farnsworth, I can make that happen easily.

I actually have many inner voices!

After I started to get into meditation and I could sit in silence and just watch how my brain behaves, I came to realize that I actually have multiple internal voices and most of them behave autonomously and say things that I didn't consciously solicit for them to say.

And, I don't mean this in a 'crazy' way at all: you, dear reader, statistically speaking, have a brain that does the same thing. Most people call these unsolicited voices as "intrusive thoughts" and they are a completely normal phenomenon. All of the voices still feel like 'me', and they aren't distressing in any way, but they say things at random that I didn't have a conscious intention to hear them say.

Updated to clarify: I don't have conversations with these other voices! They speak up and throw random thoughts out there, but if I try and address these voices and ask them a question, they go radio silent.

While I do often 'talk to myself' and sometimes roleplay as a therapist and ask myself deep questions and then answer them, I am consciously controlling both sides of those conversations, the same way that I might simulate a conversation with others and anticipate how they might reply. Those thoughts are all manually controlled by me in those cases.

I think that if one of these other voices did speak back to me automonously, it would startle me and I would check myself in for a mental health evaluation!

When I was first learning about meditation, the resources I found actually prepared me for this.

A meditation practice that is often recommended for beginners is one where you simply sit down and pay attention to your breathing, and focus on how it feels to just breathe in and breathe out. They say: don't try and manually control your breathing, but just let it happen as normal and just keep your attention focused on it. They say: your mind is likely to wander, you'll start thinking about things like your work or what you want to have for dinner later, your mind will get carried away and you'll lose track of focusing on your breath. Even if you don't have an inner monologue, the other ways that you normally think will distract you and then you'll suddenly notice and realize you've been swept away by your thoughts. They say: don't beat yourself up over it when it happens, but just come back to your breath and start focusing on that again, and practice makes perfect over time and the process gets easier.

All of that is to say, already: our minds have a mind of their own, and they tend to be thinking about nonsense all day long and they will go off and do it without you even if you don't want to consciously sit there and think. A meditation practice helps you to notice this behavior and to eventually realize: you are not your mind, you are in fact the awareness that hears your thoughts but you are not your thoughts themselves.

So, I was already prepared to find this sort of thing out. What I wasn't prepared for was to find out that my inner monologue is actually a collective of multiple different 'sub-personalities' that each can be narrating to themselves at the same time! And I don't think this is an unusual thing either.

The way that I first began to notice it was this: I was having a brainstorm session one day thinking of new ideas for my videogame project. So I was thinking about things like level design, and collision detection, and how enemies would be programmed, and about multiplayer, and all of these sorts of things. And, from my experiences with meditation I was able to notice what my mind was doing in this moment: I was simultaneously crunching on all of these different ideas at the same time!

Objectively, my mind was noisy as hell like a busy cafeteria full of people having their own separate conversations. But I was able to "tune in" and listen to the different threads of thought, so I could eavesdrop on the one talking about collision detection and then switch over to the one talking about save file formats. But even when I wasn't listening to any specific voice, the collective knowledge and ideas that each was generating was getting stored in my brain all the same.

I tried to count how many distinct voices or trains of thought I could hear, and I estimated that there might have been about a dozen of them going all at once.

On a normal day, there isn't nearly so much chatter going on in my head, and only one or two voices will randomly speak out of turn and say something random and unpredictable.

Anyway, all of these voices still "feel" like me and they are all aligned in my best interest, so I don't feel distressed or bothered by it. They have always been there, and I have only started to notice in recent years after I got into meditation.

My pet theory is that mental disorders such as schizophrenia are related to this phenomena but with the difference being that the other voices don't feel like "you" and aren't aligned in your best interest, but I'm not a psychologist so take that theory with a grain of salt!

The voice named "Anxiety"

So I have my "main" inner voice, the one that I use to consciously narrate to myself, where I choose every word and line them all up in a row. This is the voice that I plan my day with and practice my future blog posts with. The other voices are relatively quieter by comparison, in volume I mean, and they are the ones that toss these unsolicited thoughts into the mix.

Of those other dozen voices, I have even given one of them a name: Anxiety. Anxiety is the most distinct of the voices because whenever he speaks up, it's about, naturally, something anxious. He speaks up on his own and runs hypothetical worst case scenarios by me, and I talk him down off the ledge every time. In my younger years I had massive struggles with social anxiety, and meditation helped me to not only realize that I am not my thoughts, but to also come to recognize that Anxiety is just one sub-personality who may be a little over-bearing at times but only has my best interests in mind.

I had found over the years that Anxiety just wanted to be heard. If I tried to shrug him away and shut him up, it would only make things worse. Most of the fears that Anxiety brings up are frivilous and unfounded, but I hear them out and then explain to Anxiety how we've managed to live on this Earth for 38 years and nearly all of his nightmare scenarios never even came to happen and that, as always, everything will be OK.

The other dozen voices aren't named because there isn't anything very distinctive about them, they're all just a part of my inner community who helps me navigate the world and collect my thoughts. Like Anxiety, I hear and acknowledge what they say and if a thought is worth expanding on, I'll sit with it and flesh it out, and then let it dissolve back into the ether of my unconscious.

What is your inner world like?

Let me know in the comments if any of this stuff resonated with you, or if you have your own insights to share about what your inner world is like and how it might differ from my own!