[andai]

There was a guy at MIT about ten years ago (edit: 2018! Woah) who made a headset that would read electrical impulses from your face. Apparently when people think in words, the same nerves fire as when they speak, just at a lower activation level. Using those signals it is possible to reconstruct the words being thought.

I'm surprised it didn't seem to go anywhere.

Edit: found it https://youtu.be/RuUSc53Xpeg

[zamadatix]

The project page claims it's different process than thinking in words:

> What exactly is “silent speech”? Does the user have to move his or her face or mouth to use the system?

> Silent speech is different from either thinking of words or saying words out loud. Remember when you first learned to read? At first, you spoke the words you read out loud, but then you learned to voice them internally and silently. In order to then proceed to faster reading rates, you had to unlearn the “silent speaking” of the words you read. Silent speaking is a conscious effort to say a word, characterized by subtle movements of internal speech organs without actually voicing it.

> Can this device read my mind? What about privacy?

> No, this device cannot read your mind. The novelty of this system is that it reads signals from your facial and vocal cord muscles when you intentionally and silently voice words. The system does not have any direct and physical access to brain activity, and therefore cannot read a user's thoughts. It is crucial that the control over input resides absolutely with the user in all situations, and that such an interface not have access to a user's thoughts. The device only reads words that are deliberately silently spoken as inputs.

https://www.media.mit.edu/projects/alterego/frequently-asked...

[judge2020]

> I'm surprised it didn't seem to go anywhere.

At least not publicly.

[danem]

There have been some corporate research groups that have tried to take this approach further, and they all have more or less failed as far as I know.

[Filligree]

People only think in words right before they say something, so I'm not sure how big a deal this is. I guess they'd be able to predict what I'm writing half a second before I write it?

Would be useful if I lost the ability to write or speak, for whatever reason.

[Symmetry]

The extent that people's thinking relies on inner monologue is something that varies wildly between different people. Likewise people's abilities to form mental images.

[slingnow]

Citation definitely needed. I have a nearly constant internal monologue that is 100% composed of words.

[joadha]

I only have that when I'm reading something and really trying to take it all in.

Otherwise my internal monologue is a combination of notions, visions, and words.

Do you think in complete sentences?

[berniedurfee]

I do

[TechBro8615]

Do you know what it's going to say next? If not, who's generating each new word? And if yes, then isn't this just subvocalization?

[l33t233372]

> If not, who's generating each new word

Do you know what your next thought will be? If so, how? Did you think it before you thought it?

[None4U]

> who's generating each new word?

Thinking

[judge2020]

Many people do have an internal monologue. The vector is that some police unit presents you with a login form (eg. for your password manager or encrypted filesystem), and you involuntarily think of the password, which this device reads and presents to them.

[airstrike]

Joke's on them, my passwords are entirely unpronounceable

[kzrdude]

only my fingers know my passwords. And no way all ten will rat me out

[djmips]

oh yeah, maybe they'll put electrodes on your fingers! JK - this doesn't seem like a viable approach.

[squeaky-clean]

I'm "thinking in words" this entire thread as I read it. Do some people read without hearing the words in their head?

[TechBro8615]

Yeah, personally - and this might be a controversial opinion - I think most people who say they have an inner monologue are actually misattributing their experience of subvocalization while either reading text, or planning hypothetical conversations with other people (like a child might speak to their imaginary friend). It seems dubious to label that a monologue, because it depends on external stimuli (either the text you're reading, or your previous experience with people to whom you're imagining yourself speaking).

You might classify talking to yourself as a monologue, but when most people discuss this topic, it sounds like they're describing a dialogue (i.e. one between multiple people). That seems crazy to me, because who does the other voice belong to?

If you have an inner monologue, then by definition you should be able to predict what it's going to say - because mono- means just you. Yet people talk about this experience like there is some novel conversation happening in their head.

It's frightening to think about a voice in my head that is one thought ahead of me. If you experience this, how can you possibly feel in control of your own mind? When does an inner monologue become schizophrenia?

[burnished]

Wow, this is interesting, I thought pretty much everyone had an internal monologue. It feels like a colorblind person sharing the suspicion that everyone is just making up this other color spectrum.

[berniedurfee]

Yeah, really interesting, who’s neurodivergent in this case?

I guess we’ll soon have a device that can find out!

[burnished]

Where does a device come into play? Just need to perform a poll

[slackdog]

> or planning hypothetical conversations with other people

It's not that, but it's related to that. It is done in the same manner, with you imagining what the other person would say.

Have you heard of the "rubber duck" method of debugging? The idea is that you put a little rubber duck on your desk and whenever you get stumped by a problem, you explain the problem to the duck and, as you put the problem into words, your brain figures out the answer.

Well it turns out that it works for many tricky problems besides programming, you don't really need the duck, you don't actually have to use your mouth, and you can do it entirely in your own head, having the exchange with an imagined "reasonable person" (who is just another aspect of yourself consciously playing the role.) The key insight is that language is a tool for thinking, expressing problems in language can help your brain reason them out. Once you realize this, you should be able to consciously choose to have conversations with yourself as a tool for figuring problems out.

> That seems crazy to me, because who does the other voice belong to?

Me, obviously. The process is that of authoring a dialogue. If you write a short fictional story about you explaining your problems to a wise sage who asks lots of questions and then tries to come up with a reasonable answer, who is the sage? It's your creation as an author. Now do this process without the pen, just in your head. Who is the sage? The sage is still your creation, it's still an aspect of you, slightly divorced from your ego because you're deliberately playing a roll when you imagine what such a sage would say about your situation. But it's obviously still you, it's not a foreign voice in your head disconnected from your conscious will. It's not schizophrenia, it's just a process of 'talking' problems out to figure them out.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging

[dragonwriter]

> Yeah, personally - and this might be a controversial opinion - I think most people who say they have an inner monologue are actually misattributing either their experience of reading text, or of planning hypothetical conversations with other people.

No, we aren't. Now its true that (well, for me at least) the inner monologue is the exact same experience as when reading text or when planning hypothetical conversations. Or when thinking ahead of words to write. The difference is that it is not planning a hypothetical conversation or something to write, and there is no text being read, and it happens pretty much all the time, except when I'm doing one of those other things (and sometimes as an intrusive interruptions when I am.) If you imagine there exists a common piece of mental infrastructure that is used for each of those actions, its as if it was always on doing a narration except when you are specifically, actively concentrating on using it for some other purpose.

> Hearing voices is schizophrenia.

No, hearing voices that aren't there is an auditory hallucination. Among the things it can be a symptom of is schizophrenia, but "X can be a symptom of Y" is not the same thing as "X is Y".

But an inner monologue is not an auditory hallucination. Its obviously and distinctly internal, not something that "sounds" like it is coming from outside.

> You might classify talking to yourself as a monologue

Because it literally is.

> but when most people discuss this topic, it sounds like they're describing a dialogue (i.e. one between multiple people). That seems crazy to me, because who does the other voice belong to?

I think a lot of people do what amounts to roleplaying out conversations, particular on decisions which are troublesome, with themselves; because this is similar to planning a hypothetic conversation with another person, which I gather people without inner monologues can do without outward speech, I'm not sure how connected it is to an inner monologue. From the perspective of someone with one, its a fairly easy deliberate "mode switch" where you basically decided that that is what the monologue is going to focus on.

It's also conceivable that, within plural systems, there is what amounts to an "inner dialogue" or "inner multiparty conversation". Not being a plural system, I can't comment on that and the degree to which it is perceptually different than an inner monologue.

> If you have an inner monologue, then by definition you should be able to predict what it's going to say - because mono- means just you.

That...doesn't follow. But if you have an experience of a conscious thought of what you are about just instantaneously before you say it, an inner monologue is a lot like that, but without the follow-through of speech. That is, I think you are not only wrong that it is true "by definition" that you should be able to predict an inner monologue, and that this is a false analogy to external speech, but that an inner monologue is perceptually similar to, and may well be fundamentally resusing the same infrastructure as, the natural internal "prediction" (or planning; not sure those things are, in this case, different) of outward-directed speech.

[ryukafalz]

This tends to start long threads with tons of anecdotes whenever it comes up but the answer is yes, some people do. (I usually do but not always, for example.)

For lots and lots of discussion, you can search for things like this on e.g. Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/comments/nosdwt/d...

[Baeocystin]

I don't have a word-based internal dialogue. When it's time to use words, like writing this post, sure, it's word time, so words are used.

But if I'm just reading, I just take in chunks and phrases while constructing a meaning model. The sounds themselves (or even individual words) don't really enter into it.

[berniedurfee]

That’s really fascinating and very different from my experience.

It’d be a really interesting project to measure and classify people’s individual thinking mechanisms. That daemon that seems to exist at the boundary of the conscious and unconscious.

Then again, maybe we wouldn’t want that as yet another data point to be bought and sold.