“I Didn’t Know My Mind Was So Strange Until I Started Listening to It”

It is surprising that some folks hear nothing as normal.  Others actually have a lot of chatter.  Quelling that chatter was a welcome consequence of meditation practise and allows you to do to the theta state after about fifteen minutes..

So there is something going on here.  My own conjecture is that this flow of chatter comes from the other side  and also perhaps internally.  I also think our memory is partially external inasmuch as it reaches back in TIME to a past self.  not too efficient for most of us, but sometimes wonderfully as well.

This shows us how fuzzy our own knowledge continues to be.  We are so strugglling to rise out of our animal instincts.

Phil Jaekl Takes Us Behind “I Didn’t Know My Mind Was So Strange Until I Started Listening to It”

Not long ago, a viral meme captured Phil Jaekl’s imagination. Someone had posted on social media a discovery they’d made—that some people, unlike them, don’t “hear” themselves speak internally. This person was blown away when they realized other people can’t listen to their own inner speech. The funny bit is that it goes the other way—some people who can’t listen to their inner speech are shocked to hear that other people can hear themselves talk in their heads.

Having been trained as a cognitive neuroscientist, Jaekl tried to make sense of this. Wasn’t the capacity for hearing inner speech important cognitively? “I was wondering,” he told me recently, “‘If somebody doesn’t innerly speak, then there should be some consequences or something measurable.’” So he got in touch with, among others, Russ Hurlburt, a psychologist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who studies inner experience using a technique he pioneered called Descriptive Experience Sampling. This is a data-gathering practice he coaches his participants to execute. “I woke up one morning,” Jaekl said, “and there was an email in my inbox saying, ‘Hey, Phil, do you want to actually try it and see for yourself? And then you can discover things about your own inner speech perhaps, if you do innerly speak.’”

In our conversation, Jaekl explained the peculiar experience of being a participant in Hurlburt’s experiment, which involved extensive interviews with the psychologist. Hurlburt grilled Jaekl on the notes he jotted down for each “sampling”—a journal entry about what exactly was on Jaekl’s mind when the beeper he wore for the experiment would unexpectedly go off.

“He really wants you to get down to the details and be clear about what you’re saying,” Jaekl said, of Hurlburt. “I think it makes a big difference with him if you’re confident or if you’re not confident. If you’re wavering on what you say, then he has different ways of asking the same question, or he listens to you very carefully to see if you repeat something, but describe it slightly differently.”

Jaekl also discussed how surprised he was to find that, often, he had nothing to report. “I began to think that there was something wrong with me,” he said. “Russ told me—and I completely agree using my own cognitive neuroscientific knowledge—that there’s no reason why you have to be experiencing something at any given moment.” That’s because our brain blocks out sensations that aren’t, at the moment, relevant—like the feeling of your back against the chair, or your feet on the ground. “And it doesn’t have to stop at that. Your mind can be blank. I’m not about to say that I was often in a meditative state, but that’s the first thing that I discovered about my mind while doing descriptive experience sampling.”

More remarkable, for him, was uncovering that he sometimes could listen to two parallel streams of inner speech. “I was rehearsing the combination of my bike lock and I was wondering if I should wear this earpiece in my ear while entering a bank.” He was weirded out writing this experience down. “I was like, ‘Hey, I was talking to myself, but with two separate voices.’” Watch here.

—Brian Gallagher, associate editor