NoneoftheaboveJust a conforming non-conformist.Twilight ZoneRegistered Userregular
Do any historians and/or anthropologists here have any good sources on very early humanity and how it might have been that we started out without internal monolgues to our thought processes? When we started hearing voices in our heads we thought it divine in origin? I forget who, or when this theory was proposed, 1970's? It was a controversial and possibly bunk theory, but I'm curious. Does anyone know what I'm talking about? Do I know what I'm talking about?
Do any historians and/or anthropologists here have any good sources on very early humanity and how it might have been that we started out without internal monolgues to our thought processes? When we started hearing voices in our heads we thought it divine in origin? I forget who, or when this theory was proposed, 1970's? It was a controversial and possibly bunk theory, but I'm curious. Does anyone know what I'm talking about? Do I know what I'm talking about?
As an amateur historian. No. History as a academic subject concerns itself pretty much exclusively with written sources (and by the time we started writing any sort of society where a part of the population didn't have an inner voice was long gone. Archeology concerns itself with material culture.
Historical anthropology might be the right branch, but it's considered fairly niche and often speculative.
Though if anyone worked on a theory like that though I think they'd have a hard time not talking about Lev Vygotsky's work in developmental psychology.
"The western world sips from a poisonous cocktail: Polarisation, populism, protectionism and post-truth"
-Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
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NoneoftheaboveJust a conforming non-conformist.Twilight ZoneRegistered Userregular
Do any historians and/or anthropologists here have any good sources on very early humanity and how it might have been that we started out without internal monolgues to our thought processes? When we started hearing voices in our heads we thought it divine in origin? I forget who, or when this theory was proposed, 1970's? It was a controversial and possibly bunk theory, but I'm curious. Does anyone know what I'm talking about? Do I know what I'm talking about?
As an amateur historian. No. History as a academic subject concerns itself pretty much exclusively with written sources (and by the time we started writing any sort of society where a part of the population didn't have an inner voice was long gone. Archeology concerns itself with material culture.
Historical anthropology might be the right branch, but it's considered fairly niche and often speculative.
Though if anyone worked on a theory like that though I think they'd have a hard time not talking about Lev Vygotsky's work in developmental psychology.
Just a brief check on Lev, but it does not seem if I recall this being a theory he might have put forward. Still looking into this, but I thank you for sharing.
Do any historians and/or anthropologists here have any good sources on very early humanity and how it might have been that we started out without internal monolgues to our thought processes? When we started hearing voices in our heads we thought it divine in origin? I forget who, or when this theory was proposed, 1970's? It was a controversial and possibly bunk theory, but I'm curious. Does anyone know what I'm talking about? Do I know what I'm talking about?
As an amateur historian. No. History as a academic subject concerns itself pretty much exclusively with written sources (and by the time we started writing any sort of society where a part of the population didn't have an inner voice was long gone. Archeology concerns itself with material culture.
Historical anthropology might be the right branch, but it's considered fairly niche and often speculative.
Though if anyone worked on a theory like that though I think they'd have a hard time not talking about Lev Vygotsky's work in developmental psychology.
Hominids probably were extremely unimaginative and not intelligent by our standards, but it’s likely that they were otherwise socially human. Mirror neurons are present in monkeys!
Seeing oneself in the same light as family or tribe members seems like a small step; narrating a theory of mind of oneself is not far-fetched.
I doubt that this is the same thing as ‘hearing voices’.
It's not that uncommon for humans now not to have that either, so I'd guess pretty late.
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MorninglordI'm tired of being Batman,so today I'll be Owl.Registered Userregular
edited June 2022
Internal monologues is only one way that some people think right now.
Think of the words people say as an output. The internal processing done to get there can be wildly different, but because our language requires a linear sequence of sounds, we assume everyone does that internally too. There's no way to tell if someone is or isn't unless they tell you.
I dont have an internal monologue unless Im actively planning how to construct a sentence. I dont think in words, but images, abstracts, emotional impressions, and shapeforms.
I remember one lady who said she has an old italian married couple arguing in her head. Not like at her. She doesnt argue with them. Theyre literally her thoughts. Theyre in a kitchen, and everytime shes thinking of anything its these two going at it.
Italian couple lady is pretty great but I honestly think mr hopkins life is pretty peaceful. His internal idling is complete silence.
“Like a tiny island, surrounded by an infinite ocean,” is how Justin Hopkins describes his brain. “The tiny island is where all the conscious things seem to happen, but it’s surrounded by this infinite, inaccessible stuff.” Hopkins, who is 59 and works for a social enterprise in London, doesn’t have an inner voice. There is no one in his brain to blame, shame or criticise. In his head, there is emptiness: just the still warm air before a rustling breeze.
“There’s nothing there,” says Hopkins. “And I don’t think there ever has been.” Of course, Hopkins has thoughts: we all do. But the inner monologue that fills our brain while the engine stands idling isn’t there. It’s been clicked off, permanently. “When I am alone and relaxed, there are no words at all,” he says. “There’s great pleasure in that.” He can easily while away an hour without having a single thought. Unsurprisingly, Hopkins sleeps like a baby.
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He also apparently had a higher pitched, nasally voice (as opposed to modern pop culture, which almost always makes him a baritone.) He possessed a notably biting wit, which is also often missing from modern depictions (focused as they generally are on the civil war)
So, ‘slightly uglier bill nye’ isn’t that far off
"NOW YOU FUCKED UP! NOW YOU FUCKED UP! NOW YOU FUCKED UP! ...YOU HAVE FUCKED UP NOW!"
Okay, what's this from?
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MorninglordI'm tired of being Batman,so today I'll be Owl.Registered Userregular
edited June 2022
Incidentally that link has the neuroscience current theory for where inner voices come from.
In order to understand how the inner voice works, you need to understand how human thought translates into action. “Whenever we do any action, our brain makes a prediction of the sensory consequences of that action,” says Loevenbruck. Say you want to fetch a glass of water. “Your brain sends the appropriate motor signals to your hand, but it also generates a sensory prediction of the command,” she says. “Before you’ve even picked up the glass, your brain has made a prediction of what the motor command will do, which means you can correct for mistakes before you make an error. This system is very efficient, and it’s why humans can do so many actions without making errors.”
The same principle applies with human speech. Every time our mouths move to form a word, our brain is simultaneously generating a predictive simulation of that speech in our brain, to correct for error. “The current understanding of inner speech is that we do the same as in overt speech – make predictions in our mind of what we will say – but we don’t actually send the motor commands to our speech muscles,” Loevenbruck concludes. “This simulated auditory signal is the little voice we hear in our brain.”
Loevenbruck explains that, for the most part, we hear what she terms “inner language”. But not always. “You can have expanded and more condensed forms of inner speech,” she says. “People may experience them as abstract representations of language, without sound … some people say their inner voice is like a radio that’s on all day long. Other people don’t have a voice at all, or they speak in abstract symbols that don’t involve language.” Loevenbruck can’t explain why some people experience the inner voice differently: we are at the limits of neuroscience, already the most slippery of all the branches of human knowledge.
As you can see, its remarkably simple and not really some magical leap into hey voices now. A system used for everything is being applied here too.
Does this mean animals that communicate with each other could be doing an obviously much simpler version of this? There's absolutely no reason why not. Animals can make predictions too, just not to our level of complexity or sophistication.
Id be very surprised if dogs, dolphins or corvids werent doing something similar. Or rats, especially when it comes to smell related tasks, where they can solve multiple step abstract puzzles.
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He also apparently had a higher pitched, nasally voice (as opposed to modern pop culture, which almost always makes him a baritone.) He possessed a notably biting wit, which is also often missing from modern depictions (focused as they generally are on the civil war)
So, ‘slightly uglier bill nye’ isn’t that far off
"NOW YOU FUCKED UP! NOW YOU FUCKED UP! NOW YOU FUCKED UP! ...YOU HAVE FUCKED UP NOW!"
We understand very little of how people think and what it is and the differences in how real living people who can go in an fMRI and do thinking while answering simple directed questions.
Consciousness, sentience, sapience are poorly defined and qualitative. There are no objective standards. Inner dialogue is poorly defined what it actually is or how much it exists in individuals.
As much as I enjoy the evo psych stuff it's important to admit we have no idea and may never really know. It's basically phrenology at the moment. Snow Crash was a fun book though.
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MorninglordI'm tired of being Batman,so today I'll be Owl.Registered Userregular
We understand very little of how people think and what it is and the differences in how real living people who can go in an fMRI and do thinking while answering simple directed questions.
Consciousness, sentience, sapience are poorly defined and qualitative. There are no objective standards. Inner dialogue is poorly defined what it actually is or how much it exists in individuals.
As much as I enjoy the evo psych stuff it's important to admit we have no idea and may never really know. It's basically phrenology at the moment. Snow Crash was a fun book though.
Neuroscience, not evo psych.
Consciousness is not internal dialog. I think you misunderstood that article.
It's just descriving how people are right now.
An interesting thing I find happening is that whenever there is a piece of evidence that uncovers a little bit of the puzzle of how people work, people instantly move the goalposts and go oh no consciousness is special and we can't define it and oh no we don't really know anything, no no all that evidence is just fluff really.
Which is roughly analogous to someone going up and saying "You know we don't really know how physics actually works, so we can't really define anything in it" and then claiming relativity or quantum physics isn't real.
It's true that scientists who know way more about this than you and I always say that there's a lot of mysteries and not everything is fully defined. But isn't anywhere close to saying they can't explain anything at all. They can explain quite a lot, and they can use it to make predictions too.
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Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
edited June 2022
The human species has been functionally the same for at least a couple hundred thousand years now. As far as people "hearing voices", I'd consider it far more likely that, considering the distribution of individuals with mental issues from birth, even small groups regularly had somebody they would've considered "touched" but we would consider mentally disturbed; consider that small populations also would've been more inbred and thus more susceptible to genetic issues and probably every social group everywhere had or knew somebody that "heard voices". Fifty thousand years ago, you run across some guy in the woods with a wide-eyed stare that looks like he wants to eat you but keeps getting distracted by voices and things he can't see? Yeah, you aren't gonna wonder why he's not being taken care of, you're gonna wonder what the fuck is going on that he can see and hear things you're missing.
I've heard of people claiming that they hear their own thinking as if it's somebody else talking, but I've never encountered anyone who claims that and I'm inclined to think that it's rare, if not made-up entirely.
At the same, we do have a multi-lobed brain that you can kinda think of like four brains working together and have a bazillion neural connections so I dunno, maybe I'm wrong and some people end up wired such that their thoughts kind of are another person in their mind. Our brains are some crazy shit.
Someday we may learn that the "cat sees a ghost" thing is literally a hallucination.
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MorninglordI'm tired of being Batman,so today I'll be Owl.Registered Userregular
edited June 2022
My favorite thing about studying psychology was realising how colossally useless (in terms of being reliable evidence) all my ancedotal experiences of interacting with people in my life actually is, and how fundamentally backwards most of our everyday beliefs about other people are, and how fantastically we lie to ourselves with our little stories that we are experts at something we so badly misunderstand on a fundamental everyday level.
It was some real trippy shit. About halfway through I was going through a twilight zone bedrock of the universe is shifting feeling in my head that made me feel like I was losing my mind. I mentioned this to my professor and he's like "Yeah, that's normal"
Would recommend.
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Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
That sounds dangerously close to critical thinking and you know what else starts with a "C"?
That sounds dangerously close to critical thinking and you know what else starts with a "C"?
That's right, Communism.
And we don't like those kinds 'round here. Ayup.
I don't even trust my own anecdotal evidence. Do you have any idea how maddening that is.
You know what else?
Student psychologists drink a lot. There was a pub literally across the road from the psychology department. There was a psychology club, and I was informed it was basically just a drinking club. I could easily go to that pub and find my professors and we could sit down and drink and talk about mad psychology shit, like properly explaining how factor analysis works. I once told them I started psychology because I thought it would help me understand people and they all laughed at me. One joked that I chose the wrong field of study. At least I think it was a joke.
Anecdotal (especially since students drink a lot anyway), but I'm ignoring that rule because its funny.
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NoneoftheaboveJust a conforming non-conformist.Twilight ZoneRegistered Userregular
This has been amazingly indepth and fascinating. I did not wish to stray the discourse from history to psychology, but it was rewarding. If I remember where the idea originates in history it would be right about the time humanity was developing art and religious concepts. The idea put forth was that the common way we think in our minds was developed quite late in our human history during early civilizations and not hundreds of thousands of years ago when recognizably modern humans arrived. And there must be something to this as was pointed out by @Tastyfish, if certain people are unable to think in their minds conversationally.
For me at least I can quietly think to myself as though I were talking to myself, as well as thinking in terms of feeling, imagination or daydreaming. I assume this is the norm for everybody.
There are more kinds of mental experience than sci-fi has yet written about. Some folks have a lot of limitations, but then you have other folks who have stuff like synesthesia and I can only assume that at least some of them carry that into their mental experiences. There's certainly no global limit to what the species can experience within the range of experiences they can encounter, but there's no necessarily a minimum either, though at a certain point it would present limitations in decision-making.
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MorninglordI'm tired of being Batman,so today I'll be Owl.Registered Userregular
edited June 2022
It's best to think of it as there being a general guide to how most people develop, but what creates that guide is going to be based on their culture, their experiences growing up, and only partly their genetics.
So there's a lot of things that can develop differently for an individual.
The dominant model is the biopsychosocial model, where genetics, pscyhological factors, and social factors all combined to result in an individuals unique experience and makeup.
People in a different culture can literally think differently. That's just the wacky wild nature of brain plasticity.
Have you ever seen recording of how people from previous times used to speak? Not the language syntax, but the way they used to construct sentences to communicate ideas? It gives clues to their way of thinking, as all language does. And boy is it interesting to see how different they could be. It can be hard to follow along, but for them it was everyday speech. You can assume the genetics hasn't changed meaningfully, but everything else definitely would have.
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Just observing how language has changed since the dawn of the internet has been a real trip.
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MorninglordI'm tired of being Batman,so today I'll be Owl.Registered Userregular
edited June 2022
I watched this old interview with a politician arguing about wiretapping from, I think it would have been around the 1950s or 60s. Black and white. It was a debate with another politican. And the way they spoke, constructed their sentences, the way their ideas flowed, it was remarkable how eloquent it was.
I wouldn't trust movies though, because the olde time movie accent was a fictional invention, and likely so was the way they spoke.
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NoneoftheaboveJust a conforming non-conformist.Twilight ZoneRegistered Userregular
It's best to think of it as there being a general guide to how most people develop, but what creates that guide is going to be based on their culture, their experiences growing up, and only partly their genetics.
So there's a lot of things that can develop differently for an individual.
The dominant model is the biopsychosocial model, where genetics, pscyhological factors, and social factors all combined to result in an individuals unique experience and makeup.
People in a different culture can literally think differently. That's just the wacky wild nature of brain plasticity.
Have you ever seen recording of how people from previous times used to speak? Not the language syntax, but the way they used to construct sentences to communicate ideas? It gives clues to their way of thinking, as all language does. And boy is it interesting to see how different they could be. It can be hard to follow along, but for them it was everyday speech. You can assume the genetics hasn't changed meaningfully, but everything else definitely would have.
In earlier posts of this thread there are snippets of President Lincoln's manner of speaking in written form which is fantastic. I can see a comparison to this former and eloquent manner of english that has links to Shakespeare. Reading Shakespeare for me is a challenge to the degree that there are many words and expressions that are alien to me. Reading it is certainly easier than the old english of Beowulf without translation and no understanding on my part. For this and Shakespeare there can be a musical flow or cadence that appears with my readings when I get lost in the language which I can enjoy.
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NoneoftheaboveJust a conforming non-conformist.Twilight ZoneRegistered Userregular
Yes, when a culture and language dies, humanity loses a way of thinking that is unique in humanity. Keep this going forward as we arguably regress as a civilization with shorter attention spans and written language reduced to emojis, acronyms and abbreviations, you begin to wonder if that could also be another filter for alien intelligences out there. They don't blow themselves up, they just lose their ability to think. Evolution just evolves that out of them in favor of something less complex maybe.
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MorninglordI'm tired of being Batman,so today I'll be Owl.Registered Userregular
It's best to think of it as there being a general guide to how most people develop, but what creates that guide is going to be based on their culture, their experiences growing up, and only partly their genetics.
So there's a lot of things that can develop differently for an individual.
The dominant model is the biopsychosocial model, where genetics, pscyhological factors, and social factors all combined to result in an individuals unique experience and makeup.
People in a different culture can literally think differently. That's just the wacky wild nature of brain plasticity.
Have you ever seen recording of how people from previous times used to speak? Not the language syntax, but the way they used to construct sentences to communicate ideas? It gives clues to their way of thinking, as all language does. And boy is it interesting to see how different they could be. It can be hard to follow along, but for them it was everyday speech. You can assume the genetics hasn't changed meaningfully, but everything else definitely would have.
In earlier posts of this thread there are snippets of President Lincoln's manner of speaking in written form which is fantastic. I can see a comparison to this former and eloquent manner of english that has links to Shakespeare. Reading Shakespeare for me is a challenge to the degree that there are many words and expressions that are alien to me. Reading it is certainly easier than the old english of Beowulf without translation and no understanding on my part. For this and Shakespeare there can be a musical flow or cadence that appears with my readings when I get lost in the language which I can enjoy.
Shakespear in original pronunciation has hidden puns and rhymes that don't work in modern english, which when you hear someone speak it who studied the original pronunciation, the words suddenly come alive, like magic.
There's some examples in this video, and my god, it's just so different. It's vibrant, and fast, and natural and full of puns and rhymes and lyrical, including some spectacularly dirty sex puns that are completely lost in regular english.
The vibe goes from pompous and snooty to down to earth and charming. I would pay a lot of money to go watch one of his plays in original pronunciation, the difference is that stark.
They have audio recordings for quite a few of the plays (and some other things, if you fancied the KJB in the original pronunciation etc). Unfortunately the company that were doing them has split up.
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MorninglordI'm tired of being Batman,so today I'll be Owl.Registered Userregular
Noooo
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MorninglordI'm tired of being Batman,so today I'll be Owl.Registered Userregular
Sorry should have elaborated, it split it up as one of the main guys behind it moved to the University of Nevada, I've not traced what he's done since but you never know...
That play wasn't an OP one, Shakespearen was more rural "West Country" now, a bit like Bristol probably being the closest to a large rural population with some hints of the upper classes in towns. That one was performed using local accent (Yorkshire), rather than the classic RP.
Lot more "Dun 't' Pit" than "Aive got a luverly combine 'arvester"
Here's a map that kind of gives the idea, though Glaswegian is definitely not highlighted distinctly enough compared to the rest of scots.
There's differences in Welsh accents across Wales, there's differences in the Yorkshire accent, usually I can tell what city someone in South Yorkshire someone is from cos of little accent quirks!
Keep this going forward as we arguably regress as a civilization with shorter attention spans and written language reduced to emojis, acronyms and abbreviations, you begin to wonder if that could also be another filter for alien intelligences out there.
I do lament losing various bits of culture but it's nonsense to call changes in how we speak regression.
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MorninglordI'm tired of being Batman,so today I'll be Owl.Registered Userregular
edited June 2022
It is true that there are changes in our ability to pay attention due to disruptive influences of various technologies and destruction of healthy sleep.
Changes in how we speak are a consequence though, and not a cause.
Funny little images of how people talked about it over a hundred years ago has little relevance to that. The reduction in focus is well studied and isnt just some dude saying it.
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Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
it doesn't help that shakespeare is (imo at least) kinda desperately mis-taught in american schools
Yeah, Shakespeare has been done hideous disservice by modern presentation of classical material. The guy wrote shit to be entertaining. Funny. Dramatic. Compelling.
And then education for classical materials gets a hold of it and sucks out aaaaaaalllll of that. Every. Last. Drop. Cut out all the bawdry stuff. Cut out almost all the funny stuff. Talk up the iambic pentameter a ton, scatter in some extremely dry dissections of important outdated phrases. Slap some graded material on it. Done.
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MorninglordI'm tired of being Batman,so today I'll be Owl.Registered Userregular
Sorry should have elaborated, it split it up as one of the main guys behind it moved to the University of Nevada, I've not traced what he's done since but you never know...
I don't suppose you have the name? The two main guys were a father and his son, David and Ben Crystal, with the son Ben the one really into it. Was it Ben who moved?
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Incidentally that link has the neuroscience current theory for where inner voices come from.
In order to understand how the inner voice works, you need to understand how human thought translates into action. “Whenever we do any action, our brain makes a prediction of the sensory consequences of that action,” says Loevenbruck. Say you want to fetch a glass of water. “Your brain sends the appropriate motor signals to your hand, but it also generates a sensory prediction of the command,” she says. “Before you’ve even picked up the glass, your brain has made a prediction of what the motor command will do, which means you can correct for mistakes before you make an error. This system is very efficient, and it’s why humans can do so many actions without making errors.”
The same principle applies with human speech. Every time our mouths move to form a word, our brain is simultaneously generating a predictive simulation of that speech in our brain, to correct for error. “The current understanding of inner speech is that we do the same as in overt speech – make predictions in our mind of what we will say – but we don’t actually send the motor commands to our speech muscles,” Loevenbruck concludes. “This simulated auditory signal is the little voice we hear in our brain.”
Loevenbruck explains that, for the most part, we hear what she terms “inner language”. But not always. “You can have expanded and more condensed forms of inner speech,” she says. “People may experience them as abstract representations of language, without sound … some people say their inner voice is like a radio that’s on all day long. Other people don’t have a voice at all, or they speak in abstract symbols that don’t involve language.” Loevenbruck can’t explain why some people experience the inner voice differently: we are at the limits of neuroscience, already the most slippery of all the branches of human knowledge.
As you can see, its remarkably simple and not really some magical leap into hey voices now. A system used for everything is being applied here too.
Does this mean animals that communicate with each other could be doing an obviously much simpler version of this? There's absolutely no reason why not. Animals can make predictions too, just not to our level of complexity or sophistication.
Id be very surprised if dogs, dolphins or corvids werent doing something similar. Or rats, especially when it comes to smell related tasks, where they can solve multiple step abstract puzzles.
As I was playing through getting my degree in jazz trumpet and just transposing my memorized “go-to” licks to whatever key I was playing in, I realized that among the things that separated me from world class talents was that they were playing their solos in their minds a few bpm faster than the actual tempo and then repeating them on their horn….and playing with such precise, deliberate intonation and phrasing between notes because they were matching pitch and articulation with their mind, not just the muscle memory of what fingers to press and how tight or loose to make their embouchure
I am very good at mind rhythm but absolutely cannot “hear” pitch in my brain
I have weird pitch in that I can hear a pitch with my ears and know exactly note it is, but if I had to just start singing like middle C cold I couldn’t do it
It is true that there are changes in our ability to pay attention due to disruptive influences of various technologies and destruction of healthy sleep.
Changes in how we speak are a consequence though, and not a cause.
Funny little images of how people talked about it over a hundred years ago has little relevance to that. The reduction in focus is well studied and isnt just some dude saying it.
I am quite interested in hearing more elaboration on this. I don't have much commentary off the bat, but have to imagine sleep patterns were substantially different in times before lighting was essentially ubiquitous and free.
I have heard that in ye old times during winter months people essentially would be sleeping for 14 hours, interspersed with periods of awareness for social activities (and boning). But I dont know how much of that is just speculation / guesses or if that is related to what you are talking about.
Edit - re: high level flow, when you actually do have an experience where you truly get into that state it is a transcendental experience.
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MorninglordI'm tired of being Batman,so today I'll be Owl.Registered Userregular
It is true that there are changes in our ability to pay attention due to disruptive influences of various technologies and destruction of healthy sleep.
Changes in how we speak are a consequence though, and not a cause.
Funny little images of how people talked about it over a hundred years ago has little relevance to that. The reduction in focus is well studied and isnt just some dude saying it.
I am quite interested in hearing more elaboration on this. I don't have much commentary off the bat, but have to imagine sleep patterns were substantially different in times before lighting was essentially ubiquitous and free.
I have heard that in ye old times during winter months people essentially would be sleeping for 14 hours, interspersed with periods of awareness for social activities (and boning). But I dont know how much of that is just speculation / guesses or if that is related to what you are talking about.
Edit - re: high level flow, when you actually do have an experience where you truly get into that state it is a transcendental experience.
Circadium rhythmns are remarkably strict. You can adjust but it takes a few days. You require 8 hours of sleep (it can vary slightly between people, you need a minimum of 6.5 for no catastrophic effects although this will still result in problems for most people who need 8). This sleep needs to be within your "sleep time" as dictated by your circadium rhythm. If you get disrupted sleep and sleep outside of it, you are not getting quality sleep, even if you sleep 8 hours, or more. It's just not working as effectively. You need regular times, and adjusting your times takes about 3-4 days. (Not getting into evo psych here, but this does seem to match up with how changing daylight hours would work. We'd need the ability to adjust over the year, but generally it would be pretty regular day to day. But this isn't why we know what you need. We know that based on studying people now.)
On top of that, light is, as you say, disrupting peoples circadium rhythms. Causing them to stay up longer. This is because light is one of the ways our brain knows that it is time to sleep. When light levels fall, our brain knows its time to wind down, and starts producing melatonin to initiate sleep.
There is SO MUCH LIGHT at night now, that for all intents and purposes it might as well be daylight. Especially LED lights, which give off frequencies that are particularly disruptive. "Fire" light, or even just old incandescent bulbs, aren't anywhere near as disruptive to melatonin production. LEDS are everywhere now, and being used excessively. Your eyes can detect light levels through closed eyelids, so too much light in your sleeping environment can make it difficult to fall asleep. It can be difficult to get a room at night to be completely dark, because so many things have bright lights on them, and if you live in a city you can get light pollution coming in around curtains and blinds. We had to buy huge block out curtains, and even then the fire people installed a new smoke alarm with a really bright LED in it, so now my sleep is fucked because of the bright light. We have to go around turning off everything in the house that might have LED lights, but we can't do anything about that light. You need your room to be as pitch black as possible. I recommend a sleep mask. Not to mention smartphones as well, and reading on them, which is well known to disrupt sleep, unlike reading a regular book with the old incandescent lamp or candlelight which wasn't as bad.
In fact you can purchase a strong LED light and use it to reset your circadium rhythm. If you turn it on near you when you get up, your brain will after a few days readjust so that is your wakeup time, because it treats that LED as the sun rising. I have one, and it works incredibly well, even if I have to reset it to before daylight due to work or whatever, so its still dark outside. By the fourth day I'm reset, and I get tired 8 hours before the time I turned the LED on. I can hit the hay and ill be asleep within a few minutes, instead of the insomnia I used to suffer.
Think about that next time you walk into a store at night and its blazing with artificial daylight.
As to what this means for focus, chronically disrupted sleep results in the same kind of symptoms as ADHD.
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edited June 2022
To separate the sleep discussion from the focus one, I'll make a separate post.
We think of people as multitaskers, but this is a complete lie. People are single taskers, and it takes a fair amount of time (about 20 minutes to half an hour) to really engage deeply with any given thing. If you switch away from that task, even for a few seconds, that deep focus is broken, and completely resets. You now need another 30 minutes to get back to it.
Smartphones. Notifications. Beeps. Vibration. Extra tabs on browsers. Watching one thing while doing another. Listening to podcasts. Easy access tablets. Endless distractions. Endless task switching. A really stupid cultural belief in the lie of the benefits of multitasking.
How much deep focus do you think you get in a day? We can all do it, if we give ourselves the time. How often do you give yourself the time? This impacts everything in society because everyone's ability to deeply focus is crippled.
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As an amateur historian. No. History as a academic subject concerns itself pretty much exclusively with written sources (and by the time we started writing any sort of society where a part of the population didn't have an inner voice was long gone. Archeology concerns itself with material culture.
Historical anthropology might be the right branch, but it's considered fairly niche and often speculative.
Though if anyone worked on a theory like that though I think they'd have a hard time not talking about Lev Vygotsky's work in developmental psychology.
-Antje Jackelén, Archbishop of the Church of Sweden
Just a brief check on Lev, but it does not seem if I recall this being a theory he might have put forward. Still looking into this, but I thank you for sharing.
Hominids probably were extremely unimaginative and not intelligent by our standards, but it’s likely that they were otherwise socially human. Mirror neurons are present in monkeys!
Seeing oneself in the same light as family or tribe members seems like a small step; narrating a theory of mind of oneself is not far-fetched.
I doubt that this is the same thing as ‘hearing voices’.
Think of the words people say as an output. The internal processing done to get there can be wildly different, but because our language requires a linear sequence of sounds, we assume everyone does that internally too. There's no way to tell if someone is or isn't unless they tell you.
I dont have an internal monologue unless Im actively planning how to construct a sentence. I dont think in words, but images, abstracts, emotional impressions, and shapeforms.
I remember one lady who said she has an old italian married couple arguing in her head. Not like at her. She doesnt argue with them. Theyre literally her thoughts. Theyre in a kitchen, and everytime shes thinking of anything its these two going at it.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/oct/25/the-last-great-mystery-of-the-mind-meet-the-people-who-have-unusual-or-non-existent-inner-voices
Italian couple lady is pretty great but I honestly think mr hopkins life is pretty peaceful. His internal idling is complete silence.
Okay, what's this from?
As you can see, its remarkably simple and not really some magical leap into hey voices now. A system used for everything is being applied here too.
Does this mean animals that communicate with each other could be doing an obviously much simpler version of this? There's absolutely no reason why not. Animals can make predictions too, just not to our level of complexity or sophistication.
Id be very surprised if dogs, dolphins or corvids werent doing something similar. Or rats, especially when it comes to smell related tasks, where they can solve multiple step abstract puzzles.
Consciousness, sentience, sapience are poorly defined and qualitative. There are no objective standards. Inner dialogue is poorly defined what it actually is or how much it exists in individuals.
As much as I enjoy the evo psych stuff it's important to admit we have no idea and may never really know. It's basically phrenology at the moment. Snow Crash was a fun book though.
Neuroscience, not evo psych.
Consciousness is not internal dialog. I think you misunderstood that article.
It's just descriving how people are right now.
An interesting thing I find happening is that whenever there is a piece of evidence that uncovers a little bit of the puzzle of how people work, people instantly move the goalposts and go oh no consciousness is special and we can't define it and oh no we don't really know anything, no no all that evidence is just fluff really.
Which is roughly analogous to someone going up and saying "You know we don't really know how physics actually works, so we can't really define anything in it" and then claiming relativity or quantum physics isn't real.
It's true that scientists who know way more about this than you and I always say that there's a lot of mysteries and not everything is fully defined. But isn't anywhere close to saying they can't explain anything at all. They can explain quite a lot, and they can use it to make predictions too.
I've heard of people claiming that they hear their own thinking as if it's somebody else talking, but I've never encountered anyone who claims that and I'm inclined to think that it's rare, if not made-up entirely.
At the same, we do have a multi-lobed brain that you can kinda think of like four brains working together and have a bazillion neural connections so I dunno, maybe I'm wrong and some people end up wired such that their thoughts kind of are another person in their mind. Our brains are some crazy shit.
It was some real trippy shit. About halfway through I was going through a twilight zone bedrock of the universe is shifting feeling in my head that made me feel like I was losing my mind. I mentioned this to my professor and he's like "Yeah, that's normal"
Would recommend.
That's right, Communism.
And we don't like those kinds 'round here. Ayup.
With a capital C, and that rhymes with P and that stands for
I don't even trust my own anecdotal evidence. Do you have any idea how maddening that is.
You know what else?
Student psychologists drink a lot. There was a pub literally across the road from the psychology department. There was a psychology club, and I was informed it was basically just a drinking club. I could easily go to that pub and find my professors and we could sit down and drink and talk about mad psychology shit, like properly explaining how factor analysis works. I once told them I started psychology because I thought it would help me understand people and they all laughed at me. One joked that I chose the wrong field of study. At least I think it was a joke.
Anecdotal (especially since students drink a lot anyway), but I'm ignoring that rule because its funny.
For me at least I can quietly think to myself as though I were talking to myself, as well as thinking in terms of feeling, imagination or daydreaming. I assume this is the norm for everybody.
So there's a lot of things that can develop differently for an individual.
The dominant model is the biopsychosocial model, where genetics, pscyhological factors, and social factors all combined to result in an individuals unique experience and makeup.
People in a different culture can literally think differently. That's just the wacky wild nature of brain plasticity.
Have you ever seen recording of how people from previous times used to speak? Not the language syntax, but the way they used to construct sentences to communicate ideas? It gives clues to their way of thinking, as all language does. And boy is it interesting to see how different they could be. It can be hard to follow along, but for them it was everyday speech. You can assume the genetics hasn't changed meaningfully, but everything else definitely would have.
I wouldn't trust movies though, because the olde time movie accent was a fictional invention, and likely so was the way they spoke.
In earlier posts of this thread there are snippets of President Lincoln's manner of speaking in written form which is fantastic. I can see a comparison to this former and eloquent manner of english that has links to Shakespeare. Reading Shakespeare for me is a challenge to the degree that there are many words and expressions that are alien to me. Reading it is certainly easier than the old english of Beowulf without translation and no understanding on my part. For this and Shakespeare there can be a musical flow or cadence that appears with my readings when I get lost in the language which I can enjoy.
This might interest you.
Shakespear in original pronunciation has hidden puns and rhymes that don't work in modern english, which when you hear someone speak it who studied the original pronunciation, the words suddenly come alive, like magic.
There's some examples in this video, and my god, it's just so different. It's vibrant, and fast, and natural and full of puns and rhymes and lyrical, including some spectacularly dirty sex puns that are completely lost in regular english.
The vibe goes from pompous and snooty to down to earth and charming. I would pay a lot of money to go watch one of his plays in original pronunciation, the difference is that stark.
This also, a long lecture about it.
They got a complaint about the "accent".
https://www.euronews.com/culture/2022/03/31/shakespeare-with-northern-accents-creates-social-media-furore-after-audience-complaint
It just seems that if I want to see it I'll need to go to England.
Sorry should have elaborated, it split it up as one of the main guys behind it moved to the University of Nevada, I've not traced what he's done since but you never know...
That play wasn't an OP one, Shakespearen was more rural "West Country" now, a bit like Bristol probably being the closest to a large rural population with some hints of the upper classes in towns. That one was performed using local accent (Yorkshire), rather than the classic RP.
Lot more "Dun 't' Pit" than "Aive got a luverly combine 'arvester"
Here's a map that kind of gives the idea, though Glaswegian is definitely not highlighted distinctly enough compared to the rest of scots.
There's differences in Welsh accents across Wales, there's differences in the Yorkshire accent, usually I can tell what city someone in South Yorkshire someone is from cos of little accent quirks!
Pluto was a planet and I'll never forget
I do lament losing various bits of culture but it's nonsense to call changes in how we speak regression.
Changes in how we speak are a consequence though, and not a cause.
Funny little images of how people talked about it over a hundred years ago has little relevance to that. The reduction in focus is well studied and isnt just some dude saying it.
Yeah, Shakespeare has been done hideous disservice by modern presentation of classical material. The guy wrote shit to be entertaining. Funny. Dramatic. Compelling.
And then education for classical materials gets a hold of it and sucks out aaaaaaalllll of that. Every. Last. Drop. Cut out all the bawdry stuff. Cut out almost all the funny stuff. Talk up the iambic pentameter a ton, scatter in some extremely dry dissections of important outdated phrases. Slap some graded material on it. Done.
I don't suppose you have the name? The two main guys were a father and his son, David and Ben Crystal, with the son Ben the one really into it. Was it Ben who moved?
As I was playing through getting my degree in jazz trumpet and just transposing my memorized “go-to” licks to whatever key I was playing in, I realized that among the things that separated me from world class talents was that they were playing their solos in their minds a few bpm faster than the actual tempo and then repeating them on their horn….and playing with such precise, deliberate intonation and phrasing between notes because they were matching pitch and articulation with their mind, not just the muscle memory of what fingers to press and how tight or loose to make their embouchure
I am very good at mind rhythm but absolutely cannot “hear” pitch in my brain
I have weird pitch in that I can hear a pitch with my ears and know exactly note it is, but if I had to just start singing like middle C cold I couldn’t do it
I am quite interested in hearing more elaboration on this. I don't have much commentary off the bat, but have to imagine sleep patterns were substantially different in times before lighting was essentially ubiquitous and free.
I have heard that in ye old times during winter months people essentially would be sleeping for 14 hours, interspersed with periods of awareness for social activities (and boning). But I dont know how much of that is just speculation / guesses or if that is related to what you are talking about.
Edit - re: high level flow, when you actually do have an experience where you truly get into that state it is a transcendental experience.
Circadium rhythmns are remarkably strict. You can adjust but it takes a few days. You require 8 hours of sleep (it can vary slightly between people, you need a minimum of 6.5 for no catastrophic effects although this will still result in problems for most people who need 8). This sleep needs to be within your "sleep time" as dictated by your circadium rhythm. If you get disrupted sleep and sleep outside of it, you are not getting quality sleep, even if you sleep 8 hours, or more. It's just not working as effectively. You need regular times, and adjusting your times takes about 3-4 days. (Not getting into evo psych here, but this does seem to match up with how changing daylight hours would work. We'd need the ability to adjust over the year, but generally it would be pretty regular day to day. But this isn't why we know what you need. We know that based on studying people now.)
On top of that, light is, as you say, disrupting peoples circadium rhythms. Causing them to stay up longer. This is because light is one of the ways our brain knows that it is time to sleep. When light levels fall, our brain knows its time to wind down, and starts producing melatonin to initiate sleep.
There is SO MUCH LIGHT at night now, that for all intents and purposes it might as well be daylight. Especially LED lights, which give off frequencies that are particularly disruptive. "Fire" light, or even just old incandescent bulbs, aren't anywhere near as disruptive to melatonin production. LEDS are everywhere now, and being used excessively. Your eyes can detect light levels through closed eyelids, so too much light in your sleeping environment can make it difficult to fall asleep. It can be difficult to get a room at night to be completely dark, because so many things have bright lights on them, and if you live in a city you can get light pollution coming in around curtains and blinds. We had to buy huge block out curtains, and even then the fire people installed a new smoke alarm with a really bright LED in it, so now my sleep is fucked because of the bright light. We have to go around turning off everything in the house that might have LED lights, but we can't do anything about that light. You need your room to be as pitch black as possible. I recommend a sleep mask. Not to mention smartphones as well, and reading on them, which is well known to disrupt sleep, unlike reading a regular book with the old incandescent lamp or candlelight which wasn't as bad.
In fact you can purchase a strong LED light and use it to reset your circadium rhythm. If you turn it on near you when you get up, your brain will after a few days readjust so that is your wakeup time, because it treats that LED as the sun rising. I have one, and it works incredibly well, even if I have to reset it to before daylight due to work or whatever, so its still dark outside. By the fourth day I'm reset, and I get tired 8 hours before the time I turned the LED on. I can hit the hay and ill be asleep within a few minutes, instead of the insomnia I used to suffer.
Think about that next time you walk into a store at night and its blazing with artificial daylight.
As to what this means for focus, chronically disrupted sleep results in the same kind of symptoms as ADHD.
We think of people as multitaskers, but this is a complete lie. People are single taskers, and it takes a fair amount of time (about 20 minutes to half an hour) to really engage deeply with any given thing. If you switch away from that task, even for a few seconds, that deep focus is broken, and completely resets. You now need another 30 minutes to get back to it.
Smartphones. Notifications. Beeps. Vibration. Extra tabs on browsers. Watching one thing while doing another. Listening to podcasts. Easy access tablets. Endless distractions. Endless task switching. A really stupid cultural belief in the lie of the benefits of multitasking.
How much deep focus do you think you get in a day? We can all do it, if we give ourselves the time. How often do you give yourself the time? This impacts everything in society because everyone's ability to deeply focus is crippled.