Coastal wrote:don't get me started wrote:I was just randomly reading some book reviews to see what might be next on my list (it's not as if i don't have a number of unread books staring at me from the shelves - but that's another story.)
Anyways, I came across this by the author of a book on neuroscience.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/jun/12/david-eagleman-the-working-of-the-brain-resembles-drug-dealers-in-albuquerqueThe author suggests that dreams have a function in resisting brain plasticity.
The metaphor of the brain as a computer has had a good run, but as we learn more about how the brain works, it is becoming increasingly obvious that it is a rather poor metaphor.
The author points out that different parts of the brain can take over other parts if needs arise.
From the text:
"One of the great mysteries of the brain is the purpose of dreams. And you propose a kind of defensive theory about how the brain responds to darkness.One of the big surprises of neuroscience was to understand how rapidly these takeovers can happen. If you blindfold somebody for an hour, you can start to see changes where touch and hearing will start taking over the visual parts of the brain. So what I realised is, because the planet rotates into darkness, the visual system alone is at a disadvantage, which is to say, you can still smell and hear and touch and taste in the dark, but you can’t see any more. I realised this puts the visual system in danger of getting taken over every night. And dreams are the brain’s way of defending that territory. About every 90 minutes a great deal of random activity is smashed into the visual system. And because that’s our visual system, we experience it as a dream, we experience it visually. Evolutionarily, this is our way of defending ourselves against visual system takeover when the planet moves into darkness."I thought this was very interesting. The nature of visual thought is a fascinating subject and I have also read a fair amount on the nature and function of verbal thought. These two modalities - the visual and the auditory/linguistic seem to be the primary ways in which we experience 'thinking'. As Plato said: 'thinking is the soul's dialogue with itself'. If the brain is constantly prone to re-wiring, as Eagleman suggests, then silent, dialogic thought and dreaming could be similarly functional in keeping radical re-wiring at bay.
Very interesting thoughts, but I've heard some people say they have no internal monologue or voice. I think that being able to report on such a subjective experiences could perhaps suffer from a difficulty in defining what you experience, but it seems to be legit from what people have told me and from what I was able to subsequently read up on it.
Having done some mindfulness meditation, this is not strange to me though. This mediation aims to enable you to "step back" from your consciousness, which includes thoughts, but not all thoughts, as it's impossible to stop your brain from thinking, but rather what we would think of as "vocal thoughts". So, if someone like me (with a monologue) is able to enter this state at will, then I am not surprised that some people might just "be" there always.
Yes, the question of inner speech is one fraught with difficulties. No amount of electrodes or MRI scanning will be able to reveal what it is like to experience verbal thought. We only have the subject's account for what he or she is experiencing.
In my case I can report that I have a near constant inner dialogue (and it is dialogue, not monologue.) It is mostly in what would be recognizable as English but occasionally in Japanese or German.
I've done a fair amount of reading on inner speech and it has fascinated philosophers from Plato, through St Augustine and into the modern era with people like Vygotsky
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lev_Vygotskyand Bakhtin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mikhail_Bakhtin describing the ways language and thought are interrelated.
There is also the related phenomenon of 'self-talk'. I talk to myself quite a lot when I am alone, and in the field of conversation analysis the data often includes turns at talk which contain utterances that are clearly addressed at the self rather than the interlocutor. It happens more often than you would imagine.
One book I found interesting was:
The Voices Within: The History and Science of How We Talk to Ourselves by Charles Fernyhough
As you mention, there are some individuals who report not experiencing verbal thought and Fernyhough investigates these outliers as well as other cases such as people with psychiatric disorders who hear voices in their heads. A close friend who is a practicing clinical psychologist was telling me that in some of his patients they seem to have lost the ability to distinguish between the inner thought that most people experience everyday and externally produced speech. That is, they think that the voices they 'hear' internally are produced by some person other than the self...which can cause all kinds of reactions.
The practice you mention of meditation that seeks to quiet the mental voice(s) and exist is a state of here and now awareness is something I have heard people talk about. A Japanese friend and practicing Buddhist told me that the term in Japanese is 無(mu), which is a state of absence and clarity. I don't have any negative feelings towards those who practice this, but it is not for me. I really enjoy my mental chats with myself. Sometimes the process of dialoging internally leads to some of my best insights, and seeing things in a new way.
by 
All I know about Brother West is him calling everyone brother. 
Stay clueless, Brother Cornel.
Dreams are so cool.
He told me to go out back to have a word, and finished up the transaction. When he came back to talk to me his first word was HAHAHAHAHAHAHAAH! at the top of his lungs. Then he started to tell me to ignore attitudes like that and just ...HAHAHAHAAHAHAH!! again. 
