With lots of family time and then overcoming writer’s block to finally do some good writing of my own over the weekend, I was unable to participate in any of my usual favorite discussions (seems like that’s been happening a lot recently). Still, David Amerland had his usual Sunday brilliance and thought-provoking article, this time on the “Voices in our Heads.” Well worth reading and diving deep into the links if you have some time.
Originally shared by David Amerland
‘Don’t Listen to the Voices!’
At any one time, inside our heads, live at least two people. One roots for us, tells us how great we are and is our greatest fan. The other, well. Suffice to say that all that one wants is to see us crash and burn just so there can be an “I told you so” moment.
Now the entire voices debate was started by the Russians. One in particular, Lev Vygotsky: http://goo.gl/pqNsx who went as far as to suggest that until the voices actually come alive in some way, inside our heads, we are incapable of thinking: http://goo.gl/CZUmfv.
This is a controversial theory, as you guess, what is not so controversial is the fact that the voices inside our heads represent mental representations of reality models that may help us understand the way reality itself works: http://goo.gl/mDytHa. The easiest testing ground of that theory is our reading of fiction: http://goo.gl/6XAna8. The writer’s ‘coded’ words unfurl once they pass through the filters of our experiences and perceptions into a fully-blown model of some perceived, albeit imaginary, reality. What is of even greater interest is the fact that writers themselves, the wielders of the ‘code’ are not immune from falling prey to their own magic: http://goo.gl/1U9sg2 with their characters, talking to them with a will that appears to originate from outside the writer himself.
A little unstable as that may sound, many of us have had at least a taste of it with an imaginary friend: http://goo.gl/Tomyu, during our youth. Lev’s theories notwithstanding, as adults we seem to still hold all these conversations inside our heads, many of which sometimes go against us: http://goo.gl/XHBYQG. This is eerily reminiscent of the exam performance scores of students and minorities mentioned in our Radiolab report: http://goo.gl/CZUmfv (and if you haven’t listened to it yet, now’s the time to do so).
You would think that as adults we’d have no problem distinguishing the ‘realness’ of a voice and what’s inside our heads but the mechanisms involved in the manifestation of this ghostly speech are actually not that different from those of physical speech itself: http://goo.gl/EtBJmm and although the brain is indeed adjusting the volume of the inner and outer voices so that it becomes easier to decide which one to choose to listen to it’s far from clear yet on why we are just not better at it (or at least outgrow it).
Voice, however, take many manifestations: http://goo.gl/ouc7Zl and range from perceptions of the shadows of our aloneness, to a more jockey and yet somewhat compelling statement, like when +martin shervington mentions why he shared something: http://goo.gl/wP9LgJ.
And so here we are. Full circle almost from nurture (and the voices of infantilism) to our present where our personal sociopathologies find it easier to manifest themselves through a medium where the threshold barriers of interaction are considerably lowered.
There is a point to this journey. Our brains are complex and we are all, at some point, subject to some kind of internal negativity, to say the least. We are also quite capable of externalizing that as our constant mode of interaction simply because it feels the easiest thing to do. As Eleanor Longden says about her journey: http://goo.gl/0smR11 it is important to understand that the negative voices we hear are the ones we ought to show the most compassion to. They represent the greatest hurt and may, subconsciously, also be trying to protect us from something they see but cannot express, anxieties they cannot articulate.
When to some degree we are each other’s ‘voices’ in the digital plane, empathy, acknowledgement, compassion and understanding go a long way towards finding a balance that works for us all.
For my part, this Sunday, I sincerely hope the voices told you to stock up with coffee and donuts, croissants, cookies and chocolate cake and that you listened. Have one awesome Sunday, wherever you are.
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