Inner Voice

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Just to disambiguate for the OP, "inside voice" refers to talking quietly when indoors. It is something grownups say to children who are shouting, and also something people say jokingly to other adults if they are talking too loudly. "I don't have an inside voice" means the speaker lacks the ability to modulate their volume.

"Inner voice" is what the OP seemed to want to actually discuss, and what all the subsquent posters assumed, so nobody seems to have been confused by the similar phrases but me.

This post is somewhat confusing for me. I do have an inner voice. I've noticed, strangely, that often my inner voice (when talking things over with myself) comes in the form of imagined conversations with other people. I would never actually have these conversations with the "real" person, but talking it over with them in my head, or even just thinking it as though I were talking to them, for some reason is what comes naturally.

But, then, also, it isn't just an "inner voice," more of an "inner everything." I don't think there's a sense that I DON'T experience when thinking. To take an example from a different thread a bit back, if I think of "cat," I don't just think the word "cat." I see a cat, I feel cat fur, I smell cat (thankfully cat fur smell, not cat pee smell), if I really want to, I can taste cat fur (from a few times, I'm sure, that a cat has decided to rub up against my face and gotten fur in my mouth).

When I talk things over with myself, I do it aloud and as a means of reinforcing ideas, sort of like a list on paper. I will do it in a barely audible whisper if I suspect that my dialogue will irritate colleagues in the same work area, but it isn't effective or natural not to actually use speech muscles.

I sometimes us talk with myself using the word "we" as if I was working with a partner: "what are we doing next? Aligning these elements with the grid and making sure they have the right hierarchy across the spread. OK, let's anchor these here..."

I don't really have an inner voice for this. I could imagine one, but it would not be natural.

I think everyone has an inner voice, but people conceptualize what this is in different ways. These can take a wide variety of forms from what I've heard.

The concept of some sort of dialogue with yourself freaks me out. If I concentrate on the words I can think of my voice making them... But as a rule I tend to think in concepts and logic gates. If I try to guess what someone will say as a reaction to my words I can get caught in all the permutations the discussion could take. Kind of a mental chess game thinking of moves and counter moves until I realize I just missed most of what they just said. But that's cool, cause it was probably way more boring than what I was hoping we were going to discuss anyway. What were we talking about again? Squirrel.

I don't think that having an inner voice is related to autism.

Since my childhood I've always heard inner voices talking about me and commenting my actions, but I've never cared about them or talked to them. I hear them a lot less often now. I did hear them a lot more as a child.

I've never considered it a weird thing and was never worried about it.

I just read Attwood's Guide to Asperger's and in there he says that some autistic people don't have an inner voice, or develop one much later than neurotypicals do. Typically what happens is children talk to themselves about a number of things in order to reason or play or express emotions or whatever, and by about 5 years old or so they internalize that process. Autistic people, on the other hand, may or may not do this, and instead continue to talk to themselves out loud instead of in their head, or even if they don't do that, they may never develop internal thinking in language. Attwood says that autistic people who do develop a thinking voice in their teens or later may be surprised by the whole deal and think they're going crazy.

I have an inner voice but it doesn't "talk to me" or tell me what to do or anything like that; it is very much like talking to myself except in my head. It sounds like sort of a faint echo of my own. So sometimes I will have imaginary conversations with people or if something is very difficult to figure out I will think through it in words. I'm not really a visual thinker (I can't bring images up in my head, I sense them in a weird way when I am thinking) but not really a language thinker either most of the time. It is very difficult to describe. My thinking is like a boiling pot and what bubbles to the surface can be expressed in language if I want it to be, but the process of thinking is below the surface and hard for me to access.

Well, with me, it's not one voice only. First, there's myself--I hate when when I do stupid stuff, even if it's minor, like not lining something up correctly, or I'm telling myself how many street lamps, etc. are there, or why something should work a certain way.

Sometimes I love this, because it's like a cool Human Interface Guidelines or something that's embedded in my internal 'operating system', and sometimes I hate it because it can dictate how something must be right or wrong no matter how much I want to finish (or need to finish) something! Or how something is not standing in correlation to something else. This can be differences in a lot of things. Abstract paint splashes and flowers all over a tissue box make that voice mad! Looking at a good, but un-symmetric restaurant menu causes that voice to prompt me to either try to fix what's wrong or comment to someone, "You know that's Myriad Pro and Impact here, and the font placement is off here, and your color schemes don't match across items..., etc." It's enough to make me so angry at myself I will hit myself in a dark room or curse inside. So this is good and bad, without going much further. I'm sure all of you who have this enabled know what I'm saying.

Then, there's a second voice, from what I listen to--for example, a line from some software keynote I watched on YouTube (even if it was years or years ago) and that will "play" inside like I'm saying it, because my mind will repeat that inside, and it applies to that situation. It's weird. And I imagine I'm not alone in this either. For example, "You can please some of the people some of the time..." was a quote from the WWDC 1997 keynote by Steve Jobs, and that's being "played" in my head right now.

Finally, because I'm a Christian--there's God, and that voice I'm a lot more careful with, but I know that's who is quietly telling me "You know that's wrong... don't do that." And that's just being honest, and I imagine some people might think I'm either superstitious or crazy for posting this last post, but if you're truly interested in voices, there's all of them. I hope this wasn't too long; there's my input on the subject. Thanks all for reading.

I thought hearing voices was for schizophrenia, how come I hear it?

It's a little creepy. It tells me to do things like talking to people and in addition to Inner Voice A, Inner Voice B seems to control my tics and reminds me to tic.

I don't think that meme picture is talking about that. I think it's talking about the phrase 'inside voice', meaning a volume of voice that doesn't hurt the listener's ears. (Inside voice is actually a misnomer, because the determinants of appropriate voice volume are more complex than indoors vs outdoors.) A lot of autistic people have only one volume they speak at, often a fairly loud one.

This thread is quite interesting. My thoughts are a stream of words with virtually no pictures. If I do get a picture at best it will be a vague dark outline against a lighter background or a very quick flash of a vague image. I don't 'hear' any tone or volume in the words. They just exist in my head.

Here is a quick question. Say you want a cup of coffee (or any other beverage). What would your thoughts be? In my case I would think something like 'A cup of coffee would be nice'. A friend of mine would see himself getting up and making the coffee.