My creativity advent calendar 2024: Day 18.
What’s going on in your head?
“I just learned that silent reading isn’t silent for everyone.
Some people hear the words in their heads as they read.”
This statement, quoted by one of my contacts, Lynda Thompson, in a LinkedIn post sparked a deluge of “how did we not know this?” juxtaposed with “isn’t this true for everyone?” questions that revealed a hidden world of creativity going on inside some people’s heads — but that others were completely unaware of.
My answer is that I absolutely hear the voices — they’re the voices of the characters and one of the reasons I hate authors to “write” in accents — I find that very annoying. I also see the characters quite clearly and that makes watching a film made from a book that I’ve read really difficult.
I can’t listen to someone speaking on the radio while I’m reading and I can’t listen to someone speak and read or write a text message at the same time, making group video calls fraught with an overload of chaos.
In 50+ comments on Lynda’s post, there was a huge variety of experiences, ranging from this: “I really had to stop and think about this because I have never questioned that it is the same for everyone. I don’t hear anything. I just process the words” to “If I’m reading Shakespeare I always hear the words (I suppose they were written to be declaimed). Reading a novel it would depend on the intensity of focus — if I’m really involved in it, I see the images in my head like a movie, if I’m not that engaged in the story or losing focus, I hear the words.”
“I’m not sure if I do or not. I think probably yes but I can’t imagine it any other way, it’s just how I read… As I’m typing this, I’m talking the words out in my head.”
And then there was this …
“I’ve always heard my own voice when I read or think so I’m permanently in conversation with myself. I’ve never questioned it. Equally I see things in shapes or colours in my mind. So days of the week have a colour and shape, months have colour and the year has a shape.”
A few people I know have described what it’s like to live with Synaesthesia, a perceptual phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway. It sounds simultaneously exciting and terrifying.
My friend, Helen Lindop, said “This might throw a spanner in the works but if what I’m reading isn’t much effort to follow I don’t hear a voice in my head, but if I have to concentrate — e.g. it’s hard material to understand or there’s background noise — I do ‘hear’ a voice and it’s usually mine.”
One person said: “As an extra mind-bender, I both hear words in my mind when I’m reading (usually my voice, unless it’s a character in a book with an imagined distinctive voice, or a real person whose voice I know), and I see words written in my mind when people are talking to me or there’s dialogue on the television. It’s called tickertaping synesthesia (I think about 7% have it). So my brain is incredibly noisy all the time!”
The most surprising thing of all was that people who know each other very well had no idea what was going on in each others heads …
In this series about creativity I’ve touched on how different people translate their ideas but until I saw this post it hadn’t occurred to me that we know so very little of how other people experience the same thing. When Ursula Le Guinn declared that “reading is art”, (see Day 7) I wonder if she knew just how many different ways people experience an author’s writing? I wonder what her own experience was of both reading and writing?
And now I’m wondering if there is a correlation between the rich inner world of creativity and the people who express that world externally? Do prolific artists have an inner dialogue? Do people who have a quiet mind find difficulty in creating art? Is this another rabbit hole I need to explore before I finish this calendar?
Are you a “read out loud in your head” person or a silent reader who is blissfully unaware of all this other activity? And how does that relate to your creativity?
So many questions.
(Roland Gérard Barthes 1915 – 1980) was a French literary theorist, essayist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician. In semiotics, a sign is defined as anything that communicates intentional and unintentional meaning or feelings to the sign’s interpreter.)
