Even if you managed to go the entire minute without subvocalizing, it probably didn’t feel like the natural way of things
You gave the example: “Maybe I’ll have steak for dinner” …that sort of thought doesn’t usually happen to me. I just feel hunger, followed by imaginary eating of whatever I am craving (I imagine the taste, how it will feel to chew, how my stomach will feel after having eaten, and stuff like that). These aren’t full-blown imaginations—just little pieces of imagination (the same way that when you think of someone you don’t vividly imagine their entire face and personality, but little pieces of it)
That said. I did sub-vocalize during your mediation exercise, but largely because your telling me not to implanted the suggestion. “Don’t sub-vocalize” in particular kept sub-vocalizing into my head. Just you try not to think of an elephant for one minute.
If I’m subvocalizing, it means one of the following things:
1) I’m communicating (reading, writing, etc), recalling a communication, constructing a communication, or imagining a communication.
2) I’m formally applying a counter-intuitive logical operation (Counter-intuitive means: I can catch myself subvocalizing for the Wason selection task, but I can’t catch myself subvocalizing for the human-customized “drinking” version. I also have to sub-vocalize for sums and products, despite having lots of practice.)
3) I’m trying to put things into categories and/or pin down very fine distinctions (although I suppose this is a logical operation, it feels different, perhaps because it’s used more frequently)
4) I’m dealing with a concept which is extremely abstract: “Statistically significant”, “Eukaryota” are examples of this (it’s really hard for me to think of these words). “Association”, “socioeconomic”, “exponential”, correlation:, or “complexity” are not examples of this. I’m not sure what makes something abstract enough to bring language into it. I suspect that it may be related to the extent that I don’t fully understand the concept and am using the word as a placeholder.
5) I’m trying to commit something to memory. Also, if I come to some important insight, I’ll put the effort into verbalizing it because often, if I don’t verbalize a thought, I’ll have difficulty accessing it later. I’ll have the memory of having the thought, but I won’t always be able to get at the thought itself.
6) I’m engaging in self-analysis: Sort of how like writing down your thoughts can help make them more explicit or clear, the act of verbalizing stuff can make stuff more explicit and clear for me. (This isn’t really separate from the others—the faculties I mentioned earlier which are strengthened by verbalizing are helpful)
Oftentimes when I do sub-vocalize, it’s not a complete sentence. It’s just a word or so, interspersed here and there among sensations and emotions.
Verbalizing is good, but I also find it helpful not to always verbalize things immediately. While I’m talking I’m much more verbal, and I find that when I go back over the conversation in non-verbal format stuff that seemed important before ends up seeming like a silly distinction and questions get dissolved, and these mistakes are not made as often when I’m not thinking verbally in the first place.
Side information: I have an unusual language history. Frequent moving in childhood caused me to rapidly learn and forget multiple languages. I am unsure as to whether this is related to sub-vocalization frequency.
I actually doubt the extent that I do not sub-vocalize is particularly unusual. I’m guessing other commentators will shortly verify that they too, do not sub-vocalize frequently. This might be an individual differences thing?
Yeah, I felt a little uncomfortable about my presentation of the exercises for precisely this reason. It was a choice between giving instructions that might be insufficient to cause the desired effect—which is noticing of subvocalization, not subvocalization itself—and causing subvocalization that might not have been there had I a way to communicate “notice subvocalizations” without mentioning subvocalizations.
Still, I’m claiming something whose positive and negative versions are extremely difficult to verify. I’m claiming that subvocalization happens when you aren’t paying attention to it, which means you’re very unlikely to remember that it ever happened. It’s easy to design an experiment to test this, but it would require some expensive equipment few of us have access to. My claim comes from the many many reports of meditators who are almost universally astonished to discover how much narration is going on in their head when all the distractions are removed—and they often aren’t told explicitly about subvocalization. Soto Zen is notorious for simply telling students so sit down and shut up, basically. And then they experience this anyway.
Obviously, that doesn’t mean everyone experiences it. Just that lots of people do. I’m banking on “lots” being “almost all” for the exercises to work.
Maybe switch exercises two and one? The first exercise could be “just sit down, don’t try to think or not think...just take notice of what arises in your mind”
meditators who are almost universally astonished to discover how much narration is going on in their head when all the distractions are removed—and they often aren’t told explicitly about subvocalization.
I too, experience an endless stream of thought. It’s just that it is largely nonverbal thought and therefore not described by the term sub-vocalization. But it’s still thought, and it is similarly problematic in its capacity for distraction (if not more so), and would probably benefit from meditation.
You gave the example: “Maybe I’ll have steak for dinner” …that sort of thought doesn’t usually happen to me. I just feel hunger, followed by imaginary eating of whatever I am craving (I imagine the taste, how it will feel to chew, how my stomach will feel after having eaten, and stuff like that). These aren’t full-blown imaginations—just little pieces of imagination (the same way that when you think of someone you don’t vividly imagine their entire face and personality, but little pieces of it)
That said. I did sub-vocalize during your mediation exercise, but largely because your telling me not to implanted the suggestion. “Don’t sub-vocalize” in particular kept sub-vocalizing into my head. Just you try not to think of an elephant for one minute.
If I’m subvocalizing, it means one of the following things:
1) I’m communicating (reading, writing, etc), recalling a communication, constructing a communication, or imagining a communication.
2) I’m formally applying a counter-intuitive logical operation (Counter-intuitive means: I can catch myself subvocalizing for the Wason selection task, but I can’t catch myself subvocalizing for the human-customized “drinking” version. I also have to sub-vocalize for sums and products, despite having lots of practice.)
3) I’m trying to put things into categories and/or pin down very fine distinctions (although I suppose this is a logical operation, it feels different, perhaps because it’s used more frequently)
4) I’m dealing with a concept which is extremely abstract: “Statistically significant”, “Eukaryota” are examples of this (it’s really hard for me to think of these words). “Association”, “socioeconomic”, “exponential”, correlation:, or “complexity” are not examples of this. I’m not sure what makes something abstract enough to bring language into it. I suspect that it may be related to the extent that I don’t fully understand the concept and am using the word as a placeholder.
5) I’m trying to commit something to memory. Also, if I come to some important insight, I’ll put the effort into verbalizing it because often, if I don’t verbalize a thought, I’ll have difficulty accessing it later. I’ll have the memory of having the thought, but I won’t always be able to get at the thought itself.
6) I’m engaging in self-analysis: Sort of how like writing down your thoughts can help make them more explicit or clear, the act of verbalizing stuff can make stuff more explicit and clear for me. (This isn’t really separate from the others—the faculties I mentioned earlier which are strengthened by verbalizing are helpful)
Oftentimes when I do sub-vocalize, it’s not a complete sentence. It’s just a word or so, interspersed here and there among sensations and emotions.
Verbalizing is good, but I also find it helpful not to always verbalize things immediately. While I’m talking I’m much more verbal, and I find that when I go back over the conversation in non-verbal format stuff that seemed important before ends up seeming like a silly distinction and questions get dissolved, and these mistakes are not made as often when I’m not thinking verbally in the first place.
Side information: I have an unusual language history. Frequent moving in childhood caused me to rapidly learn and forget multiple languages. I am unsure as to whether this is related to sub-vocalization frequency.
I actually doubt the extent that I do not sub-vocalize is particularly unusual. I’m guessing other commentators will shortly verify that they too, do not sub-vocalize frequently. This might be an individual differences thing?
Yeah, I felt a little uncomfortable about my presentation of the exercises for precisely this reason. It was a choice between giving instructions that might be insufficient to cause the desired effect—which is noticing of subvocalization, not subvocalization itself—and causing subvocalization that might not have been there had I a way to communicate “notice subvocalizations” without mentioning subvocalizations.
Still, I’m claiming something whose positive and negative versions are extremely difficult to verify. I’m claiming that subvocalization happens when you aren’t paying attention to it, which means you’re very unlikely to remember that it ever happened. It’s easy to design an experiment to test this, but it would require some expensive equipment few of us have access to. My claim comes from the many many reports of meditators who are almost universally astonished to discover how much narration is going on in their head when all the distractions are removed—and they often aren’t told explicitly about subvocalization. Soto Zen is notorious for simply telling students so sit down and shut up, basically. And then they experience this anyway.
Obviously, that doesn’t mean everyone experiences it. Just that lots of people do. I’m banking on “lots” being “almost all” for the exercises to work.
Maybe switch exercises two and one? The first exercise could be “just sit down, don’t try to think or not think...just take notice of what arises in your mind”
I too, experience an endless stream of thought. It’s just that it is largely nonverbal thought and therefore not described by the term sub-vocalization. But it’s still thought, and it is similarly problematic in its capacity for distraction (if not more so), and would probably benefit from meditation.