(I'm sure there are others, yet to be articulated)
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The phenomena of inner experience Heavey and Hurlburt 2008
This study provides a survey of phenomena that present themselves during moments of naturally occurring inner experience... we have discovered five frequently occurring phenomena—inner speech, inner seeing, unsymbolized thinking, feelings, and sensory awareness.
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etymology of 'thought'
Stream of Consciousness Wikipedia
Stream of Consciousness
Jane Hu in Routledge Encyclopedia of Modernism
...The term quickly came to mean a narrative mode
that seeks to give the written equivalent of a character's thought processes,
and is sometimes described in terms of an 'interior monologue'...
William James on Stream of Consciousness
(Chapter IX of The Principles of Psychology, 1890)
In this room - this lecture-room, say - there are a multitude of thoughts, yours and mine, some of which cohere mutually, and some not. They are as little each-for-itself and reciprocally independent as they are all-belonging-together. They are neither: no one of them is separate, but each belongs with certain others and with none beside. My thought belongs with my other thoughts, and your thought with your other thoughts. Whether anywhere in the room there be a mere thought, which is nobody's thought, we have no means of ascertaining, for we have no experience of its like. The only states of consciousness that we naturally deal with are found in personal consciousnesses, minds, selves, concrete particular I's and you's.
Each of these minds keeps its own thoughts to itself. There is no giving or bartering between them. No thought even comes into direct sight of a thought in another personal consciousness than its own... It seems as if the elementary psychic fact were not thought or this thought or that thought, but my thought, every thought being owned....
the personal self rather than the thought might be treated as the immediate datum in psychology. The universal conscious fact is not 'feelings and thoughts exist,' but 'I think' and 'I feel.' (225-226)
...secondary personal selves. These selves are for the most part very stupid and contracted, and are cut off at ordinary times from communication with the regular and normal self of the individual; but still they form conscious unities, have continuous memories, speak, write, invent distinct names for themselves, or adopt names that are suggested; and, in short, are entirely worthy of that title of secondary personalities which is now commonly given them. According to M. Janet these secondary personalities are always abnormal, and result from the splitting of what ought to be a single complete self into two parts, of which one lurks in the background whilst the other appears on the surface as the only self the man or woman has. (227)
(quoting Shadworth Hodgson)
I go straight to the facts, without saying I go to perception, or sensation, or thought, or any special mode at all. What I find when I look at my consciousness at all is that what I cannot divest myself of, or not have in consciousness, if I have any consciousness at all, is a sequence of different feelings. I may shut my eyes and keep perfectly still, and try not to contribute anything of my own will; but whether I think or do not think, whether I perceive external things or not, I always have a succession of different feelings. Anything else that I may have also, of a more special character, comes in as parts of this succession. Not to have the succession of different feelings is not to be conscious at all... The chain of consciousness is a sequence of differents. (230)
...Consciousness, then, does not appear to itself chopped up in bits. Such words as 'chain' or 'train' do not describe it fitly as it presents itself in the first instance. It is nothing jointed; it flows. A 'river' or a 'stream' are the metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life. (239)
...The transition between the thought of one object and the thought of another is no more a break in the thought than a joint in a bamboo is a break in the wood. It is a part of the consciousness as much as the joint is a part of the bamboo. (240)
...and William James as quoted in The Three Jameses:The mind is at every stage a theatre of simultaneous possibilities. Consciousness consists in the comparison of these with each other, the selection of some, and the suppression of the rest by the reinforcing and inhibiting agency of attention. (pg 144)
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Subvocalization (Wikipedia)
Does everyone have subvocalization?
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Imaginary Friends and Alter Egos
(here I'll perhaps explore the personal significance of Crockett Johnson's Barnaby
[see RC Harvey on Understanding Barnaby]
and the work of Abner Dean in my own development of hyperphantasia and hyperauralia)
see also APA Dictionary of Psychology entry for 'alter ego'
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Kian's contribution:
"The part of my brain that isn't the thinking part is really complex...
And it's completely separate from the thinking part but it gets ideas from my thinking part
and how it points things out is sort of like it's another person inside of me,
like there's somebody behind me who says something then points a finger towards it."
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And John O'Donohue really nailed it:
I would love to live like a river flows,
Carried by the surprise of its own unfolding.
...that's a good characterization of how I experience my Voice
and here's another right-on crystallization, from Ursula Le Guin's Tao Te Ching:
To bear and not to own;
to act and not to lay claim;
to do the work and let it go:
for just letting it go
is what makes it stay. (5)
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I realize that I enjoy the internal conversation, and that I like the ...person... who seems to be talking, and admire its eloquence betimes. That thought took me to the burgeoning list of Convivium topics, in search of outings that seem mostly concerned with aspects of Mind. Here's my catalog of them:
Inspiration Feb 2021
Memory June 2021
Fox or Hedgehog? Sept 2021
Narrative Jan 2022
Authenticity Feb 2023
Vocation Mar 2023
Dreams and Dreaming Oct 2023
Unconscious Enlightened Being Dec 2023
Consider the Elephant Feb 2024
Joys and Challenges of Writing March 2024
of the Numinous March 2024
(the criteria for inclusion are pretty flexible)
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I ran across this graphic on Wednesday morning, offering a spectrum view of
"thin" to "thick" first-person inquiry re: "inner worlds":
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I'm not sure if this Voices thing needs a digression into meditation, involving the notion of "quieting the mind" or shutting down the distracting yammer that some seem plagued by. Others may have useful thoughts in that realm. I did gather up some material on my first Kripalu experience (2007), and explored it looking for evidence of my Voice as it was 17 years ago.
I made some efforts in the direction of vipassana, after reading Larry Rosenberg's Breath by Breath: The Liberating Practice of Insight Meditation, but I didn't really take to it. Recently I encountered a meditation variant that might be a better fit with my proclivities, and might "create an appealing environment in your mind": Imaginative Meditation, which seems to be image based
"Just choose an image that inspires you — a positive peaceful image — and rest your mind on that, as in the simply seeing meditation..."
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