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The Typical Psyche Fallacy says my methods won't necessarily work for everyone, but anyway...
The hardest part for me was the beginning, getting a toehold at any inner sound. Pick a note on the guitar - I started with D on the second string. Play it at a steady rhythm with rests, slowly fading away into nothing. (Might not be possible on the piano or other instruments.) At some moment the brain will start to "complete" the sound, even though by that point you're playing too softly to hear. Catch that feeling, expand on it. When you can "do" several different notes, try playing a simple melody and hearing it afterwards. After you're comfortable with that, try to hear a simple major scale without playing it immediately beforehand. Then work from unfamiliar sheet music without playing it - solfege-sing in your mind - by now I can do this quite easily. And so on.
I used to sing is a boys choir. At the time, I started to develop an ability to actually hear songs in my head, but I became afraid of this turning into uncontrollable hallucinations, so I suppressed the vividness of experience. I'm still not sure whether it's dangerous, as the issue never turned up since. But I urge you to research this risk before going deeper.
As a trained musician with a vivid aural imagination, I find this idea to be hilarious. Totally. Risky? Really? What could possibly be risky about practicing a skill that others possess in much greater quantities, due to the same sort of practice?
Remember, I had no data on this, and a priori starting to hear sound where it isn't really there seems like nothing normal. Even if you possess the knowledge to rule something hilarious, it doesn't necessarily invalidate the correctness of an a priori position. If I toss a coin without looking, you peak at it and see it's "heads", my suggestion that it might well be "tails" isn't wrong for my state of knowledge.
Granted, naturally.
It is worth noting that Musical Ear Syndrome is often framed as a condition in which 'victims' can 'suffer' from auditory hallucinations. Any intrusive mental event can occur to the point that it is negative. I have also heard some sufferers of OCD (specifically Pure O) complain of ever-present music.
However, I agree that in general, more music in your head is better :-)
I have had that ability all my life. I do not experience any sort of auditory or visual hallucinations as a result (I can distinguish the difference between a sound or image from my mind and one from my eyes or ears). I guess it was alarming to you because it turned up suddenly and you had no prior expectation of it. Maybe for some people this is something to worry about, but as long as you can perceive the difference between external inputs and internal ones, this abiility is actually very useful.
When you say "actually hear", do you mean that the only way you could tell that the sounds weren't real was that you knew (for example) the radio was off? Or do you mean something else?
I would describe my related experiences as my imagination producing background noises. If I tried to concentrate on the background noises and bring them to the foreground they disappear and I only have the non-noise version left in my head. My hunch is that this latter state is more common amongst people who get songs stuck in their head: You think of words, you think of melodies, but you do not hear anything.
Another easy way to show the distinction, I never sing along with the fake audio. It is always background and as soon as I notice that I am hearing something it goes away. The experience reminds me of deja vu to an extent. I can tell something is hiccoughing in my sensory processing but instead of complaining about it I just enjoy the song as long as I can before it goes away.
Obviously, I cannot speak for Vladimir_Nesov.
My singing teacher can imagine polyphony and doesn't seem crazy. My opera singer friend can imagine vocal lines complete with manner, and doesn't seem crazy either. It seems to be a pretty standard ability of trained musicians.
Wait - there are people who can't do this? How do they get ear-worms? If you imagine Boris Karlof singing "You're a mean one, Mr. Grinch", and the voice in your head doesn't sound like Boris Karlof, what does it sound like? How can you do a Ronald Reagan impression if you can't hear what Ronald Reagan sounds like in your head?
I get terrible, terrible ear-worms. I once heard parts of the first 2 movements of Beethoven's 5th nonstop for almost a week.
I've introspected about this a lot - yes, introspection bad - trying to figure out how many parts I can hear at once. At first I thought I could hear 3 to 4 parts at once (4 only when the song was very familiar or the parts were very different). But I can't hear even 2 parts begin at precisely the same moment. It seems to require very rapid, barely-perceptible, attentional switching between parts, on the order of tens of milliseconds, to change the note.
Mozart could reproduce complex polyphony after hearing it once, so he must have been able to hear and imagine all the parts. Although I'm sure he had very good compression and predictive accuracy to help him reconstruct it.
It doesn't sound like anything.
If that seems odd to you, imagine a triangle.
No, really, do it. I'll wait.
Now: what color was that triangle? How many centimeters across was the base? Was it a solid, or a line enclosing an area, and if the latter how thick was the line? Did it have a matte finish, or glossy? Was it opaque, transparent, or translucent? If opaque, did it cast a shadow? Where was the light source, and how tall was the triangle, and what was the color of the light... for example, was the shadow cool or warm?
Most people's imagined triangles simply won't have those visual properties, even though triangles they actually see do have those properties, because imagination isn't a matter of re-presenting things to our visual systems. It's something else, though it has aspects of that.
In much the same way, when I imagine a song, it doesn't sound like anything... it simply doesn't have those acoustic properties.
Or, well, that's my default state. I've trained (mostly for my own entertainment) to where imagined songs have various acoustic properties for me if I pay close attention to providing them, but typically they don't.
So this is a few months later but I decided to respond anyways because 1) I had answers to many of your questions when I pictured a triangle and 2) my name is also David and "TheOtherDavid" is a name I frequently use online. How's that for typical mind?
Anyways, without even realizing I had done so, when I pictured my triangle, it was: solid, red-orange, matte, opaque, and it had no shadow. As triangles go, that particular form means nothing to me that I am aware of (it's not, for example, a sign I see at work on a regular basis or anything like that) it just happened to be what I imaged. For whatever it may be worth, I read "You're a mean one, Mr. Grinch" et al in the appropriate voices in my head, but am unable to produce music or other specific sounds that I am aware of.
Similar to this type of thing, though, I experience fiction almost as a movie both as I am reading it and in retrospect. Even just after I have read a page, I will have no recollection of any of the particular words used to describe the scene, but will be able to recount everything that just happened in detail. It wasn't until I met my wife in the beginning of my time at college that I realized this wasn't how everyone experienced books.
You might be generalizing from one example. There are plenty of games asking people to imagine (say) a cube, then asking them about various properties of the cube, and then purporting to relate them to features of the subject's personality, and I can recall very few people answering “I don't know” to any such question.
I'm confident I'm not generalizing from one example, though I might certainly be overestimating the relevance of my sample.
To be a little more concrete, I would be very surprised if it turned out that more than, say, 10% of the population honestly included all of those elements, or even most of them, in their imagined triangle if instructed to imagine a triangle. Do you think I'm overconfident about that?
How many of those elements did you include in your triangle, before being prompted by the questions?
I'm not sure you can generally answer that by introspection. At least in my case, when prompted by the question I remember having seen the specific detail. However knowing how the mind works, I also assign high probability to the explanation that my mind filled in the requested detail when prompted - rewriting my memory, loosely speaking. This is, I believe, the same phenomenon that makes eyewitness testimony so unreliable.
I agree completely, but it's socially conventional to ask people questions about our past experiences as though we were a definitive source of information about it.
"Very few" /= "none." People seem to vary widely in their visualization abilities. It hadn't previously occurred to me that they could vary in their auditory imagination, but now that TheOtherDave reports his experience, I feel like I should have expected it.
Hi, Phil .
Seems like some people don't get them (incidentally, I'd never heard the term ear-worm used for it before now--I always thought of that as song-stuck-in-my head--yours is a good succinct term for it). I get them, though. Songs don't get stuck in my head too often, however, and I find I can easily make them go away by playing a few songs on a radio or mp3 player that are different from the song that's stuck there.
I addition, most of the time I can control the auditory channel in my thoughts, so I can use this to listen to songs I feel like hearing, and change these as desired. I can also use this to listen to other people's voices in my head, or to waves on an ocean beach, etc. I don't get perfect fidelity of remembered songs, but I can get both instrumentals and vocals. The lower the fidelity of the remembered song, the more the vocals sound like me(if I were a much better singer doing a passable karaoke of it).
Incidentally, why would introspection be bad? As an introvert, I desire large amounts of introspection. In addition, I think that understanding one's self is essential for knowing what one really wants in life, which in turn is essential for creating plans that will maximize your satisfaction of life. Some examples of this would be choosing the best major for yourself in college, choosing what employment you will seek, and choosing your overall approach to life. I feel this is always one part understanding myself and one part understanding the world.
Some of us are devoid of all mental imagery, not just visual, but in all sensory modes. It's awfully quiet in my mind! I've never heard a peep, not the sound of a voice --my own or anyone else's --, no music, nada. No ear-worms possible. I can't imagine Boris Karloff doing anything, because I can't imagine Boris Karloff! I can't hear what Ronald Reagan, or anyone else, sounds like. Auditory imagery sounds like a mighty fine superpower that I would like to have!
That's anecdotal evidence; if it's that usual, there should be a better study. How many people do you know that have hallucinations? Is not knowing people who can imagine hearing sounds but don't hallucinate any indication that there is as little risk of developing hallucinations in these people as in the rest of the population? What is the absolute risk with/without aural imagination? At most, you may place an upper confidence bound on the absolute risk, like 10%, which is not that good for deciding to jump off the roof. Also: "imagine" allows too much ambiguity, I was talking about hearing in a way that's basically indistinguishable from actually hearing (hence the worry).
Ahh, I see. I've never really experienced this; I can always tell the difference between imagined sounds and real ones. Note that this is entirely different from the phenomenon of misinterpreting real sounds as being something else (especially very soft ones), which is completely harmless.
To add more anecdotal evidence, I also "hear sounds" in my head that relate to music. I can catch myself actually processing these as audio which seems similar to your statement of actually hearing songs in your head. As soon as I notice it, it will go away.
The real example, however, is that I took an intro from a folk song and made it my ring tone. I hear that thing everywhere even when my phone is not ringing. I have no idea why. If I think, "was that my phone?" I start hearing the song.
Personally, I find it annoying, but not harmful.
"As soon as I notice it, it will go away."
Wow, you are blessed. When I hear sounds in my head, whether remembered or imagined, I feel as though I literally hear them. They are not merely background noise... on some days all of the music in my head gets so loud I just can't think straight and I have to find a way to silence my inner world. When I hear a melody, even in isolation, I hear full harmonization in my mind, which is why if I start singing along with a friend I have to work at sticking to the melody and not expressing the accompanying harmonies I hear in my mind. Because hearing them so vividly while knowing the sensory sells in my choclea are not vibrating accordingly is sometimes frustrating, thus by creating phsyical expressions of the sounds I hear in my mind, I reconcile my external reality and my internal reality. All this, too, is anecdotal evidence, and evidence of perhaps nothing more than my own strangeness.
That is actually pretty cool. Are you a musician/composer in any form? If not...I think you could be without too much effort. I would love to have the ability to sing harmony on the spot...I know the theory well enough to write harmonized parts, but not in real-time because it's not intuitive to me. And when I have a song in my head, it's usually just the main vocal line my attention can hold. With a LOT of effort I can "hear" chords or two parts in counterpoint, but I have to work hard at it.
I can imagine hearing imagined sounds like you do, maybe because it's something I wish I could do...although you find it annoying, so maybe I should revise my expectations. I do know that up until about age 11, when I was completely tone-deaf, I had almost no ability to hold a tune in my head..."songs" stuck in my head consisted of the lyrics, in rhythm, but in a sort of monotone. Which is how I would then sing them, which is why everyone said I was tone deaf.
Is this related to the phenomenon where if I play on a Gameboy for a long time, I start hearing its music constantly (usually identifying it as someone else playing the same game on theirs)?
I'm reminded of the Tetris Effect.
Possibly. It certainly seems related, but I have no real idea. It seems a little more like processing long-distance repetition after the source has stopped. Hearing my ring tone may be more of an association between the thought "I wonder if I am going to miss a call" and hearing the ring tone. My experience backs this up: I only hear the ring tone if my phone is within earshot and I am doing something that causes me to miss calls (driving, taking a shower).
While we are talking about auditory randomness, when I listen to a large amount of music in a day and the next day listen to none, I have the songs from the previous day stuck in my head but in reverse-chronological order. The song I played at the end of day 1 is in my head at the beginning of day 2 and as the day progresses I move backward up my playlist. Has anyone else ever noticed this?
Related: Reverse replay of behavioral sequences in hippocampal place cells during the awake state (LiveScience, Nature News and Views)
I can't relate ... that sounds weird. I'll certainly lower my expectations as to how other people's experience is like mine.
You don't need to suppress it, you just need to include something to be able to tell the difference between it and a real sound. It doesn't even need to be something auditory, it can be imagining them coming out of a pair of imaginary speakers.
Hypnotherapist Milton Erickson is said to have cured a woman of schizophrenia in the following fashion: after finding out that she couldn't tell the difference between things that actually happened and things she imagined, he hypnotized the woman's therapist and asked him how he could tell the difference between fantasy and reality.
The therapist said that he saw imagined things in a little square box like a TV set, with a black border around them. So Erickson hypnotized the woman and told her to put a square black border around everything she imagined so she'd be able to tell the difference. Subsequently, she ceased to be "crazy".
Your reply is not even anecdotal evidence. It only tells me that you find it fitting to give this particular advice.
Is your example with curing hallucinations supposed to impart the idea that getting hallucinations is OK, since they can be cured or worked around anyway? That's bullshit.
No, it was intended to impart the idea that the primary difference between imagination and hallucination is whether you can tell the difference between the two. NLP latched on to this distinction from Erickson's example, and have since noted that skill in a wide variety of achievements (music, baseball, golf, interior design) rely on various forms of visual or auditory hallucination, and that these hallucinations are behaviorarlly indistinguishable from the hallucinations of crazy people. (Same eye movements/focal changes, same breathing/posture/ shifts, etc.)
The only difference they've been able to find is that the crazy people don't know when they're hallucinating, but they can be taught to do so.
IOW, distinguishing imagination from reality appears to be a learned skill, just like learning to imagine things on purpose.
Yes, very yes! Talking to oneself is considered to be a sign of madness in folk psychology, but in actuality everyone talks to themselves constantly and merely represses the exterior component of this discussion to an incomplete degree. (The nerves of the larynx still react, making it theoretically possible to 'read someone's mind' by examining the electrical activity of the throat.)
People who hear voices aren't fundamentally different from normal people, except that they attribute their own internal thoughts to other entities instead of perceiving them to be self-generated. There's actually very little reason to think that the auditory system of such people acts differently.
Uncontrollable imagination that you can tell from reality but can't get rid of isn't fun either. I'm pretty confident it's called 'hallucination' too, although we'd need to look that up in a diagnostic manual to resolve the question of definition.
True. Sometimes I find it annoying when a song gets stuck in my head. I usually just replace it with a song I like better, though.
Still, it would be nice to be able to learn how to suppress auditory information like that... which sounds like something you learned to do. Any pointers?
This came up awhile ago; actually, we went back and forth a few times about it, here. That discussion looks like a clear case of the typical mind fallacy, on both our parts, but there may still be something of value there.
I'm not very susceptible to this. On the rare occasions when it happens, a session of thinking about something with total concentration consistently does the trick. The routine of concentrating on one question or another during the day is possibly the reason this problem got away since childhood, but I won't count on that explanation. The statistics on what portion of people gets that effect, how often it goes away, and how often if goes away for e.g. mathematicians will be more informative as a start.
So, when you say "thinking about something with total concentration", how does that work, exactly? Do you consider "thinking" to be visualizing, talking to yourself, what?
I guess it's the same for everyone, the state where you are so inside a puzzle that the rest of the world gets pushed to the background. Visual imagination is a primary working tool, but that's form, not the causal structure of what gets represented by it, which is the thing that ought to be universal, a level below the obvious levers, even if implemented on the same substrate.