“I just learned that silent reading isn’t silent for everyone.
Some people hear the words in their heads as they read.”

This statement 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, there was a huge variety of experiences, ranging from this: “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.”

“As I’m typing this, I’m talking the words out in my head.”

And then there was this …

“I always hear my own voice when I read or think, so I’m permanently in conversation with myself.”

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% of people 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”, 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?

Image: Roland Barthes No 159, 15 Dec 1971

This is part of a series of posts on Questions about Creativity. The rest of the series can be seen at: https://annhawkins.com/creativity