Sunday 10 August 2003

Pic of the day: So perhaps it is getting crowded from time to time ...

The "voices" in my head

I have mentioned these so often, I guess they deserve their own entry (although not on the cast page ...)

To be honest, I am not sure whether everyone experiences this, or only introverted people, or some other subgroup. But let us first clear up something: These are not the voices that some psychotic people hear.

Not all "insane" people hear voices. As a chronic condition it is mainly associated with a subtype of schizophrenia. But since schizophrenia is fairly common as psychoses go, there's a good chance you may have met some. Anyway, otherwise healthy people can briefly have such auditory hallucinations too, if they are extremely sleepy, run a high fever or are influenced by certain drugs. One hallucination doesn't make you psychotic. But if you keep hearings voices no one else can hear, you most likely have a problem.

***

I don't actually hear these "voices" in the same way I would hear a radio for instance. They aren't even recognizable by tone or pitch, although on a rare occasion I can tell one is female. (Most are not, although they may just be gender-neutral.) They are basically independent thoughts. In psychology they would be called complexes, but in daily speech that means something more specific.

When we talk about the human soul, it seems common to regard it as a single unit. Even Sigmund Freud divided it into just 3 parts. But the soul, like the body, actually has many different parts, like organs, and these again have underlying structures. It is division of labor all the way down. And just like the body isn't all head, so the soul isn't all "I". People ignore this at a high price.

The "voices" have memory but they are not simply memory. They are more like small detached parts of me. Often they sing a song I have heard, for instance. It is not at all like hearing the original song. It is like hearing me singing the song. In fact, if I choose to, I can take over and continue the song. (Only I'm a really bad singer, which is doubly sad because I love to sing.)

Lately, the voices have taken to babbling in Japanese. Obviously this is because I hear Japanese spoken almost every day, on anime. I recognize some of the words, while others may be right or wrong, I am not sure. I suspect some are just made up to sound like Japanese. But I would not bet on it... a while ago I made a couple romantic stories set in Japan, complete with Japanese-sounding names. Only after I had put it all on the Net did I find out that the both the family names and given names were not just real Japanese names but fairly common. It may simply be that Japanese has so few commonly used syllables that almost any combination of them makes some kind of sense.

***

Most famously, the "voices" prepare fiction. When I write a story, it is more like writing down a dream than writing an essay. For each story there is usually one "muse" in my head preparing it and telling it to me. I can protest and insist on changes; but if I press it too far, the "muse" will lose interest. The same if I stop writing for a time - and I always do, since other fads interrupt - so basically I am doomed anyway.

A "muse" can have a personality that differs a bit from my own, and they differ from each other. They don't have well developed personalities though, unlike the actual characters. The "muse" is hidden in the shadow, a voice from beyond the curtain. It does not want attention for itself. As well it should not, since it is really an "automated" part of myself. And I am also part of my self - but a much bigger part, and self-aware.

I think of the "voices" as applets, a much less dubious name than the UNIX concept of daemons, even though they are really doing the same thing. Like when my mail program checks the mail every 5 minutes. It is self-active, but not self-aware. It does its job and goes back to rest. The thought processes in my head are of course much more complex: A modern home computer has about the processing capacity of an ant brain. It makes perfect sense then, that the small programs we run on our brains can study languages or plot stories while we go about our daily tasks.

I understand that some people have a troubled relationship with their independent thoughts. Doubts, worries, accusations, dark temptations. Mine are mostly very friendly and cooperative, even helpful, like well-treated servants. While I sometimes have had sudden vivid daydream sequences of horrific violence ("I wonder how it would feel to drive a lorry into a street packed with shoppers"), that is a separate experience and rather uncommon. By and large, we are a team, the intelligent agents of my brain and me. And there is no doubt at all who is team leader. After all, I am the one paying the rent!