Week of 2024-05-28

Before the Soul Dawn - Helen Keller on Her Life Before Self-Consciousness

Some people have a strong inner voice, and some people think mostly non-verbally. People love making a big show of how shocking it is to learn that the other type of person exists.

I believe I’m in an unusual minority of people who have lived in both camps: I had nearly no regular mental chatter through high school, but developed it some time toward the end of high school or early college.

I have always assumed it was associated with my writing ability. Writing a 3-page essay in high school felt like torture¹. Even in college, I was barely required to write more than 10 pages at a time due to my engineering course schedule. It was only after I noticed how poor my writing skills were in the working world that I made a concerted effort to improve them; as I did that, I noticed that I started to vocalize whole sentences in my head. This was new. Eventually, entire conversations started happening mentally[^2]. The article by Helen Keller feels like a similar experience to transitioning from no inner voice to having mental dialogue, but turned up by several orders of magnitude. While she claims

I cannot represent more clearly than any one else the gradual and subtle changes from first impressions to abstract ideas.

in fact, she may have given us the clearest description of what it’s like to move from a world of feelings and sensations to one with words.