you don't consciously think up what you say...new research

One of our great, and common (mis)conceptions is that we need "thoughts" to speak - that we "think up", consciously, what we say before we say it.  This conception extends to well-known "religious" folk.  When discussions were first circulating about my alleged "no thoughts" state, one of the most prominent Buddhist folk in the western world wrote:

                "...and myself once met a retreatant in...who told us that sometimes he had no thoughts for several days.  We actually thought it was a bit funny, since this practitioner was animatedly talking about all kinds of things.   So we wondered what qualified as "thought" in his view since he was obviously thinking."

As a DIY, take a few minutes and watch carefully what you say, and see if you do think up what you say.   Go ahead, just do it...

Do we know what we're going to say before we say it?   Or do we just hear it as it is said, and then try to see if it was a "good" thing or if we might have "misspoken"?

The quieter your internal narrative is, and the closer you watch, the easier it is to see that you have no idea what is going to be coming out when speech happens.   

Andreas Lind
Lund University

An excellent paper was just published in "Psychological Science" entitled "Speakers' Acceptance ofReal-Time Speech Exchange Indicates That We Use Auditory Feedback to Specify the Meaning of What We Say", by Andreas Lind, et al., from the Swedish universities at Uppsala and Lund.  

What Lind and his colleagues did was to see what would happen if someone said one word, but then heard themselves apparently speaking another word.   As Lind said “If we use auditory feedback to compare what we say with a well-specified intention, then any mismatch should be quickly detected.  But if the feedback is instead a powerful factor in a dynamic, interpretative process, then the manipulation could go undetected.” 

So, if the word that was said was different from what we had mentally pre-planned to say, it would be very obvious to us.   However, if we routinely have no idea what is going to be said, and only know it when we hear it spoken and then interpret it, the change to a different word will not be seen.

How this works is shown below.   This is the famous Stroop effect/test, which shows you letters that spell a "color" word in the "wrong" color, i.e. it spells out "r-e-d", but the word is colored "green".  It takes a little concentration to do it correctly.  

In the "a" box, you correctly recognize the deception and say "green" which is recorded for later use.  

Then in "b", you are shown "g-r-e-e-n" but it is colored "gray", and you correctly say "gray", but your recording of your saying "green" earlier is replayed in your headphone.  

In "c", you are then asked "What did you say", and you say "green", even though you really did say "gray", i.e. you said what you heard, not what you actually said.  

Most importantly, this did not seem "strange" to you, i.e. you really believed that you said what you heard, rather than what you actually said.  If you had prementated and consciously said "gray", you would have objected when you heard "green" and said "What i heard in my headphones was not what i said!" 

It matters a lot exactly when the "wrong" word is heard in your headphones.  If the synchronization w/the "voice trigger" in b) was begun within 5 to 20 milliseconds after you began to speak, it was undetected more than 2/3 of the time.  

The 1/3 of the "detections" are effectively less than that.  They fell into 3 categories, "certain, uncertain and possible", with only 4% being "certain".  

For you techies, they did use a "noise cancelling" headset so that the 78 subjects wouldn't be able to hear what they really did say.   As these were all Swedish students, the words used were “green” (“grön”) and “gray” (“grå”).    In Swedish, “grå” is pronounced [ɡɹoː], and “grön” is pronounced [ɡɹoːn].  These words sound similar but are semantically clearly distinct.  

These results were a big surprise to Lind, who put himself through the test, knowing what was going on.   He felt that the speech exchanges were convincing, and said "“When you say one thing but hear yourself clearly saying something else, it’s a very powerful feeling”.

When research this compelling directly contradicts established dogma, both scientific and societal, the current researchers in the field, who have been saying and believing otherwise, "respond".   This happened when Libet published his "no free will" results in the early 80s, and continues, despite many iterations with increasingly sophisticated equipment and experimental designs confirming it.  (Plz see "The impossibility of 'free will'...scientifically and logically".)

One summary on Lind's work cited Barbara Davis, who studies speech acquisition in infants and children at the University of Texas.   She says that Lind's work offers an “intriguing challenge to the dominant paradigm” of speech pre-planning, but she still believes there is "preverbal planning" going on and adds “Naming a colour is different than fluid discourse, it’s a different level of complexity,” she says. 

Davis adds, “A lot of people would agree that there is both pre-planning and auditory feedback going on.”  She also points out that folk who lose their hearing can speak for a long time before their speech patterns deteriorate, which she says indicates that auditory feedback is not necessary for speech.  

IMHO, Dr. Davis misses the point.  The question is, "However speech manifests, do we consciously pre-plan it with internal narrative?"   Speech emerges, and some functionality must be creating it, but it isn't conscious, IME.  Citing "A lot of people..." is using conventional wisdom to prove it is correct, like saying "we all know the earth is flat".   

Similarly with the deterioration of speech patterns after losing hearing.  Clearly speech can happen w/o auditory feedback, whether it's "fluid discourse" or "naming a color".  However, in both cases, one can see that we create the illusion of planning what we say, post hoc, by hearing about it, not by "thinking" it up.  

Lind agrees...“If you don’t have it (auditory feedback) you can still speak, but if you do have it, you probably rely on it more than other types of feedback when it comes to determining the meaning of your own words."

The Bhagavad Gita noticed the same thing as shown in "Dancing Beyond Thought" in V, 8 - 9: 

नैव        किञ्चित्     करोमि       इति          युक्तः                मन्येत         तत्त्व        वित् 

naiva     kinchit     karomi-   iti        yuktaH            manyeta     tattva       vit 

not    anything    do I do   thus  absorbed in Self would think  Truth   knower of

पश्यन्          शर्ण्वन        स्पर्शन       जिघ्रन्       अश्नन्     गच्छन्       स्वपन्          श्वसन् 

pashyan    shrnvan    sprshan   jighran    ashnan  gacchan   svapan     shvasan 

 seeing    hearing    touching  smelling   eating    moving  sleeping   breathing 

   

“I do nothing at all”, thus would one absorbed in Self, the knower of the Self, think – 

seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, eating, moving, sleeping, breathing

 प्रलपन्           विसर्जन       ग्र्ह्नन          उन्मिषन्                निमिषन        अपि

pralapan     visrajan     grhnan      unmishan            nimishan      api 

speaking    releasing   holding   opening eyes       closing eyes    even 

इन्द्रियाणि                       इन्द्रियार्तेषु             वर्तन्ते            इति        धारयन्

indriyaani                indriyaarteshu      vartante        iti    dhaarayan 

sense/action organs  in their objects  are engaged   that   knowing 

speaking, letting go, holding on, even opening and closing the eyes –

knowing that it is the organs of sense and action engaged in their objects

For the “awakened” one absorbed in the Self, there is the clear realization and understanding that (s)he really does nothing.  What may appear to others as willful action is just the organs of action and sensation moving among their objects. 




BTW, there is a useful interview with Katherine MacLean, "The Strange, Fuzzy Fat Brick of Everything" that has a discussion of her brief Dark Night of the Soul and our working together.  The key parts are 13:51 - 15:24, and 46:54 - 52:36. Katherine did a lot of research on both meditation and psychedelics, including putting together the current psilocybin +/- meditation program @ Johns Hopkins.

BTW2, i was interviewed recently on The Secular Buddhist.