On the Myriads of Inner Experiences
Or ‘Neurodivergence amongst Neurotypicals’
Figure: The Temptation of St. Anthony, Salvador Dalí (1946).
It started with two old codgers named O’Brian and Nolan discussing the weather. “Terrible rain and wind for this time of year,” O’Brian ventured.
“Ah, faith,” Nolan replied, “I do not believe it is this time of year at all, at all.”
At this, Murphy spoke up. “Ah, Jaysus,” he said, “I’ve never seen a boogerin’ normal day.” He paused to set down his pint, then added thoughtfully, “And I never met a fookin’ average man neither. -Robert Anton Wilson.
Here I wish to explore a topic that I and a few of my friends have been fascinated with for several years. Namely how bizarrely divergent one person’s inner experience can be from another’s even when both people think they are having a ‘normal’ experience. The implications of these differences are that ‘normal’ people are not at all well understood by science, which ironically often defines normality by studying what is ‘abnormal’. Many of the examples I give below are subjective and personal, rather than scientific. My motivation is only to whet people’s curiosity, and I hope that people with more expertise than me might some day pick up the baton and take it further than I am able to.
A quick word on Neurodivergence
In this era, Neurodivergence has become a major zeitgeist topic. Changes in the diagnostic criteria in version 5 of the Diagnostic Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (2013) and the later version V-TR (2022), have affected many people, especially those who have been diagnosed with either Autism Spectrum Disorder, or ADD/ADHD. The DSM is the book that your doctor, psychologist or psychotherapist uses for most of their Mental Disorder diagnoses. As such, I highly encourage those who are affected to read it. I have personally found educating myself on my own disorders: depression, anxiety, and PTSD, to be very empowering.1
One change for Autism diagnoses, which has been controversial to some, was the removal of the term, ‘Asbergers’, and a move away from terms like ‘low functioning’ or ‘high functioning’ in favour of treating all Autism diagnoses at three core levels: From level 1: ‘requiring support’, to level 3: ‘requiring substantial support’.
There have also been a changes in which groups are targeted for diagnoses. For one, many more girls and women are now being diagnosed as autistic. This is a huge change from the thinking of previous decades where autism was often described as a type of cognitive ‘hyper-masculinity’.
Hans Asperger (1906-1980), one of the pioneering figures in autism research in the 1940s, described autism as an exclusively male disorder and his early clinical case histories featured only boys. Today, feminine-normative behaviours have been included as part of the wider lens in autistic-spectrum diagnoses, which has been transformative for many people’s lives.
Similarly there has been a push this decade to diagnose adults, previously left out, with ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) and ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder). This has resulted in several of my friends, family, and students being able to receive medical help for these symptoms for the first time.
With these popular discussions as a background, and leaving medical diagnoses to those who are qualified, I would like to discuss other, (currently) non-medicalised forms of ‘neurodivergence’, and especially those that apparently occur in people who pass as ‘neurotypical’. My purpose here is simple. I’m not on a campaign for recognition, or for identity, rather I wish to illustrate how incredibly different one person’s inner world can be from another, even when both people think they are having a typical experience.
What do I mean by ‘neurotypical?’. For my purposes I mean simply that one passes through school, work and society without having one’s inner experience questioned (or at least not questioned regularly). The terms ‘neurodivergence’ and ‘neurotypical’ were apparently coined around 2000 by Kassiane Asasumasu (b.1982), an autism rights campaigner. She hoped the terms would help with inclusivity, and that is the spirit by which I use them here.
What do you experience when you read a book?
My interest in ‘neurodiversity amongst neurotypicals’ started about fifteen years ago when I was trying to figure out why my girlfriend at the time could read books twice as fast as me, but was unable to read out loud without paraphrasing. For me it is the opposite. I read at the roughly the pace of a fast talker (comparatively slowly), with an inner voice that I can ‘hear’, and all I have to do to read out loud is make the inner voice my outer voice. It turns out my girlfriend was not audiating (hearing internally) what was on the page, but rather, paraphrasing it on the fly. Thinking this was an interesting difference, I asked my cousin, who was was boarding with us at the time what his experience of reading a book was. He related that he neither read with an inner voice, nor did he paraphrase. Instead he tried to describe his experience of converting the text to pure concepts, without hearing, or seeing language internally.
How interesting! All three of us are educated, and supposedly ‘neurotypical’2.
It made me think more deeply about how radically my inner world might differ from others. One thing that has become clear to me is that I can split my inner voice, which I can ‘hear’ internally, up into multiple voices like a committee, and have a round table discussion with as many as eight selves! Each part have a different opinion on an issue. When I’m done, I absorb all the selves back into one and go about my day. This has been especially useful in my life. For instance I approach politics, religion, identity and many other topics by ‘trying on’ many differing opinions or beliefs. This has made me a good diplomat for my friends, and I am proud of the fact that I have friends who have very different politics and religious from each other, and that they find my points of view relatable and vice versa. If I truly understand an issue, I can also debate on either (or multiple) sides. I suppose at times this has caused me to be a contrarian, though I try not to be combative about it. When I’m teaching, I can easily adjust my position to one the student can relate to, and which follows their line of questioning, without losing my thread.
The drawback, of thinking this way perhaps is that it can be hard for me to identify strongly with one position. For this reason I tend not to campaign on behalf of certain sides, preferring neutrality3.
Perhaps for this reason I’ve often been a stressy student, sometimes holding up the class while I ask question after question. Occasionally this has frustrated my teachers. The best of them however figured out that if they took a bit more time with me at the beginning, I’d be tutoring some of the other students who were stuck after class later on. I believe that the very same qualities that have made me an annoying student have made me a good teacher who can relate to my students.
Another subtle difference in the ways different friends process language became clear when I was in a band with a friend, who I will call D. Untypically for most bands, where different people write different songs (or jam them out), D and I would share writing duties at almost every level of the music, and this often included co-writing (and rewriting) each other’s lyrics.
While D was, at face value, not great at spelling, it slowly dawned on me that this allowed him to do something special with his lyrics, and that this had an underlying cause in our different experiences with words.
For me the spelling of a word, and its meaning are the word. Two words with different spellings, but the same sound (homophones), are for me different words. For instance, knew, and new, night and knight...
Whereas for D, they are perhaps more like one word with different meanings. Therefore D’s approach to lyrics was filled with deliberate misspellings in order to create double entendres. For instance a subversive tongue on cheek song about death rumination he called ‘Youth in Asia’.
Playing with sounds and mispellings was key for D. His approach reminds me of John Lennon’s book ‘In His Own Write’, and the children’s books of Spike Milligan.
"Goodeven Michael,' the Poleaseman speeg, but Michael did not answer for he was debb and duff and could not speeg." John Lennon ‘In His Own Write’Page 35
In relation, my lyrics are filled with conceptual metaphors. I was often adding additional layers of ‘literary narrative’ on top of D’s pun-laden, but often narratively straight-forward texts.
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I urge you to explore the question: What happens when you read a book?, and how do you experience words?
Do you:
• See a movie in your mind?
• Do you lack any internal imagery, a condition called ‘aphantasia’.
• Do you have different voices for different characters or does everyone talk in you own single voice? How does your inner voice compare to your speaking voice?
Many people, especially my beginner singing students, report not identifying with their recorded voice, or their voice through a microphone, until they become accustomed to the way it sounds different to their imagined inner voice.
• Do you hear your own voice as if you were speaking aloud? If so, are you especially good at reading aloud?
• Do you paraphrase, readjusting the words to fit the way you would write them? Does this allow you to speed-read? Does this effect your ability to accurately read out loud?
• Do you take in on concepts, without ‘sounds’ or language? How would you explain this experience to others?
• Do you entirely lack an inner voice, that you can ‘hear’ internally. A condition called ‘anendophasia’.
• Can you think in more than one language? Is this something you can switch between? It took me a long time to be able to think in German, and once I could, it was very hard to switch back to English. With practice I eventually was able to switch at will, which in linguistics is called ‘code-switching’. I presume some people speak their own language in their head in an idiosyncratic way.
Perhaps there are many ways to ‘codeswitch’ how we think and experience thought and that these can be trained as skills?
-Ask some of your friends and family the same questions. You might be, as I was, very surprised at the results!
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Some of these inner experiences can change, to some extent, with training. Many trained musicians can ‘audiate’ inner sounds of music from simply reading sheet music. I would discourage people from over-identifying with these different experiences as if all they represent ‘types of people’. They may also simply be habits that could be changed with effort. For instance, I drew a lot of pictures as a child and I had a very detailed, nearly photographic inner eye. Over time I moved away from drawing and dedicated my time to learning music. As a result my inner eye became a lot less detailed, and I now have an ‘auditory dominant’ mind. I can now imagine multiple lines of music and harmonies, but have trouble forming images as well as I used to. Just recently I started drawing again and some of the capability for imagery from my childhood started returning.
For me this ability to alter my inner experience with practice is where a lot of the power of a daily magical or spiritual practice comes from. Your inner experience is probably more malleable than you realise. My music students report similar changes as they improve. The world starts sounding different to them. Likewise entire magical and spiritual systems exist for training, and improving one’s inner experience: Golden Dawn magic, Zen, Kabbalah, Tantra, Hypnosis, Cognitive Behavioural Therapy...
As briefly mentioned before, Some people report having no inner voice at all. A condition which is sometimes called, anendophasia. The Youtuber and Old English expert Simon Roper discusses his experience of lacking an inner voice, and his own ponderings on differences in inner consciousness in this video:
Is Everyone Conscious in the Same Way?
Interestingly Roper is unbelievably talented at a variety of British accents including historically reconstructed ones. He is also quite fluent in several dialects of Old English. Not having an inner voice definitely doesn’t hinder his language talents. Perhaps it somehow gives him an advantage?
People who have this condition have reported that the Hollywood trope of a movie character doing a voice-over when reading is ‘unrealistic’ to them. For me and many other people the voice-over accurately represents how I experience reading: with an internal voice. In any case, very few people think through everything they are going to say before they say it, so language faculty seems to be separate from the presence of, or lack of, an internal voice.
Similarly there are professional artists who have aphantasia, a total lack of any internal imagery.
How a Visual Artist With Aphantasia Drew What She Couldn’t “See”
Rather than imagining what they are going to paint, theses artists plan everything out on a page, screen, or a canvas. In contrast to this we have surrealists, channeling artists, and psychedelic artists who are able to paint their dreams, spirit experiences or psychedelic trips in high detail.
Figure : Leonora Carrington, Les Distractions de Dagobert (1945)
As well as aphantasia or anendophasia one would expect there to be people who lack internal smells (I can barely imagine smells), or flavours or other senses. This is perhaps a question for others to explore.
People who lack an autobiographical narrative
One of the more unusual self-reported types I have come across, are people who lack any autobiographical narrative. That is, they don’t identify as being the same person as their former self. They tend to lack nostalgia, and may not be interested in pictures of the past especially pictures of themselves. For these people, the present moment is much more real than the past. In extreme cases, these people lack the ability to relive past experiences. The linked article elaborates:
Could you have this memory disorder?
While the linked article presents this condition as a disorder, there are also people who claim to get on with life just fine without an inner autobiographical narrative. While I don’t have this condition, I have very little nostalgia compared with some people I know. I also feel very different to my past self of even ten years ago. It’s just a small extra jump for me to understand someone who cannot relate to their past self at all.
People who lack internal gender
Trans-rights are another hot issue in the current era of politics. I have been interested in gender for as long as I can remember. In relating my personal experiences several trans-friends (all Trans women) have suggested to me that my self-reported experience has similarities to a trans person, in particular having a different inner experience of gender than apparently most cis-people4 feel. Reportedly, most people feel as if they have an ‘inner gender’ and for cis people this aligns to their body closely enough that they almost never have cause to question it. People who are motivated to change from one gender to another typically report going through life feeling like they are a different gender to their body. Often they are adamant that ‘inside’ they are a woman, or a man.
I’ve always felt a disconnect to this. I don’t feel like I have any internal gender at all, a condition some call ‘agender’. While I sometimes feel a disconnect between the way my body processes emotion and the way I feel mentally, I’ve otherwise never particularly felt a need to change my body to fit my mind. My mind and body feel, perhaps much more separated than they do for many people. Some trans people understand this type of feeling to be an aspect of their dysphoria. Personally, while I’m considering that, I’m not sure that I have dysphoria exactly. However it is starting to dawn on me that my experience of not feeling my gender, is probably not typical of cis-people.
It’s hard to say how many people feel similar to me. Obviously an ‘agendered’ person is going to have a harder time accepting they are trans than someone who more easily understands that they are the opposite gender, and it’s harder to know what one would do about it. For now, for me, it’s an open question. I do however feel strongly that having no internal gender, for me, feels different than people who express themselves as androgynous, meaning a mixture of male and female.
I wonder how many other people feel they have no internal gender?
Left and right brain dominance
This is a big topic which I will only summarise here. I am a great fan of the work of Iain McGilchrist and his book The Master and His Emissary, which represents his cutting edge life-long study of the difference between left and right brain dominance in people and in society at large. Below is a quick summary of my takeaways from McGilchrist’s work. Not only do these present as different modes of attention and thinking within a person, but also tendencies within different people:
Right Brain dominance:
• Big picture, ‘top down’ thinking or ‘gestalt’ thinking.
• Engages with new information. Enjoys novelty.
• Thinks in terms of relationships.
• Intuitive.
• Symbolic.
• Metaphorical.
• See’s other beings as people, and sometimes objects as people.
• Entertains multiple worldviews.
• ‘Feels’ the world.
• Lives easily in the moment.
• Happily communicates with the left brain.
Left Brain dominance:
• Thinks in parts and is detail-focussed.
• Prefers what it already knows. Tends to compare new things to it’s established ideas.
• Bottom up thinking, or reductionism.
• Black and white and causal thinking. ‘If this then this’.
• Sees other beings and bodies as if they are machines.
• Prefers certainty, and will often push for certainty when confronted with ‘grey’ matters.
• Engages with the world through language and concept.
• Tends to live in the past.
• Often shuts the right brain out.
These are a very rough summary. Hopefully one can see the usefulness in both types of thinking. For instance, while it is usually preferable to treat other humans as ‘people’, one would probably prefer a surgeon who treats their unconscious patient dispassionately ‘as a machine to be fixed’, while they are performing surgery. Similarly a formula-one driver who treats the other cars as moving obstacles is going to be more successful in the race, than one who tries to understand the other driver’s feelings.
On the other hand, many right-brain dominant children have suffered emotionally at the hand of an overly left-brained parent, who might have little interest in their emotional world, or the subjective point-of-view of their child.
As each hemisphere is complex, there are perhaps infinite ways for both to come to a balance in an individual. Outside of extreme cases where a career path, or situation is very unipolar, most people benefit from finding a balance between their hemispheres.
Multitaskers
As a musician, and one who performs as a one-man-band, multitasking is another interest of mine and one I appear to be predisposed to. Traditionally, quite a bit has been made of a difference between men and women in regards to multitasking. As a male (at least in body) perhaps I am an outlier in this regard, or perhaps the cliché of women being better multitaskers has more to do with traditional expectations of women and the division of labour of our ancestors than a true biological difference?
In any case, some of my music students find multitasking, for instance, singing while strumming a guitar, very natural, while others require special practice and training. As multitasking is a favourable skill in music I’m unsure as to whether those who are more single-minded have advantages over multitaskers in other tasks, however differences amongst my students have been obvious enough as evidence that there are different types of people: those who easily multitask and those who don’t. In my subjective experience these types don’t correlate to gender at all, though I accept that I may simply be a biased outlier in this regard.
Many ways to be conscious
While the examples I have explored in this article must be a mere tip of the iceberg, they are hopeful enough to show the myriad of inner experiences amongst even those who ‘pass’ as ‘neurotypicals’.
A general rule in all philosophy is that there are almost always fewer ways for a thing to be within a ‘type’ than there are ways for it to be different to that type. Hopefully I have presented some surprising examples of how a person’s inner experience can be quite alien to another’s, even when that person might seem ‘normal’ from the outside.
My purpose is not to present myself as an expert, or a weirdo, rather to relate some personal findings that I have found to be very surprising, of other people and of myself. My hope is that some of these differences become the scientific studies of the future.
Finally, as this is a blog themed around the philosophy of magic and magical thinking, I leave you with this challenge:
While there can be ‘group-energy’ and empowerment in identifying as one ‘type’ of person or another, I urge you to question how mutable your inner experience can be. Perhaps trying to alter or train your inner thought tendencies may benefit you in both understanding others and getting what you want out of life?
As such, it is my ongoing project to consider and to try to have the experiences of other people. To try out beliefs or identities in a playful way. In magic, beliefs, and even identities are tools, not fixed propositions.
Feel free to get in touch or leave comments if my article has resonated or challenged you. I hope it has been received positively.
-Ari Freeman.