-
Asked by anon-181774 on 12 Jun 2018.
-
Joanne Sharpe answered on 12 Jun 2018:
If you have previously had hearing and then lost your hearing due to illness or accident, I believe you still hear your “inner voice” because you have heard things in the past. However, if you were born deaf, people report having an “inner voice” that is not in fact a sound because sound has no meaning to them, so like visual signs instead.
-
-
-
Nathan Clarke answered on 12 Jun 2018:
This is a really great question Molly and a bit of a head-scratcher. I really liked Joanne’s answer because I don’t know much about cognition in profound (total), congenital (from birth) deafness – it’s a very interesting to think about considering some deaf people only know sign languages. Given that, I’d like to just add another couple of interesting things to consider to ‘put a little flesh on the bones’ if you want to think about it further:
1) many people born with ‘hearing impairment’ aren’t totally deaf. This is why they’re able to use hearing aids effectively. They will be able to hear some environmental sounds and speech sounds. I think language would be a very important thing to consider for this question.
2) a famous model in psychology is something called “working memory”. This model describes our ability to hold and manipulate things in our short-term memory. It says there’s something called the ‘phonological loop’ which acts like a mini-tape recorder in your head. This can be interfered with (imagine someone trying to put you off while learning a telephone number or adding something together). It’s interesting to consider what would happen to this system if it is not being used for sound… -
Donna MacCallum answered on 14 Jun 2018:
mmm… that’s a great question and I have no idea…
I guess that an MRI scanner might be able to tell us how they process “sound”
I’ve no idea how they talk to themselves… -
Claire Donald answered on 14 Jun 2018:
I’m with Joanne on this one. I know that that is the case with blind people. Those people who were able to see before losing their sight know what a certain thing looks like but if you were born blind they have never known what it looks like.
Comments