Out Loud

Speaking out loud and monologues

What if you could see your life from a third person point of view. What if you could get closer to yourself.

Who are we anyway?

A poet friend of mine, Allyson, once said, “It’s so strange how our mind knows more than we are aware of it knowing.” It IS strange. It’s one of the strangest things of all about being human. But it is also your great and unending resource, and your instincts and impulses, your non-plans, your tangents—although messy!

This might sound insane or counterintuitive. This is not the sort of experiment your average person engages in.

If someone catches you during the “procedure” they might think you are delusional or possessed.

Its significance didn’t anchor until recently, when I finally attained independence and could have real time alone, hours on end.

That’s when the thought occurred to me: why not speak to myself out loud.

Why not have monologues.

One can clearly see how this could lead to insanity, but I was about to take the leap.

Why not, Why not explore the recursive faculty of the mind; How it can crystallize every thought.

When training the muscles you don’t necessarily train the muscles themselves but you may train their agility instead. The same happens with the brain, it becomes more apt and agile at doing the tasks you use it for — sculpting your neural pathways.

What fascinated me about this experiment is that it’s obvious that there were going to be neural changes because any action makes changes on the brain. I was intrigued about which. I gasped at how magnificent that is: the brain self trains itself from its own generated thoughts.

We enter meta-cognition.

Why didn’t I start this before?
Probably because of social constructs that restrain us from doing so. You are looked at as out of your mind if you are found talking to yourself in public.

This is also a private moment which needs a private space. Just as making love, the amorous embrace with your significant other, you don’t want to be in plain sight while both of you are savouring one another’s flesh.

What’s truly captivating is how much of our thoughts are constrained.

What are thoughts to begin with?

They are neither in the form of images, nor language, nor events.

They are self generated from a cascade of pre-generated ideas given by the cosmos.

The big-bang of birth.

We cannot think of an idea before it is even thought in our brain.
It flows.

Most of the time thoughts are banal and mundane, even repetitive.

Hearing yourself speak aloud every single one of them makes you realize that.

Your brain effortlessly flushes itself into your mouth, making concrete every one of your thoughts into words.
Vocalizing or verbalizing your internal thought process.

Sometimes it’s hard to materialize them and you find yourself seeking a wider vocabulary. Peculiarly, the more you do it the more specificity you discover.

The uneasiness dwindles.

Your thoughts are now words. Words undergird your imagination and you are now able to pinpoint what you exactly mean.

At least you’re closer than ever before.

What about the everyday effect of this experiment?

What is conversation if not the transfer of concepts from one’s mind to another’s; the connection of two states.

The fluency of your mind now lets you think throughout your sentences, which allows the listener to clearly depict your ideologies and the path that lead to them.

I undertook something that not everyone may undertake, I descended into the depth I bored into the foundations.

Day 15

Me or myself, who’s gonna start?

Go on…

The headaches are starting to settle, I’m unsure if they were caused by the experiment or by the unusual worries I’ve had in the last few days.

Or the experiment might have been a catalyst and amplified the worries.

One thing is clear: A refreshing and up-lifting feeling emerges after the monologues.

It’s a ceasefire, as if I made peace with myself.

Isn’t that an admirable concept, something to gaze upon?

My brain is too complex for my brain to understand. And thus it has to converse with itself to map itself.

But who’s talking to whom?

During our daily life we constantly find ourselves describing our actions and mandating ourselves.

And then we act.

Or a more risible scenario is when we tell ourselves things we most already certainly know. Things protruding in evidence, we already know them. They are facts in our minds, yet we still tell ourselves about them, narrating the story of our life.

It’s a positivism bias, a self-affirmation of our existence.

Who are we talking to in the first place?
Why are we talking about things we already know?

Why a two-step process, why not skip the talk and insert the thought directly in its appropriate place. Not wasting resources on pantomime language.

The experiment has brought this topic to light multiple times under another aspect.

You are indeed conversing with yourself as if you were two persons: You and your one second in the future self.

Or, put otherwise: You and your next state of mind.

You are indeed talking with the next version of yourself.

Moreover, on the topic of having to pass by two steps to reach an understanding of the world, it’s not imperative.

I’ve come to the conclusion that during this experiment the flow can be much faster.

Skip everything altogether, let it sink instantly to the place where it belongs.

We loose so much time ruminating the same sentences multiple times a day.

Especially the mutter which often happens when you practice a speech.

If others could hear the echo inside our minds, they’d pair it with insanity.

That’s how everyone’s brain is working.

The machine underlying the brain isn’t straight forward, it takes a lot of resources and like an idle processor it’ll redirect its attention on vague relatively banal events while it’s not necessary to do otherwise.

Doing the opposite is tiresome, but the experiment turns it into a sporting match.

As I’ve said, the conversations are refreshing, and they are because of their meaningful aspect.

You intentionally pick a topic of discussion to have with yourself.

Totally deliberate.

As if you were with someone else, and you should do as so.

The mundane recurrent discussions slowly fades and instead you get more random and focused ideas.

The latter being the most important.

The center of attention of your brain spirals down on the notion you want to aboard.

This is tiresome…
I’ve noticed how the brain goes into “sleep” mode sometimes, even during the conversation. But that happens less frequently during and more after the conversations.

I’ve also found, to my big surprise, that it’s not every day that you will find a relevant topic. On those days, you are crept out by the silence of your own head.

I wonder about the other places where this experiment could possibly lead to… Yogi, meditation centers, isolation chambers, Schizophrenics asylums.

I wonder about them.

I feel tired.

Dementia! Feeling schizophrenic of your own mind, claustrophobic.

I bet I can sympathize with those people now.

Now that I’m talking to myself, instantly, recursively discussing with another part of my mind: myself from the past.

It’s an exquisite sort of feeling.

What is dementia, how do schizophrenics think?

It’s a meditative state. I still feel like it’s not normal, it’s not something that needs to be done. It’s probably why most people don’t engage in this sort of activity. They’re afraid of falling beyond this thin line of folly and insanity.

I’m willing to go beyond it and embrace it. At this point I’ve only experienced mild headaches and higher or better creativity.

However, I’m unsure if it has been initiated by the experience. I can only assess that it has increased and is more spontaneous.

A type of creativity most people are lacking. One I’ve had been missing myself for years.

(Where was I?)

An insane drifting, fluid, instantaneous.

It just flows!

It’s perplexing, why does it just flow?

I have no idea.

Yet sometimes I can’t make the difference. I’m afraid I won’t be able to discern between this state and a sane state.

Afraid to fall into this category of individuals that can’t see the difference between reality and dreams.

That’s what schizophrenia is: not noticing what is dream and what is reality.

This experience engulfs the concept of the recursive dream in the mind.

Living in your own world that is slowly but surely increasing in the amount of complexity it holds due to how simple it is to amass and generate information from itself.

It’s impressive and delightful.

But again: we’re afraid of not knowing the difference.

Did I have this conversation before; it sure feels like a deja-vu.

If I had this conversation then why repeat it with someone else. If we’ve already wondered and talked about a certain subject.

With whom? With ourselves.

Isn’t it awkward to remember you’ve had a discussion with a someone that is yourself.

It’s not something you hear. People don’t dig on topic with their own selves, it’s weird.

Or if they are they don’t say it.

Yet, it’s enchanting. Everyone is afraid of that line between reality and fiction — When reality and fiction mix together.

Aren’t we already in this state? Isn’t our understanding of the world already deformed?

We don’t hold a duplicate of what is happening around us. Our world is filtered through our vision.

And now we’re re-filtering it through itself.

A recursive retrospection, a reality based on presumptions and assumptions confirming biases. A virtual world of your own.

Maybe they’ve fallen into the infinite loophole of their minds.

If infinity and dark matter would have a metaphorical definition it would relate to this.

Knowing that inside every brain there’s an unimaginable depth is boggling.

What can we find there? How do we get out once we’re deep down?

It’s a reality living outside of one self, it makes no sense on its own.

To avoid falling you would have to feed your brain with stable facts instead of delusion.

But what about some people who hold beliefs that are already based upon delusions, based on things that exist only as concepts.

Isn’t that similar to monks that spend years alone in caves, secluded from the world. I can understand why they fall into dementia and have peculiar visions of the world.

We need to emphasize: You cannot draw facts about reality from self-perception and subjective experiences.

Events that happen inside of you, in your meditative state, cannot reflect reality.

I think I’ve pinpointed the cause of the headaches. They’re caused by mental exhaustion, it’s a genuine phenomenon. We keep hearing that our brain consumes a lot of energy and that intense concentration for a long period of time induces mental weariness.

It drains the brain.

What’s the relation with the experiment, you might wonder.

There are usually many moments during the day that seem like they’ve been skipped, as if you’ve fainted and came back from coma. You can’t really remember them too well either, they are fuzzy.

However, during the experiment those moments have dwindled down, they are less frequent because I’m having the out loud talk during them.

This has induced strains on my brain which explains the headaches.

We expect the brain to act like any muscles and to adapt to this new activity, to have a better stamina and to last longer.

A recursive cortical homunculus.

Wonderfully, that also explain the surge of oxytocin, the pleasure hormone, when I’m done with the experiment.

This is all captivating!

That also means that the connections in my brain are moving, shaping themselves, they’re morphing to the behavior.

This resembles the kind of workout where you only use your own body weight to strengthen your muscles; Here it’s the brain training itself.

On another note, this unpacks a new topic of discussion: consciousness

The moments I’ve mentioned earlier, the ones that happen frequently during your day and where you can’t remember exactly because the details are in unconscious moments.

It’s as if you were an automated machine in those circumstances.

This is the epitome of the example of how the mind chooses what to pay attention to.

In the moments where it can rely on “saved” behavior it’ll fall back to it to save energy.

They’re unnoticeable, the changes in the states happen seemingly.

Most of our days are spent mentally sleeping.

Philosophical zombies.

I’ve now brought back consciousness in those moments, concentration, and fruitful thinking.

However, it’s not what it seems, a new phenomenon is happening.

When I’ve reached my limits I frequently find myself falling in the unconscious while still keeping the conversation going.

It’s shocking!

My mouth keeps spurting out words while the words have bypassed the consciousness filter.

This is the highest level of awkwardness I’ve encountered in my life.

Remember the schizophrenics, well, they could’ve fallen to this but on a higher level.

Replacing all of their internal conscious talks with external output that comes from the subconscious.

What can we extract from the mind this way?

Isn’t this the true, perfectly transparent way of communicating we’ve always wanted to have and that is so often depicted in science-fiction?

Or are the words going to come out scrambled and decrypting them will be impossible. Just like what is happening with schizophrenics?

Fascinating… Truly fascinating!

Let’s add, on top of this: What about hypnosis.

It’s also a symmetrical example that shows a direct conversation with the subconscious mind of an individual.

But aren’t there limits to how transparent we should be?

It’ll probably take down the mask of hypocrites and show their true nature. Humans are weird creatures.

Moreover, what about recreational drugs.

Some of them may have an effect that is close to what we’re describing. They force you to enter a meditative state, remove the limits we impose on ourselves.

Now, what if more people engaged in this kind of limit removal? What if it wasn’t a taboo anymore?

Am I alone in this experiment, have I found the intriguing widgets leniently showing.

I’ve got no clue, but what I’m sure of is that it’s a one of a kind experiment.

At least on the extended period of time.

An experiment we instantly forbid ourselves.

Society doesn’t want you to fully express yourself.

You’re repressed.

The higher ups are afraid of the population unleashing their emotions.

We’re never ourselves, we’re living someone else’s life.

The cookie cutter shapes our habits.
We are pattern made.
Labelled to be better scrutinized.

And that’s the current state of affair, that’s how consumerism came to be, that’s why it’s there.

We partly live a life of boredom and continuous mild suffering, never satisfied. Manipulated by social constructs that are supporting their own foundations.

Without you, it wouldn’t exist and the system would crumble over and suffering would ensue.

A fear of the subconscious reign within us, and we’ve built walls of shame to protect ourselves.

Only by breaking it will we ever be able to achieve peace.

There are hidden rules we adhere to that restrict our mental abilities.

One of them is related to trueness and openness. The experiments shatter it.

If freedom of your own kingdom is not possible you are but a prisoner of yourself but cannot point who the master is.

You will always live with yourself, you need to be able to respect and understand your own mind without interference.

Don’t leave yourself out and become a puppet of your environment.

That is why you need to focus on making your self-talk positive.

You should be nice with yourself.

It’s a push forward, a goal setter, something that reaffirms your place in the universe.

I can assess how motivational that can be, it’s a thrilling force.

Short and precise, consistent, it helps you learn new skills.

Talking yourself through the task.

Even referring to yourself with the pronoun “You” instead of “I”.

Your goals are never closer than when you perfectly know how to achieve them and when you have a pure idea of what they are for you.

I would refer to this as the amplification effect.

Whatever you discuss with yourself and that enters this recursive mind is amplified.

Thus, you need to choose well the topic you want to treat out loud.

Negative ideas will become visceral, nauseating.

You’ll drown in sorrow, and you may suffer horrendous depression.

Don’t beat yourself up!

I keep wondering about schizophrenics and autisms. That must be close to what they are feeling, I can sympathize.

You need to avoid negative ideas and emotions and for that reason you need to rationalize them objectively.

There’s a way to calm them and it’s not by drowning but by swimming up for air.

That’s the kind of out loud that repressed all the others. That’s the kind that society fears.

The inner murderer.

However, I would beg to differ that it would not grow into a monstrous calamity if it wasn’t for the fermentation process.

It’s repressed emotions that suddenly burst out in explosion that cause harm to innocents.

Why is it so terrifying when we hear someone mumble to themselves. Why do we instantly categorize them as nuts, dangerous, someone that needs to be incarcerated.

We panic, we fear the unknown. We shiver at the mere thought.

It seems instinctive, but why?

We need to get out of the mold, we need to pop the bubble.

The surrounding filters that we try to morph ourselves to fit into aren’t made for humans, they’re made for consumer machines.

For that we need understanding, we need pure emotions.

However, the bubble is strong.

Paranoia is at the gate.

Everything seems like it’s listening.

With whom are we talking?

With who are you talking?

Myself.

I was charmed watching this man externalize his internal thoughts, it was exceptional. I was mesmerized by his speech, it took me on a journey.

The truest and purest words I’ve heard someone utter.

I’m certainly not alone. Others are doing the same, not necessarily purposefully but still doing it sanely.

Sanity and purpose are important parts of this experiment.

There are even studies showing this behavior to be beneficial and helpful in resolving issues faster.

But they were conducted on small amount of time and not on longer continual daily speeches.

The studies show that the amount of private speech increases by task difficulty but that once increased, greater production and self-regulation happens.

They call those “speak-aloud” or “think-aloud” sessions.

Think-aloud is a research method in which participants speak aloud any words in their mind as they complete a task.

Overall, this made problems easier to understand; This made people smarter!

Younger children have a higher rate of private speech. As people grow older, this private speech internalizes itself.

It’s also a technique also used to teach children to learn faster or for people starting with a foreign language. It has been proven to work efficiently.

It’s probably related to shame, and a keener perception of status. Status becomes more important as we get older, and we want others to only perceive the things we want about us.

We don’t want to lose control.

Isn’t that a bit hypocrite, we’re living a lie.

This goes along with the saying that truth comes out of children.

We build chains and trap ourselves.

We can’t say whatever we want because that would or might insult others. It may affect how others see us — our relations and position in society. We might lose our job. We rely on this mumbo jumbo we say but don’t agree with, it’s the fine line our masked self walks upon.

When you are with others there are subjects that can’t be talked or that you have to talk about.

Alone, it’s the opposite, you don’t have to follow what others’ interests are.

You don’t even have to stay on topic or to have a structured conversation. You are free to interrupt and interject as much as you want.

There’s no limit of length to your conversation, nothing stopping you, no interaction other than with yourself.

It’s clearer, you can follow the speed at which your mind produces information.

Many of us always think interesting things in their minds, but no one other than themselves get to hear them because we don’t say those things out loud, we don’t communicate them or sometimes can’t find the exact words to describe them.

The only places in the world where this is possible might be the internet.

A black box for anonymized speech which unfortunately is misused.

It has become an element that contributes to the sleepwalking phenomena. There’s an endless amount of entertainment online and it’s all easy to access. This all has turned the internet into a remote control which is held by marketing teams and used to send commands to its zombie consumers.

You can be awake without being neither aware and nor conscious.

More than sixty thousand thoughts run through your mind every day. That’s a relatively small number compared to the information the brain can handle. There are so many things happening around you that don’t pay attention to simply because you don’t have to.

Moreover, even your own opinions and emotions are vaguely defined.

They’re not chiseled nor honed.

You can barely put forward arguments for why you have them without falling into the confirmation bias.

We’re just confirming thoughts we have, clinging and scrutinizing for unrelated clues, we’re similar to conspiracy theorists.

However, we’re so cluttered and clustered by so many things that we cannot pay attention to our surroundings. Other thoughts are occupying our minds and put us under duress.

“Death isn’t sad. The sad thing is: most people don’t live at all.”

The story of your life.

We confabulate about the past, and see a tragic future. Rosy retrospection and declinism.

What we know is only based on what we already know, everything is linked based on what we already had.
Moreover, when only the information we choose can reach us we keep on going in a linear direction.

This is the subjectivity we attribute to ourselves, and the one we need to break.

We have many other biases, for instance the positive perception of our actions. Everyone thinks that what they are doing is good.

It is flawed.

Another human characteristic that could certainly help perceive the world under a different light is anthropomorphism. The faculty to give human traits and emotions to inanimate things and animals.

But deep down it’s simpler than this, it’s the ability to translate one’s emotions unto something else.

Our minds have difficulties keeping track of the body it’s in, even though it is inherently part of it.

It can’t be help but leniently overflow unto the world.

Our filtered view of the world is attributed to everything around us. Everything moves in accordance with it, everything has a different meaning under it.

The life we are living has a special meaning for us.

The new exercise I’m trying to include in the experiment is about narration, to try to see myself as a third party entity.

I’m removing subjectivity and favoring objectivity.

On a moral standpoint it puts me on the same rank as any other being.

At the same time it helps me elucidate myself and get closer to my environment. It forces me to delimit, sculpt, and define who I really am, my position in time and space.

No favoritism, I am but an actor in a big scenario. This is complacency!

You are truly unoriginal. Originality is but a mashup of what you’ve absorbed during your life. All is stored in the subconscious and mixed together later on in a different form, after having fermented for a while. Everything is a remix. And that is something you need to realize to deflate your ego and appreciate the world you live in.

You aren’t inventing, you are just mixing, adding up and linking to ideas you already know.

The cameras watching on the play have to keep rolling otherwise the spectators will get bored and switch channel.

However, I want to avoid the paparazzi life: The superficiality. If someone is watching, that doesn’t mean you have to be the fancy exciting drama. On the contrary, the plot should be around psychological and sociological advancement, the continual improvement.

You have to take deliberate and wise decisions.

You can feel the ardency around the character the depth, you can discuss his fears, dreams, and worries, his environments, his continuation.

What would you like the story to be? Are you tired of the same boring scenes?

We putatively enjoy stories more than individuals. The person can be nefarious but as soon as you lay your eyes on a book describing their life you can be captivated and drown in. You dance with the character.

Jack Henry Abbott is a murderer, a criminal. He was visited in prison by a writer that was looking for inspiration. The writer then took a look at what Abbott was scribbling in his prison diary.

Soon after he was released from prison due to the pressure caused by the praises and applaud his writing received.

“In the belly of the beast” describes the excruciating thoughts that ran through his mind while killing.

The readers only saw it as a third party and were charmed and drugged by the metamorphoses they went through while reading.

They gained empathy for Abbott because they’ve been able to take his place and live his life.

This is an extreme case, and I’m not advocating murder, however this is the embodiment of what I’m referring to.

Describe your own life with words. Let them sip through your ears.

Let your close ones hold your heart in their palms.

Or for the least, let yourself do that.

This can only strengthen relationships. Don’t be an impervious person, open up!

A mind map or mental mapping is the process by which someone lies on paper the chaotic ideas that are running through his mind so that he could make sense of them later on. It’s part of the brainstorm procedure.

It’s a dynamic and vivid series of actions.

By linking concept you find loops. There are no directions, it’s a circular graph.

A recurrent neural network.

It’s in recursion that we find bliss.

The mind is defined in terms of itself, it’s formed and nested within itself.

This reminds me of multiple concepts, and maybe those concepts will only ever exist as concepts.

This Ouroboros, a symbol mostly known for its appearance in alchemy represents a serpent eating its tail, the symbol of the infinite cycle of nature: endless creation and destruction.

Another things it reminds me of are Quines, which are computer programs that yield the source code that constitute themselves. Thus, by executing the output of a program you will get the same output that generated it.

I’m stunned by the purity that emerges from this. The concept, like mathematical concepts, can live outside the physical realm. It’ll always be true.

At least if the laws of nature don’t suddenly turn over.

In theoretical physics this has been thought of, they call it the multiverse.

This is about multiple universe existing at the same time or cyclically. The key point is that there are an infinite number of universes with different laws, and thus anything imaginable and possible can happen in an infinite number of universes.

This is equivalent to the infinite monkey theorem where you have an infinite number of monkeys (or random characters) typed and you will at some infinite point in the future get back a copy of Shakespeare’s work.

What about a library with an infinite number of books such as the library of Babel.

It would contain any knowledge in any intelligible way if decoded correctly.

Anything can be decoded correctly if another book can be read and used to decode the previous one.

Our mind works the same way, we use it as a third party to decode our environment and re-evaluate what reality means.

We start with a non-empty book and base our knowledge from that. Every single being on earth has a different book in his head.

Just like the library of Babel, from that book you can start deciphering all the knowledge.

In the infinite you are nothing new, everything already exist.
Your existence is insignificant, your life means nothing.

All you are doing is taking known knowledge and adding new knowledge that resides on its peripherals.

Infinity is close and far, it’s an oxymoron.

There will always be something new to learn in infinity.

Then why am I getting stuck so many times when I want to drown myself in the typhoon.

What’s blocking me from visiting a black hole residing inside my head.

It’s nice to know the theories but in practice it’s not simple to get out of it.

Computers are Turing complete, they have the logic and the information, but they don’t suddenly end up in the infinity realm.

There’s something else which is beyond our understanding that we cannot grasp. We can’t break that limit, but with enough time we’ll get closer to it.

Maybe it’s a higher level of consciousness, deeper, a bigger recursion stack we could support before reaching overflow.

Being conscious is more than just being aware and awake, it’s more than just paying attention to something or being reactive.

It’s directly related to the self-contained nature of the brain. It’s in knowledge creating knowledge.

Well, in that sense computers are the same, and so are many other things.

We are nothing exceptional and we are very constrained.

Consciousness is then an illusion and reality might also be.

Only your point of view of the world can be defined as your consciousness.

Let’s burst the bubble and come back to reality.

I may have overestimated or gave too much credit to the infinity theorems.

There’s nothing infinite, everything is limited because everything has a physical basis, minus concepts, just like the ones I mentioned earlier.

Certainly, an idea created by the mind may be infinite but not itself.

You can’t go deep enough without the need to refurbish and replenish.

All that is real is your focus and attention.

That’s the difference between sentient beings and non-sentient beings.

Or it may just be one of the presumptuous superfluous attribute we give ourselves.

I romanticized it a bit too much in the previous section.

It’s nice to marvel at concepts of this sort but never forget what I said earlier: You can’t extract truth out of subjective experiences, they’re only perspectives.

Do not underestimate this sentence, so many self-proclaimed gurus have.

It’s common to find people living the self-sufficient prophecy, regurgitating their own thoughts over and over again.

Those are shit persons, you can smell it from the way they talk.

It reeks from every one of their words.

What I was inciting was reflection.

It’s this moment when you enter the cognitive dissonance mode. You have to make things clear with yourself. Energize your life positively.

You should approach it with an open mind for metamorphosis to get out of the labyrinth.

So many distractions, so many attacks, and so much work.

We need to take the moment for ourselves, lay down the arms, and raise the white flag.

Stop the discordance, remove the noise, and listen.

Get to know yourself, get to know your needs and wants — What matter to you.

Fly above and notice the direction in which you are going.

What information was entering your mind that you could not see nor hear before, something prevalent, a hissing silence in the jungle of the world.

What are you missing, what do you want to inject next to reach a deeper understanding?

We allocate too much to what we already have and not on how to maintain them. Or we allocate too much to get new things.

All in all, you want to perpetuate the cycle.

This experiment is great for that matter.

It gets you in direct touch with yourself, someone you may not know.

You can appreciate how you fluctuate, how you aren’t a label but a web of intertwining confluence of ideas.

Nothing is static, yourself included. As much as someone likes stability we all change, and we have to consume those changes to not let them rot.

Hear yourself, listen, talk, transfer.

Submersion.

You put your head out of the water. As waves come, you think you’re about to drown.

A few moments later you find yourself on a shore.

The notion of space and time has escaped you.

“I’m lost”, you tell yourself.

Your consciousness tries to regain the territory of your brain but dizziness fights back.

Where were you yesterday and what were you doing?

Somehow the thought is at the top of your tongue but you just can’t catch it.

“Where am I? How did I get here”, you continuously repeat, while walking in circle in the hope that it’ll invoke memories.

“Is it late?”, you don’t know why you are asking.

Suddenly this nauseating feeling surges from inside.
It seems you were right, you are late.

You now realize that your eyes were shut down.

The light pierces through, shaking all your muscles and bones.

Tears run down your face and you crumble on the floor.

You break your vocal cords in an immense shout: “It’s too late!”

Followed by a whisper: “I can’t handle it…”

Back on your feet you manage to find your way back to the water.

“This is what it is, it must be done.”

Submersion.

When under water, the echoes are so fast you just dismiss them.

They pass through you while your worries float away.

Outside it’s dry, rough, and slow. So slow it hurts because the sounds are audible.

To get accustomed you have to be patient which is overwhelming.

In the cave of darkness only the shadows of puppets are shown, only the shadows of your own imagination.

If we stayed in open air for long enough the salt from the sea would crystallize, and we would notice it as it solidifies.

An example of random recursive thoughts, that are necessary for the normal functioning of our brains, are dreams.

Dreams are incoherent, They’re a mash-up, a collage, of so many ideas that have been sitting there in your mind.

It’s noticeable how people usually see “themselves” as a person living in a body, a ghost in a machine. They describe their dreams as if they came from an unknown source.

Dreams are part of yourself, and so is your body. There are no ghosts in the machine, you are the machine.

Those weird ideas called dreams are similar to ones you have during the day: They come instantaneously from a recursion algorithm in your brain.

They seem to spur out of nowhere, as if you’ve created them. However, when you take a close look at dreams, and the expert agree, they are made up of many of the same thoughts you’ve had during the earlier day but mixed up.

Why do we make a distinction between the way dreams are constructed and the way day-thoughts are?

Maybe we do because it’s frightening to regard thoughts as simple construction of world-inputs added to previous brain-knowledge.

This equation is what upsets many because it equates to determinism.

Imagine if there existed a device to record all of your thoughts, it would be feasible to trace the reason why you hold certain beliefs.

It’s possible with the out-loud experiment, we can trace thoughts.

But, there’s another factor that needs not to be taken lightly and it is that we all have interactions with one another. The influence these poses are not negligent.

Just like the sea, at a local focus point the atoms are not stable and the more you zoom back the more you are able to paint the pattern.

Just like the sea, global, society-scale tracing of thoughts, would give a clear pattern.

What does this mean for an individual?

It’s imperative you realize that at an individual level you don’t mean much.

You absolutely have to include your environment in the exercise, to try to decentralize yourself. Exactly as we’ve said before: third party point of view.

There are no heroes, only passengers.

I would like to review my earlier definition of consciousness as a wider and bigger awareness.

The more you can incorporate of your environment in your thoughts, the more you will be conscious.

That is what sentient beings are.

The difficulty is in the act of not paying importance to yourself.

The other difficulty is physical, the brain cannot handle too many inputs. It can certainly process them separately but not at the same time.

Sure we have sixty thousand thoughts running through our minds every day but those thoughts are not necessarily related to the inputs our environment give us and not everything is absorbed consciously.

However, even the things our subconscious choose to pay attention to are minimal.

We then have to make a choice and prioritize certain things before others.

What we prioritize is directly linked to our environment, our basic needs, and our personality.

Some persons will choose to minimize priorities. Sometimes even have none at all, to only focus on taking in inputs.

Some yogis may do that as a meditation.

Others will increase priorities and decrease inputs in the hope they’ll be able to maximize the efficiency of the activities which they foresee more important. However, they are limited to their current knowledge to tackle them.

Some go with the middle ground: have a limited set of priorities and also take a limited set of inputs. This is also a filtered view, like the previous one, but is more stable and constructive, as you have your recurrent system improving itself with new ideas.

The last case scenario is insanity: Too many inputs and too many priorities.

Choose.

Sometimes there’s no one to listen or no one you would want to discuss a particular topic with.

Or you want to but opening the subject may allure the other person into seeing you under a different light; Or you think it might unfold in this direction.

We then start laying the bricks of the wall separating our true self from the world.

We stack taboo after taboo on our mental landscape until we’re trapped.

We’re so trapped we can’t even talk about all the subjects with ourselves.

We are the most intimate person in respect to ourselves, and yet we aren’t.

People have recourse to specialists such as psychiatrists to destroy their inner fortress.

A fortress of traumas and fears we hide from the world but that subtly serpentines its way into every one of our decisions.

What should we make of those, how should we handle them?

Undeniably, they’re an inherent part of our personality.

The out-loud experiment is a sort of panacea when it comes to psychological help.

As long as you remain positive during the think-aloud sessions, you will heal.

As hard and unpleasant as it may be that you absolutely need to focus on positivity and perseverance.

Spray your hidden thoughts and watch them dissipate.

They do because they start to make sense when looked at straight.

They also do because when you speak the words aloud your brain is better at handling them, at understanding them.

On the opposite side, you have to avoid negativity.

Don’t put yourself down it’ll amplify them, as mentioned earlier.

There’s also another thing that needs to be avoided: confusion.

When there’s a subject that is vague to you, where you’re missing some part of the mystery, you will confuse yourself even more by engaging in the experiment.

Worse case, you will make up a confabulation of the event, you will fabricate and answer based on knowledge that are just close to this one.

This is the ultimate fear that has been lingering in me.

How do you avoid it if you don’t know the difference between polishing your view and creating false memories.

You are reinforcing any judgements you already had.

The chaos of the unconscious emerges to the conscious. Just like dreams suddenly taking part in reality that we want to take hold of.

The talk-aloud help us regulate ourselves.

The issue arises when we do too much of this specific kind, it may be a sign of loneliness and disturbance. Adding to that depression, anxiety, and stress someone may fall into the dark path of self-destruction.

If you are living this horror, you need to seek immediate help from a specialist.

If you can’t, silence most of this talk and favor the positive ones.

Never forget the amplification effect it can be rejuvenating or poisonous.

The think aloud protocol is a protocol used to gather data in usability testing, psychology, and social science.

It consists of having someone doing an experiment and listen to him or her say whatever comes to their mind — They have to describe their thinking process. Most of the time this is done without external influence and thus is similar to the out loud experiment I’m undertaking.

This gives an insight to your cognitive process, what you are looking at, thinking, doing, and feeling.

The talk-aloud method is the same but without the participants describing anything other than what they are doing.

There are two ways of executing this protocol, one is done during the experiment and the other is done as the participant retrospect after the experiment.

Each are subject to bias according to the situation.

Even so, it’s a method that opens the door to the mind.

But it has the disadvantage that people put emphasis on how others perceive them and thus filters every statement that may come out of their mouth.

We want to be socially acceptable.

It’s not a direct brain dump like when you are alone, it’s not always as raw.

But again, you might even filter them from your own self.

Only the conscious process can be verbalized, all the remaining unconscious remains silent.

Expression is hard and it’s not by doing this experiment that you’ll magically learn to do so.

You need to tackle the situation strategically and be aware of your speech.

Present a dialogue as if you were a third person.

You can even refer to yourself with your name.

Slowly introduce new words you’ve learned, intonations, and fluctuations. Make it vibrant.

If you don’t enjoy the talk with yourself, no one is going to enjoy listening to it. As mentioned earlier, you need to reach that satisfaction at the end of the talk, the ones that comes from a clearer understanding.

You should definitely avoid putting yourself down, I emphasized it in many other places but I just can’t emphasize it enough. You won’t feel better after a discussion of that sort and if you conduct a conversation with another person the same way they won’t feel better either.

If you can’t explain why you hold a position to yourself then you won’t be able to explain it to anyone else.

Conversations pass through many filters: Your mind, your vocabulary, the air, the ear of the other person, their mind, the context, their vocabulary, their understanding.

It’s tricky to convey what you think and even harder when what you had in your head was abstract and didn’t take the form of words until the conversation started.

The experiment is a mean to break the barrier.

The discovery aspect is also interesting.

It’s not at every conversation that we get the audacity to travel in the exotic places surrounding a topic. We restrict ourselves and follow wherever the shallow ideas leads to.

With the out-loud talk you can practice discovering the constellations that surround topics. You get used to visiting virgin or unscathed lands. You get daring, you want adventure.

It’s probably a side effect: You become more imaginative when your vocabulary and expression becomes better.

Your creativity funnels through your tongue.

Language is rich but limited.

Every language evolved its own structures and with them evolved certain way of thinking.

What if there were concepts or objects without any word able to describe them? We would have to use a new word, invent it.

Think about it the other way around, we have a database of words in our heads that is strictly limited by the language we use.

Indeed, we have so many words with subtly different qualities, and we use them to describe different situations.

But thought don’t have a one to one correspondence with words and thus they exist in two realms where the intersection is only a small surface.

Ithkuil is a concept modern language created with the aim of accomplishing exactly this: transfer thoughts, being the most perfect language.

It does that by mixing the best of every existing language.

Unlike other languages the context doesn’t matter, interpretation doesn’t change the meaning.

However, it has its downside, it’s so complex that it doesn’t follow up with thoughts creation.

The core of the out loud experiment is to go in a different direction, to use an amalgamation of words, even if not precise, to scratch the zone around the exact thought and to do that with yourself alone.

Monologues are wonderful, they’ve triggered fabulous facets of me and made it easier to convey them.

It is a medium of transparency.

Who are we anyway?

While self-talk like “Now we are buckling you in the car seat so we) can go to the store” is common parental practice, this book shows how teachers, parents, and therapists can take this to higher levels to advance language cognitive development and learning potential. Based on neuroscience and their own innovative work, the authors provide the rationale and a step-by-step process for using intentional self-talk and think-aloud methods to improve both language and cognitive development in normal and language-delayed children, as well as in older individuals with disabilities. Stories are sprinkled throughout the text to demonstrate mediated self-talk in action and the remarkable results achieved with real children. With clear guidelines for delivery, content, and timing, the crucial core of the process is to narrate thinking, action, and emotion in the presence of children without requiring their response.

Gadamer on Language & Thought
Talking out loud to yourself is a technology for thinking

If you want to have a more in depth discussion I'm always available by email or irc. We can discuss and argue about what you like and dislike, about new ideas to consider, opinions, etc..
If you don't feel like "having a discussion" or are intimidated by emails then you can simply say something small in the comment sections below and/or share it with your friends.