How Many Are You?
http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/how_many_are_you/
An interesting idea, that you could be more than one person inside your head. It might go a long way toward explaining multiple personality disorder and people who hear voices. I am used to having conversations in my head, though what I feel isn’t quite as distinct as what Scott is describing. I do talk to myself, not always in full sentences (I tend to digress quite a bit (as any of my regular readers will know) and often lose my point (why I prefer writing, I can look back and pick up my train of thought again)). Likely exclusively, when writing I am speaking the words in my head, which leads to my hands magically making the words appear on the screen (I don’t do paper/pen and paper much any more, my penmanship has degraded to the point I can barely make sense of what I have written). When I think about ideas (something I tend to do a lot, you all have only been exposed to a tiny fraction of my ideas (granted only a tiny fraction of the manifold ideas I think about are worth discussing)) I tend to have a wee bit of conversation where I present a part of an idea, then discuss it a bit, then attempt to refine it. I also repeat myself a lot, sometimes I think that repeating an idea creates ruts in my brain which allow me to follow the same path again in the future. I have many (many!) times had what seems like a brilliant thought (we can all be brilliant in our own minds; there is no competition!), but then immediately side tracked myself with a digression and been unable to recapture that ‘brilliance’. When I was young I was very resentful when that happened, but as I got older I realized that 99% of my ‘brilliant’ ideas are not very sparkly at all when given further consideration, so I gave up the thought that I was losing great ideas.
Scott updated his post to have a link to a Wiki page about the “bicameral mind“. Also very interesting reading, the point being that it seems humans were of two minds (literally) until relatively recently (3K years ago). I didn’t read the page in detail, but the concepts are interesting. Difficult or likely impossible to prove, though, and in the world of science, theories without evidences are just campfire stories. They might be really cool to listen to, but they shouldn’t change your life.
