Echoes of Inner Speech
It seems to me that I sometimes have thoughts that linger after the inner speech that expresses them is done. I might say silently to myself, "Shoot, writing three posts a week is a lot of work!" and then that thought may briefly stay with me, in some sense that's hard to articulate, before I move on to new thoughts.
Can I say more about what that experience is like? Only through metaphor, it seems: It's like a resonance or an echo. But I don't think the inner speech literally resonates or echoes in the sense of, say, the last word or the last few words quietly buzzing or repeating themselves, slowly dying away.
I found it interesting, then, to contrast this sense I have of my inner speech with a report by Melanie, the subject Russ Hurlburt and I interviewed in our just-published book, Describing Inner Experience?, regarding a randomly-sampled (with a beeper) moment of her inner experience:
Russ: So you had said in inner speech, “they lasted for a nice long time,” just prior to the beep?
Melanie: Um hm, not at the beep but just prior to it.
Russ: But in some way the “nice long time” portion is still there. Is that right?
Melanie: Yeah, it was. The best I can liken it to is an echo.
...
Russ: Okay. And “echo.” I want to understand what you mean by “echo.” An echo gets softer and softer; did you mean to imply that? And echo sometimes is repeated and sometimes once but…
Melanie: No, it didn’t get softer and softer, it’s almost like [quizzically] it got blurrier and blurrier. Not in terms of visual blurry, but a sound blurry [again quizzically], where it just started overlapping itself until it just came to this jumble in which you can’t make any noise out. It sounds really weird but…
Russ: So are you saying that you said in inner speech something that was quite clear…
Melanie: Um hm.
Russ: … “It lasted for a nice long time,” and then there’s “nice long time,” “nice long time,” overlapped with “nice long time”…
Melanie: Yeah.
Russ: … then “nice long time” overlapped with “nice long time” overlapped with “nice long time”…
Melanie: And it keeps going.
Russ: … until there’s sort of several of these things going?
Melanie: Yeah (Sixth Sampling Day, p. 207-208).
In the book, I express skepticism about this report. I wonder if Melanie is being taken in by her own metaphor (as, I think, people are often taken in by metaphors in describing their experience, e.g., in calling dreams black and white or visual experience flat). Russ, however, accepts the report.
What do you think? Any other ideas about the phenomenology, if any, of lingering thoughts?