It's not a voice in one's head like there's someone else there. It's like you talking aloud to yourself, but in your head.

The voice in my head is me. Sometimes if I watched a movie or talked to someone, the voice might sound different but it's still me. It doesn't talk to me, I talk with it. It's as if I was speaking out loud, but only I can hear it. Look up subvocalization. This voice in your head is so much like talking that you make some larynx movements to match the words.

Visualization, or seeing things with your mind's eye is similar. The closest metaphor I can come up with is if your regular perception was the main monitor of your computer, subvocalization and visualization would be the monitor and speakers on the side. It's doing its own thing without taking away from the main monitor, and you can focus on it (zoning out), and for some people it's higher res or higher quality than others. For you, there is only the main monitor and set of speakers. In this metaphor, there is nothing outside of the monitors and speakers in terms of perception.

Some examples of what my stuff works like: When I remember something I saw, it "plays on the second monitor". Having a song stuck in my head is like having the "second set of speakers" play the song on repeat. If I say "this sentence is narrated by Morgan Freeman", then my inner voice now sounds like Morgan Freeman. If I want to visualize anything, I "turn to my second monitor" and the thing is there. It can be still or animated, black and white, 2d or 3d, I can do it. I can't do 4d or anything like that.

What's it like when you try think through a math problem? Like do you just follow your feelings and intuitively get to the answer?

For me it's definitely a clearly defined voice in my head. "First I do this, add those together..." etc

Not the person you're responding to, but yeah, the voice-in-my-head CAN (but does not always) sound just like actually hearing someone.

I have a caveat there because the "voice" that is "me" (that is to say, I don't perceive it as someone else talking, but me talking/thinking to myself--it does not have the feeling of an outsider or stranger talking to me) does not always hold all the "information" of an actual audio voice.

Like, I don't normally carry the same "pitch" as my real-life voice, it's usually without pitch, but can still contain emotional prosody? It's a shifting mix of soundless but verbal (as opposed to nonverbal) thought and sound-markers that indicate emotion in real life when spoken out loud.

However, I'm also a writer, and when I write dialogue of a character, it usually carries "sound information" much more distinctly in my head, like listening to a radio narrator or watching an actor. Like, a male character will have a lower voice, a female higher. A flamboyant character might pronounce and say things with a lot of drama and theatrics, where a stoic bored character might be closer to a monotone. It's all controlled by me, by the way--it's not schizophrenia where I perceive it as an outside person or force talking to me. But it is very "audible". (But there's still some mental filter where I know it's thought and don't mistake it for real in-the-present sound.)

...I did have musical training as a child which might play into my ability to have strongly imagined sound in my head. When I get songs stuck in my head, I actually do "hear" them. I hear the singer singing, but also the unique tones of the various instruments. So if a song has a guitar I hear that, but if it's a piano I hear a piano playing it in my memory and not a guitar.

...these things don't always have 100% fidelity though, it's not like playing a file on a computer. It's a fuzzy in-and-out-of-focus thing. But when it's "in focus" it's definitely something tagged by my mind as "sound".

I have really strong audio imagination (if that's a sensible term) and if i'm in a quiet area and relax sufficiently i can literally play music in my mind like an mp3 file, it's precisely as wild to experience as you'd think it is. Obviously i'm probably not actually remembering all the details of the audio but to my subjective experience it's like 95% identical to just listening to a pair of headphones.

But when i'm not relaxing and in a noisy environment it's much less extreme, i definitely hear what i imagine but it's like.. in the background and on a separate channel so there's no way i'd think i'm actually hearing it with my ears, and it's significantly lower fidelity, more like how those AI tools tended to spit out things that are sensible on a surface level but when you look at the detail it's nonsense.

I can totally make morgan freeman narrate my life so long as i remember what his voice sounds like, so if it's been a while i'll need to look it up online first to refresh.

And for reference i think? i have visual aphantasia, and my visual imagination works the same except that it's like 20% as vivid unless i'm just about to fall asleep, and when i dream it's fully vivid like real life.

Here is a well-done podcast about this: https://www.20k.org/episodes/voiceinside.

Not the person you responded to, but yeah, I hear a voice as an inner monologue. It's just my voice though... or rather, how I hear my voice when I talk. I don't have other voices in my head as a general monologue.

Like, I can think of other voices and what they sound like, but it's very much not 'me', if that makes sense.

Hard to describe but I'll try. Not sure if you've played Baldur's Gate 3, but it's a lot like that; announcing things other people are doing, commenting on what I'm doing, or sometimes a choice phrase that my brain seemed to find amusing might repeat a few times. Sometimes it creates a full-on musical number, like a song from American Dad, based around some fairly-banal incident. I've spent around 30 years writing various types of music so not sure if it's the chicken or the egg there.

I would think I'm insane if I hadn't been assured by many people (and a psychologist) that having an internal narrator is perfectly normal. It's when the voice starts talking directly to you and issuing commands that it becomes a problem, which fortunately I've never had. My stepbro is schizophrenic and from what he describes it's nothing like my inner voice, his is quite malevolent and conspiratorial when he's off the meds.

If you neither hear nor see the words in your head, how do you experience them to reorder them?