As a person who was born deaf, can you describe your inner dialogue?

Answering this question has become a bizarre endeavor where I try to think about my own thinking. I find myself getting all entangled in my own thoughts, but I'll attempt to explain. Before we get into the curious state of my mind let's take a step back. In many ways, our thought processes are shaped by the languages and stimuli we encounter in our daily lives. Hearing people (not all, though) seem to have an inner "voice" because their main mode of communication is auditory. So, I figure communication methods have a lot to do with the idea of an "inner voice." This can be a complicated question for a deaf person. Not all deaf people access and learn language in the same way. Some receive hearing aids or cochlear implants, so they have some access to sound (not necessarily int he same way as a hearing person does). Others rely on cued speech and lip reading. Still others use sign language (which one on their location, cultural identity, and proficiency, among other factors). Many use some combination of the above e. So, this isn't a simple question for many deaf people, myself included. It has a lot to do with what environment one was raised in and the most accessible language for that person, among other factors. Now, to me. I was born profoundly deaf and no hearing aid was able to give me any sort of auditory stimulation. I started to learn sign language when I was six months old. I started with Signed Exact English (SEE) and soon transitioned to American Sign Language (ASL).[1] When I was six, I received a cochlear implant and went on a not-so-lovely 11-year journey of speech therapy. On top of that, I come from a family where English is not the only language in the household. So, I've had a lot of linguistic influences that shaped my thought process. I find that my "inner dialogue" has a multiple personality disorder. Depending on the substance and context, my inner dialogue can be purely visual, tactile, or even auditory. More often than not, it's a combination of all of the above. For example, when I'm trying to recall something, I can usually pull up a single image, sometimes accompanied by a single word or a sentence (either printed, signed, or spoken words, depending on which one best captures my thought). Moreover, my inner dialogue adopts the communication style that I happen to be using at the moment. If I'm signing with someone, I think in ASL. Likewise for speaking. I don't seem to have the more linear, auditory based "conversation style" that some people seem to have. My thoughts are more scattershot with flashes of images, signs, sounds, among other stimuli. When I want to communicate something, I have to do a lot of real-time conversions of my thoughts into words (spoken, written, or signed). Sometimes I feel like I think in RAW image files (minimally processed) rather than JPEG. I tend to get from point A to point B rather quickly and almost intuitively. I, however, also have a tendency to get discombobulated and disorganized. (This will explain a lot if you spent any significant amount of time with me.) I can't tell you how much of my thought process is attributable to my  my deafness. It's probably some kind of unholy combination of my deafness and my. Don't discount the possibility that someone miswired osmehting somewhere. Well, I think I'm going to go lie down now. ______ [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signing_Exact_English is a manual communication style (it's not a real language) that is a near-exact representation of English using individual signs. I learned SEE because it was recommended. Many educators believed SEE would help deaf children gain fluency in English. ASL, on the other hand, is a separate language with its own grammar and syntax. SEE, however, is heavily disparaged by the Deaf community. It's seen as silly, slow, and audistic.

Being Deaf does not mean we are literally silent in our heads. We communicate. We think. We speak (if not with our voice, then definitely with our hands). We also experience constant stream of words and thoughts in our mind. I was born Deaf and have been Deaf my whole life. I do not wear hearing aids or cochlear implants (and have no desire to wear either). I speak American sign language (ASL) and it is my primary language. I am a mother of two born-Deaf children who also speak ASL, so our being Deaf is genetic for us. I have a 'voice' in my head, but it is not sound-based. I am a visual being, so in my head, I either see ASL signs, or images, or sometimes printed words. My inner dialogue is like yours...the only difference is, yours is sound-based. Mine is visually-based.  Other than that...my mind is full of thoughts, words, ideas, and so on. Deaf people are no different from hearing people.  We just have our own language and culture.  But our bodies function in more or less the same way yours does, with one important distinction: you're an aural being, and we're visual beings.  We receive our information through our eyes, while you receive your information through your ears.

I'm not deaf, but its not hard to conceptualize the answer. Everyone thinks using language. For me, words, in their auditory form, happen to be the building blocks of thought. I personally rarely use images in my thinking- mostly just words. But that depends on which kind of thinking im doing. When I'm asleep, I think in images and sounds- as we all tend to. When I'm philosophizing- either to myself or with with others, I think in the sounds of words. I feel like the brain thinks in whatever language it knows. A person who has no idea what words sound like (deaf) but can read might philosophize using the pictorial representations of words (by imagining the words on paper). I imagine that our thinking depends on our communication style, because thinking is after all, your communication with yourself. if you are deaf and you lean sign language, your thoughts may consist of imagined hand symbols. Lets also point our that "thinking" is not a well defined concept. Its hard to form a strict definition of which brain functions are and aren't thoughts. You cant imagine thinking without words because to you, the thinking involves sounding out words in your head. That's not "thinking", that's your "conscious communication style". As far as thoughts in general, we cant define let alone discuss a thought. Its really fascinating.

I'm not deaf... However, I can remember being too young to talk, so I have some memories of a pre-verbal world. I'll explain it as best I can. Take a deep breath and look at that tree. Think, "That is a tree." Immediately let the breath go, and focus on the sound of the air escaping, while looking at the tree. Now if you are like most people, you probably don't think, "I am exhaling now". You just do it. And you already looked at the tree, so you've satiated your thought on the matter. The difference between infancy and now is that you're just delaying the next thought, but you can be clever by being mindful of the inhaling process too. That, to me, is the basis of meditation. You can use other focus points. If the tree doesn't work, scale down and look at the bark. Or use a sound. As a teen I would clasp my hands together, squeeze and wring them, paying attention till I could feel the bones shifting around. As a child I had a autistic like habit of patting and stroking my pant leg. I think that there is a brief period where we were capable of forming memories, but we did it in a non verbal way, and the pruning of our neurons as we learned to talk fenced that off from us. But I've still got a couple early memories left, but perhaps understandably, they are hard to put into words. The pant leg habit persisted from when I was still bottle fed, right up until kindergarten and first grade. After that I tapered off, but it bridged that watershed moment, and it brought that non verbal world with it. I can still do that, and it puts me into a special zone. However, I think that the non verbal world is still available to most of us. You can somewhat visit it with meditation, and we still dip into it more deeply at other times. For instance, have you ever driven down the road, perfectly attentive to traffic, but then you realize you don't remember the last half hour? Obviously you were conscious, but you were in a different mode. And you still had your driving skills.