System Ramble: reading, inner/internal voices, and our brain's continuous attempts to understand the world around us
[PT: System Ramble: reading, internal voices, and our brain's continuous attempts to understand the world around us / end PT]
I'll probably have to expand on this at some other point because it ties into how we feel our plurality is a fundamental part of how we process the world (and that deserves its own essay), but there's something interesting that happens when we read that has to do with our system.
Have you ever seen those posts that talk about "the little voice in your head" that you get whenever you read something? A lot of people are able to hear the words they read being "spoken" in their head as they read them. A lot describe the voice reading "out loud" in their brain as either being their own voice or some detached voice without anything more to it, but for us...
... it's closer to one of us reading out loud to the rest of us.
As we write this post, for example, we can identify the headmate in front who's taken on the role of the "voice" reading each word. There's no simpler way to describe it – he's the one reading out each word to the rest of us, and we can hear his own inflections and other verbal quirks as he reads. We've recently begun trying to consciously pass the role of this "inner voice" around, and we can definitely hear a change depending on who's reading, even if it's the exact same text. Eddie has a deeper voice, and reads much slower, giving the impression of a grandpa reading a book by the fire. Danny, by comparison, has a higher voice, reads quicker, and is often audibly annoyed when he has to reread something. It's a very interesting thing to experiment with.
Based on these experiments, acting as this "inner voice" is sort of like a very flexible system role for us, one we naturally fall into or out of most of the time, but can occasionally choose (which is, funnily enough, very similar to how our switches function). This phenomenon happens automatically with most texts we read, and may be part of the reason we have so many introjects; our brain may be simply creating the most fitting "voice" for what we read as it sees the need, which is frequently either the author, or a character in the text. But regardless of the reason, it's a very helpful tool for figuring out who's in front or discovering new headmates, as we have a strong sense for whoever it is that's reading at any given time, and find it especially easy to visualize a headmate whenever they're taking on this role.
On rare occasions where this doesn't happen, we often have trouble absorbing the information we read. It just doesn't stick in the same way one (or more) of us reading to the others does. Which is definitely a con; if it weren't so automatic for us and thus rarely a problem (especially now that we've identified what's going on), we'd definitely be counting it as one of the ways our DID disables us. It's not too different from how it becomes difficult to impossible to absorb information when we're too dissociated, after all. (But then, that raises a question: is the reason we can't absorb text when too dissociated because the dissociation is keeping us from fulfilling this role? Food for thought.)
This isn't the only way in which we utilize our plurality in order to process and absorb information; we also have various system members we call "captioners" whose job it is to make it easier to understand what we hear or see by creating visuals based on this sensory input. We haven't tried having these two roles active at the same time – mainly because I think it would just overload our brain with too much to keep track of and any attempts would fizzle out – but it's an interesting idea for something to experiment with in the future. The parallels are interesting, anyway, especially with how they seem to indicate that our plurality is fundamental to how we process the world and what kinds of choices our brain made when creating us. Perhaps it's all part of our brain's attempt to cope with its own dissociative disorder by creating work-arounds for the problems dissociation can cause, but... I feel like there's more to it than that. The question is where to look for answers (and if the answers are something we should be unpacking just yet).
That brings me back to the beginning. It's interesting to see how our plurality functions almost like a neurotype in some ways – I don't know if I'd call it that, but I can see some parallels in how others talk about them with how plurality functions in our brain. One day, I hope to write a collection of all the different ways our plurality affects us like this, as a sort of guide to our own processing and understanding of the world through a plural lens. For now, though, it's just interesting to think about how I'm now reading this post "out loud" to my headmates as I write it, and how my internal voice differs from those who have read it before me.
... Also, I'm just now realizing this system (no pun intended) works better when the fronter writing a text is also the headmate reading the text. Huh. That fits, somehow.
So, to recap: we get the most out of reading when we use our plurality to host what is essentially system storytime, our internal voices differ a lot more than we first thought they did, and it's interesting that our brain keeps making selves and roles just for helping us understand the world around us. Thanks for reading our ramble.
