song hook

My Four Voices

The Narrator

This is the internal voice that narrates my life. “I am typing this blog right now.” If I have a big ego my narrator might be in third person such as “Nick takes a big swig of his bottled water.” Mine isn’t usually in third person. This voice is my mind making sense of the external world using the variety of senses I have. Here is the senses wikipedia. They say we possibly have 21 different senses that our brain uses to evaluate the world. I am curious, if I lost my narrator voice would I still be “self-aware?” The narrating voice seems to be a driving factor for self-awareness.

The Questioner

Fuck this voice. This voice is the most broken one I have. The questioner, it questions what I observe. “Why am I feeling sad?” “Why don’t I ever get invited to parties?” “Do the arrangement of atoms that form my being ever come back together after decomposition?” “Is this website a stupid idea and a waste of my time?” “Are people going to start calling me a delusional schizophrenic after mentioning voices in my head?” You can see how this could get annoying, but this voice drives discovery and innovation. Curiosity and anxiety drive this voice for me. I want to know why things are the way they are.

The Simulator

This can either be my best friend or my worst nightmare. The simulator is the voice in my head that predicts and “simulates” probable outcomes of hypothetical events. Best way I can describe this is thinking of a time I was driving to an interview. I bet I was imagining what the interviewer would ask me and maybe how I would introduce myself, all of this being based on preconceived notions and judgments. Often my simulating voice is making pretend conversations with people to “prep” me for social interaction. Let’s say I see a cute girl and want to talk to her, I’ll probably have simulated what I want to say and how I want to say it maybe three or four times before actually approaching her. If the conversation goes nothing how I’d expect then I would be forced to improvise, which is a skill in itself.

The Recollector

This is driven by memory. The Recollector is the song hook that’s stuck in my head. It’s the memories of times spent with my ex-girlfriend that come back to haunt me, or previous life traumas. I say this is a voice because often times it is someone else’s voice in my head. A singer or a person that said a nice or mean comment to me, those things tend to echo in my head while my brain tries to make sense of it. Sometimes I can catch myself adopting someone else’s voice as my own, which can be very troublesome if it is not aligned with my own values. The Recollector is a pretty useful tool though. If I previously failed, I could recollect my experience from that failure and learn from it, do something different. Idiocracy is doing the same thing over and over expecting different results.

Until next time, take it easy!