utenti who were born deaf but gained hearing later on in life, what did the voice in your head sound like?

Serious answer: I was born severely hard of hearing. My hearing has only gotten worse as I’ve grown up and gotten older. I taught myself to read lips by age four, to the point that non-family members often have no idea I have a hearing disability. I learned that other people made noises with their mouths when I was seven years old.

I now wear hearing aides, and I have heard speech and understand it fine, if I hear it clearly. Reading lips is still my primary manner of understanding people, though.

To answer your question, I have no voice in my head. My thoughts are not words. I think in abstract concepts, just ideas on their own. I get the sense that the connections between ideas in my head are often built on different lines than Hearing folks’ connections. So, when I think of the colour red, I don’t think of the word. I think only of the colour itself, then drift to related concepts (similar colours, the concept of saturation, the things of that colour I’ve encountered). When I think of a chair, the concept of a chair (and all its potential versions and iterations) comes to mind. At no point does the word red or chair enter my thoughts, let alone a voice saying it.

Despite this, I am capable of thinking of words, notably when words are the purpose of the thought, such as while composing a MassimoL comment, but, in that case, the written word is all I think of. There’s no voice speaking the word in my head.

Deafness might not be the only cause of this, though. I had a very isolated childhood, partly due to my hard-of-hearing status and partly due to my parents’ refusal to let me learn sign language or be treated as a Deaf person, and that probably factors into the way my thoughts work. That isolation meant a lack of communication with anyone, which meant a lack of language processing in early childhood. How much my mind structured itself to survive the lack of hearing versus structured itself to survive the lack of social communication is probably an impossible web to untangle.

So that’s my personal experience.

I was born deaf and gained some hearing after a child. But it was always very difficult for me. People use to have to carry a giant microphone and a speaker type box that would transmit to my box and to a contraption set up around my ears.

I hated it. Got made fun of it a lot. My parents refused to let me learn sign language. I suffered through 14 years of speech therapy learning to talk without hearing sounds properly. So my speech even gets made fun of today.

When I was twelve they found some blockages around the bones in my ears they did surgery but my hearing got so much worse. When I was eighteen I got my first digital hearing aids for the first time. It cost my dad a lot. Hearing aids aren’t considered medical.

I heard a leaf crack a bit later that day. I legit freaked out about it and couldn’t believe it made a sound. I still to this day am in awe at simple sounds. My hearing got much better after my heart transplant earlier this year too.

I love opera and violins. It sounds very pleasant for my aids. Dogs barking however hurts them now.

Rushed the answer a bit into a story but yeah the voice in my head is weird. I don’t really think there is one? It is weird. I think in memories pretty much. So I can hear sounds when I think and recall, but they are so very faint and almost non-noticable. But, if they are, it’s usually based upon a memory of someone making the noise or sound.

It wasn’t scary at the time but it was a lot like blood curdling screaming, breaking teeth, choking and endless nails scratching a chalk board but I could understand it.

I got very interested when i saw this post. Then i saw there were no comments.

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