MemeMachineGo!

Even the deaf have inner voices.

No one seems to have studied the question of deaf people’s inner language, but Hauser, who is deaf, responded with insights I hadn’t anticipated. Most interesting was his assertion that deaf people who were born to deaf parents, and who read well, create sounds in their heads as they learn to read.

“My best answer to this,” Hauser wrote, “is that the brain has a special capacity to develop phonological representations, even when it does not have auditory input. The representations might be dramatically different from what hearing individuals hear. Nevertheless, they function in the mind as ‘sounds.’” Deaf schizophrenics, he continued, have auditory hallucinations, and blind schizophrenics have visual ones.