ओम्

Ōṃ, symbol ॐ oṃ

sacred spiritual incantation — healing अक्षर akṣara

Inner unyielding voice countermeasure

राधा Rādhā and कृष्ण kṛṣṇá on a single lotus within an ओम "Om" sign

surrounded by rondels of scenes of कृष्ण kṛṣṇá's life

अक्षर akṣara literally, "imperishable, immutable", and also "letter of the alphabet" or "syllable".

एकक्षर ekākṣara; literally "one letter of the alphabet" refers to its representation as a single ligature.

ओम् Ōṃ is regularly pronounced [õː] in the context of संस्कृत Sanskrit and when occurring within spoken Classical Sanskrit, the syllable is subject to the normal rules of सन्धि sandhi [sɐndʱi, "joining"] in Sanskrit grammar, with the additional peculiarity that the initial o of "Ōṃ" is गुण the guṇa vowel grade (Indo-European ablaut) of u — not वृद्धि “growth, increase” the vṛddhi grade — and is therefore pronounced as a monophthong with a long vowel ([oː]), ie. ōm not aum. Also, the final m is often assimilated into the preceding vowel as nasalisation, रङ्ग raṅga, i.e. ṃ. The Ōṃ symbol, ॐ, is a cursive ligature in देवनागरी: Devanāgarī, combining अ (a) with उ (u) and चंद्रबिन्दु the chandrabindu (ँ, ṃ).

ओम् Ōṃ presents, as a phonic symbol, the quality of being both acoustic and utterable and as consequence can occupy soundproofing and repairing space between the voidào and the persōna "mask or character" heard 『元神』 ab origine and simultaneously uttered by the resonant body. As such it acts as a modulator and a moderator of the talkative, overdeterminating and space-occupying covert speech, bringing inner peace by demonstrating the fakeness of the "necessary inner expressiveness" used as an alibi — in the strategy of the ego — that is advanced to dissimulate the usurpation of the throne, "if I do not silently speak, I do not exist".

The egoist, ลปิน พิชัย นิรันต์ (Pichai Nirand, b. 1936)

Active inner monologue

When people reflect upon their own inner experience, they often report that it has a verbal quality and despite its variability among individuals and across the life span, inner speech — also known as covert speech, covert self-talk, verbal thinking, inner speaking, internal monologue and internal dialogue — appears to perform significant functions in human cognition, which in some cases reflect its developmental origins and its sharing of resources with other cognitive processes.

Πλάτων Plátōn (Plato, Θεαίτητος Theaítētos or Theaetetus, Waterford R. H., Trans. London, UK: Penguin1987) noted that a dialogic conversation with the self is a familiar aspect of human experience.

In Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky’s (1934/1987) theory of cognitive development, inner speech is the outcome of a developmental process. For instance, children talk to themselves while engaged in a cognitive task, a phenomenon now known as private speech (previously Jean Piaget's "egocentric speech"). Lev Vygotsky's unifunctional view of private speech as having a primary role in the self-regulation of cognition and behaviour, with the child gradually taking on greater strategic responsibility for activities that previously required the input of an expert other (such as a caregiver) is now instead proposed to have multiple functions including pretence, practice for social encounters, language practice, and so on. In fact, the Vygotskian position prioritizes the question of how language is employed in internal self-regulation above the neural or cognitive substrates that make language use possible.

Stage design for the production Atlantis, 1961 Ladislav Vychodil, Slovakian

Private Speech as a Precursor of Inner Speech

Private speech is an almost universal feature of young children’s development. It was first described by Jean William Fritz Piaget in the 1920s, who considered it as evidence of young children’s inability to adapt their communications to a listener (hence, his term egocentric speech). Private speech has subsequently been shown to have a significant functional role in the self-regulation of cognition and behaviour. Typically emerging with the development of expressive language skills around age 2–3, private speech frequently takes the form of an accompaniment to or commentary on ongoing activity. A regular occurrence between the ages of 3 and 8, private speech appears to follow a trajectory from overt task-irrelevant speech, to overt task-relevant speech (e.g., self-guiding comments spoken out loud), to external manifestations of inner speech (e.g., whispering, inaudible muttering).

Private speech emerges through a differentiation of the social regulatory function of social speech, with the speech that was previously used to regulate the behaviour of others gradually becoming directed back at the self. Private speech appears to have a role in emotional expression and regulation, planning for communicative interaction, theory of mind, self-discrimination, fantasy and creativity. Engaging in private speech has also been proposed to have a role in the mediation of children’s autobiographical memory. The self-regulatory speech “goes underground” in middle childhood to form inner speech, with private speech peaking in incidence around age 5 and then declining in parallel with growth in inner speech use.

Children’s adoption of inner speech is evidenced relatively early in development in the apparent emergence of the phonological similarity effect around age 7.

Dragon by Maria Rikteryte

Internal speech makes use of a system that is primarily involved in processing external speech and is closely related to theories of the auditory hallucinations associated with schizophrenia.

Many people use an internal language-based monologue to organize and focus their thoughts, but not everyone. Instead, some people rely more on visualization to process their thoughts.

The inner monologue is associated more with personality than intelligence. If someone has more developed verbal skills, they are more likely to have a wordier inner voice than someone with less language development. The level of confidence of an individual has not much to do with that internal speech habit and is not a good indication of whether a person has or not an active inner voice.

The critical inner voice can be thought of as the language of the defensive process. It has been defined as an integrated system of thoughts and attitudes, antithetical toward self and hostile toward others that is at the core of an individual’s maladaptive behaviour. The concept of the “voice” is not restricted to cognitive processes but is generally associated with varying degrees of anger and sadness. The term “voice” is used to describe a form of intrapsychic communication that represents a split within the individual between forces that are life-affirming and those that are antagonistic to the self .“Listening” to the voice, that is, believing its prescriptions and prohibitions leads to self-limiting behaviour and negative consequences. In other words, people often make their actions correspond to their self-attacks.

People often use more inner verbalization when they are under pressure. Among people with an inner monologue, many tend to perceive those voices as their own. That self-talk generally has a familiar pace and tone, although the exact voice might change depending on whether the current scenario is happy, scary, or relaxed. Sometimes whole sentences may be in use. Other times condensed wordplay that would be meaningless to anyone else might be relied on. There is a brain signal called "corollary discharge" that helps one distinguish between sensory experiences internally created versus those from outside stimuli – and this signal plays a big role in internal speech. It also plays a role in how the auditory systems process speech. When one speaks, there is an internal copy of the sound of the voice generated at the same time as the speaking voice. Corollary discharge is a kind of predictive signal generated by the brain that helps to explain, for example, why other people can tickle us but we can’t tickle ourselves. The signal predicts our own movements and effectively cancels out the tickle sensation.

And the same mechanism plays a role in how our auditory system processes speech. When we speak, an internal copy of the sound of our voice is generated in parallel with the external sound we hear. The internal copy of our voice produced by corollary discharge can be generated even when there isn’t any external sound, meaning that the sound we hear when we talk inside our heads is actually the internal prediction of the sound of our own voice.

If corollary discharge does, in fact, underlie our experiences of inner speech, then the sensory information coming from the outside world has to be cancelled out by the internal copy produced by our brains if the two sets of information match, just like when we try to tickle ourselves.