If anyone has ever heard a voice talking to them inside their head, chances are they are experiencing an internal monologue.
Internal monologue, also known as inner voice, is the process of hearing yourself talk in your head without speaking or making any sounds.
Although this phenomenon is common, between five and ten percent of people cannot hear their inner voice, according to Daily Science.
But after people opened up the fierce debate online, both groups of individuals found it disconcerting that the others’ minds operated with or without a consistent voice.
Internal monologue, also known as self-talk, is the process of hearing yourself talk in your head without speaking or implementing sounds.
The ability to have an internal monologue can develop at an early age through imaginary friends, experts say.
It can also form during private speech, that is, when one speaks out loud without intending to do so.
During private speech, children gain language skills and reflect on their own thoughts while working alone or with others.
“According to psychologist Russell Hurlburt’s research, between 30 and 50 percent of people regularly engage in internal monologues,” said therapist Kyle Killan. Psychology Today.
‘Internal or private speech is something most of us probably did when we were very young, trying to develop our language skills, and later as a way of rehearsing information in order to successfully encode and retain it.’
Speakers who hear a voice inside their head, whether while replaying conversations or performing everyday activities, are experiencing a verbal form of internal monologue.
Not having an internal monologue has been described as having “silence” inside the mind, and instead of listening to a voice, people often think through impulses and images.
Discussing this age-old question, Reddit users said their internal monologue is like a constant chatter inside their minds, with one person writing: “Mine won’t shut up, all day, non-stop.”
‘I often have trouble falling asleep because he won’t shut up.’
Another added: “I’ve got whole orchestras in my head,” and a third said: “Mine never fucking stops! It’s both a blessing and a curse.”
Others who experienced an inner voice said it was like having a “little narrator in your head.”
Some people, who say they have a vocal inner monologue, expressed that they could not understand how others had no voice inside their minds.
Another user wrote: ‘I can’t stand people not having a monologue.
“Is it as quiet as an empty room? Besides, if you’re in an empty room, what happens? Don’t you think?”
Those without a voice attempted to rationalize their experience, with one Reddit user chiming in: “Instead of processing thought through language, I process it through emotions and impulses.
“When I see something interesting, for example, my brain doesn’t say, ‘That’s cool,’ but feels that it’s cool.”
Some people say they have no inner voice, except in one particular scenario: while reading.
And another user without an inner monologue said: “For me it’s not a blank space. It’s more images and fragments of memories and synaptic activations that connect the pieces for me.”
“There are no words.”
While another person described: ‘I have a constant stream of thoughts, but they’re not words. It’s like a web of interconnected images, memories, random bits of information.
‘I come to conclusions and then I have to translate those thoughts into words.’
One person said that he had no inner voice, except in one particular case: while reading: ‘I have no inner voice! Neither my own nor anyone else’s.
“The only exception is when I’m reading. That’s when I hear a voice.”
Others, however, fall somewhere in between.
One person described having a vocal internal monologue only for certain thoughts: ‘I don’t have a constant voice in my head, it’s just for certain thoughts, like I’m replaying a conversation in my head or trying to comfort myself or trying to remember something or reading.
‘But I often have fleeting fragments of words here and there. Many (or maybe most, I’m not sure) of my thoughts don’t have any real internal words associated with them.
‘Usually the thoughts I’m thinking about deliberately are a monologue. If I’m going to brush my teeth, I don’t have the conscious thought of words in my head that say, “I’m going to brush my teeth.”‘
Meanwhile, some people also believe that language greatly influences their internal monologue.
One Reddit user wrote: ‘Interestingly, my friend is Chinese but speaks fluent English and her internal monologue is in whatever language she’s thinking in.
“When he’s in China, his inner monologue is in Mandarin, but when he’s here in the UK with me, his inner monologue is in English.”
Music and podcasts can also help bring closure to internal monologues, depending on how deeply they stick in someone’s mind.
At least 98 percent of music listeners tend to have songs stuck in their heads when they appear out of nowhere, according to Iris reading.
Another way Killan thinks he might be able to determine who has an internal monologue is through visual imagery – the ability to create mental pictures of things like scenes, events, and concepts.
“I found this explanation helpful because I think in terms of words, visual images and music all day long, and it’s easy to gain perspective from people who are a bit ‘quiet’ by relating it to their use of imagery or playing a song in their heads, which I do as well,” Killan said.
“It’s helpful to think of your inner experience in visual terms, for while it may be as quiet as the occasional cricket when it comes to words, it’s not a total void there.”
Last May, experts from the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Copenhagen published a study in Science Daily on how an internal monologue can affect verbal memory.
Postdoctoral researcher and linguist Johanne Nedergård explained that some people think in images and translate them into words when they feel the need to say something.
Nedergård continued his explanation by saying that some people describe their brain as a “well-functioning computer” that cannot process thoughts verbally.
Nedergård and Gary Lubyan’s study involved hundreds of people: half experienced the inner voice and half did not.
Each of them participated in four experiments that involved remembering words and switching tasks.
The results have not yet been determined.
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