THE VOICE INSIDE YOU: why you need it and what it means if you can’t hear it
Art design: huxley.media via DALL·E 3
The fact that all people are different needs no convincing — compare your reflection in the mirror with the appearance of others. This applies not only to appearance but also to voice, hearing, and vision. However, the differences between people, it turns out, are hidden even more profoundly. They extend to what is commonly referred to as the inner voice or inner speech. Scientists believe that the degree of mastery of this inner voice affects the quality of performing specific cognitive tasks.
YOUR VOICE — NOT JUST YOURS?!
It’s a universally accepted belief that everyone has an inner voice. This evolutionary gift of internal communication with our ‘self’ is not just a survival mechanism but a key to socialization and self-control. We often see this in children, who, while playing, voice their thoughts out loud, even before their speech is fully formed.
In his book, «Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It», University of Michigan professor and psychologist Ethan Kross argues that when children talk to themselves, they learn to manage their emotions. Remember how, as a child, you would repeat after adults: «Don’t fight», «Listen to your elders», and so on? Over time, the instructions that children verbalize to themselves begin to form verbal models.
Interestingly, this inner voice is our own. On the other hand, parents who have a strong influence on their children also have their inner voices formed by their cultural surroundings.
Thus, it turns out that our inner voice is far from just our own — in it, like a matryoshka doll, the voices of many generations are «hidden». It’s no wonder that the inner voice awakens earlier in children whose parents interact with each other more intensively.
WHO DOES YOUR INNER VOICE SPEAK FOR?
A person’s entire life is continuous communication, including with oneself. However, the social role in which you converse with yourself also depends on the social context. Malgorzata Puchalska-Wasyl, a psychologist from the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, conducted an experiment in which students described their inner voices. The types of inner interlocutors were reduced to just four roles: a loyal friend, an ambivalent parent, a proud competitor, and a helpless child.
Their inner voice represented each of them depending on the specific situation. The inner interlocutor is so adept at adjusting to reality that even the «tone» of non-verbal voices, like verbal ones, can change. We certainly wouldn’t communicate in the same way with a boss and a subordinate, a friend and a stranger, or babble with a cashier at a supermarket as we would with our child.
Russell Hurlburt, a psychologist from the University of Nevada, equipped participants in his experiment with a sound sensor that responded to the form their thoughts took: words, images, emotions, etc. The range of the average frequency of inner dialogue was extensive: from 0 to 100%.
THE BENEFITS AND HARMS OF THE «STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS»
As with any interaction with others, interactions with oneself can have both negative and positive consequences. The inability to turn off the «stream of consciousness» (a term introduced by writer Marcel Proust) helps us thoroughly consider our decisions and experiences, recall the past, and dream about the future.
The inner voice helps us create our lives and find a special place in this world. At the same time, through inner speech, our brain can excessively immerse us in a problem, fixating on specific elements of reality, causing something akin to analytical paralysis. Sometimes, it can be the opposite, when the inner voice gets out of control and chatters incessantly, preventing us from concentrating on something important.
People invented special pyrotechnics, which were originally part of religious rituals, to protect thinking from malfunctions and consciousness from overloads. These techniques help one distance oneself from the inner monologue, taking the position of an observer rather than a participant in the inner speech act.
You do not concentrate on your thoughts, but calmly allow them to come and go as if they have nothing to do with you. However, as scientists have discovered, such problems only arise in some people simply because some people may lack an inner voice altogether.
INTERNAL VOICE: «WEAK» AND «STRONG»
Gary Lupyan, a cognitive scientist from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, argues that until you start asking the right questions, you won’t even realize that variations exist. New research conducted by him and his colleague Johanne Nedergaard, a cognitive scientist from the University of Copenhagen, has shown that these differences are not only real but also have implications for our cognition.
They conducted a series of experiments, the results of which were reported in the journal Psychological Science. In the first task, participants were asked to memorize English homophones — words that sound or are spelled similarly: bought — caught, taut — wart, and others. Participants with a «weak» internal voice performed worse on psychological tasks testing verbal memory.
In the second task, volunteers had to choose from pairs of pictures depicting objects with rhyming names: for instance, «clock» — «sock». Participants with a «weak» internal voice also performed poorly on this task.
The third test, which measured the speed of switching from one task to another, and the fourth test, which assessed visual differences, showed no difference in performance between «strong» and «weak» members of the group. Lupyan believes that in these cases, people likely employ many other strategies besides internal speech, or that internal speech may simply not be useful for visual similarity judgments.
ANENDOPHASIA: A NON-FATAL PATHOLOGY
Our inner worlds differ significantly from one another: some people have a severely weakened or even completely absent «inner voice» function. These internally voiceless individuals make up about 5 to 10 percent of the population. Scientists have even coined a specific term for this anomaly: «anendophasia» (from Greek an — «absence», endo — «inner», aphasia — «speech»).
Scientists proposed this term by analogy with another word — «aphantasia», which describes a condition where people lack visual mental imagery. They believe that a predisposition to anendophasia hinders the typical memorization of paronyms because they need to be mentally articulated, thus «activating» the inner voice.
Overall, scientists believe that there is nothing terrible about anendophasia. In everyday communication, weak verbal memory in those not inclined to mental conversations will not be particularly noticeable. According to Johanne Nedergaard, there is at least one area where the ability to have an internal dialogue with oneself matters — psychotherapy.
Techniques that involve mentally articulating problems are crucial for this discipline. Although the new research deals with the invisible realm, it may have quite tangible medical implications.
«A person with a well-developed inner speech can rely more on it», says Gary Lupyan, suggesting that the inner voice’s potential can be used to treat speech disorders resulting from a stroke.
Original research:
- People without an inner voice have poorer verbal memory
- Not Everybody Has an Inner Voice: Behavioral Consequences of Anendophasia
