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Some People Don’t Have An Inner Monologue And I Am One Of Them
The voice you hear inside your head? Yeah, I don’t have it.
It is believed that most humans narrate their day from start to finish via the thoughts inside of our head and our emotional response to different events; however, the variation takes place when it comes to how a person narrates these events. In every brain, there are a gazillion different neurological connections so it should come as no surprise that not everyone converts this computing power into words. In fact, most would believe that we all ‘think in words’ or ‘have an internal voice,’ but I am here to say that this is far from the truth and I am living proof of it.
Russell T Hurlburt, a professor in psychology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas has devoted his entire career to studying the psychological phenomena of what he calls the ‘Pristine Inner Experience.’ In his tests, he would expose participants to a beeping sound several times a day and then ask them to recount what was going on in their head just before they heard it. The idea being that they would get better and better at it and he would end up, after a few weeks, with an accurate portrayal of their mental landscapes.
In a study performed with 30 college students, an average of 26% of participants reported having some sort of internal speech — some up to 75% while others had none at all.
Bernard Baars, one of the leading researchers in consciousness science, says: “Human beings talk to themselves every moment of the waking day. Most readers of this sentence are doing it now. It becomes a little clearer with difficult-to-say words, like ‘infundibulum’ or ‘methylparaben’. In fact, we talk to ourselves during dreams, and there is even evidence for an…
