People without an inner voice have poorer verbal memory
humanities.ku.dk
The vast majority of people have an ongoing conversation with themselves, an inner voice, that plays an important role in their daily lives. But between 5-10 per cent of the population do not have the same experience of an inner voice, and they find it more difficult to perform certain verbal memory tasks, new research shows.
  • Schmoo@slrpnk.netEnglish
    40·
    6 months ago

    Your anecdote seems to support that it’s a learned behavior/skill, which tracks for me. I have a very active internal dialogue that’s difficult to turn off. I say dialogue instead of monologue because I often make up “other voices” that bounce ideas off each other, and this generally happens without my conscious effort. I think I developed this because as I was growing up I was encouraged to pray regularly, and I was very fanatically religious as a kid so I did so as often as I could. I prayed silently so often in fact that my thoughts were basically a constant one-sided monologue directed to god. Whenever I would daydream or let my imagination wander I would imagine god responding, and eventually the constant monologue became a dialogue. I would work out problems or make decisions by having conversations with an imaginary god. When I stopped believing in god the second voice never went away, I just started recognizing it as my own.

    • Ibaudia@lemmy.worldEnglish
      14·
      6 months ago

      Okay, now I have to know if religious individuals are more likely to have an inner voice. That just makes sense!!!

      • Schmoo@slrpnk.netEnglish
        6·
        6 months ago

        Perhaps! I also think internal monologues can develop just from learning to read and write silently. Having an inner voice makes it easier to absorb the information in a book or to plan out your writing in advance.

    • lagomorphlecture@lemm.eeEnglish
      5·
      6 months ago

      There’s actually a theory that back in ye olden times when inner monologues first started, people thought it was God talking to them because it was a new phenomenon and that didn’t have any way to understand that it was some kind of evolution of consciousness, not a god.

        • Zetaphor@zemmy.ccEnglish
          2·
          6 months ago

          I mean the NVIDIA stock price speaks for itself, I think Jensen is onto something

          • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2·
            6 months ago

            Ha! Good one.

            On a serious note here are the issues

            • He can’t explain how the event impacted the rest of the world. Only a fraction of the human race was there. How does he explain China for example?
            • We already know that meta-cognition isn’t limited to humans. A rat that knows where food is vs ones that do not engage in different behaviors.
            • He can’t explain the almost superhuman reflex speeds some people have in modern times under his model.

            I do agree some of it rings true. Just very hard to pin down what exactly.

    • mrcleanup@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      6 months ago

      I am trying to wrap my head around this. So if you are just walking down the street alone, watching cars go by, not reading, there a voice? What would it even be saying?

      • Schmoo@slrpnk.netEnglish
        3·
        6 months ago

        Yes, multiple voices, probably debating what I’m going to cook for dinner later. At this point I might be going a bit too far anthropomorphizing the voices, it’s not like actual separate personalities, they’re all me. It’s more like perspective taking. I’m engaging in a conversation with myself and the different voices will take different stances. For example I might have a “lazy voice” that just wants to eat leftovers and a “craving voice” that wants to cook tacos. I decide what to do by having the voices hash it out.

        As I’m describing this it all sounds very intentional and like I’m playing pretend, but it really is just automatic.

        • mrcleanup@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          6 months ago

          I guess I have something similar, but it’s all just nonverbal feelings. I don’t argue with myself about getting up in the morning, I just feel comfortable, lazy, frustrated, determined, and rarely tell myself “get up” but that’s the only voice part.

    • grrgyle@slrpnk.netEnglish
      1·
      6 months ago

      Whoaaaa that’s so interesting. I grew up silently praying in the daily as well, and also tend to have dialogues going on in my head. Also a stream of unsolicited advice, which is less pleasant… But I’d probably miss it if it went away.

      • Schmoo@slrpnk.netEnglish
        4·
        6 months ago

        Learning to get over religious shame and guilt took quite some time for me, and I still have to catch myself sometimes when an inner voice says things I no longer believe/agree with. Part of getting over that meant cultivating other voices. When one voice bites another bites back lol.

        As a plus I’m very good in a debate.