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.
  • MudSkipperKisser@lemmy.worldEnglish
    61·
    6 months ago

    I’ve seen this conversation come up so many times and I’m never not fascinated by it. I have a nonstop internal monologue, it can be exhausting really. But I can’t fully wrap my head around thinking without it

    • Tiefling IRLEnglish
      28·
      6 months ago

      I have ADHD, it’s like having talk radio permanently on in my head. Often times I’ll have an internal monologue playing on top of internal background music.

      • EmptySlimeEnglish
        10·
        6 months ago

        I have ADHD too but in my case I don’t actually “hear” any of the thoughts. But they exist similar to how you describe. At any given time I can feel multiple different thoughts kind of floating around. When music gets stuck in my head I don’t so much hear it in there as I feel the presence of a song. So I have to talk out loud in order to keep from losing the thread of what I was thinking about.

        • rhombus@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          2·
          6 months ago

          I’m the same way, if I don’t talk out loud or write my ideas down I can’t think straight. Without an inner monologue my thoughts just feel like a jumbled abstract soup I have to manually untangle by speaking. I also get songs stuck in my head, but I’ve always explained it as feeling a particular part of the rhythm, or almost feeling the lyrics in my mouth like I’m speaking them.

    • livus@kbin.social
      11·
      6 months ago

      Me too. People like you are fascinating to me. When I first found out that everyone thinks differently I went around interrogating everyone I knew about how they think.

      I don’t have an interior monologue unless Im typing, but I sometimes use my internal “sound system” to play music.

      • Today@lemmy.worldEnglish
        4·
        6 months ago

        Me too!! I had my nephew and his wife arguing at dinner about whether the inner voice was real or god. 🤣

      • KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        2·
        6 months ago

        i dont have one at all, i think, i don’t even have one when typing, which i think leads to a lot of weird mistakes, sometimes i’ll just interject a completely random word, or pickup halfway through a sentence with a completely different sentence, it’s weird sometimes.

        • livus@kbin.social
          3·
          6 months ago

          I can see that could have that effect! I pretty much need it for typing, it’s like an act of translation. I have to write a lot for work or I probably wouldn’t have started doing it that way.

          If someone is talking or the radio is on when I type I will accidentally include some of the words from those sources.

          • KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
            1·
            6 months ago

            usually im pretty good with typing, ironically. The problem is that if i start to multi focus on things, it gets really messy, just having music in the background isn’t enough to cause me problems though, neither having youtube videos, though it’s impossible for me to focus enough on the video to understand whats happening, while being able to type legibly.

            if i’m rapidly jumping between things, like reading something, and talking to people on discord, while listening to music, i can absolutely throw random words in places they shouldnt be, it’s weird.

      • nickwitha_k (he/him)@lemmy.sdf.orgEnglish
        1·
        6 months ago

        That’s really fascinating and similar to how I think, I think. Like, typing, reading, or thinking about things that are by nature verbal get internally verbalized but in an atonal “narrator voice”, though it’s still not “quiet” otherwise. I also have what I call my “internal walkman” for playing music in a recording/playback manner (sometimes with some “skips”), rather than any voice of my own.

    • ShaggySnacks@lemmy.myserv.oneEnglish
      7·
      6 months ago

      I too have an internal monologue. I was high on mushrooms and I thought to myself “What would it be like not have an inner monologue?” Then I had an existential crisis on top of an already emotional workout trip.

    • Shadowq8@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      6 months ago

      Same, sometimes I even move my mouth when I talk to myself if I am too engaged in my internal dialogue. Freaks my wife out sometimes.

      • efstajas@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        6 months ago

        I think that’s pretty normal to some extent, I remember reading that you can kinda see people’s inner monologue on a head MRI based on tiny movements of speech organs. Take this with a massive grain of salt, no idea where I read that and too lazy to find it right now lol.

        Personally I definitely notice every now and then that when I activate my inner voice I also slightly move my tongue etc. as if I was saying what it says.

    • gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      2·
      6 months ago

      It’s fascinating to me, too.

      I have seen everything by now: People who think that only sociopaths have an inner monologue. People who think an inner monologue would be useful, but can’t quite lean in on the concept. People who are confused that some people don’t have an inner monologue. People getting angry at me for even “questioning” the inner monologue, as if it was holy.

      • MudSkipperKisser@lemmy.worldEnglish
        1·
        6 months ago

        It’s an interesting exercise in trying to understand the experience of others while removing our own biases. Doesn’t always go so well I guess! So how do you think?? I really can’t tell from your comment

        • gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
          1·
          6 months ago

          The brain structures develop to help us navigate through the environment. So of course, at times where an inner monologue is helpful, we will probably have one.

      • korazail@lemmy.myserv.oneEnglish
        1·
        6 months ago

        This is a really interesting question. If I were a researcher, I’d try to go chase this topic, since it seems to be fairly quantifiable.

        Like Mudskipper, I can replay music in my head but it has a few caveats: I don’t really process the instruments… I remember the pitch/volume/etc but primarily of vocals. I also replay with the original singer’s voice and not my own. Replaying a few songs in my head now and I can’t even focus on the instruments if there were vocals unless they are critical to how the song works, like a bass drop. If I try to replay music that is instrumental, I get verbal recreations, like someone performing the song acapella. If i focus hard, I can hear instruments instead, but that requires thinking about it. This matches how I ‘sing along’ with instrumental pieces in otherwise verbal songs. It might just be that the backing music isn’t retained, so I can remember the melody, but not, say, a bass line unless the bass is being highlighted.

        Are there people who CAN’T replay music in their heads? Are they immune to ‘ear-worms’ or do they just perceive it differently?