“The mind makes its own place, and in itself can make a heaven out of hell, and a hell out of heaven,” wrote the Englishman. John Milton in his poem Lost paradise in 1667.
It has always been assumed that among thoughts and emotions, there is also an inner voice as a universal characteristic of human beings. It is the speech that people “hear” when they think or read. However, researchers in cognitive neurosciences and psychology They have realized that between 5 and 10% of people They do not have the experience of feeling that inner voice.
The researchers Johanne Nedergårdof Denmark-who was interviewed by Infobae– and his colleague Gary Lupyanof the USAhave begun to study what this lack implies and have called it “anendophasia”. They have just published their research in the journal Psychological Science.
They revealed that anendophasia can have consequences: people have more difficulty performing verbal memory tasks. Because they don’t have an inner voice, some people told researchers that they think in images and then translate the images into words when they need to say something.
Others describe their brain as a computer that works fine, but does not process thoughts verbally, and that the connection to the speaker and microphone is different than that of other people. And those who say there is something verbal inside their heads often describe it as words without sound.
In dialogue with Infobae, Dr. Nedergård, who is a linguist and works at the University of Copenhagen, said that, in fact, it was known that there were people with anendophasia. But “in recent years the science and philosophy of inner speech are beginning to take these individual differences seriously,” she noted.
The same goes for the “aphantasia”, which is the absence of mental vision or the inability to visualize mental images.
“The objective of the new study was to verify whether the anendophasia Do you have any consequence on behavior. It could also simply be a matter of meaning different things when we say ‘inner speech‘or perhaps a lack of awareness of it,’ said the researcher.
“We found that the self-reported propensity to use inner speech was related to the performance on some tasks that required saying things out loud in your head, which indicates that people who claim not to experience inner speech are right to some extent,” he said.
There is a theory, which is usually attributed to the developmental psychologist Lev Vygotsky, which maintains that inner speech comes from the regulatory speech that caregivers direct to children. For example, “don’t touch the hot stove” or “you have to stack the bricks like this to build a tower,” the scientist commented.
“Most children have a period when they talk out loud to themselves. What is known as “private speech”. This occurs between the ages of 2 and 7, but usually goes “underground” around age 4 or 5, when children stop talking to themselves out loud. The theory is that inner speech in adults arises from there,” he expressed.
Do people who have no inner voice discover it easily? he asked. Infobae. “According to the people I have spoken to, they are usually quite clear that they have no inner voice as soon as we start talking about it. Sometimes they say they would find it annoying or frustrating to have it. If the person is not used to thinking about that or this type of introspection, they may need to take a few days to try to figure out what usually goes through their head and what format it has (speech, visual or spatial images, etc.).
Dr. Nedergård responded: “I am opposed to talking about anendophasia as something that needs to be diagnosed. “I don’t think we know enough about the phenomenon, there is still a lack of research to determine how harmful it is to not have an inner voice, if at all.”
Is about “a very new field of research, so there are many things we still don’t know. I can only say that people without the inner voice find it more difficult to perform tasks that specifically require saying things out loud in their minds, such as remembering words in order or judging rhymes.
One can imagine that “the lack of inner speech can have consequences for the self-reflection or social interactions -if we are based on theories about what inner speech is for-, but it is too early to say more about it. These are questions for future research,” she emphasized.
To make the study published, Nedergård and Lupyan included 93 people from the United States as participants. Within that total, 46 had low levels of inner speech and 47 recorded high levels of inner speech. They were all native English speakers.
The participants were subjected to four experiments, for example, remembering words in sequence and switching from one task to another. They found that there are differences in the verbal memory of people without an inner voice. But they are not noticeable in their daily conversations.
People who reported experiencing a high degree of inner voice or very little inner voice in everyday life were subjected to an experiment aimed at determining whether there were differences in their ability to remember linguistic input and another in their ability to find rhyming words. The first experiment consisted of participants remembering words in order, that is, phonetically or orthographically similar words.
To the participants without an inner voice it was harder for them to remember the words. The same was true for a task in which they had to determine whether a pair of images contained rhyming words.
The scientist admitted that there is still much to investigate, and stressed that there is one field in which it is suspected that having an inner voice does play a role, and that is therapy.
In the case of widely used cognitive-behavioral therapy, adverse thought patterns must be identified and changed, and having an inner voice can be very important in that process.
However, it is still unclear whether differences in the experience of an inner voice are related to how people respond to different types of therapy.
“The experiments in which we found differences between the groups had to do with sound and being able to hear the words by themselves. “I would like to study whether it is simply because they do not experience the sound aspect of language, or if they do not think at all in a linguistic format like most other people,” he said.
The future of her research will go into this question: “I am interested in the possible consequences for social interaction (since people with little inner voice do not rehearse or simulate conversations).”
Also – he indicated – I am interested in knowing “if it will be possible to verify whether anendophasia is really a total lack of internal linguistic activity or if it is more accurately characterized as a lack of experience of imagined speech sounds or imagined articulations of an inner voice.” ”.
