The vast majority of people maintain a permanent conversation with themselves, an inner voice, which plays an important role in their daily lives. But between 5 and 10 percent of the population do not have the same experience of an inner voice and find it more difficult to perform certain verbal memory tasks, new research shows.
Previously, it was commonly assumed that having an inner voice had to be a human universal. But in recent years researchers have realized that not all people share this experience.
According to postdoc and linguist Johanne Nedergård from the University of Copenhagen, people describe the condition of living without an inner voice as time-consuming and difficult, because they must spend time and effort translating their thoughts into words:
“Some say they think in pictures and then translate the pictures into words when they need to say something. Others describe their brain as a well-functioning computer that simply does not process thoughts verbally and that the connection to the speaker and microphone is different from other people. And those who say there is something verbal going on inside their heads will usually describe it as words without sound.”
It is more difficult to remember words and rhymes.
Johanne Nedergård and her colleague Gary Lupyan at the University of Wisconsin-Madison are the first researchers in the world to investigate whether the lack of an inner voice or anendophasia As they have coined the condition, it has consequences for how these people solve problems, for example, how they perform verbal memory tasks.
People who reported experiencing either a high degree of inner voice or very little inner voice in everyday life were subjected to an experiment aimed at determining whether there was a difference in their ability to remember language input and another in their ability to find rhymes. words. The first experiment involved having participants remember words in order: words that were similar, either phonetically or in spelling, for example, “bought,” “trapped,” “tense,” and “wart.”
“It’s a task that will be difficult for everyone, but our hypothesis was that it could be even more difficult if you didn’t have an inner voice because you have to repeat the words inside your head to remember them.” Johanne Nedergård explains and continues:
“And this hypothesis turned out to be true: participants without an inner voice remembered words significantly worse. The same applied to a task in which participants had to determine whether a pair of images contained rhyming words, for example images of a sock and a watch, also here it is essential to be able to repeat the words to compare their sounds and thus determine if they rhyme.”
In two other experiments, in which Johanne Nedergård and Gary Lupyan tested the role of the inner voice in quickly switching between different tasks and distinguishing between very similar figures, they found no difference between the two groups. Although previous studies indicate that language and the inner voice play a role in these types of experiments.
“Perhaps people who don’t have an inner voice have simply learned to use other strategies. For example, some said they tapped with their index finger when performing one type of task and with their middle finger when performing another type of task,” says Johanne Nedergård.
The results of the study by the two researchers have just been published in the article “Not everyone has an inner voice: behavioral consequences of anendophasia” in the scientific journal psychological science.
Does it make any difference?
According to Johanne Nedergård, the differences in verbal memory that they have identified in their experiments will not be noticeable in everyday conversations. And the question is: doesn’t having an inner voice have any practical or behavioral meaning?
“The short answer is that we simply don’t know because we’ve only just begun to study it. But there is one field where we suspect that having an inner voice plays a role, and that is therapy; in the widely used cognitive behavioral field. In therapy, For example, it is necessary to identify and change adverse thought patterns, and having an inner voice can be very important in that process. However, it is still unclear whether the differences in the experience of an inner voice are related to the way in which one thinks. different types of therapy,” says Johanne Nedergård, who would like to continue her research to find out if other areas of language are affected if you do not have an inner voice.
“The experiments in which we found differences between the groups concerned sound and the ability to hear the words themselves. I would like to study whether it is because they simply do not experience the sound aspect of language or if they do not think in a linguistic format at all like most people,” he concludes.
About the study
The study by Johanne Nedergård and Gary Lupyan included almost one hundred participants, half of whom experienced having very little inner voice and the other half of whom experienced a lot of inner voice.
The participants were subjected to four experiments, for example, remembering words in sequence and switching between different tasks. The study has been published in the scientific journal. Psychological science.
Johanne Nedergård and Gary Lupyan have called the condition of having no inner voice anendophasia, which means no inner voice.