“The Phenomena of Inner Experience”, Christopher L. Heavey, Russell T. Hurlburt2008-09 (inner-monologue (psych))⁠:

This study provides a survey of phenomena that present themselves during moments of naturally occurring inner experience. In our previous studies using Descriptive Experience Sampling (DES) we have discovered 5 frequently occurring phenomena—inner speech, inner seeing, unsymbolized thinking, feelings, and sensory awareness.

Here we quantify the relative frequency of these phenomena. We used DES to describe 10 randomly identified moments of inner experience from each of 30 participants selected from a stratified sample of college students.

We found that each of the 5 phenomena occurred in ~1quarter of sampled moments, that the frequency of these phenomena varied widely across individuals, that there were no statistically-significant gender differences in the relative frequencies of these phenomena, and that higher frequencies of inner speech were associated with lower levels of psychological distress.

[Keywords: Descriptive Experience Sampling, consciousness, awareness, inner experience, individual differences, inner speech, inner seeing, unsymbolized thinking, feelings, sensory awareness]

See Also:

• Measuring the Frequency of Inner-Experience Characteristics

• Pristine inner experience while silent reading: It’s not silent speaking of the text

• What the voice inside your head says about you: We tend to assume that our internal monologue ‘speaks’ in words—but it turns out that, for many of us, it’s much more complicated

• The varieties of inner speech: Links between quality of inner speech and psychopathological variables in a sample of young adults

• Using a Thought Listing Procedure to Construct the General Inner Speech Questionnaire: An Ecological Approach

• Not Everyone Has an Inner Voice: Behavioral Consequences of Anendophasia

• Generalizing From One Example

• The Unreliability of Naive Introspection

• Trips and neurotransmitters: Discovering principled patterns across 6,850 hallucinogenic experiences

• Clusters of Individual Experiences form a Continuum of Persistent Non-Symbolic Experiences [PNSE] in Adults

• The varieties of contemplative experience: A mixed-methods study of meditation-related challenges in Western Buddhists

• What is the frequency and nature of visual hallucinations in non-clinical participants?

• The Frequency with which a Group of Unselected College Students Experience Colored Dreaming and Colored Hearing