“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”, 2019-08-20 (; similar):
Psychologist Russell Hurlburt at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, has spent the last few decades training people to see inside their own minds more clearly in an attempt to learn something about our inner experiences at large. Though many individual studies on inner speech include only a small number of participants, making it hard to know whether their results apply more widely, Hurlburt estimates he’s been able to peek inside the minds of hundreds of people since he began his research. What he’s found suggests that the thoughts running through our heads are a lot more varied than we might suppose.
For one, words don’t seem to feature as heavily in our day-to-day thoughts as many of us think they do. “Most people think that they think in words, but many people are mistaken about that”, he says. In one small study, for example, 16 college students were given short stories before being randomly sampled to find out what they were thinking during the course of reading. Only a quarter of their sampled thoughts featured words at all, and just 3% involved internal narration.
…If people aren’t constantly talking to themselves, what are they doing?
In his years of studying the inner workings of people’s minds, Hurlburt has come up with five categories of inner experiences: inner speaking, which comes in a variety of forms; inner seeing, which could feature images of things you’ve seen in real life or imaginary visuals; feelings, such as anger or happiness; sensory awareness, like being aware of the scratchiness of the carpet under your feet; and unsymbolised thinking, a trickier concept to get your head around, but essentially a thought that doesn’t manifest as words or images, but is undoubtedly present in your mind. But those categories leave room for variation, too. Take inner speaking, which can come in the form of a single word, a sentence, some kind of monologue, or even a conversation. The idea of an internal dialogue—rather than a monologue—will be familiar to anyone who’s ever rehearsed an important conversation, or rehashed an argument, in their mind. But the person we talk to inside our head is not always a stand in for someone else—often, that other voice is another aspect of ourselves.
…Famira Racy, co-ordinator of the Inner Speech Lab at Mount Royal University, Canada, and her colleagues recently used a method called thought listing—which, unsurprisingly, involves getting participants to list their thoughts at certain times—to take a broader look at why and when people use inner speech, as well as what they say to themselves.
They found that the students in the study were talking to themselves about everything from school to their emotions, other people, and themselves, while they were doing everyday tasks like walking and getting in and out of bed. Though it has the same limitations as much research on inner speech—namely, you can’t always trust people to know what or how they were really thinking—the results appear consistent with previous work.
“I can’t say for sure if it’s any more important [than other kinds of inner experience], but there’s been enough research done to show that inner speech plays an important role in self-regulation behavior, problem solving, critical thinking and reasoning and future thinking”, Racy says…“It gives you a way to communicate with yourself using a meaningful structure”, says Racy. Or as one of her colleagues sometimes puts it: “Inner speech is your flashlight in the dark room that is your mind.”