AFP – As Inside Out 2 hit cinemas, it brings to life the emotions that race through our minds.
Yet, for some, those inner voices remain completely silent. This surprising phenomenon is the focus of a recent Danish-American study published in Psychological Science, which explores the nature of our internal monologue.
For many, inner speech is a familiar part of daily life – a voice reminding us to pack sunscreen or encouraging us to get to work on Monday morning. It’s such a common experience that scientists have long assumed it to be a universal part of being human.
But in recent years, researchers have discovered that some people don’t hear any kind of little voice in their head.
They are said to be “anendophasic” (which literally means a person who cannot speak internally).
Until now, this phenomenon had not been studied in depth.
That’s why Johanne S K Nedergaard of the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, and Gary Lupyan of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, United States, put a group of 46 volunteers who had a near-absent inner voice through a series of tests, and then compared their results with those of 47 people who reported near-constant inner speech.
The aim was to see if the absence of inner voice had an impact on their auditory-verbal working memory capacity.
Working memory enables us to carry out complex cognitive operations such as thinking, reading, writing or counting, based on information temporarily stored in our brain.
It plays a crucial role in language production and comprehension.
The authors of the present study therefore hypothesised that the absence of an inner voice could have an impact on word memorisation.
And this appears to be the case. The researchers found that people with an inactive inner voice performed less well on certain tasks involving their verbal memory.
“We found that adults who reported low levels of inner speech had lower performance on a verbal working memory task compared with adults who reported high levels of inner speech,” the researchers write in their paper.
In other words, the ability to mentally represent words and sounds is closely linked to the little voice we hear in our heads.
Nevertheless, the researchers report that some people with anendophasia seemingly compensated for this singularity by speaking the words out loud.
In fact, study participants who did so were able to match the performance of those who had an inner voice, as the British Psychological Society reports in an online article.
This study is part of a growing body of scientific work suggesting that our inner worlds are far more different than we might imagine.
Some people often hear an inner voice, while others are seemingly unable to do so.
Whatever the case, not having an inner voice is not a pathology.
It’s an individual trait like any other.
