Published on
Updated
Reading 2 min.
In theaters for a few weeks now, the animated film “Inside Out 2” gives voice to the emotions that jostle in our minds. But for some people, these little inner voices are mute. A surprising phenomenon that a Danish-American study, published in the journal Psychological Science, examines.
The authors of this study were interested in our internal monologues. Because it is not uncommon to talk to ourselves to, for example, remember to put sunscreen in our suitcase or motivate ourselves to go to the office on Monday morning.
This practice is so widespread that the scientific community has long thought it was inherent to the human condition. But in recent years, researchers have discovered that some people do not have a little voice in their head. They are called “anendophasic” (which literally means “a person who cannot speak to themselves”). This phenomenon had not, until now, been the subject of in-depth study.
So scientists from the Department of Linguistics in Copenhagen and the Department of Psychology at Wisconsin State ran a battery of tests on a group of 46 volunteers who rarely engage in self-talk, and compared their results with those of 47 people who often talk to themselves. The goal: to see if the lack of self-talk affected their auditory-verbal working memory abilities.
Working memory allows us to perform complex cognitive operations such as thinking, reading, writing or counting, based on information temporarily stored in our brain. It plays a crucial role in the production and understanding of language. The authors of the current study therefore hypothesized that the absence of internal conversations could have repercussions on the memorization of words.
And that seems to be the case. Researchers have found that people with an inactive inner voice perform worse on tasks involving verbal memory. “Adults who reported low levels of inner speech performed less well on a verbal working memory task […] than other participants who reported a high level of inner speech“, they write in their study.
In other words, the ability to mentally represent words and sounds would be closely linked to the little voice we hear in our head. But researchers say that the absence of inner speech is not inevitable. People with anendophasia can compensate for this singularity by… speaking to themselves in a low voice. The study participants who did this managed to match those who have an inner voice, as the British Psychological Society points out in an article on his site.
This study is part of a growing body of scientific work that shows that our inner worlds are much more different than we think. Some people talk to themselves a lot, while others can’t. Regardless, not having an inner voice is not a pathology. It’s a peculiarity like any other.
Slide: What happens in our brain during…