Silent inside? Study links lack of inner voice to cognitive challenges

Ever thought about what it might be like to go through life without your inner voice? The inner monologue is familiar to most people, yet not everyone has had the same experience.

Scientists have discovered recently that5–10% of people do not have an inner voice.

"Some say that they think in pictures and then translate the pictures into words when they need to say something," linguist Johanne Nedergård from the University of Copenhagen said.

"Others describe their brain as a well-functioning computer that just does not process thoughts verbally, and that the connection to loudspeaker and microphone is different from other people's. And those who say that there is something verbal going on inside their heads will typically describe it as words without sound,"Nedergård added.

The absence of an inner voice, which Nedergård and colleague Gary Lupyan from the University of Wisconsin-Madison have called anendophasia, may have an impact on how individuals solve issues and recall information.

These findings were published in the journal Psychological Science.

Out of the 93 persons that participated in the study, 52 had poor inner speech.

Participants were given four tasks to perform, including recalling words in order and assessing whether a collection of photographs contained words that rhymed.

Given that it helps to mentally repeat phrases, the team's original hypothesis was that those who had anendophasia would have trouble remembering these lengthy lists of words.

"And this hypothesis turned out to be true. The participants without an inner voice were significantly worse at remembering the words. The same applied to an assignment in which the participants had to determine whether a pair of pictures contained words that rhyme, e.g. pictures of a sock and a clock. Here, too, it is crucial to be able to repeat the words in order to compare their sounds and thus determine whether they rhyme," Nedergård said.

This research prompts the question:does anendophasia affect the people who have it in some significant way?

"The short answer is that we just don't know because we have 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 behavioural therapy, for example, you need to identify and change adverse thought patterns, and having an inner voice may be very important in such a process," Nedergård said.

"However, it is still uncertain whether differences in the experience of an inner voice are related to how people respond to different types of therapy," Nedergård added.

(With inputs from agencies)