Amayzine

Do you have an inner voice?

image of Wieke on her phone

You are never too old to learn, and after my birthday last Thursday, I have come across something new again. I was today years old when I learned that not everyone has an inner voice. Whut? I do have one and I assumed that everyone did, but apparently not. A literal little voice that thinks along with me, that reminds me of messages I shouldn't forget, that is singing an annoying tune all day long. Also a little voice that I don't always really have control over, because often it doesn't want to stop singing.

I have found out that this voice doesn't quite sound like my ‘real’ voice, I am still shocked when I hear it on a recording or video. In fact, I don't really have an idea of how this voice actually sounds, but it is present all day long.

Psychologists have also been fascinated by this for years, such as Russell Hurlburt, who is a professor at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas. He conducted a study called Descriptive Experience Sampling (DES), in which participants heard a beep at random moments. Afterwards, they were asked what they were thinking about during that beep. Were they visualizing something? Were they daydreaming? Did they feel a certain emotion?

Apparently, you need to conduct this research over several days for good results, because people find it difficult to formulate this kind of answers on the first day. But after a few days, Hurlburt discovered that a reasonable number of his participants could not answer the question of what words and/or sentences passed through their minds. 26 percent indicated that they did not ‘hear’ any form of words or sentences in their head, while 75 percent said they did.

Now I am very curious: do you experience an inner voice? I find it so hard to imagine what that is like, how you think then and how that works.