In the 2014 Inner Voice movie, Joy (voice of Amy Poehler) and Sadness (voice of Phyllis Smith) catch a ride on the Train of Thought. — Disney/Pixar
In theaters for a few weeks now, the animated movie Inside Out 2, gives a voice to the emotions that race through our minds.
But for some people, these little inner voices are completely silent.
This astonishing phenomenon is the subject of a Danish-American study published in the journal Psychological Science.
The authors of this study were interested in our internal monologue.
After all, it’s not uncommon for people to hear this kind of inner speech or verbal thoughts, to remind themselves to pack sunscreen or to motivate themselves to go to the office on Monday morning, for example.
This practice is so widespread that the scientific community has long believed it to be inherent to the human experience.
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.
It’s common to have inner speech or verbal thoughts but for some people, these voices don’t exist. — 123rf.com
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. – AFP Relaxnews
