

Sure, we are doers, too, but at least for me, there is an awful lot of contemplating before any doing. ET to fix Hélène Lœvenbruck's title.Naturally, introverts are thinkers. Up until now, the types of inner speech and experiences children can have, and the resources they may need to learn, have likely been vastly underestimated, she said.Įditor's note : Updated on June 15, 2021, at 2:38 p.m. But a better understanding of inner speech and the wide array of thought processes people experience could be especially important "for learning methods and education in general," Lœvenbruck said. You can participate in Lœvenbruck's research on aphantasia and inner speech via a survey starting this month.Īphantasia and the lack of an inner voice aren't necessarily bad.

Many times, those who don't experience visualizations don't experience clear inner speech, either, Lœvenbruck noted. The lack of an inner monologue has been linked to a condition called aphantasia - sometimes called "blindness of the mind's eye." People who experience aphantasia don't experience visualizations in their mind they can't mentally picture their bedroom or their mother's face. How accurate is the Myers-Briggs personality test? They experienced images, sensations and emotions, but not a voice or words. But others had less inner speech than usual, and some didn't have inner speech at all. Eventually, this methodology revealed that some people had inner speech every time the device beeped, almost like "there's a radio in their head," Lœvenbruck said. With each meeting with the researcher, participants got better at articulating their true thoughts, she said. "Or did you think 'bread'? Or were you hungry, or was there a sensation in your stomach?" Lœvenbruck explained.

Perhaps the participant wrote down, "I need to buy some bread." The researcher would then ask if that's what they actually thought. At the end of the day, they met with a researcher to go over their responses. Whenever the device beeped, they had to write down what they were thinking or experiencing in their mind just before the sound. Hurlburt studied participants' inner speech by asking them to wear a beeper.

This long-held assumption that all people rely on an inner voice was first challenged in the late 1990s, in large part by research led by Russell Hurlburt, a psychologist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Are you engaging in inner speech on purpose? For reasons we don't know, sometimes inner speech can just come to you or drift to entirely random and seemingly disconnected topics.īut a long-time confounder in studying inner speech was the fact that, in studies, people expressed their thoughts in words, Lœvenbruck said, even if they weren't exactly thinking in words. But other times, like when you're preparing for a conversation or presentation, you're likely thinking in whole sentences and paragraphs. Sometimes you think in words or fragments. The second dimension is condensation, a measure of how verbose your inner speech is. A monologue happens when you think to yourself something like, "I need to buy bread." But other times, when you are reasoning, you might entertain and engage several points of view - like a conversation, a dialogue. So the first dimension measures whether you're thinking in a monologue or a dialogue. Humans can have such complex inner speech, there's debate about whether it's accurate to call all inner speech a monologue. Lœvenbruck's research looks at inner monologues in three dimensions, according to a 2019 study she and colleagues published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology.
