Not everyone has an internal monologue
Popular Science...
When I first started researching this story, I assumed I was writing about other people: those fascinating outliers who reportedly lack an internal monologue—the experience of actively speaking words in your mind as a sort of private narration of your life.
Then I got on a Zoom call with Dr. Russell Hurlburt, a psychologist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who has spent 50 years studying inner experience, and somewhere in the first ten minutes, I started to wonder: What if I’m talking about myself? Do I really think in fully-formed sentences all day, or are sentences merely the tools I reach for when I need to explain myself to others? And how well do any of us actually know the difference?
“Basically everybody—or almost everybody—thinks they have inner speech all the time,” Hurlburt says. “And so we have to start with the fact that people are ignorant about their own inner experience.”
‘A faulty armchair introspection’
When scientists talk about inner monologue, or what Hurlburt calls “inner speaking,” they mean the experience of actually forming words in your mind, sequentially, as if you were speaking them aloud. It’s not just a vague verbal sense of a thought, but the active experience of stringing words together internally.
Hurlburt says there’s no definitive data on how many of us have an internal monologue, or how often we think this way. The proportion, he says, ranges “from zero to 100 percent, and everywhere in between.”
Part of the reason the phenomenon is so difficult to track is because the entire process is so stubbornly internal. Tools like questionnaires can be problematic, Hurlburt says, because they prime the respondent to express their thoughts as words. By retrofitting words onto these thoughts, a person might falsely believe that this was how they originally experienced them.
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Hurlburt argues that the belief that we’re always thinking in words stems from what he calls “faulty armchair introspection.” When you ask yourself, “What am I thinking right now?,” the verbal nature of that question prompts you to find words in response.
In this way, we can all too easily become the unreliable narrators of our own narration.
“It’s like the refrigerator light,” Hurlburt says. “When you open the door, the refrigerator light’s on. That doesn’t mean the refrigerator light is on all the time.”
Paging your brain?
To get around the questionnaire problem in his own research, Hurlburt deploys a decidedly nonverbal, quaintly low-tech approach: the humble beeper. He tracks individual participants as they go through their daily lives: grocery shopping, commuting, spacing out in front of the television. When the beeper sounds at random intervals, they stop and note exactly what was occurring in their inner experience at that precise moment. No verbal prompt, no appending words onto the experience. Just noting what was actually there.
The process is time-intensive. Hurlburt spends approximately 10 hours with each research subject before he is confident in his results. This is part of why large-scale data collection is challenging.
“It’s going to take us two or three hours for you to figure out how to do a good job of describing that experience,” he says. “But once you get good at it, you can say either ‘I was speaking’ or ‘I wasn’t,’” he says.
Based on the patterns he has noted in his decades of gathering these beeper-prompted samples, Hurlburt says most people speak internally (forming words and sentences in their minds) some of the time, but not as often as they might assume.
“If we put all the samples into one pot, roughly one quarter of those samples are going to involve inner speaking,” he says. “Which means three-quarters don’t.”
But what does a thought consist of, if not words? Turns out, internal monologue is just one of many ways we experience thought, Hurlburt says. Some people think primarily in visual images, emotions, or sensory awareness, like noticing the color of someone’s shirt mid-conversation without it having anything to do with what’s being discussed.
Hurlburt notes that no single style of thinking stands out as superior or preferable—each has its own advantages and disadvantages. In fact, his research has sampled the internal landscapes of some of the world’s most accomplished meditators. Perhaps as you’d expect, their thoughts are not especially wordy.
“Their experience is predominantly in what I call sensory awareness,” he says, “that is, not in words.”
Interestingly, these meditators tend to view Hurlburt’s beeper method as a useful tool for developing meditation skills, like a portable Zen gong.
Lost in translation
So how might Hurlburt’s observations about internal monologue square with the popular concept of “positive or negative self-talk,” the internal practice of either encouraging or criticizing ourselves? The assumption embedded in both is that unhealthy self-criticism can be verbally interrogated or edited.
That perspective helped spawn a whole industry of affirmations and cognitive reframing techniques, but it may not be meeting some thinkers where they are. If some people don’t experience their thoughts through words in general, then the negativity might be arriving through channels that have nothing to do with language. This means verbal reframing tools might be addressing the wrong layer for some people.
“Some people really do say to themselves, ‘You’re a terrible person,’ or ‘You’re fat,’” says Hurlburt. “They have negative thoughts that are expressed as words. But others might use negative imagery or negative feelings to express such self-criticisms.”
Whatever your chosen approach to cognitive reframing, Hurlburt maintains that having a clearer understanding of your internal process is generally quite helpful.
“Having a high-fidelity view of your own inner experience is probably a good idea,” Hurlburt says. “For example, if you were prone to anger, it would be healthy for you to feel that anger rising in the foothills of the anger, rather than in the mountains of the anger.” In other words, it’s better to catch anger, depression, or anxiety early and deal with it, rather than find yourself unexpectedly in the full-blown throes of it.
Or ‘Know thyself,’ as the Oracle would put it.
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