Not everyone has an internal monologue

When I began researching this story, I assumed that I was writing about other people: these fascinating outliers who, it seems, lack internal monologue—the experience of actively speaking words in your mind as a kind of private narration of your life.

Then I got 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 talked about myself? Do I Really think all day in fully formed sentences, or are sentences just the tools I use when I need to explain myself to others? And to what extent do any of us really know the difference?

“Basically everyone – or almost everyone – thinks they have self-talk all the time,” says Hurlburt. “So we have to start from the fact that people ignore their own inner experience.”

“Faulty armchair introspection”

When scientists talk about self-talk, or what Hurlburt calls “inner talking,” they mean the experience of forming words in your mind, sequentially, as if you were saying them out loud. It is not just a vague verbal sense of a thought, but the active experience of stringing words together internally.

Hurlburt says there is no definitive data on how many of us have internal monologue or how often we think that way. The proportion, he says, varies “from zero to 100 percent, and everywhere in between.”

Part of the reason the phenomenon is so difficult to track is that the entire process is stubbornly internal. Tools like questionnaires can be problematic, Hurlburt says, because they pressure the respondent to express their thoughts in words. By tailoring words to these thoughts, a person might falsely believe that this is how they originally experienced them.

Hurlburt argues that the belief that we always think in words arises from what he calls “defective armchair introspection.” When you ask yourself, “What am I thinking about right now?” ”, the verbal nature of this question encourages you to find words to answer.

In this way, we can too easily become the unreliable narrators of our own narrative.

“It’s like the light in the refrigerator,” Hurlburt says. “When you open the door, the refrigerator light is on. This does not mean the refrigerator light is on all the time.”

Beeping your brain?

To get around the questionnaire problem in his own research, Hurlburt deploys a decidedly nonverbal and strangely low-tech approach: the humble beep. It follows individual participants throughout their daily lives: shopping, moving around, spacing out in front of the television. When the beep sounds at random intervals, they stop and write down exactly what was happening in their inner experience at that precise moment. No verbal prompts, no words added to the experience. I was just writing down what was actually there.

The process takes a long time. Hurlburt spends about 10 hours with each research topic before he is confident in his results. This is part of why large-scale data collection is difficult.

“It will take us two or three hours to figure out how to properly describe this experience,” he says. “But once you get good at it, you can either say ‘I was talking’ or ‘I wasn’t talking,’” he says.

Based on the patterns he’s noted during his decades of collecting these beep-triggered samples, Hurlburt says that most people talk internally (forming words and sentences in their minds) from time to time, but not as often as they might assume.

“If we put all the samples in one pot, about a quarter of those samples will involve inner language,” he says. “Which means three-quarters don’t.”

But what does a thought consist of, if not words? It turns out that internal monologue is just one of many ways we experience thought, Hurlburt says. Some people think primarily in visual images, emotions, or sensory awareness, such as noticing the color of someone’s shirt in the middle of a conversation without it having anything to do with what is being discussed.

Hurlburt notes that no one 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 might expect, their thoughts aren’t particularly wordy.

“Their experience lies primarily in what I call sensory awareness,” he says, “i.e. not in words. »

Interestingly, these meditators tend to view Hurlburt’s beep method as a useful tool for developing meditation skills, much like a portable Zen gong.

Lost in translation

So how do Hurlburt’s observations about self-talk fit with the popular concept of “positive or negative self-talk,” the internal practice of encouraging or criticizing oneself? The assumption inherent in both is that unhealthy self-criticism can be questioned or changed verbally.

This perspective has helped give rise to an entire industry of assertions and cognitive reframing techniques, but it may not meet some thinkers where they are. If some people don’t experience their thoughts through words in general, then negativity could arrive through channels that have nothing to do with language. This means that verbal reframing tools may speak at the wrong level for some people.

“Some people are really like, ‘You’re a horrible person,’ or ‘You’re fat,'” Hurlburt says. “They have negative thoughts expressed in words. But others may use negative images or negative feelings to express such self-criticisms.”

Regardless of which approach you choose to cognitive reframing, Hurlburt argues that having a clearer understanding of your internal process is generally very helpful.

“Having a high-fidelity view of your own inner experience is probably a good idea,” says Hurlburt. “For example, if you are prone to anger, it would be healthy for you to feel that anger rising at the foot of anger, rather than in the mountains of anger. » In other words, it is better to detect anger, depression or anxiety as early as possible and deal with it, rather than unexpectedly finding yourself in the middle of turmoil.

Or “Know thyself,” as the Oracle would say.

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