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“The mind makes its own place, and can of itself make hell a heaven, and heaven a hell,” the Englishman wrote. John Milton In his poem Lost paradise In 1667.

It has always been assumed that among thoughts and emotions there is also an inner voice as a universal characteristic of human beings. It is the discourse that people “hear” when they think or read. However, researchers in Cognitive neuroscience And psychology They realized that between 5 and 10% of people They do not have the experience of feeling this inner voice.

Researchers Johan Nedergaardl Denmark– who was interviewed information-And his colleague Gary Lupyanthe follower United StateThey set out to study what this deficiency means and named it “AndonovasiaThey have just published their research in the journal Psychological sciences.

They revealed that phaselessness can have consequences: people have more difficulty performing verbal memory tasks. Because they don’t have an inner voice, some people told researchers that they think in pictures and then translate the pictures into words when they need to say something.

Others describe their brain as a well-functioning computer, but it does not process thoughts verbally, and that communication with a speaker and microphone is different from that of other people. And those who say that there is something verbal inside their heads often describe it as words without sound.

In conversation with informationIn fact, it was known that there were people with aphasia, said Dr Nedergaard, a linguist who works at the University of Copenhagen. But he noted, “In recent years, the science and philosophy of inner speech have begun to take these individual differences seriously.”

The same applies to “imagination“, which is the absence of mental vision or the inability to visualize mental images.

“The aim of the new study was to verify whether… Andonovasia It has some consequences on behavior. “It may simply be a matter of what different things mean when we say ‘inner speech’ or perhaps a lack of awareness of it,” the researcher said.

“We found that a self-reported tendency to use inner speech was associated with performance on some tasks that require saying things out loud in your head, suggesting that people who claim they don’t experience inner speech are right to some extent.”

There is a theory, often attributed to developmental psychologist Lev Vygotsky, that inner speech comes from regulatory speech that caregivers direct at children. For example, “Don’t touch the hot stove” or “You have to stack the bricks this way to build a tower,” the scientist commented.

“Most children go through a period when they talk out loud to themselves. This is known as ‘private talk.’ This happens between the ages of 2 and 7, but usually becomes ‘covert’ around age 4 or 5, when children stop talking to themselves.” “The theory is that inner speech in adults arises from there.”

He wondered, do people who do not have an inner voice discover it easily? information. “According to the people I’ve talked to, they’re usually quite clear that they don’t have an inner voice as soon as we start talking about it. Sometimes they say they would find it annoying or frustrating to have it. If not, the person isn’t used to thinking In this or that kind of introspection, he may need to spend a few days trying to realize what usually goes through his mind and its form (speech, visual or spatial images, etc.).

Dr. Nedergaard responded, “I’m opposed to talking about aphasia as something that needs to be diagnosed. “I don’t think we know enough about this phenomenon yet to determine how harmful it is to have no inner voice, if at all.”

This is a very new area of ​​research, so there’s a lot we don’t know yet. I can only say that people who don’t have the inner voice find it more difficult to perform tasks that specifically require saying things out loud in their mind, such as remembering words in order or Judge the rhymes.

One can imagine that “the lack of inner speech might have consequences for self-reflection or social interactions – if we rely on theories about the purpose of inner speech – but it is too early to say more about this. These are questions for future research,” he stressed.

To publish the study, Nedergaard and Lupyan included 93 people from the United States as participants. Of this total, 46 people had low levels of inner speech, while 47 people had high levels of inner speech. They were all native English speakers.

Participants were subjected to four experiments, for example, remembering words in sequence and moving from one task to another. They found that there were differences in verbal memory for people who did not have an inner voice. But they are not noticeable in their daily conversations.

People who reported experiencing a high degree of inner voice or very little inner voice in everyday life were subjected to an experiment aimed at determining whether there were differences in their ability to remember linguistic input and those in their ability to find rhyming words. The first experiment consisted of participants remembering words in order, that is, words that were phonetically or orthographically similar.

Participants without an inner voice had difficulty remembering words. The same was true for the task in which they had to determine whether a pair of pictures contained rhyming words.

The scientist admitted that there is still much to be investigated, and stressed that there is one area in which the presence of an inner voice is suspected to play a role, which is therapy.

In the case of the widely used cognitive behavioral therapy, negative thought patterns need to be identified and changed, and the presence of an inner voice can be very important in this process.

However, it is still unclear whether differences in the experience of the inner voice are related to how people respond to different types of therapy.

“The experiments where we found differences between groups related to sound and the ability to hear words themselves. “I would like to study whether it is simply because they are not experiencing the sound aspect of language, or if they are not thinking at all about linguistic form like most other people,” he said. .

Her future research will address this question: “I am interested in the possible consequences of social interaction (since people with little inner voice do not rehearse or simulate conversations).”

He also noted that I would be interested in knowing “if it could be verified whether disarticulation is in fact a complete lack of internal linguistic activity or whether it is more accurately described as a lack of experience with someone’s imagined speech sounds or imagined expressions.” The inner voice.