People With No Inner Voice Have Poorer Verbal Memory
You may have seen the memes on social media: “What do you mean you don’t have an inner voice?”
For majority of us—somewhere between 90% and 95% of the population—this ongoing conversation with ourselves—plays an important role in our daily lives. So it makes sense that we might be surprised in learning that something many of us believed to be a universal is in fact not indicative of the entire human race.
Researchers from the University of Copenhagen and the University of Wisconsin-Madison wanted to investigate whether anendophasia (lack of an inner voice) has consequences for problem-solving. Specifically, they wanted to know if not having an inner monologue impacted performance on verbal memory tasks.
“Some say that they think in pictures and then translate the picture into words when they need to say something,” explained University of Copenhagen postdoc and linguist Johanne Nedergard. “Others describe their brain as a well-functioning computer that just does not process thoughts verbally, and that the connection to loudspeaker and microphone is different from other people’s. And those who say that there is something verbal going on inside their heads will typically describe it as words without sound.”
The Research on lack of inner voice
Nedergard, who also serves as an Honorary Fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and her colleague, University of Wisconsin-Madison Professor of Psychology Gary Lupyan, are being credited as the first researchers in the world to coin the term “anendophasia.” Together, they created four experiments, all of which used nearly 100 participants. Some claimed to have a high degree of inner voice and those who claimed to have very little inner voice.
For the first experiment, they wanted to determine whether there was a difference in how the two groups remembered language input. This involved remembering similar (phonetically or in spelling) words in order. For example, “bought,” “caught,” “taut,” and “wart.”
“It is a task that will be difficult for everyone, but our hypothesis was that it might be even more difficult if you did not have an inner voice because you have to repeat the words to yourself inside your head in order to remember them,” explained Nedergard. “And this hypothesis turned out to be true.”
Indeed, those without an inner voice were “significantly worse” at remembering words.
For the second experiment, they wanted to measure their ability to determine if a pair of pictures contained words that rhymed (e.g., “sock” and “clock”). With the theory being that it’s vital to be able to repeat the words in order to compare their sounds, the scientists found that the group without an inner voice also performed significantly worse.
In two additional experiments, the participants were asked to quickly switch between different tasks and to distinguish between figures that are very similar. They found no differences between the group with members who have a high degree of inner voice and those who have anendophasia.
Why were there no differences between the two groups in the two additional experiments?
“Maybe people who don’t have an inner voice have just learned to use other strategies,” says Nedergard. “For example, some said they tapped with their index finger when performing one type of task and with their middle finger when it was another type of task. The experiments in which we found differences between the groups were about sound and being able to hear the words for themselves.”
Real-word applications
If you’re wondering whether not having an inner voice has any practical significance, Nedergard says that’s yet undetermined.
“But there is one field where we suspect that having an inner voice plays a role, and that is therapy,” says Nedergard. “In the widely used cognitive behavioral therapy, for example, you need to identify and change adverse thought patterns, and having an inner voice may be very important in such a process. However, it is still uncertain whether differences in the experience of an inner voice are related to how people respond to different types of therapy.”
The study was published in an article entitled, “Not everybody has an inner voice: Behavioral consequences of anendophasia” in the May 10, 2024 journal “Psychological Science.”
MBJ
Wendy Burt-Thomas writes about the brain, mental health and parenting.
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