Do You Have An Inner Voice?

A Lot of People Don't...

I was having a cup of tea with my youngest daughter this week when she told me something that blew my mind. Apparently, she said, 30-50 per cent of people have no inner monologue.

I scoffed. Like, you’re saying I am living among a large number of aliens whose inner experience is radically different from my own? It was duly Googled - and apparently confirmed. I could not contain my astonishment. My own mental world is so exclusively verbal, that the idea that a very significant number of people don’t think in words knocked me sideways.

A little more research revealed that the truth wasn’t that simple, as this piece in the Guardian from December last year reveals.

The Inner Voice

Another Guardian piece from three years earlier on the same subject, interviews someone called Justin Hopkins, who is 59 and works for a social enterprise in London.

Mystery of the Mind

He doesn’t have an inner voice. There is no one in his brain to blame, shame or criticise. In his head, there is emptiness: just the still warm air before a rustling breeze.

“There’s nothing there,” says Hopkins. “And I don’t think there ever has been.”

So it really does seem to be the case that there are significant number of people who do not have a primarily verbal mental universe I cannot conceive of this in any way since I am talking to myself in the head all the time, at least when I am not engaged in some activity that does not seem to require it - say playing tennis, or, if I remember rightly, having sex.

It also seem remarkable to me that this information is not more widely known, since to me it seems of earth shattering importance. And it explains - to some extent - why I find the behaviour of others so deeply puzzling, and alos why (perhaps) their attempts to articulate their reasons, if they are forthcoming at all, are so unconvincing. It’s because they don’t know themselves, or at least can’t find the words for it. Which is why some people are so often deeply threatened when asked to explain themselves.