Can you think without the inner voice? This is life with ‘endophasia’

Although thinking with an “inner voice” is considered universal, it is one of the most elusive and difficult to document cognitive phenomena. So much so that Lev Vygotsky, the first scientist to deeply study this internal dialogue, said that it is as mysterious as “the hidden side of the moon.” This Russian psychologist became interested in this topic while studying the way children speak in the early 20th century and developed the following hypothesis: Children first listen to their parents’ instructions, later repeating them out loud. And finally assimilate them. That speech, which gets merged in their mind in the form of verbal thought and remains with them throughout their life.

But if that kind of inner voice is so important for thinking, why do some people say they lack it? This, in part, is the question that University of Wisconsin–Madison researcher Gary Lupyan and his team asked when designing a series of recently published experiments with individuals who say they have no inner voice. Is. The researchers explain, “People sometimes define it as a little voice in your head that appears in your mind when you think or when you read, but we were interested in it because it was something It’s something that people think is universal, but not everyone experiences it.” To elDiario.es.

search for conscience

To solve this mystery, the authors devised a series of simple strategies through questionnaires. Online, For example, one of the tests involved giving them two images and asking them to tell whether the names of the presented objects rhymed (which forces them to think about how the words sound). In the second, they were given a series of words or numbers that they had to say backwards (for which mentally reviewing the words would be a clear advantage).

The result was that the subjects who said they did not have an internal voice – which they called “endophasia” or the absence of an internal monologue – took slightly longer than the rest to complete these tests, But his success rate was slightly worse than others. “This tells us that there are multiple strategies for completing certain tasks,” Lupyan explains. “For example, we think that remembering requires recreating sounds in your mind, but there are other ways to do this. And it also gives us an image of the variability that exists when it comes to the flexibility of thinking and human cognition.

The result tells us about the variability that exists in terms of the flexibility of thinking and human cognition.

In the authors’ opinion, the results confirm that it is not necessary to resort to the little inner voice to think about verbal concepts. They also find a connection between the lack of an inner voice and the lack of ability to produce images, a condition known as aphasia, “Contrary to the common belief that a person is a thinker Oral one of two pictureverbal imagination and visual imagination are actually positively correlated,” they write. “Another thing we noticed is that this one continuum The distribution of which is very similar to what we find in visual imagery,” says Lupyan. “On a scale of 1 to 5, most people would put themselves at a 4. You don’t have a normal distribution around the middle, but a skew to the right.” And no one uses their inner voice to think all the time: “There is a lot of variability within the same person, depending on what you are doing at each moment.”

hazy thoughts

For Agustín Vicente, professor of linguistics at the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU), who has been studying the inner voice for years, this last aspect fits with those that have been documented in other experiments, such as American researcher Russ Hurlburt. This scientist has tried to “capture” the inner voice through a mobile application (impromptu) which alerts the subject randomly several times a day and forces him to write down what he is thinking at that time. Like an ambush to surprise the little voice in action, “But, if you compare what people put in the questionnaire and what they write application, “There are huge discrepancies,” Vicente warned. “There are people who say they have their voice all the time and the app shows them they don’t, and vice versa.”

Hurlburt’s own conclusions about the nature of thought go in the same direction: it is more complex and complicated than it seems, because many things happen in our minds at the same time. “This study also shows that not having an inner voice, apparently, does not cause any harm,” says Vicente, who has studied the phenomenon in people with aphasia and autism. “Subjects can perform this type of task without the need for language, although how they do it remains to be seen.”

A form of “fantasia”

Helene Lowenbruch, leader of the CNRS Psychology and Neurocognition Laboratory and one of the world’s leading experts on the inner voice, finds the rhymes and memory tests in this work interesting, but the fact is that the study Online This did not allow checking whether participants talked out loud while taking the test. “The findings need to be replicated in the laboratory to make sure everything is done quietly,” he says. In any case, he thinks, “this shows that you can have verbal memory, Even if you don’t have an inner voice; “Subjects can think, they just don’t think with the auditory component.”

Experts have a different view of this phenomenon than Lupien’s team and believe that it is a manifestation of “phantasia”, but at the auditory level. He argues, “The inner voice has been discussed for centuries, but interest has recently returned after British researchers discovered patients without visual imagery.” In 2015, when Adam Zeman’s team described the phenomenon of aphantasia, dozens of people began contacting researchers and reporting not only the absence of visual imagination, but also the inability to recreate the sensation of sound, smell, or touch. Also told about the impossibility of.

We say that people who don’t have that inner voice when talking to themselves have auditory/verbal apathy.

“We say that people who do not have an inner voice when they talk to themselves auditory/verbal aphasiaLowenbruch says. The researcher believes that these people talk to themselves, but the difference is that they do so without a voice. To demonstrate this, he and his team are working on designing neuroimaging tests that show the absence of activity in the auditory cortex in people without inner voices. “That is why I believe the term chosen by the authors of this work is confusing, because anendophasia This would be the complete absence of an ‘inner voice’, but even people who say they don’t have an ‘inner voice’ talk to themselves with concepts as though they don’t have one. they hear Voices,” he says.

Despite these various viewpoints, this ‘ghostly voice’ remains a mystery to science. The most direct way to realize this in the mind is to read a text silently, when the so-called “subvocalization” occurs, which is the name given to the production of imaginary voices, ours or those of others, when we read. To understand this, another example is given by neuroscientist and author Oliver Sacks in his book. i see a voice (Anagram, 2003), in which he described the case of a child who gradually lost his hearing and who, at the age of 7, discovered that if people covered their mouths he would be considered a ‘ghost’. The sound stops being heard. He does not actually hear them, because he is already deaf, but what he expects to hear when reading her lips is reproduced in his mind.

In the head of an ‘anendophasic’

Although it is estimated that this absence of an inner voice only affects about 2% of the population, Lowenbruch believes that studying the phenomenon could greatly help in understanding how we think. “We believe that people with this condition cannot test what they are going to say before they speak, which can affect the way they express themselves,” he explains. “People we interviewed said they had difficulties learning to read, especially when they were not allowed to do it out loud. So a good thing for a person suffering from aphasia is to let him read aloud as he learns, and gradually he will associate the written text with meaning.

“If I read by mentally repeating what I read, it would take me years to finish books,” says Juan, 63, who considers himself a person with little or no inner voice. In his case, he does not remember having any problems starting to read, but he reads very quickly without experiencing inner speech. Löwenbruk’s team observed that people without an inner voice read faster, but were stuck in texts that contained complex words or in another language, such as crime novels by Nordic authors. “This is one of those points in which it can be an advantage and a disadvantage,” the expert says: “These people read faster, but when it’s a complex text they have to read it out loud to understand it. ”

I explain everything very briefly and without details. My ability to remember conversations or what was in the room is minimal.

Similarly, there is evidence to suggest that autobiographical memory may vary, and that these people without an inner voice remember facts, but not sensory, visual, or auditory details. “This may be an advantage, because they have fewer bad memories, there is evidence that they are less affected by post-traumatic stress, and they have fewer bad memories.” flashback”, he assures. This is the case of Miguel, 42, whose condition corresponds to aphantasia and anendophasia, and he considers himself a terrific teller of personal anecdotes. “I describe everything very briefly and without details,” he explains. “My ability to remember the conversation or what was in the room is minimal.”

For Lowenbruch, a very interesting aspect is that anyone can have this condition, purely visual aphasia or the lack of an inner voice, and not realize it until someone told them of the existence of this condition. Have not told about. rarity, “This fact suggests that they can function well even without this ‘inner voice’, as this study shows. This is really shocking,” Löwenbruk concluded. This is the case of two people who were consulted for this report without an inside voice, Juan and Miguel, who were not aware of their difference until recently. .

“I think abstractly most of the time,” says Juan. “When I write I translate and sometimes I don’t find the words.” “In my mind I don’t speak, there are abstract concepts that just happen,” says Miguel. “And when reading, the same thing happens to me, I don’t need a voice, I read and that’s it, the same thing happens to me as with images.” Regarding how this can affect him when expressing himself, Juan admits that he has to stop to try to translate the abstract into words. And that’s Miguel. “If I haven’t structured it in advance, ideas become disjointed, and it’s very difficult for me to express what’s on my mind,” he admits. “It is as if the thoughts got lost along the way because they cannot be put into words.”