INNER MONOLOGUE DEFINITION HOW TO

However, Kross adds, “As you move up the ladder of complexity in terms of the functions an inner voice serves, I think you see more variability in the degree with which people engage in. By that criterion, we probably all have some sort of inner voice. Virtually everyone can hold information, such as a phone number or a set of directions, in their verbal working memory, he says.

INNER MONOLOGUE DEFINITION HOW TO

It depends on how you characterize the inner voice, says Ethan Kross, a psychologist at the University of Michigan and author of Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It. That doesn’t necessarily mean those people don’t have one, though. In a 2010 Brain Research Bulletin study, 7 percent of subjects did not report having an inner voice. Research from Hurlburt and other scientists - along with plenty of anecdotal evidence - has indicated that some people don’t hear inner speech at all, or at least not according to their definition of it. Some people hear inner voices that may sound like recordings while others describe it as much more vague and fuzzy. In alignment with other similar research, the team found that while some inner speech involves complete sentences and even whole paragraphs (such as rehearsing a conversation you plan to have with your boss), some of it is more fragmentary - just a scrap of a thought here or a word there.Īnd as Hurlburt has discovered after decades of helping people peer into their own minds, there is a huge amount of variation from person to person. A 2019 Frontiers in Psychology study used fMRI to probe what was going on in the brain when people experienced inner speech. While DES is still used, newer techniques and technologies, such fMRI, have aided the study of inner speech. This effectively trained the subjects how to capture those fleeting thoughts as accurately as possible.Īs more research has emerged over the decades, it turns out that inner speech is both more complex and possibly less ubiquitous than most of us thought. After half-a-dozen or so beeps, Hurlburt (and later, other researchers trained in the method) would meet with the subjects and carefully question the notes they’d made. Respondents will typically describe what they think researchers want to hear rather than their genuine thoughts, he says.īut people can learn to pay closer attention. When the beeper went off, the subjects jotted down what was going on in their minds just before.Īccording to Hurlburt, it’s so difficult to study inner voices because people have what he calls “presuppositions” about what’s going on in their minds. Long before most of us had smart phones all but glued to our bodies, Hurlburt designed a beeper that research subjects wore in their ears and sounded randomly throughout the day. As a graduate student in 1973, he came up with something called Descriptive Experience Sampling (DES), a way to investigate inner speech. Russell Hurlburt, a psychologist at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, wants to change that. But as anyone who has tried meditation can tell you, it’s surprisingly difficult to figure out what’s going on even in our own heads. Investigating Inner SpeechĮveryone knows we can’t read other people’s minds.

Despite its important presence in most people’s daily lives, we know surprisingly little about how it works - or how many of us actually have one. Many of us have a consistent dialogue running in our heads that we use for a variety of mental tasks, such as working memory - reciting phone numbers or new friends’ names - and reading.

Inner monologue definition