People who have unusual, or non-existent, inner voices

My partner is one of the most optimistic and positive people I have ever met. One day we discussed negative self talk, and she was like "nope, don't have that", as I was trying to explain the negative self talk. Then she was like "oohhhhh, you mean my brainstorm partner!!!!". Floored me. She just _doesn't_ do negative self talk, instead it's a collaborative problem solving approach. Amazing.

Yeah, I don't really understand how people can have an inner voice. I vocalize text when I read, but it isn't like there is a voice in my head saying "I shall now go to the store", rather I just imagine myself going to the store or taking a shower etc, there is no voice I use to reason about problems etc. It would be so strange to talk to myself rather than just imagine the situations, why would you do that?

And then if you talk to yourself about everything, how do you think about things you can't talk about? When I imagine going to the store I can imagine all the different routes etc in a second, there is no way I can talk about the different routes in a second in an inner voice, so to me the inner voice seems utterly useless at best or it hurts your ability to think at worst.

I thought I didn’t have an inner voice for the longest time because I couldn’t hear it being vocalised. Then one day, while I was narrating how I reacted to an incident to my shrink, she exclaimed, “You have an inner critic!”

I thought about it and tried to develop awareness, because I was aware that my mind generated feelings of guilt, shame, fear, etc. out of seemingly nowhere.

Guess what. I found the inner voice. And it was harshly critical. It constantly contradicted things I did and tried to put me down.

Moreover, I recognised it as the “voice of my family”. I somehow likened it to the way my family members responded when they were at their most critical. While they are not always like that, my voice was always like that. It was like the worst of them in my head all the time.

> I know now I do have an inner critic. It just speaks in my body with emotions like guilt and gut wrenching shame.

This is not exact science, I would say. It is good to have a basic understanding of plenitude of voices, some of them being delicate and fragile, some aggressive and dominating in nature and try to make ever better distinctions (which is which? which part of my behavior is which voice?). It is not that there is only me and my Inner Critic inside me. It is most likely that shame you're feeling after performance comes from a delicate self, which can be called your Vulnerable Child, rather than from your Inner Critic. Lots of sadness, anxiety, shame, retraction comes from such child-like selves (developed during your childhood and still existing functionally in the repertoire of your CNS). These emotions coming from this child like energy are very often accompanied by internalized aggressive energies critical of ourselves. The picture is nuanced, with many parts inside us, interacting with each other.

Accessing this Inner Child energy directly in conversation (sometimes with less words, more like evoking it and just being with it, especially at the beginning) is a profound experience with far reaching consequences (including, once you see it a separate entity inside you, possibility of taking care of this Inner Child by yourself, inside yourself - you just start to take care of this child, which is in fact you... taking care of... you.) It sounds ridiculous, but it is very real.

> Some of my most interesting thoughts I don’t have the words for at all.

That's a really interesting idea, I wonder if leaning so heavily on language can limit our available thought-space. Certainly a Sapir–Whorf tie-in there!

I find when I over-do it with coding I can't stop thinking about everything in terms of coding related concepts and it drives me nuts because I can tell it's gumming up my clarity of understanding

> “Hah maybe I don’t have an inner critic” I thought.

thats your inner voice!

> “Hah maybe I don’t have an inner critic” I thought.

If you've thought "Hah maybe I don't have an inner critic", how did this come about if not through an inner voice?

Thanks for putting this into words. It made so much sense to me that I had to save it for future reference.

Might you have any additional takeaways since gaining that perspective?

It brings up an interesting idea about the relationship between consciousness and written/vocalized words. In my case during the many occasions where I suffered from shame and pain, it actually helps a lot to admit to myself that the feeling being felt is painful, and thus I can actually move on to learn the lesson instead of being trapped by the shameful feelings and my eternal battle of trying to suppress it.

yes, note that nearly all of our thoughts are subvocal/subconscious. some folks have a more active and/or efficient surfacing mechanism than others though.

and a few folks have an overactive vocalization system where most of their subvocal thoughts actually come out of their mouths. i'm always partly fascinated by these folks (just walked past one today), since i tend to be relatively economical in my vocalized thoughts.

Aphantasia: Is there a simple test or procedure we can use to make it easier to decide to what degree we have this or not? It just seems like a topic where expectations can differ a lot. Since it's hard to clearly explain what visualizing feels like and doesn't. Some people might even be very normal and yet disappointed and think they are missing something.

I don't think my mind's eye is particularly strong for example, don't have very vivid imagination. But I also don't know where the frame of reference should be!

I don't even have to close them, I can reproduce pictures of objects, people, scenery etc in my mind while my eyes are open and actively observing other things.

As I type this comment I've got an image of a girl I saw yesterday fixed in my mind, as if looking at a picture of her.

I also assumed this was the norm.

Way back in high school, I took several different tests that would have questions that would show a drawing of a folded piece of paper with a hole in it that would then ask what the pattern of dots on the unfolded page would look like. The ASVAB was one of them IIRC. At the time, I was shocked at the number of people that could not visualize this. Going through life, I then met so many people that would say they could not picture what was being described to the point I thought I just sucked at descriptions. While there may be some truth to that, I learned that aphantasia existed and it wasn't that someone was just not trying very hard.

I can barely do this, at a naturally-occurring rate of maybe one image a month or less. But I can pick up music instantly.

> Do most people mean "multiple voices" when they say "inner monologue" ?

You will find different conceptualizations of this phenomena, but generally speaking it is very prolific to treat mind (term used imprecisely) as comprised of many sub-parts (sub-personalities/voices/selves/states). You can treat them as separate, functional patterns of behavior with their own agendas, feelings, beliefs, etc. The fun part is that you can engage them and talk to them, eg. you can talk to your Inner Child (you will feel it as separate and feel its child like nature) or your Lazy part or any part you recognize as a bigger pattern. You can even talk to your Sorrow, Silence, Energy of Being (as opposed to doing), etc. You can talk to parts of yourself which were dormant or disowned/repressed (eg. Anger, Romantic Self,...). You can talk to your demonized, aggressive Inner Critic.

The changes which occur due to shift in perspective which results from such dialogues are... beyond the scope of this comment. ;)

edit: Seems I am late for the party, but definitely for a treat here (including the article). (I do Voice Dialogue for a living, which is a practical method of meeting those different parts of ourselves.)

Have you tried changing your inner voice to some one else's voice? I'm usually have 1 primary voice but I can synthesize anyone's voice. For example, if I'm reading something that I know was written by a woman my brain automatically makes up a female voice for it.

> I don't have inner voices, there's only me up there

I don't have "me" up there most of the time. Usually only when (a) I'm reading to myself or (b) if I'm practicing/going over a conversation or 'debate' on a concept. Otherwise my mind is usually quiet.

I don't, but I can imagine another voice if needs be; I can imagine some people crafted their internal monologue to be like that. I mean at some point my inner monologue was entirely in English (not my native language), and I spent a lot of time thinking in the style of writing a post on the forum I was active on at the time. I think it's a helpful tool to think outside of your own self (that's the best phrasing I can come up with at the moment).

I think that's where a lot of blogging, livejournaling, tweeting etc comes from as well - it's a way to channel an internal monologue.

Interesting - I experience the opposite in that I can only hear imagined “dialogues” involving other people, but have no inner voice of my own. My emotional priorities dictate what the imagined drama is about and, to be sure, this is a whole lot of self-pity … but the voices have distinct identities and sounds, and none of them are “me”.

Hm... multiple voices would be inner dialog, not monologue.

When others say they can see images and movies in their heads, and hear voices and play back songs in their heads, I believe I know exactly what they mean. Just as if they were describing itching or feeling cold.

Yet some people respond with “You can see pictures? You can hear voices? WAT?? I see nothing and hear nothing!”

I don’t see how those people could be having the common experience and still be so shocked to hear how others experience it in simple terms.

I'm pretty sure that's why it's a favorite - you read a different account and can't really believe it, so you write a comment to make sure they actually do experience the same thing.

> but it’s still me saying it.

It is of course always you, but putting concepts of me/ego/identity aside, you can treat your "you’re being an arsehole" as a certain kind of energy in your consciousness, which tends to make similar remarks and shows up when you're actually acting like an arsehole. The idea here is even bigger - you can talk _both_ to this 'arshole' energy/self (you behaving in a certain way) _and_ to this voice saying "you’re being an arsehole.", critising gently appearance of this 'arsehole' you.

> for some people these thoughts occur unbidden

It is a common experience. Even your examples (“that was dumb” or “you’re being an arsehole”) are not consciously, deliberately invited thoughts and indeed, in in many cases voices can become really strong and talk to you all the time.

When you look at your mind as comprised of different selves/states, which are a bit like independent people inside you operating within you, very interesting things happen.

When we focus on the fact that these parts are _talking_, we can refer to them as voices and _converse with them_, but generally these are your energy patterns, eg. your Lazy energy/part or Workoholic energy/part (or your Arsehole energy/part) shows up. Sometimes (very often) some of them are too strong and show up and stay uninvited.

If it makes you feel any better, I have pseudo-audible inner voices with no self-detectable subvocalization; but it’s never unbidden, and they never, ever seem like someone else talking, even when I’m role-playing the other side of a dialogue.

I think I am a bit like you, I hear voice (my voice when I type or read) and I comment in my head on things around be and things I do, but its me-me, it feels 100% like part of my consciousness aligned with me. It doesn't feel like a separate entity commenting on my life.

I find it fascinating reading about how others' heads are working.

I tied to learn to read faster, and one of the techniques is to stop your inner voice, but I failed. Though maybe I enjoy reading more and acting out the text in my head

> People are hearing actual voices inside their heads?

Yep, and pretty much constantly. Mostly my own, but if I think about someone else speaking - like, say, recalling a conversation or even something from TV/film/radio - then I hear the voice of the original speaker.

My own voice, especially during a period of mental ill-health, gets so fast and/or loud that it can drown out everything else. I've been to gigs while depressed and literally "not heard" entire songs because I was too busy inside.

> Can you all hear things like music and other sounds too?

Can't speak for "all", but definitely for me. Music comes and goes throughout the day; if I choose (or otherwise have cause) to think of a song, I can hear it clear as day. I can be rickrolled just by seeing a line from the song.

Visually I am considerably more blank, however. I can recall things like walking/driving routes, views/vistas, the order of shops on a street, the layout of an airport terminal, etc etc - but I can't legitimately claim to be able to see these things in my mind's eye. They're just somehow there. But it's only a past tense thing - I can't do any active visual thinking about things that don't exist. Ask me to think of an apple and I'll recall one, not conjure one up. But ask me to imagine what a room would look like painted a different colour and I absolutely cannot - even with a swatch of paint already on one wall.

>> People are hearing actual voices inside their heads?

Just to be clear, I do not hear my own voice in the way I would if I am listening to a recording with my voice. There is just a continuous train of thoughts, in one of the languages I know well, coming as if it has bypassed the ears and came directly to my attention or conscious access. I clearly know that it's not coming via the ears.

>> Can you all hear things like music and other sounds too?

Yes. Just in the same way as the above.

There have been times when lyrics of a song played back in my mind where I had no a priori awareness that I even remember those lyrics.

All the time. To be fair, it can be (a little bit) annoying at times too: typically when you have an earworm you can't get rid of, and loops in your head until you actually listen to some other music.

I hate when I hear "random" noises, but my brain tries to hear a rhythm or pattern to the point it stops doing what I feel it should be doing.

I imagine what the guys that create music from gadgets like printers, steam irons, etc. [0] must go through daily. Every little noise sounds like a note/chord that they then are reminded of a song. I'm guessing it gets old/annoying after awhile.

[0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W7eI1-rMkQI

> Can you all hear things like music and other sounds too?

Yes. I do, at least. Not always, but I can imagine music and "hear" it in my head. It's not as though it actually sounds like music (that is, it is perceptually distinct from actually hearing something, I'd never confuse an imagined with a real sound), but I can hear it. It was very useful when I actually played musical instruments, imagining how a piece would sound and then trying it later.

I've heard skilled artists can have aphantasia and my friend who has it gets very vivid dreams interestingly

Do you find you're quicker to read and process things than others seem to be?

Music definitely, it's been stronger at some points in my life, I can't do so easily these days but at one point I could hear and improvise music so clear it felt like everyone else would hear it too if you put an audio jack in my ear

> People are hearing actual voices inside their heads?

Yes. It's my voice, unless it's something written by a person whose voice I'm familiar with.

> Can you all hear things like music and other sounds too?

I can hear music sometimes. Especially just a moment before waking up.

Yes, yes it is.

Is your train of thought in the same order as the spoken/written words that it converts to?

I used to dwell on things like that also. Everyone has done or said things throughout their life that are embarrassing, make you cringe or are stupid. Thats part of you growing as a person, and being able to acknowledge them shows that you have grown!

It sounds harsh but the best advice I've ever received is that "people don't care about you". The context in which it was said was that people engage with you when you're there but when you're not you can expect them to be caught up in their own life, problems, issues and listening to their own inner voice.

I used to be a bit like that. Now I write out the things that were physically true about whatever a disconcerting memory is pointing to, avoiding sentences/grammar/style/references to emotions etc.

I think any emotion held long-term is definitely distorted, if not stigmatic.

I'm sorry, that sounds extremely unpleasant. The only advice I can offer is to look into professional therapy, as that sort of a negative self-talk pattern is extremely difficult to break out of on your own.

> “He can easily while away an hour without having a single thought.” No! It is “not a single _verbalized_ thought”!

I can have stretches of time where I don't have images (or words) in my head. My mind is blank.

I'm very much like this. I can turn it off and on at will. Meditation is easy for me, I just "turn off" the voice and sit. I run long distances and will sometimes realise that an hour has gone by without any thoughts other than "breathe in, breathe out".

I'm focusing on it right now. It speaks in my head as I'm planning out the next sentence I'm going to type, but then once I'm typing it goes away until I need to stop and plan the next words. I also read very quickly, sometimes multiple lines at a time, reassembling the words in context.

The voice certainly doesn't follow me around chattering in my head the way some people's seems to.

I used to have sleep paralysis a lot and during at least one episode I could hear, clear as day, a full orchestra playing in my head as if it was coming from somewhere in the house. And when I broke out of the sleep paralysis there was no sound at all.

So wait, if you close your eyes and picture Mount Everest, you can't see Mount Everest in your head?

For me it's easy to "fly" around my neighborhood just by closing my eyes and remembering what the streets and trees and houses look like as I take a lap. I can see off into the distance, I can see the sidewalk cracks, I can see people... all of them are obviously fuzzed versions of reality but nonetheless they're relatively easy to see. I figured everyone was able to do that to some extent.

I'm the exact same way. No mind's eye, no constant internal monologue (or dialogue), mostly just calm and silence. I think I can sort of visualize voices and music, but clearly not as well as other seem to be able to.

I always thought people who hear entirely understandable voices were the mentally ill people you hear about in the news and in fiction, not for that to be the norm. I do wonder about the statistics on the "internal monologue". I think I saw some stats on aphantasia (not being able to picture things) but that didn't include the internal monologue.

All in all, while I think the capacity to actually visualize things would definitely be welcome, I think I'd go crazy with a constant internal monologue droning on in the background.

Question for you, and those like you:

If you don't see images in your mind, do you see images when you dream?

If you don't have an "inner voice", do you hear sound when you dream?

I have no point I'm trying to make here. I just wonder if there's a correlation with dreams.

If you do not have any discursive thought, I am curious how meditation is for you. Must be incredibly simple and easy.

What happens (or what would happen) if you sit still in silence and darkness and try to observe these "feeling symbols" as they come and go?

You could be better equipped for deep meditation and deep thinking than most of us, but maybe you just need to do some practice.

I agree, if I sometimes vocalize, it takes much longer to go from one thought to the next. The thought itself takes very little time, but the vocalization takes a while, and then delays the next thought.

I've found that sometimes I'll vocalize a thought, and in the middle of it think "why am I vocalizing? I've already thought the entire thought" and just stop vocalizing altogether.

I could say similar things the other way around, but that doesn't make sense as a way to think about this ways of being.

People used to one way or another from childhood don't really recognize any drawbacks to their way of thinking or not.

People who can't think in abstractions have no other way.

I don't have an internal monologue, but I do have that board meeting. Kinda makes me think of that Pixar movie, Inside Out. The whole 'board' doesn't meet all the time, mostly it's very quiet and I get an impression or two, a feeling really, here and there, but when I'm excited or enthusiastic about something, engaged in the moment and I'm presented with a problem to solve, it feels like most of the time a solution just comes to me. Like the board meeting had gone over all the possible options, decided on the best course of action rejecting improbable or difficult solutions, gathered up a dossier with executive summary, schedules, workload estimates, problem analysis, risk analysis, the works, all the details I need to implement the solution to a problem and hands the dossier to me, wordlessly saying "Here's our recommendation". And a lot of the time I just know I have the solution, how to get from A to B without consciously knowing all the steps in between, but knowing all the steps have been figured out and it's in the "dossier". I just need to do it, put it in words and explain to others.

Interestingly enough, I haven't been diagnosed with ADHD, at least not yet, but after discussions with professionals, it seems probable that I may have it, to some degree anyhow

Anyone who can solve a problem without being able to describe what they did in words isn't using an inner voice to solve the problem. So if there exists people who mostly reason about problems using words then there are at least two kinds of ways to reason about problems.

I have a monologue in the form of an argument between different perspectives. I can envision things, but not clearly, so unclear that at first I wasn't sure if I could or not.

I also feel like I have access to a very limited range of active memory, and when I store old information it can be very hard to find. Like a slow and fragmented HDD on a new-ish computer.

For me it's a clear audible monolog which breaks into a dialog of self talk for problem solving and day-to-day planning. It sounds nothing like my physical voice but I feel that's my truest self

I've had this wonderful experience after learning sign language that for the first time I feel like I can talk to other people with the voice in my head! And when they sign back I hear a voice speaking aloud each sign. What I discovered is I'm quite a different person when I don't have to use my physical voice to talk, I'm much more expressive and fun, which I guess I find difficult to translate through the voice of a late 20s man. Something to work on!

Something I've wondered about is how noisy people find images: https://www.reddit.com/r/noisygifs/ is fun to explore. I find all repetitive motion has sound, like anything, no matter how abstract, I cannot help hearing some weird audio pattern when I look at it

A lot of monologue, though sometimes I find the abstract part has raced ahead and finished the thought before the words have time to be thought. If I stop those words because the thought is complete, it feels weird.

Sometimes just visuals, especially when I’m trying to understand geometric problems.

> The very first thing I think of when reading this article is that everyone interviewed except Hopkins is having near-constant auditory hallucinations.

Agreed. The closest I’ve come to this kind of thing is when I take more than 400 mg of caffeine in a single day (I’m genetically sensitive to caffeine). If I do that, then yes, my inner voice will become quite strange.

There’s no other self in my head to debate with. Except when I’m specifically thinking about what someone else would say, in which case I can get fragments of phrases enough to sort-of rehearse different branches of a conversation. I also can’t play chess against myself, because I can see my own logic on both sides, and it nullifies.

Are you suggesting that people without an inner voice are less conscious?

Is that an inner voice though? I get the impression that the inner voice described in the article is involuntary, whereas the thing you describe is simply you, thinking conciously.

Having read the article I find I have no idea whether I have an inner voice or not. I can't imagine an inner voice that I cannot shut down if I want to. And it certainly isn't some other persona; it's just me, 'speaking' without actually making the sounds.

I agree with the other commenter, this is not an inner voice in the sense of the article.

I didn't read the article yet but since you're offering... how do you "think through" problems?

Example, this was a dialogue I had in my head this morning:

"Avenue X has a lot of stop signs which is annoying. But Avenue Y is narrow and it's garbage-pickup time, so I can get unlucky and really stuck behind a garbage truck. That's not worth the risk, I'd rather deal with the stop signs so I am taking avenue X"

What is your equivalent of that? Basically, how do you evaluate two alternatives? And how do you know how you made your choice? EG in my case, I know I picked Avenue X because I prefer the annoyance of stop signs to the risk of getting stuck, because that was part of my conversation. How is it for you?

Question: What happens when you're reading?

For me, my inner voice kind of repeats it, if that make sense. Can't wrap my head around what "understanding" would be without that lol.

Hey! I don't know if I have the voice or not. I seen this on a video (Joe Scott maybe?) a couple of weeks ago and I wondered too. I don't know the difference between thinking and inner voice. Like if I am approaching a road, I don't recall an inner voice telling me to stop but I don't know if that is valid as an example.

The question might be too broad but how do you know you have no inner voice?

I'd love to be you at bedtime. That's when the voices love to just ruin your day/night.

When you hear a song that you know and like, does the music and singing repeat in your head after the song is over?

It's like those bullshit "studies" that claim you can't "dream in color", "can't read in dreams", "can't see new faces" etc etc and you're just left wondering if that person has ever even dreamt in their life.

You can make decisions without an inner voice.

I'm exactly the same as you. When I do have an inner voice it's essentially like talking to myself but without actually mouthing the words. But it's not present at all times, it's mostly there when I want it to. I can also create mental pictures in my head - but it's not like looking at actual pictures at all. I'm pretty convinced that it's possible that we actually all experience the same and just have difficulty explaining what our thinking experiences are like.

Yep, I am a mixed bag as you.

I met few people with exceptional amounts of chatter 24/7. I haven't work with any of them (psychologically), but, best to my knowledge, it is something that serves specific functions(s) in your mind and is susceptible to change, when approached systemically (not treated as a symptom, but rather in a perspective of totality of your experience/existence).

The basic direction is not to get away from it (to supress it using radio), but welcome it, get interested (edit: how would name those six voices?). Of course I can not go any further than tell you, that it is possible to change, imo, if you want to.

Oh good. Think everyone here is trying themselves right now. I don't really see anything when I picture stuff in my head, it is more that I know how something looks or should look or could look and it's much less than a picture, but for sure more than words. And for the inner voice, I hear my own voice in my head, it's like I'm talking to myself all the time, like a crazy person. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

To people that are confused, I offer the mind bleach test.

Have you ever imagined something that disgusted you so much that you wished you could "bleach" the image out of your head?

E.g. if you read a detailed description of the kinds of things a facebook content moderator might have to look at, is it possible for those words to generate an image and for you to regret reading the description?

>There’s a lack of this inner thought which is an actual condition people have

I find this so hard to believe. Are these people even conscious? I can solve math equations, think about my life, write code... all without any inner voice, especially when I'm in a flow state. When I do have an inner voice, I would describe it more like talking to myself without actually mouthing words. But never, ever did I have no "inner thought" at all. Like, I'm always aware of myself and that I'm thinking.

The “mind’s eye” stuff you described very well, I think.

I live with someone who experiences auditory hallucinations. These hallucinations are always telling her deepest darkest fears to her, and she's unaware that its coming from within her. It makes her a little agoraphobic, but even if she doesn't leave the house she hears these voices through the walls and thinks the neighbors are talking about her. I believed her once, but everywhere we move, the neighbors always have the same very intimate things to say about her. I try to point out that logically it's impossible for all these unrelated people to know these things and to talk about them using the same exact language, but it doesn't help. Maybe in the moment it does, but the voices are too persuasive to overcome.

I can more or less do all these things too, but I generally don't. I don't think with an inner voice, even though I can, because it's much slower than millisecond-thoughts.

Same for me.

It's not so explicit for me to say that it's just like it's actually happening. However, perhaps a few same neurons are firing as if it were for real.

I have mental imagery but it loses clarity with age, so I use less and less.

I appear to have both of these things. I wonder if that’s quite common.