Do you talk to yourself in your head? (Not everyone does)

Speaker 1 You're listening to 20,000 Hertz.

Speaker 4 In movies and TV shows, it's pretty common to hear a character's inner monologue.

Speaker 3 In this Seinfeld episode, Elaine gets stuck in a subway car and starts panicking to herself.

Speaker 7 What if I'm here for the rest of my life?

Speaker 7 Maybe I'll get out in five seconds.

Speaker 9 One banana.

Speaker 10 Two banana. Three banana.
Four banana.

Speaker 13 In adaptation, Nick Cage plays a neurotic screenwriter who's constantly second-guessing himself.

Speaker 14 I'm a walking cliché. The dentist called again.
I'm way overdue. If I stopped putting things off, I would be happier.

Speaker 6 And in Dexter, a lot of the dry humor comes through Dexter's inner monologue, like when he looks into an empty box of doughnuts.

Speaker 15 Just like me.

Speaker 15 Empty inside.

Speaker 5 This trope never really seemed weird to me because it's not too far off from the way that I think.

Speaker 16 On an average day, I spend plenty of time talking to myself, debating myself, putting ideas into words, and it all happens in my head.

Speaker 12 Honestly, it can be exhausting.

Speaker 5 It's so persistent that I just assumed everyone else did this.

Speaker 3 But then I came across this YouTube video from the CBC that completely blew my mind.

Speaker 11 I'm Olivia Rivera, and I don't have an internal monologue.

Speaker 7 I always thought it was something that people just manifested and made up for movies and books and characters just to kind of like explain your inner thought process.

Speaker 7 But I didn't realize that it was actually that constant for people that people did actually have a little kind of voice in their head telling them what to do and what to think and stuff like that i don't have that

Speaker 4 until that moment i had no idea that some people don't have an inner monologue and i'm guessing there's a bunch of people listening right now who are just as surprised as i was But at the same time, there are probably other people thinking, yeah, I don't talk to myself in my head either.

Speaker 4 Although, that's not exactly right because those people don't think in words.

Speaker 5 When I started looking into this topic, I realized it was way over my head.

Speaker 3 So I got in touch with producer and journalist extraordinaire Olivia Rosenman to help me unpack this.

Speaker 5 I'll let Olivia take it from here.

Speaker 7 What was running through your head right before you started listening to this podcast?

Speaker 21 The problem with inner speech is that it is by definition private.

Speaker 7 That's Charles Fernihoe, a psychologist at Durham University in the UK.

Speaker 21 It is something that is going on in your own head that nobody else can hear.

Speaker 7 What about when you first woke up this morning? Or while you brushed your teeth last night? What were you thinking then?

Speaker 21 It's just you talking to yourself with no external signs at all.

Speaker 7 Were you actually talking to yourself? Or was there something else going on in your head?

Speaker 21 Inner speech is a kind of inner experience, but there's a lot more that goes on in our inner experience than just inner speech.

Speaker 7 Think about just how much goes on in your mind. From your most personal thoughts and feelings to mundane lists of all the things you have to do.
Songs get stuck in there. Hopes and dreams.

Speaker 7 That awkward thing you said at a work meeting three months ago that you just can't stop thinking about.

Speaker 21 We're commiserating with ourselves. We're being creative.
We're rehearsing. We're doing all these different things.

Speaker 7 There's a whole world inside your head. But can anyone else ever really understand it?

Speaker 21 The problem we have as psychologists is how on earth do you get at it? How on earth do you find out about other people's inner speech?

Speaker 7 So how do you study what's inside people's heads? One way is to put people in various scenarios or have them perform different tasks and actually scan their brains while they're doing them.

Speaker 7 But there's another method.

Speaker 21 Russell Hilbert's work, his approach is a very intensive attempt to get at what's going on in a person's experience.

Speaker 15 If you're a subject in my research, I give you a beeper.

Speaker 7 That's Russell Hilbert, a professor of psychology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Speaker 15 The one that I use mostly looks more or less like an iPhone kind of a thing.

Speaker 7 The beeper has an earphone attached to it, so you can hear it at all times.

Speaker 15 And you carry it into your natural environment, doing whatever it is that you do.

Speaker 7 Answering emails, making breakfast.

Speaker 15 Going to the grocery store, driving to the gas station, whatever, wearing this beeper. And at random times, it will beep.

Speaker 7 When you hear it, you're supposed to record exactly what was going through your head just before the beep. You can write it down in a notebook or on your phone.
You can record a voice memo.

Speaker 15 But you'll get half a dozen beeps in that way. And then we'll get together and we'll talk about that.

Speaker 7 In these interviews, you have a conversation with Russell about what you noted down after each beep, and he collects all of that material as data for his research.

Speaker 7 It's a method he calls descriptive experience sampling, and he's spent years perfecting it, including the beep.

Speaker 15 So we can't use a phone ring or something like that, because then your experience would be...

Speaker 19 Oh, my phone's ringing.

Speaker 7 Wait, that's not my phone. Oh, yeah, it's that beeper thing.

Speaker 19 Oh, I'm supposed to record my thoughts.

Speaker 7 But of course, that moment of hesitation would mess up your inner experience.

Speaker 15 So we need to have a a well-crafted beep, which in my world is a 700 hertz tone.

Speaker 7 It's almost like you have to ambush the thought in order to catch it.

Speaker 11 I think that's exactly right.

Speaker 7 As part of reporting this story, I volunteered to participate in Russell's research. So he FedExed me a beeper all the way from Nevada to Australia and I carried it with me everywhere I went.

Speaker 7 Every time it went off, I'd try to remember what I'd just been thinking about and how I'd been thinking it. At At first, I actually found it really difficult, but apparently that's pretty common.
So,

Speaker 7 Dallas. Yes.
Tell me what is going on inside your head right now.

Speaker 3 It's interesting because nothing's happening inside my head when you ask.

Speaker 22 I

Speaker 3 write in my head nothing. I think you put me on the spot and I'm like, oh.

Speaker 1 I can't think of a single thing.

Speaker 5 I feel like I'm ruining this.

Speaker 7 You're not ruining it. Relax.

Speaker 7 I think one thing that I have found really interesting about this topic and then being involved in the research is it's amazing how hard it is to describe what's going on in your head when you're put on the spot like that.

Speaker 15 If you're a typical subject, you're not very good at it on the first day.

Speaker 15 So I'll say, well, you're pretty much typical of all subjects. Let's do it again.

Speaker 7 So you do it again and you get a little bit better. And by the third or fourth time,

Speaker 15 then you'd probably be really pretty good at it. And then we could start to be sort of confident that we knew what we were talking about with each other.

Speaker 7 I did this combination of beat monitoring and interview with Russell about five times. And honestly, I was surprised by what was going on in my head.

Speaker 7 Mostly it was words, there were a few pictures, and there was also a lot of music. Snippets of songs.

Speaker 7 Classical music.

Speaker 7 and also just way too many jingles from my two-year-old's noise-making toys that I never buy, but somehow seem to find their own way into my house.

Speaker 7 But one of the most interesting things I learned in the process is not to trust my intuition about how I think.

Speaker 15 I would say that maybe the number one take-home message from my work is that you shouldn't trust your own armchair introspection about your own experience.

Speaker 7 So when I first read about this topic, I thought, oh no,

Speaker 7 I never think in words.

Speaker 5 Really?

Speaker 7 Yeah, yeah, that's what I thought. I thought, oh, yeah, no, it's just I kind of think in a, in a much more notional, kind of unspecified way.

Speaker 7 I'm very rarely having a monologue or a dialogue running through my head.

Speaker 3 To me, that sounds amazing.

Speaker 7 Well, what I later discovered, however, was that I was wrong. I often, very often, have words running through my head.
Why is it so cold in here? What time do I need to leave to get home by seven?

Speaker 7 Where did that toy even come from?

Speaker 7 I will often be practicing or rehashing a conversation I've had with someone or that I want to have with someone, even though I know I'm not ever going to have that conversation with that person.

Speaker 23 Yeah, like if I'm preparing for a conversation with someone, I can definitely kind of perceive their side of the conversation in my head, in their voice.

Speaker 7 Yeah, totally.

Speaker 7 Part of the reason this task is so hard for people is because the word think has so many different meanings.

Speaker 21 The term thinking is just so broad as to be almost useless. Because really thinking is just everything the conscious mind does.

Speaker 15 I eventually discovered that people mean very different things about their own inner life when they use the word thought or thinking.

Speaker 7 Your definition of thinking really depends on on your own inner experience.

Speaker 15 And if you're a person who speaks to yourself, then what you mean by thinking is speaking to yourself.

Speaker 15 And if you're a person who sees a lot of visual imagery, then by thinking you mean I was seeing a visual image.

Speaker 21 So while the word might be useful in everyday conversation, In terms of scientific psychology, I think we can steer clear of the term thinking and focus on much more specific terms.

Speaker 21 It also gets us away from the problem that philosophers have grappled with for centuries, millennia.

Speaker 7 That problem is, do you need language in order to think?

Speaker 21 And I just think that's had enough airtime over the centuries. And it's self-evidently wrong.

Speaker 21 You know, you can look at any small baby and you can see a person without language who is doing an awful lot of intelligent stuff.

Speaker 7 In humans, thinking begins well before speaking does. But even after we learn to talk, some of us don't rely on language in order to think.

Speaker 7 Thankfully, Russell has come up with a classification system for the things that happen inside people's heads. There are five different categories.

Speaker 7 Category one, inner speaking.

Speaker 15 Where people talk to themselves and that experience for most people is pretty much like speaking aloud.

Speaker 3 We asked our listeners to call in and describe their own inner experience.

Speaker 6 And like me, many of you talk to yourselves in your head.

Speaker 7 I definitely think in words, but it's almost like it's slowed down into a sitcom voiceover.

Speaker 15 Hmm.

Speaker 7 So listeners, what did she do next? What should she do next? What does she really think about that?

Speaker 15 Hmm.

Speaker 24 I have an internal monologue that maybe 95% of the time is a more calm and collected version of myself.

Speaker 2 This is how I think.

Speaker 7 Full-on conversations, full-on TED Talks inside my brain.

Speaker 3 It feels like there's an internal debate going on between multiple versions of me and sometimes it's very hard to say, hey everyone up there, stop and shut up for a second.

Speaker 7 Category 2, visual imagery.

Speaker 15 So they have the experience of seeing when there's nothing in the real world that looks like what they're seeing.

Speaker 26 When I think about my day, I see the actual pictures. I see the events.
I see what could happen, what might happen, worst case scenarios, best case scenarios.

Speaker 24 So rather than thinking the sentence, I'm going to the city to shop today, it would rather just be a fleeting image of my getting in the car and arriving at what I recognize to be the city.

Speaker 8 For me, you know, played out as a movie or play.

Speaker 27 It's one of the reasons why I think I don't dream at night because I'm constantly wasting my dream juice during the day with this daydream 2.0.

Speaker 7 Category 3. Emotions.

Speaker 15 People have feelings, and some people have feelings a lot and other people don't.

Speaker 7 If it's my feelings or emotions or things like that, I kind of just feel them.

Speaker 7 I don't really have a word to them.

Speaker 7 Category 4, sensory awareness.

Speaker 15 So you might be seeing the computer screen, but paying particular attention to the color of of the font, or if I'm attending to a scratchiness in my throat, I would call that a bodily sensory awareness as well.

Speaker 7 Category five. Well, this one is a bit harder to define.

Speaker 15 The fifth one is what I call unsymbolized thinking.

Speaker 15 And people who engage in unsymbolized thinking will be able to tell you, I was thinking about something, and this is exactly what I was thinking about.

Speaker 15 It's not a vague thing, but that thought is not conveyed in words or visual images or any other kind of symbols.

Speaker 7 If I'm like, for instance, planning out my day, it's not so much like a list of words or things. It's kind of more like a flowchart of like places and concepts.

Speaker 25 What I find is that my thoughts are formed in simply the language of thought. There's no diction or syntax in this language.
It's just a jumble of synapses firing.

Speaker 25 It's a tangled mess of cables and unmatched socks. They present themselves as disordered masses without visible structures of coherence or networks of logic or data to tie it all together.

Speaker 7 According to Russell, all five categories are pretty much equally common, and each one is a sliding scale. So you might do a little of one category and a lot of another.

Speaker 7 Some people might even do them all at the same time.

Speaker 7 My thoughts encompass all the senses. It's just words.
It's an image I see. It is something I taste.
It is something I feel. It is something I smell.
And it just, it's all encompassing.

Speaker 7 It's as if I'm actually living that thought at that moment.

Speaker 7 But for people who do think in words, why exactly do we do it? When did humans start doing it? And what about people who experience voices that don't seem to be their own?

Speaker 8 That's all coming up after the break.

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Speaker 3 Up until recently, I was under the impression that everyone thought in words.

Speaker 19 But when we asked our listeners, I was surprised by how many of you apparently don't.

Speaker 7 Of course, Russell Herbert would say that we should take all of those messages with a grain of salt.

Speaker 7 And that's because, as my experience showed, people's instincts about how they normally think can often be wrong.

Speaker 7 Still, it's clear that talking to yourself in your head is not universal, even if it is extremely common.

Speaker 21 Lots of people do it, actually.

Speaker 21 They probably do it because at least some of the time it's helpful, it's useful. And the question I want to ask is, how is it useful? What kind of language goes on in people's heads?

Speaker 7 For Charles, the most useful term for this phenomenon is inner speech.

Speaker 21 I have concerns with some of the other terms that float around. So you often hear the term internal monologue.
That's fine, except I don't think inner speech is a monologue for a lot of the time.

Speaker 21 In fact, I think a lot of the time it's a dialogue.

Speaker 5 It's like different voices of different emotions.

Speaker 3 And, you know, point, counterpoint, the angel on one shoulder, the devil on the other shoulder.

Speaker 19 It's all me, and I hear it or perceive it in my own voice, but it's almost just like I'm talking to myself and working problems out.

Speaker 7 Another term people use is inner voice.

Speaker 21 My problem with that term is it just gets overgeneralized to incorporate all sorts of experiences that people have.

Speaker 21 They say, my inner voice told me to make some moral choice, or they say, my inner voice is guiding my creativity. And that's all fine, but is it actually about language? Is Is it actually about words?

Speaker 21 Is it actually about speech?

Speaker 7 One thing that Charles hopes to learn is when and why this inner speech begins in people.

Speaker 21 The theory that I've followed and tried to develop is the theory of the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky, who argued that children start off in the social world.

Speaker 21 They're interacting with others from day one.

Speaker 21 And when language kicks in, around about 12 months roughly, it gives the child so many different ways, so many powerful ways to interact with other people.

Speaker 7 Suddenly, they can tell people when they want something.

Speaker 8 I want a cookie.

Speaker 7 What they like and don't like.

Speaker 9 I like dogs.

Speaker 35 Spin this is gross.

Speaker 7 And what they want to do next.

Speaker 35 Let's play legus.

Speaker 21 So language starts off as a social thing. And in time, those words which were directed to others get turned back onto the self.
So first through this out loud stage of private speech.

Speaker 7 When he says the out loud stage of private speech, he's referring to that thing you often see toddlers do where it's kind of like they're narrating their life.

Speaker 35 I'm building a sandcastle. I'm taking puppy dog over here.

Speaker 21 And then eventually the whole thing goes upstairs, the whole thing becomes internalised and becomes the inner speech that you and I would recognize.

Speaker 7 But why do we take it upstairs?

Speaker 21 There are all sorts of interesting evolutionary psychological stories you could tell about this.

Speaker 7 The first one starts hundreds of thousands of years ago when humans were nomadic hunter-gatherers.

Speaker 7 First we started speaking to each other, which was really useful for collaborating, problem-solving, forming relationships.

Speaker 21 And then we thought, hey, it's pretty cool I can talk to myself and I can make stuff happen. I can make things easier for myself as I'm working through problems.

Speaker 7 But we quickly figured out that there are some good reasons for keeping our self-talk on mute.

Speaker 21 One would be that you don't want to give your location away.

Speaker 21 You know, when you're trying to keep away from the saber-toothed tigers, you don't want to be mumbling to yourself out loud as you cower behind a bush.

Speaker 7 Another reason has to do with competition among your own species.

Speaker 21 If you think all your best ideas out loud, somebody else is going to nick them. You're going to give your plans away.
You're going to, you know, lay your cards on the table.

Speaker 7 In modern society, the pressure to keep our thoughts inside often begins begins at school.

Speaker 21 And any elementary classroom teacher will say to you, if you had 30 kids talking out loud to themselves the whole time, it would be quite hard to make anything happen.

Speaker 21 So culturally, one of the things that has happened to us is that we go to school and we keep those words into ourselves. We put a lid on it.

Speaker 7 Quiet down.

Speaker 7 So whether you're a cave dweller or a preschooler, there are plenty of reasons not to talk to yourself out loud all day. But as you get older, that can change too.

Speaker 21 My son caught me coming out of a room the other day and sort of gave me a funny look and said, were you just talking to yourself? And I said, yes, I do that all the time.

Speaker 21 I'm pretty sure I didn't do that when I was his age. So it's about the social inhibitions.
It's like, well, are you happy to dance to ABBA at a wedding?

Speaker 21 You know, you don't care so much as you get older.

Speaker 7 But while inner speech can help us plan and create and problem solve, it definitely has a negative side.

Speaker 7 For many people, inner speech can be a source of great discomfort.

Speaker 21 So worries and anxieties and particularly rumination, thinking in words over and over again about something that's happened can be a really troublesome thing for a lot of people.

Speaker 7 Persistent negative self-talk is often associated with conditions like anxiety and depression. But we're still learning about how these things interact.

Speaker 15 For instance, most people do not experience themselves as saying something in their head before they say it out loud. There are some people who do that, and I associate that with anxiety.

Speaker 15 Some people who have anxiety do experience themselves as innerly speaking before they outerly speak.

Speaker 7 But so far, it's not clear whether this tendency is a cause of anxiety or a result of it. Another potential problem comes when you start experiencing speech that doesn't seem to be your own.

Speaker 21 Voice hearing. It comes in many, many different shapes and sizes.
It can be very distressing.

Speaker 7 One hypothesis is that these voices are essentially just a type of inner speech that somehow gets misidentified.

Speaker 21 Maybe what's happening when someone's hearing a voice is that they're actually just doing some inner speech, but for some reason they don't recognize that speech, that language that results as being something they themselves produced.

Speaker 21 And so it's felt, it's experienced as an external, as an alien voice.

Speaker 7 To help treat people who are distressed by the voices they hear, Charles and a team of researchers have been developing an unusual technique.

Speaker 21 So one of the things that we do in our therapy is we ask people to kind of play around with their inner speech, to do some inner speech, but do it, you know, making the sound of Donald Duck.

Speaker 21 Or some other kind of strange, funny accent.

Speaker 15 I'm a number one.

Speaker 21 Whatever they want, whatever they feel comfortable with.

Speaker 21 And for some people that helps them to understand that this thing that's going on in their head is actually just them speaking and it's something that they can have some control over.

Speaker 21 It doesn't work for everyone. It seems to work particularly for people who are just starting to have these experiences for the first time.

Speaker 7 We still have so much to learn about how our brains work. But the answers are out there.
And as Russell's research has shown, you can get a long way just by talking to people.

Speaker 15 People want to tell you about what's going on in their experience as it actually is.

Speaker 15 I think they know the difference between what their actual experience is and what they have practiced telling their friends or the mask that they put on.

Speaker 21 Inner speech is so intimate. It's so familiar that we hardly know we're doing it.
And when you ask people about it, you often get this sense of surprise of, oh, I never really thought about that.

Speaker 21 but actually, of course, I should have thought about that because I probably do quite a lot of it.

Speaker 6 The brain is our most complex organ.

Speaker 16 It's the control center for all of our movements, our senses, our thoughts, our feelings.

Speaker 5 And the way we experience the world on a day-to-day basis ties into all of these things.

Speaker 8 So understanding this better will open up all kinds of possibilities in mental health, in early childhood education, in medicine, and beyond.

Speaker 21 Inner speech probably connects with all sorts sorts of other things that we do with our emotions, with our creativity, with memory.

Speaker 21 It's a kind of currency or a common language for much of what our minds do, I think. And that to me is about as interesting as it gets.

Speaker 16 20,000 Hertz is produced out of the sound design studios of DeFacto Sound.

Speaker 7 This episode was written, produced, and reported by Olivia Rosenman.

Speaker 29 It was story edited by Casey Emmerling.

Speaker 31 With help from Grace East.

Speaker 16 It was sound design and mixed by Justin Hollis.

Speaker 5 Thanks to our guests, Charles Fernihoe and Russell Hurlbert.

Speaker 17 To learn more about this topic, check out Charles' book, The Voices Within, and also check out Russell's book, Investigating Pristine Inner Experience.

Speaker 4 There are links to both in the show notes.

Speaker 17 Thanks to all of the listeners who sent in messages about this, including Charlotte, Gil, Kim, Christopher, Linda, Meg, Paul, Rahul, Rowan, Cece, and Trevor.

Speaker 17 Here at 20,000Hz, this topic sparked a lot of interesting conversations.

Speaker 3 So if you know someone who would like this episode, I'd really appreciate it if you would share it with them.

Speaker 16 I'm Dallas Taylor. Thanks for listening.