September 2020
Silently talking to yourself in the third person, hearing voices alien to yourself, talking to yourself in the first person, and thinking in words are all things that many people do, but not all. Why we do/don’t do it is barely understood. There is quite a bit of research on hearing voices in schizophrenia and other psychopathological states, but very little done with people who are quite normal in other ways. A symptom of hearing voices in schizophrenia is an accepted diagnostic symptom, but it is possible to hear voices and not have schizophrenia. Hearing voices is a fact of life for people across many, if not all, cultures and in earlier times was viewed as hearing God’s voice or those of an angelic/or other realm. Most inner speech isn’t about hearing voices, however.
Inner speech, also called an internal monologue, self talk. inner discourse or internal discourse, is a person's inner voice which provides a running verbal monologue of thoughts while they are awake. It is usually tied to a person's sense of self and is particularly important in planning, problem solving, self-reflection, self-image, critical thinking, emotions, and subvocalization (reading silently). It is thus relevant to a number of mental health issues like depression and anxiety, and bulimia nervosa, as well as certain psychotherapies, such as cognitive behavioural therapy and narrative therapy, where self talk is altered from negative self talk to positive.
The ‘why’ of self talk has a number of theories. In the 1920s, Swiss developmental psychologist Jean Piaget proposed the idea that private (or "egocentric") speech - speaking to yourself out loud - is the forerunner of social speech and that it dies out as children grow up, which it clearly doesn’t. In the 1930s, Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky proposed instead that private speech develops from social speech, and later becomes internalised as an internal monologue, rather than dying out. This interpretation has come to be the more widely accepted, and this supported by empirical research.
Many of us engage in self talk, but what or who does this self talk sound like to us? In the last few decades researchers have examined this question in more depth. In one study, a Polish psychologist, Malgorzata Puchalska-Wasyl, asked his subjects to describe the different kinds of inner voices they conversed with and came up with a list of four common internal interlocutors: the faithful friend; the ambivalent parent; the proud rival; and the helpless child. Each voice might pop up in different situations – an ambivalent parent-type might offer caring criticism, but a proud rival-type is more likely to be focussed on success rather than offering support. We might adopt these different roles to help ourselves get through situations like a difficult exam or sports game.
Traumatic experiences also have a role in the quality of self talk. The inner critic seems to arise from early childhood experiences where the child feels they are not meeting the expectations of her/his parents and so their inner voice tells them to metaphorically ‘pull their socks up and do better.’
Some people don’t have an internal voice at all. Russell Hurlburt, an American psychologist currently working in the field, says that the thoughts running through our heads don’t often take the form of words, contrary to popular opinion. He believes that most people think in pictures, abstractions, symbols, algorithms, geometry, emotions, and other sensorial ways, and only 3% of people think in words. Whether this is true or not, it certainly gives one something to consider. Hurlburt’s views are absolutely counter to the once fashionable idea that all thought is inner speech, but how and where we study the business of thinking naturally limits our conclusions. We can race down the rabbit hole of the question, ‘What is a thought’ because the explanations of this (that it is a representation or a map of something or a form of information) doesn’t help. What is useful, at least as I see it, is how we make sense of things and how we may avoid getting caught up in negative thinking through accusatory self talk. That’s what interests me.
