#Inner monologue definition how to#

By posing the question in a textual way, you’re inviting the person to look at their experience from a textual standpoint. He thinks current research on the subject – mainly in the form of written questionnaires – is flawed. The very nature of asking someone “what is going on in your head?” results in a triggering of their “verbal apparatus”, says Dr Hulburt. More recent research places importance on what is now known as ‘inner speech’, with Dutch neurobiologist Bernard Baars concluding in 2003 that when people reflect upon their own inner experience, they often report a verbal quality, and researchers Dolcos & Albarracín findings in 2014 showed that people often talk to themselves using the first‐person pronoun.īut given methodological issues – measuring something in someone else's brain comes with a whole host of problems – research is generally limited. He was of the opinion that inner speech was an internalised form of speaking out loud.

#Inner monologue definition how to#

Lev Vygotsky, a Soviet psychologist and pioneer of research into inner thought, coined the term ‘Private Speech’ after his studies in the 1920s noted that children learn how to talk to themselves through talking to others. I think it is all mistaken” – Russell T Hurlburt, psychology professor, University of Nevadaĭr Hurlburt is somewhat of a maverick in his field his research hasn’t been warmly welcomed by the scientific community, despite the fact he has authored several books on the subject: “I’m trying for the n+1th time to make the point to scientific psychology that inner speech is not as common as we think it is,” he tells Dazed of his life’s work, “almost all research about inner speech says there is a lot of it. “Almost all research about inner speech says there is a lot of it. The idea being that they would get better and better at it and he would end up, after a few weeks, with an accurate portrayal of their mental landscapes.

In his tests he would expose participants to a beeping sound several times a day, and ask them to recount what was going on in their head just before they heard it. Collating his research from over the years, he found that only 26 per cent of samples experienced ‘innerly speech’ – a figure taken from a 2011 blog post of his, which, having resurfaced, has sparked the recent internet frenzy around the subject. Russell T Hurlburt, a professor in psychology at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas has devoted his career to studying the psychological phenomena of what he calls the ‘Pristine Inner Experience’. A recent Twitter thread both fascinated and freaked people out on this very subject. But, did you actually think that in ‘words’, or did it feel more like a conceptual wave of existential dread? There is a population-spanning, plethora of ways that people experience inner thoughts – emotion, sound, feeling, text, imagery – and we’re also pretty hopeless at accurately articulating what our own inner experience is really like.

When you woke up this morning, you probably thought to yourself ‘here we go again’. If you asked most people, they would probably say that they ‘think in words’, or that they have an ‘internal voice’ at least some of the time, which they use for planning and day-to-day thinking. So why does it come as a surprise to hear that most people don’t convert this immense computing power into words? The human brain has more possible neurological connections than there are atoms in the known universe – between ten quadrillion vigintillion, and one-hundred thousand quadrillion vigintillion – that’s quite a lot.