Almost everyone thinks with a kind of inner narrator, possibly you are reading this article in your mind with a little voice in your brain, or you are thinking with words "yes, yes, I think with a voice" or even "what is it about?" talking?". That is the most normal thing, the unusual thing is to belong to the 0.8% of people with a silent mind who do not have that voice-over that helps them reflect, make decisions, make the shopping list or vent.
The neuroscientist and professor at the University of Salamanca José Ramón Alonso tells La Vanguardia what the different inner voices are like, what types of personalities these internal interlocutors usually have and some curiosities about the importance and functioning of our voice-over.
Having a silent mind, without an inner voice, is a phenomenon called anauralia, which is the absence of auditory sensory images.
The inner voice “is not the only thought system,” says Alonso, although “not having it is very rare”: according to this neuroscientist, “in a fairly large study with a sample of about 15,000 people, they found that only 0.8% did not have it.” “I experienced an inner voice.”
But how does someone who has no inner voice experience thought? According to Alonso, “the most common thing is to think in images.” Also, understanding thinking in a broad sense, “there are those who think that a form of thought is feelings; Whether you have anger, joy or sadness are ways of dealing with a certain situation.”
In any case, we do not have a single mechanism, “our brain provides us with different tools and each person uses the one that works best for them or several of them, which is what I think most of us do,” he explains.
“The most common thing is to hear an inner voice that we generally identify as ourselves, but there are also people who have an internal conversation in which different voices appear,” explains Alonso.
Why do some think in monologue and others in dialogue? How is that inner voice that the vast majority has? “The theory that has the most support is that our parents tell us as children, for example, “don't pick up the knife” and the child at first repeats it out loud and imitates the words and progressively becomes silent. It is believed that this would be the way in which we take messages from childhood, internalize them and turn them into that inner voice,” explains Alonso.
But perhaps you are one of those people who dialogue in your head, who for example are in a store and your inner voice tells you “I have to buy this because it is beautiful and on sale” and immediately another inner voice disagrees “I don't really need it.” .
In this sense, the professor at the University of Salamanca says that there is a study that states that, “if parents discuss a lot about the way of upbringing, it is very common for the child to internalize those two voices and throughout life, even As an adult, you continue to have two opposing opinions, one stricter and the other more empathetic, for example.”
However, although we often think verbally mentally, whether in monologue or dialogue, “it seems that that inner voice is much simpler than the language” that we normally use to communicate with others. Thus, if we had that dreamed of super power of reading the thoughts of others, we would most likely not understand it completely because it is often unstructured.
Just as everyone has their own personality, so do the voices in your head. This is clear from a study titled Self-Talk: Conversation With Oneself? On the Types of Internal Interlocutors by Malgorzata Puchalska-Wasyl, a psychologist at the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin (Poland), who established four types of internal interlocutors; faithful friend, ambivalent father, proud rival and defenseless child.
The first type described is a “dear friend who supports you,” which is the one that seems most common, explains Alonso. Another is “like a teacher or coach who challenges you by telling you that you can do this better, for example,” which would be what Puchalska-Wasyl called a “proud rival.” The ambivalent father is “a father figure who in some moments is very empathetic but in other cases is very critical” and finally, the defenseless child, “who is valued as the most negative, would be a kind of crybaby child, which is when you complain to yourself about how badly life, people, etc. treat you.”
“Apparently it is a fairly universal classification” and the majority fits one of these four voice profiles, although the profile can change depending on the moment.
And if what your inner voice tells you does not suit you because it is too demanding or too negative, “you can educate yourself in a certain way, you can try to make its messages more positive, to encourage yourself, etc.” because “our brain is very open to what it finds and what we ask of it,” explains the neuroscientist.
We are not used to reflecting on how we think, much less explaining it to other people, which is why many researchers on the subject bring to the table the difficulty of studying it, since most studies are based on surveys that collect the experience of the participants.
However, there are some more quantitative articles that have measured brain activity and have discovered a curious fact: there are two types of voices, one that we use to converse with others and that we sometimes use internally without verbalizing it and another that we use unconscious appears in our brain.
“The deliberate voice and the spontaneous voice are not exactly the same”, sometimes you speak to yourself and other times you listen to yourself. Alonso explains it for example, “when you play sports and you are saying to yourself “come on, let's see if you can get to that tree” it is your inner voice speaking deliberately”, “but other times it emerges by itself as if it had a life of its own” spontaneously, and “they are not the same.” “One is more that you talk to yourself and in others you listen to yourself,” he explains, and they are in different areas of the brain so that “sometimes the hearing areas are activated and other times the speech areas are activated.”
The way we articulate our thoughts is so internalized that “those who do not have an inner voice find it difficult to believe that there are people who do have one and vice versa,” he says.
Every time the topic appears on social networks, thousands of people comment, surprised that there are people who have (or don't) that inner voice and ask each other how they do it, in disbelief that others do not have the same experience.
Reading this article you will have already reflected on whether you have an inner voice, although sometimes the answer is not so simple. At first you may think not, but suddenly, when a while passes, you may surprise yourself with that conscious or unconscious voice reflecting on this topic, or reading this article with your voice.
“It is not a constant experience, it appears at certain times of the day,” explains the neuroscientist, “frequently, for example, in certain moments of stress to help face slightly more difficult moments,” he adds.
Generally that 'little cricket' that we have is positive, but there are a few cases in which it is very harmful, such as "schizophrenia and the rumination that occurs with depression or anxiety, which are things that negatively affect the well-being of the person." person".
Alonso explains important research carried out with schizophrenic patients that shows the importance that the inner voice can have and to what extent it can be modified to turn it into something more positive.
"In schizophrenia, people often hear an inner voice that tells them harmful messages for themselves or for other people, which tells you things like killing your mother." In this context, a study published in The Lancet Psychiatry Journal has been carried out in which professionals "have made a kind of robotic portrait of that voice, asking if it is a man or a woman, what age do they imagine it to be, if it is hoarse, what type of words uses, etc.” and with that information collected, they create a voice filter that a psychologist uses to speak to the patient from another room.
But they not only replicate the voice, this therapy called Avatar also creates a virtual image with a face that the patient can identify with that of the inner voice that dictates malicious messages. With all this, the professional can modulate the harmful message, making it more positive and even bring it back to normal without drugs.
"The patients began to improve magnificently," which is why the study was subsequently expanded "because it seemed that it could be a new tool without drugs or side effects and that would open new perspectives."
