Is Your Inner Voice a Voice?

Source: Anthony Tori / Unsplash

Somehow, I’ve labored under the impression that everyone experiences their thoughts in the same way. That is, like me. And my thoughts are almost entirely verbal. I have a distinct inner voice that speaks to me much of my waking hours. And it is a voice. My own—at least as I perceive it when I speak out loud (although much softer and with less prosody). It’s the same voice I “hear” when I am reading or writing. Mixed in is a lot of “inner dialogue.” That is, I talk to myself, silently, a fair amount. But this is different. When I do it, even though I “hear” the same voice, I can notice subtle sub-contractile motor firings going on in my tongue and oropharynx—some sort of articulation pre-activation—just a few steps away from speaking out loud. The inner monologue, though, seems an entity unto itself—spontaneously addressing me, making observations, posing questions, voicing concerns, drawing my attention to things, admonishing me (it is often pretty sharp-tongued), whenever I am not tying it up with distractions. I can readily and vividly pull up other voices—my wife’s, my children’s, Mick Jagger’s—but then my conscious stream rapidly reverts back to my own voice. My thoughts, therefore, exist almost entirely in the form of this inner monologue/dialogue.

People experience their thoughts in varied ways

This is how everyone thinks, contemplates, and processes, right? Well I had assumed so. Then in casual conversation I learned that one of my sons also experiences a continuous inner monologue but it’s not in his voice, it’s much more nebulous than that. It’s a verbal, auditory-like experience, but not as distinct as mine. One of my daughters-in-law experiences very little inner voice. Her thoughts are made up of images. Vivid ones. Another daughter-in-law’s thoughts are experienced as a mix of vague semi-verbal storytelling and moving images. A friend mixes a vague voice and written words—letters all spelled out. Another hears the voice of an imaginary friend from childhood. Another experiences no monologue but describes seeing movie-like storyboards. Another has ongoing dialogues between different voices. Another only hears a voice when she intentionally produces it. I could go on.

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Some people experience no definitive inner monologue

According to some sources, as many as thirty to fifty percent of people process their thoughts with little or no inner monologue. Rather, they may do so through visual imagery, symbolic representations, variations in emotional tone, variations in sensation, something more vague altogether (termed "non-symbolic"), or combinations thereof. This can make investigation of our inner experiences challenging. Indeed functional MRI studies seeking to localize the phenomena seem to come up with a collection of regional “usual suspects” seen in auditory, speech, visual, memory, sensory, and cognitive processing.

Modulation of neuronal connectivity may result in variation of our inner existences

I suppose the variation in our inner experiences shouldn’t come as a surprise. Although we’re wired similarly in an anatomic sense, we certainly aren’t wired identically at the cellular level. In fact, at the cellular level, everyone’s wiring is constantly in flux. Neuronal connections are being strengthened, weakened, created, and deleted all the time. Related genes are being upregulated, downregulated. Receptors generated, modified, and removed. Neurotransmitters released in greater and lesser volumes and removed more or less vigorously. Dendritic spines propagated and smoothed away. Cortices thickened and thinned. All in response to our external and internal environments, to the transit of action potentials down one network of axons or another, to the activation of one collection of synapses or another. Hundreds of trillions of connections. Not hard-wired, but constantly undergoing remolding, per our experiences. Therefore, how we process and present to ourselves representations of existence almost necessarily must vary. That is, we are all experiencing reality somewhat differently. And not immutably (how we experience one stimulus today may differ from how we will tomorrow, or next week).

My “reality” is not the same as yours

This opens up fascinating considerations with regards to societal functionality. We acknowledge that people come from diverse backgrounds and cultures resulting in a significant individualization of our belief systems and behaviors. We should also recognize, however, that we not only differ in our external experiences, we do so in our internal ones as well. That is, any two of us exposed to the exact same event may, and most likely will, create a different mental map of the experience—of their reality—and respond to it in different ways. This adds another level of complexity to our interfaces, our understanding of one another, our capability to empathize and interact with each other. We are quick to tell ourselves stories about one another’s opinions and actions—what the motivations are behind them—predicated on the concept that we all must experience our existences in a similar manner. But our “reads” may be way off due to a divergent processing of reality.

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Intentional direction of neuronal activity may allow for a more adaptive functionality

The good news is that this is a dynamic situation. We know that we can sometimes affect a more adaptive response to our lives through altering (for the better) our external environments. But we can also potentially do so through altering our internal ones. Certain medications likely act this way. But so might various cognitive and behavioral interventions. Such methodologies potentially reinforce adaptive neural networks over maladaptive ones through the repetitive activation of more desirable pathways. That is, we can potentially change for the better the wiring of our brains. And what is particularly inspiring is that we can and do so on the fly—no additional hardware required—whether our thoughts come to us as a distinctive voice, or not.