Sometimes I like to start a column by asking myself: should this really be a column that will live on the internet forever, for all and sundry to see? Or is this really an airing of my many neuroses that is better shared privately, with a therapist?
Not infrequently the answer is the latter. But therapy is expensive and comment is free, so I’m afraid, dear reader, that you’re going to have to be my shrink today. And I’ll get straight into my issues: I have a voice in my head that won’t shut up.
Before you get too alarmed, the voice isn’t telling me to do dastardly things, or trying to convince me that I’m Jesus. It’s just a constant inner monologue. This inner voice isn’t a bad thing per se; often it’s useful, occasionally it’s entertaining. Sometimes it’s annoying as hell, though: it keeps me up at night replaying past conversations I’ve had and coming up with all the things I should have said. When things get stressful – and the world has been very stressful lately – then all this inner chatter can get very overwhelming.
Chances are you know exactly what I’m talking about, because you have an inner auditory narrator too. A lot of people do. I used to assume everyone in the world did until a tweet went viral a few years ago announcing that some people don’t. Now a variation of that tweet seems to go viral every year. “Yo wtf…just saw a stat that said only 30-50% of people have an internal dialogue,” one podcaster tweeted in 2022, for example. “There’s really 50%+ of the population out here walking around with NOTHING going on in their head?? Everything is starting to make much more sense.”
While tweets like this have sparked a fascinating mainstream discussion about the different ways we think, they tend to be extremely simplistic summations of a very complex phenomenon. (I know, the idea that a tweet might be overly simplistic is shocking, right?!) There isn’t a clearcut binary between people who have internal voices and people who don’t. And research shows that the nature of our inner voices varies dramatically as well. Some of us might hear our own voice while others might experience the world – as the subject of a 2021 Guardian feature did – via a bickering Italian couple in their head.
Speaking to me over the phone (I promise he’s not just a voice in my head), Russell Hurlburt, a psychology professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who has done pioneering work in this field, notes that most of us are very confused about our inner experiences. Even those of us who, like me, are sure that we have an inner monologue going on all the damn time probably don’t – we’re probably just talking to ourselves a certain percentage of the time. Basically, we’re all unreliable narrators.
To try to land on a more objective way of measuring how people experience the world, Hurlburt came up with a method called descriptive experience sampling, where participants are given beepers and then told to jot down their inner experience whenever the beeper goes off. After training people for a while on this method, he says, you get to a more accurate representation of what’s actually going on in their head. He’s been doing this for more than 50 years.
And what is going on in people’s heads? Well, what Hurlburt found is that when you do the beeper experiment, people have an inner voice roughly 25% of the time. What that means, he says, is that “some people never have words going on, and a few people have words going on all the time, and a lot of people have words going on some of the time”.
Now, all of this might be an accurate way of putting things, but it’s not exactly viral tweet material, is it? I kept trying to ask Hurlburt to give me a specific percentage of people who never speak to themselves, so I could have a nice flashy headline saying something like “30% of people don’t have an inner monologue at all, they see the world in cartoons,” but he was far too detail-oriented to give one to me. All he’d say is that the number of people who don’t think in words is more than you’d expect.
As for that 30-50% figure in the viral tweet I mentioned earlier? That comes from Hurlburt’s research but is a misrepresentation of the fact that the test subject only had the inner voice going on when the beeper went off. It doesn’t mean that 30-50% of the population don’t have an inner voice at all in any circumstance.
Anyway, there are two big takeaways from all of this. The first is that it’s always useful to remember that we all experience “reality” in completely different ways. Our brains are miraculous and extremely weird things, and everyone has a different way of processing the world. And the second big takeaway is that you should never immediately trust a statistic that you see on Twitter (now X).
Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
