Sometimes I feel like raising my hands in resignation and surrender and riding into the sunset on my trusty armchair.
The most recent nonsense online is that 50 to 75% of people do not have inner voices. They do not have an internal monologue.
Well, that is a misinterpretation by the famous self-styled experts of a study.
The study found that a majority of people with aphantasia also are unable to listen to an inner voice.
Aphantasia is an inability to conjure mental images.
So these people are also unable to conjure, to conjure up audio, verbal sounds.
So yes, 50 to 75% of a tiny, tiny, tiny, vanishingly tiny fraction of the population, not of the general population.
Now the study that all these self-styled experts are misinterpreting, the study is titled Anorealia, the silent mind and its association with aphantasia.
It was authored by Zeman and Lambert was published in 2021 in Frontiers in Psychology, Volume 12.
These are the risks of being exposed to people who are not experts and yet pretend to be. A major scourge and pandemic, especially on the famous platform, YouTube.
Anorealia is an inability to hear an internal voice.
There are no internal voices talking to you. There is no internal monologue or dialogue. There's no verbal interchange or exchange. There are no sounds. It's as if your internal life is utterly silent, like in deep space.
And this characterizes anywhere between 5% to 10% of the general population.
My speculation is, its speculation is not supported by any study.
My speculation is, if you fail to form an integrated self, if as a child, you are not allowed to separate from the parental figures and individuate, become an individual, if you fail to develop a sense of personhood, becoming your own person, if your self is fragmented, non-constellated, non-integrated, then in this case, I think you are unlikely to have an active, authentic voice.
In other words, you are unlikely to have a voice which represents you. I think that's a good equivalent of what is known as the true self. You're unlikely to have a true self.
Now this is one of the voices. There are many other voices.
The other voices are known as introjects.
So there's the authentic voice, which is actually the self, or the voice of the self, or the true self.
And there are other voices which are introjects.
Introjects are actually internalization of other people's voices, mother's voice, father's voice, the voice of an influential teacher, peers, influences, media figures, and so on.
You internalize these voices, they become introjects, and they continue to talk to you.
Some of these voices are beneficial and helpful.
Some of these voices help you to maintain reality testing. These voices warn you. Don't do this. It's going to have dire consequences.
Some of these voices represent morality. This is right. This is wrong. These voices, these cluster of voices are known as conscience.
And some of these voices are self-hating, self-rejecting. These voices seek your destruction. They want you dead. They want to take you down. They want you to fail. They want you to conform to what is known as an internalized bad object.
An internalized bad object is a coalition of such voices. Voices who hate you, who detest you, who loathe you, and you want you to be harmed. These voices are not your friends.
Now, we all try to get around disabilities, around these functions. We'll try to somehow compensate for them.
You may attempt to compensate for the lack of an authentic voice by adopting a synthetic, artificial, internal voice, which masquerades as an authentic voice. This voice is known as the false self.
Another option, you may misidentify one of your internal voices as if it were your authentic voice. That's also a mistake. Mother's voice become your authentic voice. That's a mistake.
Okay, this is a general introduction.
I mentioned the work by Inouin and Lombat about people without an inner voice. These people also have a poor verbal memory. And between 5% and 10% of our population experience this problem.
There's a study, a more recent study, the University of Copenhagen, the Faculty of Humanities. The study is dated May 14th, 2024, and I'll read to you the summary.
The vast majority of people have an ongoing conversation with themselves, an inner voice, that plays an important role in their daily lives.
But between 5% and 10% of a population do not have the same experience of an inner voice, and they find it more difficult to perform certain verbal memory tasks.
This is the research in University of Copenhagen.
Now there are several neuroscientists who are studying the inner voice, most famous of which is Leavitt and Brook.
Leavitt and Brook is a woman, despite the name. She says that the inner voice is actually created in a network of different areas in the brain.
Ironically, or interestingly, it's as if various parts of the brains, various regions of the brain are communicating, talking to each other.
Perhaps the inner voice is the conscious experience of this polylogue between the various parts of the brain, including the inferior parietal lobe, the inferior frontal gyrus, the superior temporal cortex. They're all involved in the generation of the creation of the internal voice.
So this is a real phenomenon. It's been mapped onto the brain via functional magnetic resonance imaging and other technologies.
Why do we have an inner voice? Why do we interject? Why do we internalize?
According to psychoanalytic schools, initially we do this as babies in order to feel safe and secure. We create an internal secure base.
We suffer from object in constancy. Mother leaves the room. We don't know if she's ever going to come back.
So what we do, we internalize mother. We create an internal mother. And that internal mother is with us forever. She's unlikely to abandon us or vanish or disappear on us.
So this is a compensatory mechanism. There's the terror of losing a critical figure, a figure you depend on for your life as a baby, as an infant. And that's your mother, later your father.
And so what you do, you create internal representations of these people.
There are other functions described by psychoanalysis and later psychoanalytic schools and then object relation schools, and you can find a description or analysis of all these functions in the playlist titled From Child to Narcissist on this estimable channel.
Okay, but today I want to discuss the neuroscience of internal voices.
What does the brain teach us about internal voices?
The first question we need to face is an internal voice is a thought. It's a form of cognition.
Is there any correlation or is there any causation between this type of cognition, this highly idiosyncratic, specific type of cognition, concrete type, and action? Does it ever translate into action?
We know that whenever we do something, whenever we act in any way, for example, whenever I lifted this mug in order to drink the wonderful Ili coffee, we know that whenever we act, our brains make predictions. They make predictions about the sensory consequences of the action.
Actually, recent studies have demonstrated that some of these supposed predictions are actually retro-predictions.
Sometimes, in many cases actually, we act and only then the brain springs into life, trying to embed the action in some context which would make sense of it and predict the consequences of the action.
Action sometimes precedes brain activity, which is an amazing thing in itself.
However, it's clear that the brain somehow, when confronted with action, post facto or pre facto, when confronted with action, the brain somehow generates a narrative.
It's a narrative about the action, about the actor, about reality, and about the consequences of the action.
And it is this narrative that we often perceive as the internal voice.
The brain sends motor signals to the hand, but it also generates a sensory prediction of the command which is perceived or experienced as someone talking to you from the inside.
This constant activity, this constant functionality of generating narratives on the fly, this ability to heuristically correct mistakes, to foresee the adverse consequences or outcomes of errors, and to refrain from doing them, or to somehow try to correct them, this system is very efficient.
That's why we essentially can multitask and or engage in a huge variety of types of activity, animals can't do that.
So the same principle applies to human speech.
Every time you move your mouth in order to form a word, the brain generates a predictive simulation of the speech, anticipates errors, warns against outcomes, and somehow attempts to constrain or modulate the behavior.
This corresponds very well with early psychoanalytic models. This is the function of the ego, actually, in Freud's work.
Leuvenburg says that, I'm quoting, the current understanding of inner speech is that we do the same as in overt speech. We make predictions in our mind of what we will say, but we don't actually send the motor commands to our speech muscles.
This simulated auditory signal is the little voice that we hear in our brain.
For the most part, we hear an inner language, but not always.
Leuvenburg says, You can have expanded and more condensed forms of inner speech. People may experience them as abstract representations of language without sound.
Some people say their inner voice is like a radio that's on all day long. Other people don't have a voice at all. Or they speak in abstract symbols that don't involve language.
These are the 5 to 10% that I mentioned earlier on Aurelia. Levenburg has no explanation as to why people experience inner voices in such a multiplicity of ways.
She doesn't even understand or know. And if she doesn't, no one does.
She doesn't understand or know why some people don't have an internal voice at all.
Again, only 5 to 10% of our population don't have an internal voice.
Similarly, we have no idea in neuroscience and psychology, we have no idea why some people are unable to conjure images in their brains.
There's a video on this channel dedicated to aphantasia and to my suggestion of empathy, a fantasia, the inability to visualize other people.
Anyhow, coming back to returning to inner voices.
What about deaf people? Deaf people can't hear voices. What about congenitally deaf people? People who have never heard voices in their lives.
These people, amazingly, do experience an inner voice, but it is a visual voice. It is visualized.
They don't hear a voice, but they produce the equivalent of an inner language by visualizing body language, motion, and even hand signs, or witnessing, observing lip movements.
So in their minds there's a little someone who's talking and they're observing the lips of this person, of this imaginary person. They're observing the lips and reading the message. Or there is someone who is hand-signing, sign language. Or there is someone whose body language, micro-expressions and so on and so forth, communicates something.
So they visualize the inner voice.
Dr. Stark, who studies inner voices in deaf people, in Santa Cruz, he's deaf himself. He communicates using sign language in real life.
He says that he has an inner voice, but it just looks like hand signing, really.
Amazing. The inner voice of Stark, of Dr. Stark, is a pair of hands, and they sign words in his brain.
He says, the hands aren't usually connected to anything. Once in a while I see a face.
And if he reminds himself, for example, to buy milk, he signs the word milk in his brain. He doesn't always see his inner voice because he has learned sign language very late in life.
He says, I heard my inner voice before. It sounded like a voice that wasn't mine or particularly clear to me.
I don't know if Dr. Stark has been born this way, congenitally deaf, or has acquired deafness later in life. I suspect that he's a late life deaf person or into accident or disease or something.
But there are many, many manifestations, expressions and reifications of the inner voice. We've come across two of them.
Audio, verbal output, which is in the vast majority of people. And the small minority of people, visuals, images are used as the inner voice, especially among deaf people.
But there are many other stories about the inner voice.
People visualize the inner voice as a highly specific person. Sometimes they visualize the inner voice as a facsimile, a copy of themselves.
Sometimes there are two voices talking or arguing. Sometimes the voices belong to foreigners.
There's a story about someone with two Italians constantly chatting and arguing in her mind and she's totally mentally healthy. We're not talking about mentally ill people.
There are some voices constantly interview you. It's like a process of interrogation or interview. Some voices advise you. Some voices criticize you.
And some voices are disembodied, they're utterly abstract. Some voices are visualized, even among non-deaf people, hearing people. They're visualized.
Some voices are embedded in highly specific environments. For example, a studio or a room or a television camera or whatever. They're embodied in something, in some physical object, or in some place, highly specific location.
And some voices constitute a monologue, an ongoing background monologue. Some voices engage in dialogue. They talk to you, and if you answer them, they respond. They respond in kind. It's like an imaginary friend or imaginary enemy if you're unlucky.
Some voices are not attributed to human beings. For example, some voices are in the form of a television screen or a slide projector inside an attic.
Some voices are reminders, constantly remind you of things to do. Some voices criticize you for lack of appropriate performance, not meeting certain standards and benchmarks, misbehaving, self-trashing sexually or whatever.
Some voices are synesthetic. Some voices manifest as colors, actually. It's like a kind of a colored display of verbal, of words, and so on and so forth.
There are so many ways, so many ways for the inner voice to communicate with you.
And inner voices have an inner life. They have a life of their own. They become insistent. They become indignant. They go away. They return. They compromise. They make peace with you. They fight with you.
So it's definitely the inner voice represents an almost full-fledged personality.
In this particular sense, perhaps the vast majority of people actually do have multiple personality disorder, but very, very attenuated, very minimal.
As we all carry inside our minds a multitude of people, and these are almost full-fledged people. Voices are recognizable, the same way you recognize other people, out there, real external objects.
This is why the narcissist finds it very difficult to tell the difference between an external object and an internal object.
And the reason is the narcissist's internal voice, known as the false self, has hijacked the narcissist.
The narcissist is a creature of an internal voice. The narcissist himself is an internal voice.
Therefore, incapable of perceiving the externality or separateness of other people.
It's a very interesting way of looking at narcissism as a kind of identification with an overwhelming, captivating, all-encompassing, all-pervasive, ubiquitous inner voice.
It's identification with this voice, it is a surrender to this voice, It is merger and fusion with this voice.
And finally, all that remains is the inner voice, the false self.
The narcissist is gone in all other meaningful ways.
And from that moment on, the narcissist inhabits his mind because an inner voice can inhabit only an internal space, never an external space.
And so this is one way to look at narcissism, to view narcissism.
And people are not aware that the internal voices have come from the outside.
The majority of people, not all people, the majority of people believe that the internal voices represent them.
They believe in, I am the internal voice.
Like, there's no difference, no distinction between me and the internal voice.
After all, it is internal.
So people identify with the internal voices, the same way the narcissist identifies with his internal voice, the false self.
The difference is the narcissist misidentifies the false self as his authentic self, whereas people never misidentify their inner voices, and they don't consider the inner voices to be their self, their ego.
They make a distinction, healthy people, normal people, make a distinction between the self, the inner voices and outside reality.
External reality is something the narcissist is incapable of doing.
But people are so accustomed to their inner voices that they take them for granted. They believe that the inner voices are an integral part of the fabric of who they are. They constantly interact with these internal voices.
And they're very surprised to learn that their kind of internal voice is unique to them, is idiosyncratic, is not common to all other people.
When they are confronted with the structure, location, manifestation, reification of the internal voice, inner voice in their minds, and then they realize that other people have other kinds of inner voices, they're very surprised, they're very shocked.
Internal voices or inner voices have impacts. They produce emotions and cognitions. They trigger trauma and flashbacks.
Inner voices are very important mechanisms in the internal management of the psychodynamics of people, healthy and unhealthy alike.
You could conceive of inner voices as switches.
Throw up a switch. The light goes up. The light of insight.
You throw down a switch. There's the darkness of disorientation and confusion.
Throw up another switch. You suddenly get good advice.
Throw up another switch, you engage in destructive and self-loathing and self-rejecting inner dialogue.
One could say that the constellation of inner voices is the equivalent of the executive function in the brain.
Perhaps they should be one and the same, or should be perceived, as one and the same.
Inner voices are lifelong. They are confidants. They're secret imaginary friends. They're the worst possible enemies. They are uniquely our own.
And it is very disconcerting that they remain disembodied.
Some inner voices acquire such vivaciousness that it is as if they were about to step out of our minds and stand there and talk to us.
And so many people have this experience of estrangement from themselves because the inner voice is so dominant that it comes alive inside your mind.
And people find it difficult to maintain this dialogue without feeling fractured or broken.
So the control of the inner voices without feeling fractured or broken.
So the control of the inner voices, the classification of the inner voices, taxonomy, the understanding of the inner voices, and the ability to leverage the inner voices for one's well-being, these are all critical.
And it is very unfortunate that we don't teach our young to do this, that there is some consensus that we should pretend as if there are no inner voices except one.
We tend to look at other people and say he or she.
But there's no he or she. There's no unitary entity.
The concept of self is ridiculous, as is the concept of ego. These are ridiculous concepts because they assume some core which is inalienable, which is immutable, and which is lifelong.
People are not like that. People are ensembles of self-states constantly in flux, constantly talking to each other, constantly interacting. There's no real central executive host, someone in charge.
And so we need to teach our young to manage this internal coalition, these moving parts, if you wish to borrow terminology from internal family systems, theories and so.
We are made of parts. We are made of parts.
And the only glue that holds us together is language, narrative.
A lot of this narrative is counterfactual. It's wrong because it pretends as if they are not inner voices, only one voice, the authentic voice, we, the self, ego.
And that is not true.
We need to befriend our voices. We need to make good use of our voices.
They know a lot. They have access to the unconscious, which you don't.
And ultimately, we need to introduce our voices, inner voices, into our lives, and engage in such dialogues or listen to such monologues without shame and trepidation and worry and anxiety.
This is a healthy process.
The only malignant variations, unhealthy variations actually involve narcissism, pathological narcissism, not only in narcissistic personalities, but wherever pathological narcissism rears its ugly head.
Only there, the inner voice replaces the person. There's a substitution process. The inner voice takes over and that of course is a pathology.