Do you have an inner monologue?
If you’re not sure, Healthline defines them this way: ”[An] internal monologue means more than just pondering over your own thoughts. It consists of inner speech, where you can “hear” your own voice play out phrases and conversations in your mind.
According to research, only 30-50% of people have inner monologues, meaning that up to 70% of us have brains that don’t yap constantly.
However, those of us without internal monologues could be facing more than just FOMO, we could actually face memory problems.
How verbal memory is impacted by not having an internal monologue
A new study published in Psychological Science has found that people without an internal monologue could face problems with verbal memory.
Researchers coined the term ‘Anendophasia’ in the study to describe living without an inner monologue.
The research team behind the study stated that it was the first to conduct a systematic investigation of whether differences in inner speech have behavioural consequences, and what they found was that some facets of memory were impacted.
The new findings suggest that having no inner voice may negatively impact a person’s verbal working memory and ability to judge rhymes. However, so far, it doesn’t seem to affect task-switching or perceptual discrimination capabilities.
What does this mean for people with Anendophasia?
Well, it’s early days.
In a statement, researcher Johanne Nedergård says that this could change how people experience therapy.
“The short answer is that we just don’t know because we have only just begun to study it. But there is one field where we suspect that having an inner voice plays a role, and that is therapy; in the widely used cognitive behavioural therapy, for example, you need to identify and change adverse thought patterns, and having an inner voice may be very important in such a process.
“However, it is still uncertain whether differences in the experience of an inner voice are related to how people respond to different types of therapy.”
Interesting!