Ep9: That Little Voice in Your Head?

not everyone is "having" thoughts

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. — William Shakespeare, Hamlet

A few years ago I stumbled upon a fascinating article. It tells of people “freaking out” when they discovered that some of us have an “internal monologue” running in their heads — and some don’t. Here is a quote from a more recent piece describing this phenomenon:

Take a second to sit in silence. Is there chatter inside your head? Or is it relatively quiet in there? There’s a conversation making its way around TikTok about this inner voice — or lack thereof. Some people have a chatty internal monologue that narrates their life, while others have a quiet, serene inner landscape.

The folks with the internal monologue simply cannot imagine not having one — and vice versa.

The last part I can attest to myself. On a few occasions when I would mention this to another person, they would become genuinely perplexed, struggling to understand what I am even talking about. As one of them said to me recently — referring to my own lacking the internal monologue — “Wait. Are you saying your brain doesn’t work?”

Of course, my brain does, if differently. Here is what I think is going on: your inner voice, if you have one, is your subconscious mind literally talking to you — to your conscious Self. And it’s no surprise that it might have a few things to say — after all, your subconscious mind is a regular supercomputer, the underwater part of the iceberg (your conscious Self being the tip above the water). With its immense processing power it can see, hear, remember, and process much more information than you could register consciously.¹

---

Even more fascinating are the implications of the fact that the human population is split (in half?) this way. For example, we all heard of “having thoughts”, of “thought control”, of how your “thoughts” affect your feelings, etc. Well, what if the “thoughts” there refer specifically to the internal monologue — thus making those statements rather incomprehensible to anyone who doesn’t have one? Anyone would agree that they can “think”, of course. However, that word — “thinking” — would mean something entirely different to someone who doesn’t experience the chatter of the inner voice!

One can imagine that the whole concepts of meditation, mindfulness, of being “present in the moment” are devised specifically for those of us who are (continuously?) distracted by the voice in their heads. I remember how I was struggling trying to meditate — only to realize, years later, that what I could have been struggling with was a misunderstanding of the concept itself. Hearing no inner voice, I never leave the meditative state. I always reflect on something — this is what thinking means to me, to reflect on things. As such, it does not happen to me like an internal monologue would. Rather, it is a conscious, intentional effort — like, say, walking. I choose what to reflect on, and when, and whether.

Another crucial difference with the internal narrative would be that my thinking — my reflecting on things — is visual (although I would often imagine myself describing what I see in my mind to others… in fact, this is what I am doing at this very moment as I am writing these words).

---

This lack of appreciation — of how unlike the brains work in different people — would sometimes lead to tragic (even if comically so) consequences. Most often the internal narrative starts early in the childhood — and that’s why those who have it cannot imagine how one could function without it. In some of us, however, it would start much later, in their adolescence or in their 20s. The person who suddenly started “hearing voices” would become properly horrified, get themselves checked by a psychiatrist… a that would be tragic mistake because our understanding of the human mind is basically on par with medieval physicians' understanding of how the human body worked. In all likelihood, the person “hearing voices” will get labeled with schizophrenia and things will go downhill from there.²

---

All this begs the question — why some of us are “having thoughts” and some don’t?

One reason I see is that the internal narrative could be an attempt on behalf of our subconscious to make up for the person’s incomplete understanding of the world they live in. By “understanding” here I mean, yes, the Logos — a mental simulation of the Reality, of everything, one that everyone could, potentially, assemble in their imagination. In practice, however, the great majority of us fall well short of that goal, leaving us to stumble through life without a map, effectively (or, rather, having many important parts of the map as blanks with “there be dragons” inscribed over it). And that’s when our subconscious comes to rescue, trying to tell us, literally, what it “thinks” is happening with and around us.³

---

Another theory is that the internal narrative is a form of a talent. That is, some children are inclined to be more reflective, and they go on to develop that side of their psyche. Others grow more… social? extraverted? intuitive? — any of those traits might contribute to the development of their inner voice. Or could it be that all children have an imaginary friend at some point and then only in some of us it stays as a voice narrating their life?

Or, perhaps the internal narrative gets developed in some and not others to balance the intuitive and rational at the societal scale?

I hope we will gain a better understanding of this exciting development as more of us will come forward to share their experience growing up and living with or without the internal monologue.

1. In fact, your subconscious mind does not even need your input to “drive” the person that you are. This is how we “live on autopilot,” simply taking what we feel — what the subconscious makes us feel — is the best course of action. To that end, the subconscious does not need to talk to us either — and yet, in many of us, it does… Why?

2. This is not to say that schizophrenia, as a mental condition, is not real. It’s not, however, about hearing voices per se. Rather, schizophrenia is caused by highly elevated levels of dopamine (the so-called “reward” neurotransmitter) in the person’s brain. Too much of dopamine in one’s brain eventually leads to mania and, in more severe cases, to psychosis — which, depending on the individual, may or may not be accompanied by the auditory or visual hallucinations.

3. “Thinks” in quotes is because the subconscious mind has no rational understanding of its own. Rather, it is a powerful neural network AI and, as such, its insights are the product of statistical inference — or, in plain English, it’s a guesswork, if quite educated at times.