What kind of world do people who can't hear their 'inner voice' live in?
Many people can read sentences from books or newspapers in their heads, or repeat shopping lists or phone numbers in their heads. But some people can't hear this 'inner voice,' and a Danish and American research team has reported the results of a study on the performance of language-related tasks in these people.
Not Everybody Has an Inner Voice: Behavioral Consequences of Anendophasia - Johanne SK Nedergaard, Gary Lupyan, 2024
People without an inner voice have poorer verbal memory – University of Copenhagen
https://humanities.ku.dk/news/2024/people-without-an-inner-voice-have-poorer-verbal-memory/
We Used to Think Everybody Heard a Voice Inside Their Heads – But We Were Wrong : ScienceAlert
https://www.sciencealert.com/we-used-to-think-everybody-heard-a-voice-inside-their-heads-but-we-were-wrong
The voice in your head may help you recall and process words. But what if you don't have one?
https://theconversation.com/the-voice-in-your-head-may-help-you-recall-and-process-words-but-what-if-you-dont-have-one-230973
People tend to assume that other people have the same senses and abilities as they do, but it is known that there is actually a wide range of variation in the senses people have. In particular, in recent years, there has been a growing understanding of people with aphantasia , a condition in which they are unable to form images in their heads, and various research results have been reported .
How do people with aphantasia, who cannot imagine images in their heads, see the world? - GIGAZINE
A new study by researchers at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark and the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the United States has targeted people who cannot hear their 'inner voice.' The majority of people have an inner voice that reads sentences or monologues in their heads, but 5 to 10 percent of people do not have this inner voice.
Johanne Nedergaard, a doctoral researcher at the University of Copenhagen, points out that people who live without an inner voice spend more time and effort than others putting their thoughts into words. Some people who cannot hear their inner voice first imagine an 'image' in their head and then convert it into words when they speak, others process their thoughts computer-wise rather than verbally, and some think as 'silent words.'
The research team recruited 93 participants, 46 of whom said they could barely hear their inner voices, and 47 who said they could hear their inner voices loudly, and gave them language tasks. The first task involved showing participants a sequence of phonetically and orthographically similar words, such as 'bought,' 'caught,' 'taut,' and 'wart,' and asking them to remember the order.
'This is a difficult task for anyone, but we hypothesized that without an inner voice, it would be even harder because participants wouldn't be able to repeat the words in their head to remember the sequence,' says Nedergaard. 'And this hypothesis turned out to be correct: participants without an inner voice had significantly less success remembering the words.'
Similarly, people who could not hear their inner voice performed worse on a task where they were shown two pictures of objects and had to identify whether one of the words rhymed with the other, such as 'sock' and 'clock.' This is presumably because they could not use their inner voice to confirm the pronunciation of the word.
Interestingly, the difference in performance between the two groups disappeared when participants were allowed to speak the words out loud to solve the problems. Also, there was no difference in performance between the two groups on tasks that were unrelated to the pronunciation of the words, such as identifying very similar pictures.
'Maybe people who don't have an inner voice just learn other strategies. For example, some people tap with their index finger for one type of task and their middle finger for another,' Nedergaard said. The differences in language memory identified in this experiment are so small that they would not be noticeable in normal everyday conversation.
The researchers call people who can't hear their inner voice 'anendophasia.' But Derek Arnold, a psychologist at the University of Queensland in Australia who was not involved in the study, said the new name adds confusion.
Arnold, who says he is an aphantasia in which he cannot imagine images in his mind, points out that humans have a variety of senses, not just images and voices in their minds, and that naming each lack separately would cause confusion. People who do not have any kind of imaginary sense call themselves 'aphant,' and Arnold suggested that by adding a prefix to this, they could be easily identified, such as 'audio aphant' and 'visual aphant.'
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