how do you think?

Recently*, a discussion on twitter about internal monologues (or lack thereof) prompted everyone to start thinking about how they think. Pictures? Words? Sounds? Nothing at all**? And if that wasn’t enough of a mindfuck, to ask each other and then exclaim “look, your mind is utterly baffling, I can’t imagine hearing words/not hearing anything/seeing images… how the fuck do you do X?” Luckily for me, since nothing is new, not even on Twitter, a quick google brought up some articles I could read while my internal monologue said “fucking what?” to some of them. So here are Dazed, and the BBC, and The Atlantic, if you want to read the professional journalist views. Meanwhile, a question that came up frequently when I was discussing it with friends was “wonder if anxious people have more inner speech than non-anxious people?”. And since I can’t spend this entire blog ranting about mental health stuff that pisses me off, the least I could do is give it a slightly more dedicated google.

The question itself raises a number of interesting assumptions. Firstly, there’s an idea that inner speech is universal, such as this Psychology Today article Listening to Your Inner Voice which begins: “During every waking moment, we carry on an inner dialogue” and ends: “So learn to cultivate that inner voice, it’s an essential part of being human”. I can understand why someone might think so. If your entire life is punctuated with some running bullshit commentary in your head, it’s impossible to understand what life might be like without it (and there are some very fascinating case studies about the experiences of people who lost their inner monologue for a time after a stroke). Part of this could be the difficulty in defining something that exists only in your own head. Even the above Psychology Today article talks about inner speech and a ‘condensed inner speech which is closer to “thinking in pure meaning.”’ So it’s possible that some of us are talking about different things, or the same things but defined differently.

A lot of people also talk about it being wrapped up with identity, with planning, with reading, with memory, with arguing with your mother endlessly (maybe just me, eh), so I looked for a paper to try and give me a background on what the fuck is going on in there. I came across this review article by Alderson Day and Fernyhough (2015), which appears to be a good overview. They helpfully provide a number of terms that we can use to describe inner speech: “verbal thinking, inner speaking, covert self-talk, internal monologue, internal dialogue”, and they separate those out from other types of internal experiences like images, hearing sounds, and thinking that doesn’t have any particular qualities. They also talk about the process in which inner speech might develop. That commentary that runs alongside play and activities as children (private speech), is thought to become part of an internal process that we use to support cognitive functions like reminding ourselves we have to get some loo roll, or planning out a task. Sometimes we might use private speech as adults when trying to understand something difficult, like I did at several points when reading this review.

However, as fascinating as all this is, I’m skipping along to the bit on “adult psychopathology”. There we get a bit closer to the question that prompted this blog – yes, research has found links between depression and inner speech, in particular, ruminating and “hearing” an inner critic. And there are even stronger links for anxiety, where worrying is thought to most often be a verbal experience. Which sucks a little bit, I’m not gonna lie. This is further supported by the findings from Ren, Wang and Jarrold (2016), who tested a group of Chinese students to investigate the relationship between self-talk and traits like anxiety and impulsivity. They found that: “higher levels of anxiety were associated with higher frequency of self-critical but with lower frequency of self-reinforcing inner speech” (self-critical = inner speech that blames oneself for bad experiences; self-reinforcing = inner speech that talks about good things that have happened). So essentially, according to this research, a lot of anxious inner speech has a tendency towards blaming, and much less focus on positive aspects of the person or their day. Well, colour me surprised.

The only problem here, as I referred to above, is that there does seem to be an assumption, possibly linked to the “universal inner speech” thing, that people’s thoughts must be verbal. Moritz et al. (2013) looked at “sensory experiences” of depression, and found that other types of phenomena accompanied thoughts – most often a bodily sensation, but also mental imagery and auditory sensations. This piece in The Psychologist talks further about mental imagery, and also argues: “seeing mental pictures of what has been and what could be is a fundamental human experience”, which almost mirrors the inner voice is an essential part of being human, from above. It goes on to talk about the ways that this mental imagery affects people with a variety of disorders. I absolutely have visual images accompanying panic, like specific and highly imaginative deaths from whatever disorder I’ve googled that day, and they are much more rapid than thoughts, and completely unsurprisingly, significantly more emotional. 

Additionally, some researchers like Hurlbert, Heavey and Kelsey (2013)*** believe that people have to be trained to properly identify what type of inner phenomena they are experiencing. They discuss something they call unsymbolized thinking which is “the experience of an explicit, differentiated thinking that does not include words, images, or any other symbols.” They give the example of Abigail:

Abigail is wondering whether Julio (her friend who will be giving her a ride that afternoon) will be driving his car or his pickup truck. This wondering is an explicit, unambiguous, ‘‘thoughty’’ phenomenon: it is a thought, not a feeling or an intimation; it is about Julio, and not any other person; and it intends the distinction between Julio’s car and truck, not his van or motorcycle, and not any other distinction. But there are no words that carry any of these features—no word ‘‘Julio’’, no ‘‘car’’, no ‘‘truck’’, no ‘‘driving.’’ Further, there are no images (visual or otherwise) experienced along with this thought—no image of Julio, or of his car, or of his truck. In fact, there are no experienced symbols whatsoever—Abigail simply apprehends herself to be wondering this and can provide no further description of how this wondering takes place.

They also speculate as to whether the people reporting experiences of inner speaking are actually more often experiencing unsymbolized thinking, and that when people are trained to identify their thoughts more accurately, they are better able to tell the differences between the two.

So the answer to the original question is sort of yes and no. Yes, increased inner speech does seem to be a feature of some mental health disorders. But because inner speech can be defined in a number of ways, it’s not necessarily that people with anxiety and depression experience more inner speech overall, it’s just that they might have more of the types identified above (like self-blame). It’s also clear some people experience several types of phenomena at once, and that these can be quite tricky to unpick. While, in some respects, that’s part of therapeutic methods like CBT, in my experience, they have some assumptions about the types of thoughts people get, and how they’ll present. A number of sheets and exercises I was given tended to work on the basis that you were challenging a verbal thought, unless I was like “and then, I totally saw my leg fall off”. I’m unsure how you’d adequately challenge an unsymbolized thought, with a parrot that shouts at you, for eg.

In conclusion then, brains are pretty fucking complicated, no wonder they fuck up so often. God only knows what goes on in there.

*or a long while ago… dunno if you noticed, but like, the world went to shit in the intervening time, so I kinda forgot about this draft…
**hahaha, every time
**their paper is genuinely pretty fascinating if you want a more detailed idea of what they consider to be inner speech