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Your Inner Voice

The document discusses the inner voice that most people experience internally. It can be caring or critical depending on the person. Research has found that inner speech develops around age 5 and is influenced by childhood experiences and caregivers. Losing the inner voice completely can cause problems by making it difficult to function normally.

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18 views2 pages

Your Inner Voice

The document discusses the inner voice that most people experience internally. It can be caring or critical depending on the person. Research has found that inner speech develops around age 5 and is influenced by childhood experiences and caregivers. Losing the inner voice completely can cause problems by making it difficult to function normally.

Uploaded by

hitter.acute0n
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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YOUR INNER VOICE

Most of us have a voice inside our heads and it can be caring, supportive, negative or critical.
Yours might seem banal, or a nuisance, but without it you would struggle to function.

HAT was the last thing you influenced by what your caregivers say and how
said to yourself in your they say it. In Vygotsky’s view, we learn to control
head? A warm word of our impulses by internalising the instructions of our
encouragement or a parents and teachers and repeating them to ourselves.
scathing put-down? From then on, our inner voice functions as an internal
The question of our inner set of checks and balances that keep us on track for
voice is wrapped up in some our goals and on the right side of social expectations
even bigger questions, such According to Ethan Kross, a psychologist at the
as those concerning the University of Michigan, any negative connotations
nature of consciousness, of your inner critic come not from the criticism itself,
our sense of self and how our inner life affects our but from an emotional reaction to it – for instance,
behaviour. For that reason, a small band of researchers a feeling of falling short of personal expectations.
is dedicated to understanding more. It is challenging “A little bit of self-critique is not a bad thing,” says
work, not least because it is impossible to truly listen in Kross. “The problem is that, rather than objectively
on someone else’s inner world. But we are beginning scrutinise the issue and come up with a solution, we
to grasp where inner speech comes from, how it differs get stuck because the emotion takes over.” Kross
between people, its contribution to cognitive skills calls this emotional inner turmoil “chatter” and
like memory and its relationship with mental health. argues that it is one of the “major mental problems
In the 1930s, psychologist Lev Vygotsky found that we face as a species”.
our capacity for inner speech develops along with This is where our inner voice gets tangled up
external language. From around the age of 2 or 3, with the nature of consciousness. Early ideas of
children start talking out loud to themselves as they consciousness suggested that we each have one “self”,
play. Vygotsky believed that this is a precursor to with distinct likes, dislikes and motivations. Yet while
inner speech; such chatter gradually becomes internal we generally feel like one coherent person, many
around the age of 5. Subsequent brain imaging has psychologists now consider the singular self to be an
largely confirmed this idea, showing that inner speech illusion. Instead, they argue that we are made up of
develops around the same time as neural connections many selves, each with a different set of motivations
between brain areas involved in speech production and standards. This means that our inner chatter may
and understanding mature. be a result of the different roles that form our sense
What about its content? According to Vygotsky, the of self. “I as a mother”, for example, would live by
details of what is said, and its emotional weight, are a different set of standards than “I as a friend”. >

Chapter 1 | The building blocks of the mind | 19


←- experience sampling (DES). Volunteers wear an
For more on the sense of self, turn back - earpiece connected to a beeper that goes off at
to the start of this chapter- random. At the beep, volunteers record exactly
what they are experiencing internally. Later, Hurlburt
There is some evidence that our childhood experiences interviews each volunteer, drilling into what exactly
are also at the root of this internal conflict. In 2020, was happening and whether words, images or
Małgorzata Puchalska-Wasyl at the John Paul II Catholic sensations were present. This, he believes, opens
University of Lublin in Poland showed that people a true window into our “pristine inner experience”.
whose parents strongly disagreed on how to raise them Hurlburt pioneered this approach more than
experienced more intense and distressing internal 40 years ago and has collected samples from
dialogue as adults, as the two opposing viewpoints thousands of volunteers. He concludes that inner
continued to battle it out over what is right. speech is just one common form of thought, along
In getting to know our inner voice, it may also be with inner seeing, feeling, sensory awareness and
helpful to identify who is actually doing the talking. unsymbolised thinking – in which a concept isn’t
Puchalska-Wasyl attempted to do this by asking necessarily attached to words or other symbols.
hundreds of people to rate their most common inner
speakers based on a variety of emotional outcomes. →-
Her analysis boiled down their inner speakers to Turn to page 54 to find out about-
four basic characters: the Faithful Friend, the Proud different ways of thinking-
Rival, the Ambivalent Parent and the Helpless Child.
The Faithful Friend is an advocate: caring, positive Whatever type of inner voice you have, it is clear
and always on hand to provide encouragement. In that losing it altogether can be problematic. This
Puchalska-Wasyl’s sample, this was the most common is something that neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor
inner voice experienced. Second was the Proud Rival, understands well. In 1996, a stroke knocked out her
a high-fiving positivity coach who challenges a person ability to talk to herself in her head for five weeks.
to up their game. The Ambivalent Parent offers love, Now recovered, she describes the aftermath of her
support and, at times, a hefty dose of criticism. The stroke as a “blissful silence” without the cacophony
Helpless Child is the most negative, arriving with of internal speech. It created a feeling of being
a feeling of powerlessness and a need for support. untethered from her sense of self in a way that
Determining which voice pops up most often can left her feeling peaceful. “It was liberating to not
be difficult. One option is to pay attention to your maintain the pressure of my ego self,” she says.
inner dialogue and notice which version of your inner But it also had downsides. Bolte Taylor says the
voice is talking and how it makes you feel. Given that lack of a coherent inner narrative left her unable to
internal dialogues are a useful tool in psychotherapy, function. Among other things, she couldn’t determine
identifying which type of voice predominantly where her body was positioned in relation to the world
guides you may help you to reframe the conversation around her, was unable to retrieve autobiographical
for the better. memories and had a lack of self-conscious emotions,
For a more objective approach to analysing the inner most notably embarrassment. Which goes to show
voice, Russell Hurlburt at the University of Nevada, that your inner voice, however trivial it seems, is a
Las Vegas, has developed a method called descriptive vital part of who you are. ❚

20 | New Scientist Essential Guide | The Human Mind

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