Welcome to brain Stuff production of I Heart Radio. Hey brain Stuff, Lauren bog Obam Here, have you ever thought about how you think? Do you? For example, tell yourself, don't forget to take out the trash, Then hours later, when you hear the garbage truck rolling by, think how could I have forgotten that? Is there a constant talking to self throughout the day going on in your head. A lot of people do use language based chatter to organize and focus their thoughts. However, it turns out that
some people don't have this kind of inner monologue at all. Instead, they may rely more on visualization, for instance, seeing themselves placing the trash bag in the bin. Others employ a combination of these techniques. People on both sides of this inner monologue divide have a hard time imagining another way of being, to the point that it's sort of freaked everyone out. Back in February, when the concept was passing around the Internet, we spoke with one Rustle Hurlbert, a
psychology professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. For decades, he's been doing experiments on people's inner experiences. There are thoughts, feelings, and sensations regarding the online kerfuffle over inner speech haves and have not, he chuckled a bit and said he frequently hears people claim that they have an ever present inner monologue, but his experiments show that this is not always true. But rather than argue with them, he says, well,
let's find out. His tests began long ago as a graduate student in the early nineteen seventies. He began wondering how scientists could investigate subjects pristine inner experiences, experiences that are in your present consciousness before your brain has tried to make sense of them or assigned them some sort of interpretation. Hurlbert explained, the object of my research is not to explore inner speech or inner monologue, or whatever you want to call it, but to explore your experience
as it actually is is. He thought that an alarm of some kind might work, but back then there were no cell phones or pagers. So Hurlbert, who has an engineering background, designed and patented a device that beeped at random intervals. Each time the beeper went off, he asked subjects to make notes about their experiences in the moment. As students what about their days. These beepers would go
off at random times. They were instructed to try to clarify what was happening in their minds at that instant. The beepers went off only a few times. This was intentional so that the research subjects would forget that they had them and thus not contaminate their thinking processes with thoughts about the experiment. Later, researchers asked the students questions to better understand how the students were thinking when the
beepers sounded. Were they visualizing something, experiencing a tactile sensation, feeling, and emotion. This line of inquiry is called descriptive experience sampling or d e S. Harlbert said one key takeaway was that quote you can't expect a good answer on the first day. Essentially, it takes a day or two of d e S training before people find ways to focus on and express what they're experiencing in a given moment. In his research, he found that most subjects struggled to
articulate the way they were talking to themselves. When he asked them for these specific words or sentences, many came up blank. He said, And in the course of doing that, you and I together, I guess you would say we decide, well, I thought I had inner speech, but I really don't. His studies show that subjects talked to themselves inwardly about of the time they were sampled, but that many never experienced inner speech, while others had it up to seventy
five percent of the time. The median percentage of time that subjects were sampled experiencing inner speech was just Harlbert has worked with other researchers to use d E S questioning while so objects were inside m R I scanners study of to be fair just five subjects. The scanners show that the area of the brain associated with certain topics lit up when subjects said they were thinking about
those things, providing a physical link to the abstractions of thoughts. Still, scientists are grappling with a lot of uncertainty what causes an inner monologue to begin with. Some research shows that people often use more inner verbalization when they're under pressure. Perhaps they're rehearsing answers to job interview questions, or maybe they're trying to focus on a competitive task like athletics. Among people who do report inner monologue, they tend to
perceive those voices as their own. That self talk generally has a familiar pace and tone, although the exact voice might change depending on whether the current scenario is happy, scary, or relaxed. Sometimes they might use whole sentences, other times they might rely on condensed word play that would be
meaningless to anyone else. But what causes inner speech? Mark Scott, a researcher at the University of British Columbia, found that there's a brain signal called corollary discharge that helps us distinguish between sensory experiences we create internally versus those from outside stimuli, and the signal plays a big role in internal speech. It also plays a role in how our auditory systems process speech. You see, when we speak, there's an internal copy of the sound of our voice that's
generated at the same time as our speaking voice. As for the online debate regarding inner monologue, Hurlbert understands that online commenters have taken strong positions on the matter. Some people simply can't imagine not having an inner voice. Others are taken aback by the idea of constant internal chatter. He said, half of those people are probably right and half of them are not right about their own inner
monologue characteristics. The main conclusions are inc the people don't know what's in their own experience, and he said level of confidence is not a good predictor of whether someone has an active inner monologue, but could more accurate measures of our thoughts be on the way. An ongoing project called alter Ego at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has successfully demonstrated that a head mounted gadget can read people's thoughts.
The device interprets subtle neuromuscular signals that people make when they internally verbalize certain phrases or words. Although it's still a prototype, it's been demonstrated to be capable of accuracy of more than Today's episode was written by Nathan Chandler and produced by Tyler Klang. For more on this and lots of other thought provoking topics, visit how stuffworks dot com.
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