And some of that may be visual or also verbalized. I may even find it difficult to get involved in it, should a doctor later tell me hey ya know you're not helping when you walk like that if your knee hurts, so 'do this instead' when adjusting gait.īut take that situation: once I've adjusted my gait and since I'm not falling down and apparently not about to croak, my brain has the option of offering any other related info that it happens to have stashed away at some point.

So in a way there's an inner monologue going on that I don't participate in. I mean if I feel a twinge in my knee as I start walking across a room, first I just feel it and may adjust the way I'm walking, perhaps without consciously making that adjustment. Pristine Inner Experience and Descriptive Experience Sampling: Implications for PsychologyĪ lot of this stuff ends up confounded by some form of 'the observer effect', no? I'll describe features four and five in subsequent post.

All five are in basically a five-way tie for first place. The median percentage across subjects was 20 percent.Īnd it's not that the remaining phenomena are minor, in fourth and fifth place after inner speech, inner seeing, and feeling. Subjects experienced themselves as inwardly talking to themselves in 26 percent of all samples, but there were large individual differences: some subjects never experienced inner speech other subjects experienced inner speech in as many as 75 percent of their samples. The other two phenomena occurred just as frequently but are not so well known.Ĭonsider inner speech. Three of those five characteristics may not surprise you: inner speech occurred in about a quarter of all samples, inner seeing occurred in about a quarter of all samples, and feelings occurred in about a quarter of all samples. The following is an interesting article because this author mentions 5 types of the pristine inner experience, but only describes 3 examples of how they are described, leaving the other 2 for a future post.įive main characteristics emerged, each occurring in about a quarter of all samples (many samples had more than one characteristic). If an inner monologue is your reality, though, how do we train and tame our inner voice? How do we make it our friend and guide instead of your enemy and tormentor? The bottom line is, if you don’t have an inner monologue, must be nice and you might not magically manifest one. “It’s the seat of creativity and imagination, but it’s also the seat of neurosis, depression and anxiety.” “The default mode network is what produces that whole running narrative in your head-all the things you think about, connecting your past to your present and thinking about the future, all of your opinions and self-comparisons,” Dr. Likewise, our thoughts lose words when we’re fully listening to music, the incessant drilling of construction at work (just me?), or someone else’s words. Whether you have a mental narrator or not, none of us really think in words when we’re completely engaged, skiing fast down a mountain, or scaling a cliff. It turns out that it never fully stops either-it just gets suppressed the busier and more actively engaged we get.” “It’s a network of different areas of the brain that become very active, all together, when we’re not engaged in doing anything task-oriented-when we’re just thinking or daydreaming.

“Inner speech is the product of the default mode network or DMN of the brain,” says Dr. So how does inner speech come to be, and is it always running in our minds?

Inner monologue definition