Our story on inner monologues attracted comments and questions on Capsule’s social media, so we did a mini quiz – and tracked down an ‘inner experiences’ expert to answer your questions. How many people have inner monologues? How is thinking different from an inner monologue? And are we actually experiencing what we think we are or is our brain playing tricks?
Russell Hurlburt, a professor of psychology at the University of Nevada, is the world’s leading expert on inner experiences, having done 50 years of groundbreaking research in an area that had previously been largely neglected – and providing insights into previously hidden corners of human psychology.
When I asked Russell if he’d answer some of our readers’ questions – and comment on some case studies from my original story – he was kind enough to talk over Zoom. I soon realised that it’s hard to talk about inner monologues without knowing a bit about inner experiences more broadly.
What first interested Russell about inner experiences? “Well, doesn’t everybody want to know what somebody else is thinking or feeling? On television, an interviewer might say ‘how did you feel when you saw your house burning down?’ or ‘what were you thinking when you hit the home run?’. That’s what people want to know about, and I was one of them.”
Russell, who did degrees in engineering before getting a Ph.D. in clinical psychology, thought that most questionnaires about people’s inner experiences – and most of the answers – left much to be desired. “Basically, if you ask questions about inner experiences that specify the possible answer [via questionnaires], the answers don’t provide much quality information.” He wanted to answer his own question: can you ask about inner experiences in a way that you can believe the answers?
Russell invented a beeper that he gave to research participants. “I tried to simplify the task by saying ‘let’s at least be clear about the exact moment we’re talking about’. I gave them questionnaires to answer at the moment of the beeps rather than at just one time. But I soon realised that, just because I was asking those questions repeatedly, the answers weren’t any better [quality]. My questionnaires weren’t any good. I didn’t know what to do about that. So I wore the beeper for a year from when I got up until I went to bed. And I read about Buddhism and all manner of things about inner experiences and consciousness.”
From all this, he came up with the Descriptive Experience Sampling (DES) method. Research participants carry a beeper as they go about daily life and, when it bleeps, they write down – there and then – information about their inner experience (for example, a thought, feeling, voice, or visual image), having been instructed in introspective procedures. After a certain number of beeps, they do an intensive interview following strict guidelines. So you get immediacy (answering in the moment) and other quality data (from the interviews).
This method helps to minimise unconscious distortion from memory errors, biases, mental shortcuts, and self-schemas (beliefs we hold about ourselves).
What Actually IS An Inner Monologue
It’s difficult to define the term inner monologue, Russell says, because people’s experiences are so different.
“If, by inner monologue, you mean people experiencing themselves as speaking – even though there aren’t any words coming out of their mouth – that kind of thing happens to some people almost all the time. For other people, almost never.”
“Then the question becomes, ‘well, what what’s the frequency?’. The percentage of people who are engaged in inner speaking in a lot of different kinds of situations is something like 20%, 25% or 30%.” But that depends on who is selected and how. “The big takeaway from my research is that the range of frequencies is between zero to 100%. Zero percent is common; 100% is common.”
“Also, people’s opinions about their own inner experiences don’t necessarily reflect what you find through studies. Many subjects going into [a study] say ‘I talk to myself all the time’, then we find that, actually, they don’t. With subjects who say ‘I never talk to myself’, we often find they actually do.”
I have a busy inner monologue – or at least I think I do. Either way, I was shocked to realise recently that some peopledon’t have an inner monologue (or at least think they don’t). Russell nods. “Many people think everybody must have an inner monologue, and are shocked that some people don’t have that all the time.” And vice versa, though not as often.
Russell has a webpage that asks the question: ‘do I really have [an] internal monologue?’ – and features the stories of 10 DES participants: interviews, transcript, and Russell’s commentary. One of these is Ryan Langdon, whose blog entry ‘Today I Learned That Not Everyone Has An Internal Monologue And It Has Ruined My Day’ has had 10 million views. (Reading about Russell’s work “obliterated” Ryan’s mind.)
Another of the 10 people featured is Mel, “who is basically quiet in her [inner] experience most of the time. She was surprised to find that other people didn’t have that experience, and was shocked to figure out what it was like for other people.”
“Some people respond skilfully and appropriately in the external world but just have a quiet inner life. But I think my work shows that those people are in the minority.” People may not always have an inner monologue, but odds are they sometimes do.
Russell doesn’t have an inner monologue most of the time.
Capsule Reader Questions, Answered
When we asked our social-media followers if they have an inner monologue – as in ‘constantly having a conversation with themselves’ – 62% said yes, 8% said no and 30% said yes but it’s not constant. “Your question asked about a monologue,” Russell says, “then described a dialogue”. Fair (Whoops). An internal monologue (narrating your life inwardly) and an inner dialogue (conversations with yourself) overlap, but aren’t exactly the same.
“The next question,” Russell says, “is are those numbers [percentages] from your readers right? I think they’re about what I’d find if I asked people the same question.” But what is self-reported isn’t always what’s happening.
We also asked readers about how their inner monologue manifests from the following options: 25% of them are narrating their day, 22% are having an argument with themselves, 15% are singing a song, and 38% are running through their to-do lists. “Keep in mind that they’re not describing their actual experience, but their presuppositions about their experiences,” Russell says. (Plus we only gave them four choices.)
An Even Bigger Question: What IS Thinking?
I tell Russell that a reader asked how an inner monologue is different to just having thoughts. “That’s a very complex question. For some people, an inner monologue and thinking are the same thing.”
“The word ‘thinking’ is problematic because you don’t know what a person’s actual experience is. Ask someone what they’re thinking, and one person means they’re talking to themselves in their inner voice; another person means they’re seeing a visual image; another person means they’re feeling an emotional experience; another person means they’re zeroed on the colour and sensory characteristics of, for instance, my red shirt; and another person means they’re cogitating in some way but without words and images etc.”
“What I think ‘thinking’ actually means is whatever your frequent inner experience is. If your inner experience is a lot of visual imagery, that’s what you mean by thinking. If your inner experience is a lot of inner monologue, that’s what you mean by thinking.”
A case study for my original story said words appear in text form, like subtitles on a screen, in a serif typeface. “That’s unusual, but not impossible. It’s much more common to feel you’re speaking or hearing the words. It’s also possible for words to be not heard, spoken or seen, but for them to be present somehow.”
Another case study feels she has three or four radio stations playing. Unusual? “It’s quite possible to have simultaneous separate inner experiences going on, but it’s not common.”
And a reader asked ‘how do you make an inner monologue stop or take a break from it?’ “I don’t know the answer for sure,” Russell says. However, he says the object of Zen meditation – an advanced Buddhist-based meditation technique that focuses on the practice of awareness and regulating attention – is to “turn off something like an inner monologue. If someone with a lot of inner monologue meditates for a long time, the frequency of their inner monologue will go down substantially.”
I might try that because my inner monologue is loud. I tell Russell I even sometimes say thoughts out loud if no one else can hear. Common or unusual? “Unusual, but we have to be careful about what you mean by common. If I talk to myself once today, once tomorrow, once the next day, do you call that frequently or infrequently?” I get it – it’s all relative.
