Reason why some people hear an internal voice in their head while they read
Topics: Health, Psychology, Science
Joe Yates
Featured Image Credit: Getty Images/Morsa Images
Topics: Health, Psychology, Science
While we all may look similar, the chances are that what is going on in our minds and our brains couldn't be more different, and a study suggests that.
For example, there's no way of knowing what the colors I see are the same for other people - my 'blue' might be another person's 'yellow', as bonkers as that sounds.
Then there's countless differences in how we process information, as well as something known as an 'internal monologue'.
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The latter is what I'll be touching on.
The phenomenon goes by several names: 'inner dialogue', 'inner monologue', 'internal dialogue', 'internal monologue', and finally, 'intrapersonal communication'.
Basically, all these words refer to the process of talking to yourself in your head, whether that's in your own voice, your friend's voice when reading their text message, or more bizarrely, that of a celebrity - although you could argue that's just unnecessary, and fewer people claim to be able to do so anyway.
New York University Professor of Psychology Ruvanee Vilhauer published a study on the phenomenon of what he called 'inner speech', and delved deeper into 'inner voice reading', which is as the name describes.
After analyzing 160 posts from a community question and answer website, he found that 82.5 percent of people do hear a voice when they read.
He wrote: "Results indicated that many individuals report routinely experiencing IRVs [internal reading voices], which often have the auditory qualities of overt speech, such as recognizable identity, gender, pitch, loudness and emotional tone.
"IRVs were sometimes identified as the readers’ own voices, and sometimes as the voices of other people. Some individuals reported that IRVs were continuous with audible thoughts."
While a second paper released two years later, in 2017, he had 570 participants complete a survey and found that 80.7 percent 'reported sometimes or always hearing an inner voice during silent reading'.
The remaining 19.3 percent reported that they did not hear an inner reading voice, although they understood words being read.
"Results indicated that IRVs are a routine experience for many, with 34.2 percent of respondents with IRVs hearing an IRV every time something was read, and 45 percent reporting an IRV often," the professor found.
"Most respondents reported IRVs with specific auditory qualities such as gender, accent, pitch, loudness, and emotional tone. IRVs were reported in participants' own voices, as well as in the voices of other people.
"Some respondents reported being unable to control any aspect of their IRVs, while others could control one or several aspects. These results indicate that there is considerable individual variation in inner speech during silent reading."