Scientists discovered how living without an inner voice affects language processing in the brain.
Researchers have found that not everyone has a sense of inner voice. A new study published in the journal Psychological Science shows how living without an inner voice affects the brain’s language processing. Scientists also propose a new name for the condition in which there is no internal monologue: anendophasia. ScienceAlert writes that this condition is similar to anuralia, which occurs in people who have no inner voice and cannot imagine sounds such as musical melody.
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As part of the study on inner voices, researchers recruited a group of 93 volunteers, half of whom said they had low levels of inner speech and the other half said they had a very strong inner voice. Study participants were asked to complete several tasks, one in which they had to remember the order of words and another in which they had to put rhyming words together.
According to the scientists, the tasks should be very difficult, but their hypothesis was that they could be even more difficult if the person does not have an inner voice. The truth is that the person will have to repeat the words to themselves to remember them. And this hypothesis turned out to be correct.
Participants who heard internal voices in their daily lives performed significantly better on tasks than those who did not have internal monologues. The former remembered more words correctly and was faster at selecting rhyming words. Scientists believe this may be evidence that internal voices help people process words.
The study also found that differences in problem-solving performance between participants disappeared when participants said the words out loud. Scientists say that perhaps using an audible voice in such situations has the same effect as using an inner voice.
On other tasks where it was necessary to distinguish between different image shapes, for example, there was no difference in the performance of the two groups of participants. Scientists believe this is a sign that how the inner voice influences behavior depends on what the person does.
The study’s authors suggest that people without an inner voice learn to use different strategies to process information. Preliminary results of the study show that people without internal voices remember verbal information in the same way as those with auditory images.
According to the scientists, the experiment that found differences between groups of people involved sound and the ability to hear words on its own. Now scientists want to know whether this is because people don’t perceive the auditory aspect of speech, or because they don’t think in linguistic terms like most people.
As I already wrote FocusScientists have called it a personality trait that protects our brain. Our personality traits affect our behavior and mental health, but their effects don’t end there. Recently, scientists found that a particular personality trait can protect the brain even in Alzheimer’s disease.
Source: Focus
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