Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day
37°14′30″N 131°52′0″E
Joined August 2013
- Tweets7.1K
- Following867
- Followers300
- Likes19K
I don’t need to know anything about Jordan to make the claim. The man and his advice are two completely separate things.
WTF @grok
Not all people experience an internal running dialogue (also called an inner monologue, inner speech, or verbal self-talk).
Inner speech is the subjective experience of language or a voice in the mind without speaking aloud. Research shows substantial individual differences in its frequency and presence:
•Studies using Descriptive Experience Sampling (DES)—in which participants are randomly prompted during daily life and report their immediate inner experience—find that inner speech occurs in roughly one-quarter of sampled moments on average. Frequencies range widely across individuals, from near zero to nearly continuous. In one key study of 30 participants (about 10 samples each), five reported no inner speech at all in their samples.
•Questionnaire self-reports often substantially overestimate how frequently people experience inner speech compared with real-time sampling methods.
•A 2024 study by Nedergaard and Lupyan proposed the term anendophasia for the lack (or near-absence) of inner speech. Self-reported experience ranges from near-constant to nonexistent. Participants with low reported inner speech performed worse on certain verbal tasks (such as recalling word sequences in order and making rhyme judgments) than those with high reported inner speech, though speaking aloud could compensate in some cases.
The authors and others note that the exact prevalence of complete absence remains uncertain and requires further study; low frequency is clearly established, while total lifelong absence in neurotypical people is still debated.
People who experience little or no verbal inner dialogue typically think through other means, such as visual images, sensory details, emotions, or “unsymbolized thinking” (knowing or considering something without words or images). This is a normal variation in human cognition, comparable to aphantasia (the lack of visual mental imagery), rather than a deficit or disorder.
In short, while many people have frequent or nearly continuous inner speech, others have it only occasionally or rarely (or report none). The assumption that a running internal dialogue is universal does not hold.