Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff production of I Heart Radio. Hey
Speaker 1: brain Stuff, Lauren bog Obam Here, have you ever thought
Speaker 1: about how you think? Do you? For example, tell yourself,
Speaker 1: don't forget to take out the trash, Then hours later,
Speaker 1: when you hear the garbage truck rolling by, think how
Speaker 1: could I have forgotten that? Is there a constant talking
Speaker 1: to self throughout the day going on in your head.
Speaker 1: A lot of people do use language based chatter to
Speaker 1: organize and focus their thoughts. However, it turns out that
Speaker 1: some people don't have this kind of inner monologue at all. Instead,
Speaker 1: they may rely more on visualization, for instance, seeing themselves
Speaker 1: placing the trash bag in the bin. Others employ a
Speaker 1: combination of these techniques. People on both sides of this
Speaker 1: inner monologue divide have a hard time imagining another way
Speaker 1: of being, to the point that it's sort of freaked
Speaker 1: everyone out. Back in February, when the concept was passing
Speaker 1: around the Internet, we spoke with one Rustle Hurlbert, a
Speaker 1: psychology professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. For decades,
Speaker 1: he's been doing experiments on people's inner experiences. There are thoughts, feelings,
Speaker 1: and sensations regarding the online kerfuffle over inner speech haves
Speaker 1: and have not, he chuckled a bit and said he
Speaker 1: frequently hears people claim that they have an ever present
Speaker 1: inner monologue, but his experiments show that this is not
Speaker 1: always true. But rather than argue with them, he says, well,
Speaker 1: let's find out. His tests began long ago as a
Speaker 1: graduate student in the early nineteen seventies. He began wondering
Speaker 1: how scientists could investigate subjects pristine inner experiences, experiences that
Speaker 1: are in your present consciousness before your brain has tried
Speaker 1: to make sense of them or assigned them some sort
Speaker 1: of interpretation. Hurlbert explained, the object of my research is
Speaker 1: not to explore inner speech or inner monologue, or whatever
Speaker 1: you want to call it, but to explore your experience
Speaker 1: as it actually is is. He thought that an alarm
Speaker 1: of some kind might work, but back then there were
Speaker 1: no cell phones or pagers. So Hurlbert, who has an
Speaker 1: engineering background, designed and patented a device that beeped at
Speaker 1: random intervals. Each time the beeper went off, he asked
Speaker 1: subjects to make notes about their experiences in the moment.
Speaker 1: As students what about their days. These beepers would go
Speaker 1: off at random times. They were instructed to try to
Speaker 1: clarify what was happening in their minds at that instant.
Speaker 1: The beepers went off only a few times. This was
Speaker 1: intentional so that the research subjects would forget that they
Speaker 1: had them and thus not contaminate their thinking processes with
Speaker 1: thoughts about the experiment. Later, researchers asked the students questions
Speaker 1: to better understand how the students were thinking when the
Speaker 1: beepers sounded. Were they visualizing something, experiencing a tactile sensation, feeling,
Speaker 1: and emotion. This line of inquiry is called descriptive experience
Speaker 1: sampling or d e S. Harlbert said one key takeaway
Speaker 1: was that quote you can't expect a good answer on
Speaker 1: the first day. Essentially, it takes a day or two
Speaker 1: of d e S training before people find ways to
Speaker 1: focus on and express what they're experiencing in a given moment.
Speaker 1: In his research, he found that most subjects struggled to
Speaker 1: articulate the way they were talking to themselves. When he
Speaker 1: asked them for these specific words or sentences, many came
Speaker 1: up blank. He said, And in the course of doing that,
Speaker 1: you and I together, I guess you would say we decide, well,
Speaker 1: I thought I had inner speech, but I really don't.
Speaker 1: His studies show that subjects talked to themselves inwardly about
Speaker 1: of the time they were sampled, but that many never
Speaker 1: experienced inner speech, while others had it up to seventy
Speaker 1: five percent of the time. The median percentage of time
Speaker 1: that subjects were sampled experiencing inner speech was just Harlbert
Speaker 1: has worked with other researchers to use d E S
Speaker 1: questioning while so objects were inside m R I scanners
Speaker 1: study of to be fair just five subjects. The scanners
Speaker 1: show that the area of the brain associated with certain
Speaker 1: topics lit up when subjects said they were thinking about
Speaker 1: those things, providing a physical link to the abstractions of thoughts. Still,
Speaker 1: scientists are grappling with a lot of uncertainty what causes
Speaker 1: an inner monologue to begin with. Some research shows that
Speaker 1: people often use more inner verbalization when they're under pressure.
Speaker 1: Perhaps they're rehearsing answers to job interview questions, or maybe
Speaker 1: they're trying to focus on a competitive task like athletics.
Speaker 1: Among people who do report inner monologue, they tend to
Speaker 1: perceive those voices as their own. That self talk generally
Speaker 1: has a familiar pace and tone, although the exact voice
Speaker 1: might change depending on whether the current scenario is happy, scary,
Speaker 1: or relaxed. Sometimes they might use whole sentences, other times
Speaker 1: they might rely on condensed word play that would be
Speaker 1: meaningless to anyone else. But what causes inner speech? Mark Scott,
Speaker 1: a researcher at the University of British Columbia, found that
Speaker 1: there's a brain signal called corollary discharge that helps us
Speaker 1: distinguish between sensory experiences we create internally versus those from
Speaker 1: outside stimuli, and the signal plays a big role in
Speaker 1: internal speech. It also plays a role in how our
Speaker 1: auditory systems process speech. You see, when we speak, there's
Speaker 1: an internal copy of the sound of our voice that's
Speaker 1: generated at the same time as our speaking voice. As
Speaker 1: for the online debate regarding inner monologue, Hurlbert understands that
Speaker 1: online commenters have taken strong positions on the matter. Some
Speaker 1: people simply can't imagine not having an inner voice. Others
Speaker 1: are taken aback by the idea of constant internal chatter.
Speaker 1: He said, half of those people are probably right and
Speaker 1: half of them are not right about their own inner
Speaker 1: monologue characteristics. The main conclusions are inc the people don't
Speaker 1: know what's in their own experience, and he said level
Speaker 1: of confidence is not a good predictor of whether someone
Speaker 1: has an active inner monologue, but could more accurate measures
Speaker 1: of our thoughts be on the way. An ongoing project
Speaker 1: called alter Ego at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has
Speaker 1: successfully demonstrated that a head mounted gadget can read people's thoughts.
Speaker 1: The device interprets subtle neuromuscular signals that people make when
Speaker 1: they internally verbalize certain phrases or words. Although it's still
Speaker 1: a prototype, it's been demonstrated to be capable of accuracy
Speaker 1: of more than Today's episode was written by Nathan Chandler
Speaker 1: and produced by Tyler Klang. For more on this and
Speaker 1: lots of other thought provoking topics, visit how stuffworks dot com.
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