Sometimes I like to start a column by asking myself: should this really be a column that will live on the Internet forever, for all and sundry to see? Or is this really an airing of my many neuroses that is better shared privately, with a therapist?
Not infrequently the answer is the latter. But therapy is expensive and comment is free, so I’m afraid, dear reader, that you’re going to have to be my shrink today. And I’ll get straight into my issues: I have a voice in my head that won’t shut up.
Before you get too alarmed, the voice isn’t telling me to do dastardly things, or trying to convince me that I’m Jesus. It’s just a constant inner monologue. This inner voice isn’t a bad thing per se; often it’s useful, occasionally it’s entertaining. Sometimes it’s annoying as hell, though: it keeps me up at night replaying past conversations I’ve had and coming up with all the things I should have said. When things get stressful — and the world has been very stressful lately — then all this inner chatter can get very overwhelming.
Photo: EPA-EFE
Chances are you know exactly what I’m talking about, because you have an inner auditory narrator too. A lot of people do. I used to assume everyone in the world did until a tweet went viral a few years ago announcing that some people don’t. Now a variation of that tweet seems to go viral every year.
“Yo wtf…just saw a stat that said only 30-50% of people have an internal dialogue,” one podcaster tweeted in 2022, for example. “There’s really 50%+ of the population out here walking around with NOTHING going on in their head?? Everything is starting to make much more sense.”
While tweets like this have sparked a fascinating mainstream discussion about the different ways we think, they tend to be extremely simplistic summations of a very complex phenomenon. (I know, the idea that a tweet might be overly simplistic is shocking, right?!) There isn’t a clearcut binary between people who have internal voices and people who don’t. And research shows that the nature of our inner voices varies dramatically as well. Some of us might hear our own voice while others might experience the world — as the subject of a 2021 Guardian feature did — via a bickering Italian couple in their head.
CONFUSION
Speaking to me over the phone (I promise he’s not just a voice in my head), Russell Hurlburt, a psychology professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, who has done pioneering work in this field, notes that most of us are very confused about our inner experiences. Even those of us who, like me, are sure that we have an inner monologue going on all the damn time probably don’t — we’re probably just talking to ourselves a certain percentage of the time. Basically, we’re all unreliable narrators.
To try to land on a more objective way of measuring how people experience the world, Hurlburt came up with a method called descriptive experience sampling, where participants are given beepers and then told to jot down their inner experience whenever the beeper goes off. After training people for a while on this method, he says, you get to a more accurate representation of what’s actually going on in their head. He’s been doing this for more than 50 years.
And what is going on in people’s heads? Well, what Hurlburt found is that when you do the beeper experiment, people have an inner voice roughly 25 percent of the time. What that means, he says, is that “some people never have words going on, and a few people have words going on all the time, and a lot of people have words going on some of the time.”
Now, all of this might be an accurate way of putting things, but it’s not exactly viral tweet material, is it? I kept trying to ask Hurlburt to give me a specific percentage of people who never speak to themselves, so I could have a nice flashy headline saying something like “30 percent of people don’t have an inner monologue at all, they see the world in cartoons,” but he was far too detail-oriented to give one to me. All he’d say is that the number of people who don’t think in words is more than you’d expect.
As for that 30-50 percent figure in the viral tweet I mentioned earlier? That comes from Hurlburt’s research but is a misrepresentation of the fact that the test subject only had the inner voice going on when the beeper went off. It doesn’t mean that 30-50 percent of the population don’t have an inner voice at all in any circumstance.
Anyway, there are two big takeaways from all of this. The first is that it’s always useful to remember that we all experience “reality” in completely different ways. Our brains are miraculous and extremely weird things, and everyone has a different way of processing the world. And the second big takeaway is that you should never immediately trust a statistic that you see on Twitter (now X).
June 2 to June 8 Taiwan’s woodcutters believe that if they see even one speck of red in their cooked rice, no matter how small, an accident is going to happen. Peng Chin-tian (彭錦田) swears that this has proven to be true at every stop during his decades-long career in the logging industry. Along with mining, timber harvesting was once considered the most dangerous profession in Taiwan. Not only were mishaps common during all stages of processing, it was difficult to transport the injured to get medical treatment. Many died during the arduous journey. Peng recounts some of his accidents in
“Why does Taiwan identity decline?”a group of researchers lead by University of Nevada political scientist Austin Wang (王宏恩) asked in a recent paper. After all, it is not difficult to explain the rise in Taiwanese identity after the early 1990s. But no model predicted its decline during the 2016-2018 period, they say. After testing various alternative explanations, Wang et al argue that the fall-off in Taiwanese identity during that period is related to voter hedging based on the performance of the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP). Since the DPP is perceived as the guardian of Taiwan identity, when it performs well,
The Taiwan People’s Party (TPP) on May 18 held a rally in Taichung to mark the anniversary of President William Lai’s (賴清德) inauguration on May 20. The title of the rally could be loosely translated to “May 18 recall fraudulent goods” (518退貨ㄌㄨㄚˋ！). Unlike in English, where the terms are the same, “recall” (退貨) in this context refers to product recalls due to damaged, defective or fraudulent merchandise, not the political recalls (罷免) currently dominating the headlines. I attended the rally to determine if the impression was correct that the TPP under party Chairman Huang Kuo-Chang (黃國昌) had little of a
A short walk beneath the dense Amazon canopy, the forest abruptly opens up. Fallen logs are rotting, the trees grow sparser and the temperature rises in places sunlight hits the ground. This is what 24 years of severe drought looks like in the world’s largest rainforest. But this patch of degraded forest, about the size of a soccer field, is a scientific experiment. Launched in 2000 by Brazilian and British scientists, Esecaflor — short for “Forest Drought Study Project” in Portuguese — set out to simulate a future in which the changing climate could deplete the Amazon of rainfall. It is
RSS