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).
Earlier this month, a Hong Kong ship, Shunxin-39, was identified as the ship that had cut telecom cables on the seabed north of Keelung. The ship, owned out of Hong Kong and variously described as registered in Cameroon (as Shunxin-39) and Tanzania (as Xinshun-39), was originally People’s Republic of China (PRC)-flagged, but changed registries in 2024, according to Maritime Executive magazine. The Financial Times published tracking data for the ship showing it crossing a number of undersea cables off northern Taiwan over the course of several days. The intent was clear. Shunxin-39, which according to the Taiwan Coast Guard was crewed
China’s military launched a record number of warplane incursions around Taiwan last year as it builds its ability to launch full-scale invasion, something a former chief of Taiwan’s armed forces said Beijing could be capable of within a decade. Analysts said China’s relentless harassment had taken a toll on Taiwan’s resources, but had failed to convince them to capitulate, largely because the threat of invasion was still an empty one, for now. Xi Jinping’s (習近平) determination to annex Taiwan under what the president terms “reunification” is no secret. He has publicly and stridently promised to bring it under Communist party (CCP) control,
On Sept. 27 last year, three climate activists were arrested for throwing soup over Sunflowers by Vincent van Gogh at London’s National Gallery. The Just Stop Oil protest landed on international front pages. But will the action help further the activists’ cause to end fossil fuels? Scientists are beginning to find answers to this question. The number of protests more than tripled between 2006 and 2020 and researchers are working out which tactics are most likely to change public opinion, influence voting behavior, change policy or even overthrow political regimes. “We are experiencing the largest wave of protests in documented history,” says
One way people in Taiwan can control how they are represented is through their choice of name. Culturally, it is not uncommon for people to choose their own names and change their identification cards and passports to reflect the change, though only recently was the right to use Indigenous names written using letters allowed. Reasons for changing a person’s name can vary widely, from wanting to sound more literary, to changing a poor choice made by their parents or, as 331 people did in March of 2021, to get free sushi by legally changing their name to include the two characters
RSS