Descriptions of what it's like to live without internal monologue will blow your mind

The human mind is constantly buzzing with thoughts—ranging from "shower thoughts" to past conversations or inner rants. It was once assumed that everyone has an inner voice narrating their thoughts, but recent research shows this isn't true for everyone. Surprisingly, some people have no idea there’s a voice in their head that sounds like their own, according to Bustle.

Explaining the concept of an internal monologue, licensed clinical social worker Joni Ogle told Bustle, “An internal monologue...refers to the thoughts that run through your brain,” adding, “Having an inner monologue is like having a discussion with yourself inside your head.” This inner voice involves questioning, reacting to others, and reflecting on experiences. It’s like a mental tape of all the conversations you’ve had, overheard, or imagined.

But some people have quiet brains, no whispering voices to pull their attention. For example, when u/Vadermaulkylo wrote a post in the Reddit group r/nostupidquestions saying that they couldn’t hear any inner monologue, people were mind-boggled. u/cdhc commented, “I'm so confused. My mind's racing. What is a ‘thought’ without an inner voice?” u/overzealous_dentist, who too doesn’t have an interior monologue, said, “My brain just processes each thing and the right one comes to the fore. It doesn't need words. I feel like describing the analysis would only slow the thoughts down honestly.”

Many people started a discussion that inner monologue can be classified into “non-vocalized thoughts” and “worded monologues.” u/marlyn_does_reddit said the line between these two types is usually blurred. u/common_lizard replied that meditations like vipassana can help a person to stare at their own mind and see where these lines are. People who have an inner voice can’t understand the experience of those who don’t have one, and vice versa.

Russell Hurlburt, a psychology professor at the University of Nevada who has been studying what he calls “inner experience” for more than 40 years, told CBC News that he estimated that inner monologue is a frequent thing for 30 to 50 percent of people. "There are very big individual differences," he said, "Some people have absolutely none and some people have pretty close to 100 percent."

He even conducted a study in 2011 to get a better picture of how people think. He gave beepers to some random students. When the beeper went off, they had to note down what was going on inside their heads moments before it went off. This went on for several weeks. "Subjects experienced themselves as inwardly talking to themselves in 26 percent of all samples," he wrote in Psychology Today. "But there were large individual differences: some subjects never experienced inner speech; other subjects experienced inner speech in as many as 75 percent of their samples. The median percentage across subjects was 20 percent.”

But long before Hurlburt studied the concept of “inner speech,” psychologists began looking into its function in the 1930s, per My Modern Met. Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky first suggested that external conversation can become internalized. The idea of external speech becoming internalized is also supported by evidence that both stem from the same part of the brain, Broca's area, that deals with language processing, governing both inner speech and outer speech.

Research has also found that the interior monologue, sometimes, is also coincident with vivid mental imagery, that plays like a movie in the head. Researchers at Harvard University discovered that visual and verbal thinking are highly linked. They suggested that people with a clear inner monologue typically have stronger mental visuals to accompany their verbal thoughts than people who don't have inner monologues.