Silent Thinkers: Embracing neurodiversity in a noisy world

Wednesday, July 31, 2024.

In our increasingly fast-paced and loud world, growing awareness of neurodiversity has revealed the unique strengths and challenges faced by those folks who think differently.

Among these sometimes subtle cognitive profiles are the "silent thinkers," who process information internally without the typical verbal inner dialogue.

This post explores groundbreaking 2024 research on silent thinkers, highlighting their traits and the importance of recognizing and embracing neurodiversity.

Understanding Silent Thinkers

According to a study, one in ten people think without hearing any voice in their heads but still hear music internally. Up to 10% of people have no ‘inner voice,’ making it harder for them to translate their thoughts into words. Fascinatingly, people with a lack of an inner voice report being able to hear music in their heads, just not words.

Some people even experience ‘wordless’ inner speech: the feeling that the word is about to come, but it cannot internally be ‘said.’ Instead of thinking using inner speech, those without it report using concepts, a kind of thinking without seeing or hearing anything — the study’s authors liken it to unsymbolized thinking.

The Diversity of Our Inner Worlds

It is more evidence that our inner worlds are strikingly different: some people find it hard to recognize faces, some people have little or no ability to visualize, and others hear no voice in their heads.

While most of us might assume that hearing your own voice inside your head is universal, psychologists have discovered that it is not.

One of the challenges for people with no inner voice can be translating thoughts into words.

Dr. Johanne Nedergård, the first author of a study on what they term ‘anendophasia,’ explained:

“Some say that they think in pictures and then translate the pictures into words when they need to say something. Others describe their brain as a well-functioning computer that just does not process thoughts verbally, and that the connection to loudspeaker and microphone is different from other people’s. And those who say that there is something verbal going on inside their heads will typically describe it as words without sound.”

Revealing Rhymes and Silent Memories

For their study, the researchers recruited almost 100 people, half of whom had little or no inner speech, and compared them to those who experience a lot of inner speech.

They performed a memory task that involved remembering a list of words, some of which sound similar, like ‘nice,’ ‘slice,’ and ‘quick,’ ‘pick.’

Dr. Nedergård said:

“It is a task that will be difficult for everyone, but our hypothesis was that it might be even more difficult if you did not have an inner voice because you have to repeat the words to yourself inside your head in order to remember them.

And this hypothesis turned out to be true: The participants without an inner voice were significantly worse at remembering the words.

The same applied to an assignment in which the participants had to determine whether a pair of pictures contained words that rhyme, e.g., pictures of a sock and a clock.

Here, too, it is crucial to be able to repeat the words in order to compare their sounds and thus determine whether they rhyme.”

Typically, people who have a deficit in one area attempt to use other areas to compensate.

The researchers in this study found that when people were allowed to talk out loud, those with no inner voice performed just as well. So, it is likely that they were compensating using another technique.

Therapy and the Inner Voice

Many believe in the idea that people are either verbal or visual thinkers.

In fact, this is not the case: people who easily see pictures in their minds are likely to also hear their inner voice more clearly and frequently.

This suggests that inner voices and images are important to human beings, as most experience them, and it is not an either/or situation.

So, what are the consequences for those who do not have this ability? Dr. Nedergård explained that scientists are not yet sure:

“The short answer is that we just don’t know because we have only just begun to study it.

But there is one field where we suspect that having an inner voice plays a role, and that is therapy; in the widely used cognitive behavioral therapy, for example, you need to identify and change adverse thought patterns, and having an inner voice may be very important in such a process.

However, it is still uncertain whether differences in the experience of an inner voice are related to how people respond to different types of therapy.

The experiments in which we found differences between the groups were about sound and being able to hear the words for themselves.

I would like to study whether it is because they just do not experience the sound aspect of language or whether they do not think at all in a linguistic format like most other people.”

Final thoughts

Our understanding of neurodiversity continues to expand, revealing the vast differences in how people think, perceive, and interact with the world.

Silent thinkers, with their unique cognitive processes, remind us that there is no one "right" way to think.

We need all sorts of brains to run our modern world. By recognizing and embracing these differences, we can refine talk therapy into a more finely honed instrument. Perhaps this will lead to a more inclusive and understanding society that values all forms of intelligence and cognitive processing.

Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.

REFERENCES:

K. Nedergaard, J. S., & Lupyan, G. (2024). Not Everybody Has an Inner Voice: Behavioral Consequences of Anendophasia. Psychological Science. https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976241243004