Woah! That would be both miraculous and terrifying to think of having that internal silence.
How do they function?
Isn't this essentially like not having a conscious? Or a diminished one?
As one who has an inner monologue, it’s not there all the time, but... I think without one (inner monologue), there are all the things the brain does, are still happening, but without words. In some cases there are visuals, feelings, and you know there is a lot you do instinctively without a inner word spoken.
Some interesting articles. The most in-depth is the last one about Pristine Inner Experience:
People Are Shocked to Discover That Not Everyone Has an Inner Monologue

People Have Discovered That Not Everyone Has an Inner Monologue and It Has Sparked a Dialogue Online
Do you have an internal monologue?

Interestingly, researchers at Harvard University have found that visual and verbal thinking are highly linked. While people often think of themselves as being either more verbal or visual, this isn’t necessarily the case. In fact, people with a clear inner monologue typically have stronger mental visuals to accompany their verbal thoughts.
Whether you have a constant narration present in your head or hear nothing at all, the debate raises interesting questions about how we think and process information. Certainly, the next time you see someone lost in thought, you might just wonder what the conversation is inside their head.
APPARENTLY, SOME PEOPLE DO NOT HAVE AN INNER VOICE—HERE’S HOW THAT HAPPENS

Apparently, some people do not have an inner voice—here's how that happens
But here's how to befriend yours, if you have one.

So how does inner speech come to be, and is it always running in our minds?
“Inner speech is the product of the default mode network or DMN of the brain,” says Dr. Brenner. “It’s a network of different areas of the brain that become very active, all together, when we’re not engaged in doing anything task-oriented—when we’re just thinking or daydreaming. It turns out that it never fully stops either—it just gets suppressed the busier and more actively engaged we get.”
Whether you have a mental narrator or not, none of us really think in words when we’re completely engaged, skiing fast down a mountain, or scaling a cliff. Likewise, our thoughts lose words when we’re fully listening to music, the incessant drilling of construction at work (just me?), or someone else’s words.
“The default mode network is what produces that whole running narrative in your head—all the things you think about, connecting your past to your present and thinking about the future, all of your opinions and self-comparisons,” Dr. Brenner says. “It’s the seat of creativity and imagination, but it’s also the seat of neurosis, depression and anxiety.”
The bottom line is, if you don’t have an inner monologue, must be nice and you might not magically manifest one. If an inner monologue is your reality, though, how do we train and tame our inner voice? How do we make it our friend and guide instead of your enemy and tormentor?
——————
The following is an interesting article because this author mentions 5 types of the pristine inner experience, but only describes 3 examples of how they are described, leaving the other 2 for a future post.
- inner speech
- inner seeing
- feeling
- ?
- ?
Not Everyone Conducts Inner Speech
Five main characteristics emerged, each occurring in about a quarter of all samples (many samples had more than one characteristic). Three of those five characteristics may not surprise you: inner speech occurred in about a quarter of all samples, inner seeing occurred in about a quarter of all samples, and feelings occurred in about a quarter of all samples. The other two phenomena occurred just as frequently but are not so well known.
Consider inner speech. Subjects experienced themselves as inwardly talking to themselves in 26 percent of all samples, 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.
———————————
And it's not that the remaining phenomena are minor, in fourth and fifth place after inner speech, inner seeing, and feeling. All five are in basically a five-way tie for first place. I'll describe features four and five in subsequent post.
Pristine Inner Experience and Descriptive Experience Sampling: Implications for Psychology
Frontiers | Pristine Inner Experience and Descriptive Experience Sampling: Implications for Psychology
Pristine inner experience is that which is directly present in awareness before it is distorted by attempts at observation or interpretation. Many psychologi...

Pristine inner experience is that which is directly present in awareness before it is distorted by attempts at observation or interpretation. Many psychological methods, including most introspective methods, attempt to measure some aspect of pristine inner experience (thoughts, feelings, mental imagery, sensations, etc.). We believe, however, that these methods produce unspecifiable combinations of pristine inner experience, beliefs about the self, beliefs about what inner experience should be like, inaccurate recollections, miscommunications, and other confounding influences.
Last edited: