If you have clicked on this article, started reading it silently and manage to get to the end of this sentence, it is very likely that you hear each of the words that make it up inside your head. That is what it means for the vast majority of people to “read inside”: listening to “our own inner voice” mentally pronouncing what we are reading.
Well (as can be deduced from the previous paragraph) that does not happen to everyone.
That is to say, there are people for whom reading silently consists of reading in silence. What’s more, there are people who are unable to imagine that inner voice reading inside our heads.
How is this possible? We cannot say, of course, that it is something inconceivable. We have known for a long time that there are people who do not have an internal monologue. That is to say, we have known for a long time that one in ten people talk to themselves and do not listen to themselves.
What’s more, there are people who are not able to imagine anything at all. Taking this into account, it is reasonable that there are people for whom the “inner voice” is a metaphor and not a vivid experience of an intimate nature. What is lately called “adenophasia” (but applied to reading).
But what exactly is ‘inner voice’? As Adriana Castro, a neuroscientist at the University of Malaga, explained, “this internal discourse has been directly related to consciousness, the mental state that involves being attentive to our thoughts, emotions, sensations and perceptions and the environment that surrounds us.”
Furthermore, it is deeply rooted in the neurobiological substrate of the brain.
Is it problematic? It doesn’t have to. Although it is true that in cases of neurological damage, patients have trouble coping without that inner voice. In the cases of people who have grown up without it, they usually have developed strategies to live without it. For example, it is known that deaf-mute people “can feel that internal speech in a different way.”
“There are more things in heaven and on earth, Horacio… of those that have been dreamed of in your philosophy”, said Hamlet and, seeing this type of things (so little studied), it is easy to conclude that the same thing happens with the sciences. Humanity is much more diverse than we can imagine.
Because, as Castro says, “the study of the inner voice not only allows us to better understand the complexity of our mind, but it could also have practical applications in areas such as education or psychotherapy.”
It would also have the capacity to expand the moral imagination of all of us.
Imagen | Road Trip With Raj
In WorldOfSoftware | There are people who never experience the inner monologue. And they don’t understand how the rest of us can live like this
