Free essays and podcast episodes are published every Tuesday, and paid subscribers receive an additional essay and episode on Thursdays.
What we typically refer to as our stream of consciousness is made up of multiple types of what we might call thoughts, but which are actually types of phenomenology: images, sounds, words, reflections, memories, sensory information like smells—flashes of subjective experience scrolling through our minds.
This stream of phenomenological media is thought to be ever-present in most conscious humans, and our experience of individual chunks of it is the consequence of us homing in on particular moments of that stream, or items that arise from it.
This is a very theoretical concept within the world of psychology, and though it may serve as a useful metaphor for what’s actually happening in the conscious human brain when we’re awake, it may not be a literal description of what’s occurring: there’s a good chance that our perception of a stream of memories and thoughts and so on is actually just our sense of something else entirely, formatted for the way we perceive things.
That said, one component of this supposed stream of consciousness has a bit more data behind it that some of the others—though it’s still somewhat controversial, and the mechanisms underpinning it are still open to interpretation and inquiry.
Inner speech, the consequence of which is sometimes referred to as our internal monologue, is thought by some to be a component of thought, considered by others to be primarily a type of self-reflection, while still others see it as a reflexive assessment of data collected from past experiences and predicted future experiences.
Subvocalization, the formal term for reading in our heads rather than out loud, and rehearsing collections of words, like for a speech we’re trying to memorize, is considered to be a component of this—though it’s also often broken off into its own sub-realm of study.
That larger inner speech-component, though, says, in essence, that we’re engaged in an ongoing dialogue with ourselves in our brains, and everything from practicing new knowledge to negative and positive self-talk and criticism, to the reinforcement of helpful and harmful habits may be derived from, or amplified by, this inner voice.
Again, at the moment, this is a cluttered and controversial field of inquiry across many scientific fields.
It does seem, however, based on what we know so far, that our inner speech, though sometimes consisting of fully realized thoughts and sentences, is actually more typically composed of symbols and shorthand: we represent thoughts conceptually rather than verbally, and thus while we may interpret our internal vocalizations as literal speech, it generally only ends up that way after a few rounds of translation.
This symbolic, shorthand-style of thinking allows us to rifle through ideas, interpretations, and possibilities far faster than if we had to convey all that information using the cipher of language; which is super-useful when we need to process quickly, but also probably more efficient in terms of energy usage.
In contrast, it also seems that it may sometimes be valuable to think out loud—to speak, verbally, to ourselves as we think—rather than limiting our cognition to this inner voice.
The logic is that when we think in symbolic shorthand, we also limit ourselves to concepts for which we have preexisting neurological hieroglyphs.
Particularly when we’re trying to think creatively, then, but also when we’re trying to work through novel problems or think within unfamiliar confines, talking to ourselves using our mouths instead of merely our minds may keep us from sticking to familiar paths, giving us more liberty to carve out and traverse new ones.
We also process such out-loud speech differently from internal, self-talk, which can in some cases make that external information more potent, including when it’s used to self-motivate or learn some types of information.
Which makes sense, if you think about the shape this information takes: the internal monologue is all data shuffling around in our minds, processed as symbols, while external data, including our own voices and our processing of those sounds, takes a more circuitous path before eventually arriving back in our brains.
Our inner voices, based on research that’s been done thus far, seem to be more effective at priming us for things like problem-solving, preparation for social encounters, and the activation of working memory. And we know this partially as a result of studies assessing why children seem to naturally engage in more external self-talk—talking to themselves, and in fact holding entire conversations with themselves, at times—while adults do not.
It’s thought that social mores may be part of what’s going on here—talking to oneself is associated with childhood, perhaps, so adults differentiate themselves from their younger selves by keeping their processing internal—but it’s also possible that this shift is partially the consequence of recalibrating our neurological resources to address different sorts of problems and achieve different types of outcome.
This area of inquiry is still so novel that it doesn’t even have an agreed-upon designation, yet.
There have been attempts to formalize research into inner speech and its component parts, but little has come of it thus far: cross-pollination between neurologists and psychologists and philosophers, among others, is still problematic—existing data languishes in obscurity due to the wide variety of terminology and definitions used to refer to these concepts, and those performing relevant research are approaching the subject from wildly different perspectives and with very different assumptions informing their experimental frameworks.
In the meantime, it’s worth considering, as individuals, how we process different types of information, under what circumstances we slow and assess that stream of consciousness, whatever it actually is, to utilize it in a more focused and intentional way, and how external processing—talking to ourselves, thinking out loud—compares to our internal cognitive habits; and where the line between these two practices is actually drawn.
Enjoying Brain Lenses? You might also enjoy my news analysis podcast, Let’s Know Things and/or my daily publication, Yesterday’s Newsletter.
The Brain Lenses podcast is available at brainlenses.com or wherever you get your podcasts.