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A video posted on Youtube by an American doctor named Ryan Langdon ended up going viral and surpassing one million hits in less than ten days. In the video, the doctor reports that when he figured out that some people do not have a mental dialogue, he began to question whether other individuals actually do this. So he asked if anyone around him was going through this situation.

According to him, it is as if people who experience this type of situation have a different form of brain communication that is not the use of an internal dialogue, but an internal exposure of words, phrases and images.

After going deeper and looking for more cases on his social media, he realized that more people than he expected felt this. For this reason, he condensed most of his questions and conducted a brief interview with one of his colleagues, Kirsten Carlson, who reported not hearing anything in his mind.

One of the facts that drew the most attention is that, according to Kirsten, when she is writing the sentences they take shapes in your head, as if they were mental maps, connecting the words to each other. She also stated that when she tries to look in the mirror, for example, and talk to herself, she simply verbalizes everything what she was trying to say internally, failing do this activity of saying something mentally in front of the mirror.

Ryan comments that the purpose of the video is to draw attention to this possible new way of speaking with conscience, thus promoting the possibility of further studies in this regard.

But what do scientists say about this internal dialogue?

According to a study published in the journal Consciousness and Cognition (2018), the experience of talking to oneself is quite common in humans, being often responsible for helping in the creation of plans, in the process of learning and fixing memories. On the other hand, the content of these dialogues or the amount of voices we hear can be quite enlightening in detecting psychopathologies such as auditory hallucinations, depression, anxiety.

At the time, the researchers submitted the volunteers to 35 questions regarding the way they communicated with their mind, such as "I speak to myself in a critical way", "My inner speech contributes to feeling depressed and depressed". Responses to situations were given on a scale of 1 to 7, in which, 1 indicated that it never happened, while 7 was related to an event that occurred all the time. At the end of the collection, the frequency of response to each of the questions was measured. As a conclusion, the study pointed out that the content of the dialogue that we carry with our own conscience can indeed contribute to the investigation of disorders and some diseases.

While some studies relate internal dialogues to possible psychopathologies, others infer that such voices can contribute to human development and improvement of individual's self-confidence, as published in the European Journal of Social Psychology in 2014. The study concluded that when referring to the voices in the third person (“you”), our intentions and behaviors become more effective.

With this information in hand, I could not fail to comment on the great names of world science who have never hidden hearing voices in their heads. The great genius of physics Albert Einstein reported that the first insights into the theory of relativity came when he heard his inner voice. Another prominent personality is John Forbes Nash Jr, a mathematician, winner of the Nobel Prize in economics (1994) and inspiration for the film “A Beautiful Mind”, which reportedly managed to dominate the internal dialogue to bring changes to society.

How do you communicate with your inner self?

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ALDERSON-DAY, Ben et al. The varieties of inner speech questionnaire–revised (VISQ-R): replicating and refining links between inner speech and psychopathology. Consciousness and cognition, v. 65, p. 48-58, 2018. Disponível em: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1053810018301090#b0075

DOLCOS, Sanda; ALBARRACIN, Dolores. The inner speech of behavioral regulation: Intentions and task performance strengthen when you talk to yourself as a You. European Journal of Social Psychology, v. 44, n. 6, p. 636-642, 2014.Disponível em: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ejsp.2048

LANGDON,Ryan. Today I Learned That Not Everyone Has An Internal Monologue And It Has Ruined My Day. Inside my Mind. Disponível em: https://insidemymind.me/2020/01/28/today-i-learned-that-not-everyone-has-an-internal-monologue-and-it-has-ruined-my-day/

MEYNEN, Gerben. Wegner on hallucinations, inconsistency, and the illusion of free will. Some critical remarks. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, v. 9, n. 3, p. 359-372, 2010.