Is my inner voice driving me mad?

Mental Health Training

Is my inner voice driving me mad?

So many terms have been used to indicate the inner voice, also known as inner monologue, internal dialogue, inner speech, verbal thoughts and the voice or chatter inside your head.

Does Everyone Have an Inner Voice?

In most cases, the term “inner voice” refers to the constant stream of thoughts that run through our heads.

Such thoughts are a sort of conversation with themselves in their mind. For those individuals who talk to themselves, the phenomenon is called Inner speech having most of the same characteristics as external speech except that no external sounds are produced: it can proceed at the same rate of speed and pitch, with the same emotion as external speech.

Inner speech is frequent but not for everyone, and those thoughts can be positive or negative, depending on whether they serve us or harm you.

For example, if you are anxious about a test, your inner voice will tell you that you will fail. Such thoughts will cause stress and anxiety, negatively affecting your performance and ultimately becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Some individual differences exist—some people talk to themselves a lot, some never, and some occasionally.

We all have a voice in our head in some shape or form, and most people are conscious of an inner voice that provides a running monologue throughout their lives. This inner voice, or self-talk, combining conscious thoughts and unconscious beliefs and biases, providing a way for the brain to interpret and process daily experiences, is then considered a hypothetical doorway between the self and the physical world.

Another skill that appears linked to inner speech is silent reading. While children learning to read often need to read aloud. The brain’s two hemispheres are not identical twins, with the dominant left supervising inner speech and the right hemisphere observing social speech as an articulatory rehearsal.

It shouldn’t be surprising to learn that articulatory rehearsal in dementia is disrupted, along with inner speech. A case study was taken over two decades ago on a 69-year-old man with dementia. During this period, the patient started reading aloud at bedtime, annoying his wife. His voice was thunderous, and it was difficult for him to stop. Moreover, he often spoke aloud to himself during the day or suddenly began singing, all features very unusual for him. Suggesting a prefrontal inhibitory role in the control of inner speech via an early loss of speechless reading was an initial indication of early onset frontotemporal dementia due to executive dysfunction caused by frontal lobe damage.

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