by Ethan Kross
Working memory is what allows us to participate in work discussions and have impromptu dinner conversations. Thanks to it, we’re able to remember what someone said a few seconds earlier and then incorporate it into the evolving discussion in a relevant way. Working memory is what allows us to read a menu and then order food (while also keeping up one of those conversations). It’s what allows us to write an email about something urgent but not meaningful enough to get filed away in long-term storage. In short, it’s what allows us to function as people out in the world. When it stops working or operates suboptimally, our capacity to perform even the most ordinary daily activities (like bugging your kids to brush their teeth while making them pack lunches and also thinking about what meetings you have later that day) fails. And connected to working memory is the inner voice.
A critical component of working memory is a neural system that specializes in managing verbal information. It’s called the phonological loop, but it’s easiest to understand it as the brain’s clearinghouse for everything related to words that occurs around us in the present. It has two parts: an “inner ear,” which allows us to retain words we’ve just heard for a few seconds; and an “inner voice,” which allows us to repeat words in our head as we do when we’re practicing a speech or memorizing a phone number or repeating a mantra. Our working memory relies on the phonological loop for keeping our linguistic neural pathways online so that we can function productively outside ourselves while also keeping our conversations going within. We develop this verbal doorway between our minds and the world in infancy, and as soon as it’s in place, it propels us toward other milestones of mental development. Indeed, the phonological loop goes well beyond the realm of responding to immediate situations.
Our verbal development goes hand in hand with our emotional development. As toddlers, speaking to ourselves out loud helps us learn to control ourselves. In the early twentieth century, the Soviet psychologist Lev Vygotsky was one of the first people to explore the connection between language development and self-control. He was interested in the curious behavior of children who talk to themselves out loud, coaching themselves along while also doling out self-critiques. As anyone who has spent significant time around kids knows, they often have full-blown, unprompted conversations with themselves. This isn’t just play or imagination; it’s a sign of neural and emotional growth.
Unlike other leading thinkers of the time who thought this behavior was a sign of unsophisticated development, Vygotsky saw language playing a critical role in how we learn to control ourselves, a theory that would later be borne out by data. He believed that the way we learn to manage our emotions begins with our relationships with our primary caretakers (typically our parents). These authorities give us instructions, and we repeat those instructions to ourselves aloud, often mimicking what they say. At first, we do this audibly. Over time, though, we come to internalize their message in silent inner speech. And then later, as we develop further, we come to use our own words to control ourselves for the rest of our lives. As we all know, this doesn’t mean that we always end up doing what our parents want—our verbal stream eventually develops its own unique contours that creatively direct our behavior—but these early developmental experiences influence us significantly.
Vygotsky’s perspective doesn’t merely explain how we learn to use our inner voice to control ourselves; it also provides us with a way of understanding how our internal conversations are “tuned” in part by our upbringing. Decades of research on socialization indicate that our environments influence how we view the world, including how we think about self-control. In families, our parents model self-control for us when we’re children, and their approaches seep into our developing inner voices. Our father might repeatedly tell us never to use violence to resolve a conflict. Our mother might repeatedly tell us to never give up after a disappointment. Over time, we repeat these things to ourselves, and they begin to shape our own verbal streams.
Of course, our parents’ authoritative voices are themselves shaped by broader cultural factors. For example, in most Asian countries, standing out is frowned upon, because it threatens social cohesion. In contrast, Western countries like the United States place a premium on independence, leading parents to applaud their children’s individual pursuits. Religions and the values they teach likewise bleed into our household norms. In short, the voices of culture influence our parents’ inner voices, which in turn influence our own, and so on through the many cultures and generations that combine to tune our minds. We are like Russian nesting dolls of mental conversations.
That said, the influence among culture, parents, and children doesn’t go in just one direction. The way children behave can likewise impact their parents’ voices, and we human beings of course play a role in shaping and reshaping our greater cultures as well. In a sense, then, our inner voice makes its home in us as children by going from the outside in, until we later speak from the inside out and affect those around us.
Recent research that Vygotsky didn’t live to see has taken his theory further, with studies demonstrating that children brought up in families with rich communication patterns develop this facet of inner speech earlier. Moreover, it turns out that having imaginary friends may spur internal speech in children. In fact, emerging research suggests that imaginary play promotes self-control, among many other desirable qualities such as creative thinking, confidence, and good communication.
Another crucial way the inner voice helps us control ourselves is by evaluating us as we strive toward goals. Almost like a tracking app on a phone, the default state monitors us to see if we’re meeting benchmarks at work to get that end-of-the-year raise, if we’re advancing on our side-hustle dream of opening a restaurant, or if our relationship with that friend we have a crush on is developing apace. This frequently happens with a verbal thought popping in our mind much like an appointment reminder appearing on your lock screen. In fact, spontaneous thoughts related to goals are among the most frequent kind that fill our mind. It’s our inner voice alerting us to pay attention to an objective.
Part of reaching goals involves making the right choice when there is a proverbial fork in the road, which is why our inner voice also allows us to run mental simulations. For example, when we are engaged in creative brainstorming about, say, the best way to do a presentation or the best melodic progression for a song we’re writing, we internally explore different possible paths. Often even before writing the words for a presentation or touching a musical instrument, we’ve already tapped our introspective capacities to decide on the best permutation. The same goes for figuring out how to deal with an interpersonal challenge, the way Tony did while walking around New York thinking about his friends who hadn’t told him about their pregnancy. He was simulating whether he should remain close or distance himself. This multiple-reality brainstorming even happens while we are sleeping, in our dreams.
Historically, psychologists thought of dreams as a chamber of their own in the mind, and very different from what happens during our waking hours. Freud, of course, thought dreams were the royal road to the unconscious, a locked box holding our repressed urges, and psychoanalysis was the key that opened it. With our defenses down and our civilized propriety turned off while we slept, he thought, our demons came out and romped around, revealing our desires. Then came early neuroscience, which took out all the dark and naughty romance of psychoanalysis and replaced it with the cold no-nonsense attitude of the physical workings of the brain. It said that dreams were nothing more than the brain’s way of interpreting random brain-stem firings during REM sleep. Out the door went sexual symbolism, which was entertaining if a bit loony, and in came the mechanics of neurons, which was more scientifically grounded (and not at all salacious).
Present-day research with more advanced technology has shown that our dreams in fact share many similarities with the spontaneous verbal thoughts we experience when we ar
e awake. It turns out that our waking verbal mind converses with our sleeping one. Fortunately, this doesn’t produce Oedipal wish fulfillments.
It can help us.
Emerging evidence suggests that dreams are often functional and highly attuned to our practical needs. You can think of them as a slightly zany flight simulator. They aid us in preparing for the future by simulating events that are still to come, pointing our attention to potentially real scenarios and even threats to be wary of. Although we still have much to learn about how dreams affect us, at the end of the day—or night, rather—they are simply stories in the mind. And sure enough, in waking life, the inner voice pipes up loudly about the most foundational psychological story of all: our identities.
Our verbal stream plays an indispensable role in the creation of our selves. The brain constructs meaningful narratives through autobiographical reasoning. In other words, we use our minds to write the story of our lives, with us as the main character. Doing so helps us mature, figure out our values and desires, and weather change and adversity by keeping us rooted in a continuous identity. Language is integral to this process because it smooths the jagged and seemingly unconnected fragments of daily life into a cohesive through line. It helps us “storify” life. The words of the mind sculpt the past, and thus set up a narrative for us to follow into the future. By flitting back and forth between different memories, our internal monologues weave a neural narrative of recollections. It sews the past into the seams of our brain’s construction of our identity.
The brain’s multitasking abilities are varied and vital, as is the inner voice. But to truly understand its profound value, we must contemplate what it would be like if our verbal thoughts were to disappear. As improbable as this may sound, we don’t have to merely imagine this scenario. In some cases, it actually happens.
Going to La-La Land
On December 10, 1996, Jill Bolte Taylor woke just as she did every morning. A thirty-seven-year-old neuroanatomist, she worked in a psychiatry lab at Harvard University, where she studied the makeup of the brain. Her drive to map our cortical landscapes to understand their cellular interactions and the behaviors they produced grew out of her family history. Her brother had schizophrenia, and though she couldn’t expect to reverse his illness, it motivated her to try to unravel the mysteries of the mind. She was well on her way to doing so—that is, until the day her brain stopped functioning well.
Bolte Taylor got out of bed to do her morning exercise on a cardio machine, but she didn’t feel like herself. She had a pulsing pain behind her eye, like an ice-cream headache that came and went, and came and went. Then, once she started exercising, things got strange. While on the machine, she felt her body slow down and her perception contract. “I can no longer define the boundaries of my body,” she later recalled. “I can’t define where I begin and where I end.”
Not only did she lose the sense of her body in physical space, she also began to lose her sense of who she was. She felt her emotions and memories drift away, as if they were leaving her to take up residence elsewhere. The second-by-second sparking of perceptions and reactions that characterized her normal mental awareness faded. She felt her thoughts losing their shape, and with them, her words. Her verbal stream slowed like a river drying up. Her brain’s linguistic machinery broke down.
A blood vessel had popped on the left side of her brain. She was having a stroke.
While her physical movements and linguistic faculties were drastically encumbered, she managed to phone a colleague, who quickly gathered that something was wrong. Soon after, Bolte Taylor found herself in the back of an ambulance being taken to Massachusetts General Hospital. “I felt my spirit surrender,” she said. “I was no longer the choreographer of my life.” Sure that she was going to die, she said farewell to her life.
She didn’t die. Later that afternoon she woke up in a hospital bed, astonished that she was still alive, though her life wouldn’t be the same for a long time. Her inner voice as she had always known it had departed. “My verbal thoughts were now inconsistent, fragmented, and interrupted by an intermittent silence,” she later recalled. “I was alone. In the moment, I was alone with nothing but the rhythmic pulse of my beating heart.” She wasn’t even alone with her thoughts, because she didn’t have thoughts as she’d had before.
Her working memory wasn’t working, making it impossible to complete the simplest tasks. Her phonological loop, it seemed, had unraveled. Her self-talk was silenced. She was no longer a mental time traveler capable of revisiting the past and imagining the future. She felt vulnerable in a way she had never even imagined possible, as if she were spinning by herself in outer space. She wondered, wordlessly, if words would ever return in full to her mental life. Without verbal introspection, she ceased to be human in the previous sense she had known. “Devoid of language and linear processing,” she wrote, “I felt disconnected from the life I had lived.”
Most profoundly of all, she lost her identity. The narrative her inner voice had allowed her to construct over nearly four decades erased itself. “Those little voices inside your head,” as she put it, had made her her, but now they were silent. “So, was I really still me? How could I still be Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, when I no longer shared her life experiences, thoughts, and emotional attachments?”
When I imagine what it would be like to go through what Jill Bolte Taylor experienced, it fills me with panic. Losing the ability to talk to myself, to use language to tap into my intuitions, stitch together my experiences into a coherent whole, or plan for the future, sounds much worse than a letter from a deranged stalker. Yet it’s here where her story gets stranger and even more fascinating.
Bolte Taylor wasn’t frightened the way I imagine I or anyone else in her situation would feel. Remarkably, she found a comfort like nothing she had ever felt before when her lifelong internal conversation vanished. “The growing void in my traumatized brain was entirely seductive,” she later wrote. “I welcomed the reprieve that the silence brought from the constant chatter.”
She had gone, as she put it, to “la-la land.”
Being robbed of language and memory, on the one hand, was terrifying and lonely. On the other hand, it was ecstatically, euphorically liberating. Free from her past identity, she could also be free from all her recurring painful recollections, present stresses, and looming anxieties. Without her inner voice she was free from chatter. To her, this trade-off felt worth it. She later reflected that this was because she hadn’t learned to manage her buzzing inner world prior to her stroke. Like all of us, she had trouble controlling her emotions when she got sucked into negative spirals.
Two and a half weeks after her stroke, Bolte Taylor would have surgery to remove a golf-ball-sized blood clot from her brain. It would take her eight years to fully recover. She continues to conduct research on the brain while also sharing her story with the world. She emphasizes the overwhelming sense of generosity and well-being she felt when her inner critic was muted. She is now, as she describes it, “a devout believer that paying attention to our self-talk is vitally important for our mental health.”
What her experience shows us in singularly vivid terms is how deeply we struggle with our inner voice—to the point where the stream of verbal thoughts that allows us to function and think and be ourselves could lead to expansively good feelings when it’s gone. This is striking evidence of how influential our inner voice can be. Research bears out this phenomenon in less exceptional circumstances. Not only can our thoughts taint experience. They can blot out nearly everything else.
A study published in 2010 drives home this point. The scientists found that inner experiences consistently dwarf outer ones. What participants were thinking about turned out to be a better predictor of their happiness than what they were actually doing. This speaks to a sour experience many people have had: You’re in a situation in which you should be happy (sp
ending time with friends, say, or celebrating an accomplishment), but a ruminative thought swallows your mind. Your mood is defined not by what you did but by what you thought about.
The reason people experience relief when their inner voice quiets isn’t that it is a curse of our evolution. As we’ve seen, we have a voice in our heads because it is a unique gift that accompanies us from the streets of New York to our sleeping dreams. It allows us to function in the world, achieve goals, create, connect, and define who we are in wonderful ways. But when it morphs into chatter, it is often so overwhelming that it can cause us to lose sight of this and perhaps even wish we didn’t have an inner voice at all.
Before we get into what science teaches us about how to control our verbal mental stream, though, we need to understand the harmful effects of chatter that require us to intervene in the first place. When you take a close look at what our destructive verbal thoughts can do to us—to our minds, bodies, and relationships—you realize that shedding a few tears on the streets of New York is getting off easy.
Chapter Two
When Talking to Ourselves Backfires
The first wild pitch seemed like a fluke.
It was October 3, 2000, game one between the St. Louis Cardinals and the Atlanta Braves in the first round of the National League playoffs. The Cardinal pitcher Rick Ankiel watched the ball he had just thrown bounce off the ground past his catcher and then hit the backstop. As the runner on first jogged to second, the crowd made a sound of modest, almost supportive surprise—he was, after all, playing on his home turf at Busch Stadium in St. Louis—though there was no reason to think his wild throw presaged any shift in the balance of the inning. In baseball, pitches occasionally get away from even the best pitchers, never mind the fact that Ankiel wasn’t just any pitcher.