Can our inner voice both provide motivation and lead to depression?

Are you talking to yourself inside your head? The vast majority of us do. In fact, we spend an average of 25 percent of our waking hours talking to ourselves.

But what role does our inner voice actually play? And what is the consequence for those who experience that they have no inner voice?

»My starting point is that the brain exists to adapt the organism to the environment in which it lives. If you don't have the opportunity to change your behavior, there's no reason to have a brain. Our inner speech is created by the brain and therefore presumably has both a cause and an effect. It's just extremely difficult to investigate, because inner speech is part of our consciousness,« says Mikkel Wallentin, professor at the School of Communication and Culture – Cognitive Science at Aarhus University.

With support from Independent Research Fund Denmark, he will try to gain greater insight into our inner voice and its meaning. The tools will be a combination of questionnaires, brain scans and practical exercises, where test subjects will test how the inner voice affects their behaviour.

Can both hurt and do good

Our inner voice can do both good and evil, explains Mikkel Wallentin. If we tell ourselves that things will go badly, it can contribute to psychiatric disorders.

Conversely, the inner voice can also help us stay focused. For example, if we need to solve a task or perform.

»That is exciting and magical in itself, because it requires me and I to be two different people. When we talk to ourselves, we talk to ourselves as if we were someone else. And we link this to the theory we have underneath this whole project, which is that our mind and our brain and our cognitive system consist of different levels that communicate with each other,« says Mikkel Wallentin.

The first part of the research project focuses on questionnaire surveys. Here, 1,000 English speakers will be asked questions about their inner voice using an internet-based platform. This means that the participants can theoretically sit anywhere in the world, although the aim is to reach people who have English as their mother tongue.

In addition, 300 students at Aarhus University will be presented with a Danish version of the questionnaire. From this group, the plan is to continue working with the university students who, based on the questionnaire survey, seem to have the least and most inner voice, respectively.

The research project is scheduled to last for four years, and two junior researchers will be attached. One is Johanne Krog Nedergaard, a postdoc at the Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics at University of Copenhagen. She has many years of experience working with the inner voice and especially people who do not have an inner voice, known as anendophasia.

Among the 300 university students, the research group will continue to work with the 50 who are estimated to use their inner voice the most and the 50 who use it the least.

They will go through scans and their physiology will be examined. This is done, for example, by seeing if the inner voice can change a person's heart rate. If the inner voice can cause stress, it can lead to an unhealthy negative spiral.

Can help people with psychiatric disorders in the long term

Physiology can also be studied by looking at the value of the inner voice as a motivating factor. For example, if you are assigned to solve a boring task, such as pressing a button every time a cross appears on the screen you have been set to stare at.

If your inner voice can keep your focus, you should be able to react fairly quick.

»I would like to know if those who say they have no inner voice cannot actually talk to themselves, or if they just do not do it,« says Mikkel Wallentin about his hopes for the overall project.

At the same time, he wants to help map the importance of the inner voice for our well-being.

»If we can understand the importance of the inner voice for psychiatric disorders in the long term, we will be able to treat psychiatric disorders differently from person to person. We already know that psychiatric disorders are extremely heterogeneous, so my depression is not the same as another person's depression on all parameters. If we can tell the difference between people's inner speech preferences, we will also be better able to help,« Mikkel Wallentin emphasizes.

Finally, he has a tip if you feel that your inner voice is getting a little too much space: Count to 100 inside your head, it blocks your inner voice.