Psychologists may be the only researchers barred, on principle, from encountering the thing they’re meant to be studying. If anatomy’s your passion, cut up a corpse; if you want to understand Polynesian religious rituals, get on a plane. But you’ll never get inside other people’s mental experience. Not that people don’t make impressive efforts: in one recent study (which I found via the Research Digest blog), the New York University researcher Ruvanee Vilhauer investigated the “inner voice” many people claim to hear when they’re reading. Around 80% of us believe we hear such a voice, she concluded. For many, it’s their own voice; for others, it’s the voices of characters in the book; some report that they hear text messages in the voice of the sender. Perhaps one day there’ll be brain implants with customised voices, just as you can have Snoop Dogg do your satnav. Although I hope not.
Beyond the experience of reading, this inner voice is a staple of writings on self-help and spirituality. The cause of all our misery, the theory goes, is the constant commentary from a voice that tells us we’re worthless, or that others should treat us differently. Happiness results from changing what the voice says, or learning to quieten or ignore it, usually via cognitive therapy or meditation. (Some experts speculate that the other kind of inner voices – those reported by people with schizophrenia – are actually the same thing, mistakenly interpreted as originating outside the self.) Still, you’d be forgiven for thinking this raises more questions than it answers. Such as: what do you mean by “inner voice”? It’s not only that different people may have different experiences; it’s that we might not even have the language to figure that out.
Consider the only example I’m in a position to consider: me. I’ve often suspected that my inner world is less verbal than most people’s. “In case you hadn’t noticed, you have a mental dialogue going on inside your head that never stops,” Michael A Singer writes in his bestseller The Untethered Soul. A familiar refrain, but it doesn’t feel true for me. Is that because my thoughts are more visual? Possibly, yet based on talking with others, I fear my “mind’s eye” is a pitiful organ, too: the pictures it generates are dim and colourless, while theirs are sharp and bright. None of these sensory metaphors – talking, seeing – describe how thinking feels to me. Maybe I’m weird. Or maybe I’m normal, but lack the words to convey it.
Spend much time thinking along these lines, and you’ll be struck by the dizzying truth that there’s an unbridgeable chasm between your mind and everyone else’s. You’ll never know how those to whom you’re closest really experience the world. Take emotional intensity: what if their idea of “incredibly happy” is your idea of “mildly pleased”, or vice versa? Who could tell? Human interaction is a matter of yelling between mountaintops, through driving rain, in different languages, with socks over our heads. Picture that in your mind’s eye. If you even have one.
