Some people don’t have an ‘inner voice� It’s not about pathology but about grand human diversity

Meditation doesn’t come easy to many people. It’s hard to focus on one’s breathing when there’s a lot of non-cooperation from one’s mind. It seems intent on following 5-25 different tracks instead, some vividly visual like a video playing inside one’s head. Multilinguals find their inner speech doing a language medley. This internal chatter, however, is not a universal human experience. For some people, the only way to ‘hear�an inner voice is through external verbalisation. Last year, a Psychological Science paper proposed naming this condition ‘anendophasia� In a related condition called aphantasia, people cannot create visualisations in the mind.

That we call these ways of being ‘conditions�reflects majoritarian fallacy. It’s easy to assume that someone with anendophasia has ‘nothing going on in their head� Or is a sociopath. Stereotyping others�experience from one’s own is tempting. It is also unenlightened. The human experience is profoundly diverse. It’s on a grand spectrum. Take the seeming binary of those who have dreams and those who don’t. This may be related more to the recall function than dreaming per se. We are still figuring all this out. Of course, reactions to diversity are also diverse. Some readers must be wishing their own inner voices would also go silent. 

In the film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, two lovers choose to erase the memory of each other to try to escape its pain. Their doc says that while technically speaking the operation is brain damage, it’s on par with a night of heavy drinking, nothing they will miss. Except, they do miss something deep, despite the forgetting. If some of us talk to ourselves at 4,000 words per minute, as one study suggests, let’s try meditation �but stay who we are. 

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This piece appeared as an editorial opinion in the print edition of The Times of India.

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