There’s a professor at the University of Nevada whose research on the subject of “inner monologues” has recently seeped into the zeitgeist (that is, in other words, seeped into the conversation on Instagram, where I saw a random post about it).
His name — according to my Google search this morning, trying to figure out if this was real research or just a click-bait ad targeting middle-aged women worried about memory loss — is Dr. Russell Hurlburt and he has come up with a method to test what’s going on inside Americans’ minds as they go about their daily business, cleaning the kitty litter, driving up the Bronx River Parkway, or shopping for tangelos. He calls it “descriptive experience sampling” and it works like this: Participants in his studies are provided with a beeper that goes off at random intervals several times a day; when beeped, they have to freeze their current mental state and make a record of what exactly is happening in their thoughts at that precise moment.
According to Dr. Hurlburt, it isn’t true that everyone has a constant internal narrative of words running inside their brainpan. The study found that inner speech — our inner monologue — occurred in only about a quarter of the frozen moments participants jotted down. Further, the frequency of inner monologuing at any given moment was not evenly spread around the population. Some people have talkative brains and some do not. The subjects whose thoughts were organized around words and language claimed to have an inner monologue 75 percent of the time while other subjects, the non-wordy-brained, said they had an inner monologue going in their minds exactly 0 percent of the time.
Dr. Hurlburt claims that about 30 to 50 percent of people regularly talk to themselves silently.
The rest of the population, though, doesn’t just have an empty head. It’s just that their thoughts, the professor says, take forms other than words and language. These non-wordy-brained people walk around with an internal reel of mental images forever unspooling. Or they have wordless thoughts, without language, or are preoccupied with the world of physical sensations — they just feel cold, without expressing it to themselves in sentences, as some of us do (“I’m so cold where is my cardigan I’m such a silly goose I left it in the car if I go get it from the car it will be cold when I put it on and my hair is wet so maybe I’d better fetch it later. . . . “).
This research method does seem problematic to me. Doesn’t it seem iffy to have research participants self-report what’s going on in their brain? I’m no scientist, but maybe those zero-percenters weren’t actually thinking without words but were thinking with words they didn’t want to admit to. Obscenities? Curses? Internal monologues of killing their mother-in-law? Lifting the waitress’s skirt?
My inner monologue is a total chatterbox. Regular readers won’t be surprised to hear that. I wake up with words in my head most mornings. The morning-brain words that pop up, as if remnants of a dream, tend to be funny ones, multisyllabic ones, that some section of my temporal lobe is having difficulty interpreting and sorting away in the correct filing cabinet (or perhaps wants to cling onto longer, and repeat, like you’d hum a refrain). I’ve tried to take note of these waking-up words, as the subject of a “Shipwreck Rose” column — because I find them humorous, myself — but I keep neglecting to write them down, and then I forget. Recently, however, I can report that I woke up and wandered into the kitchen to make my Nespresso, shuffling in my red bedroom slippers, with the word “Mungingware” rattling around up there — whispering it silently, softly, to myself — and also the name “Vivian Rifflemacher.” Vivian Rifflemacher. Vivian Rifflemacher.
Vivian Rifflemacher was someone I knew when I was in seventh and eighth grade and we both participated in the Children’s Theater Workshop productions of “Anything Goes” and “Our Town” at John Drew Theater. I remember her backstage, by the dressing rooms that used to run along a hallway at the north side of Guild Hall. Vivian was a few years older than me, and I can only just conjure her image now, vaguely, as if seen inside the encapsulated mist of a fortune teller’s crystal ball: She had very long, wavy, dirty-blond hair and painted fingernails, and I see her wearing purple velvet. I think she was in ninth or 10th grade, and was the sort of girl who carried around a copy of “Lord of the Rings.” I believe she may have worn glasses.
But I don’t know. It’s the rhythm of her name that got caught in the cogs of my talkative brain. Apparently my brain continues talking even when I’m asleep. If this sounds like I’m bragging, I’m genuinely not. My inner monologue is often a rumination, it’s true, but it’s equally often just an observation of the most mundane events observed through my two pale-blue orbs: “Look,” I say to myself silently and foolishly, “two yellow dogs chasing a squirrel.”
Often it’s just words that come floating in, out of the ether, on the air, like a song. Sometimes it’s words I like very much: caboose. Caboose, caboose. Sometimes it’s less words, and more just memories with certain words highlighted in vivid neon yellow: I remember myself in the Plaza Hotel at the age of 15, one evening after having ridden down from Concord Academy on the Manhattan bus with cosmopolitan friends from prep school. It was winter and we were in the basement of the Plaza, at Trader Vic’s, sitting around a low cocktail table on which the waiter in a white jacket had placed a huge, rum-filled Scorpion Bowl with long straws, pineapples, and cherries. The light was amber and there were tiki carvings in the wood. Trader Vic’s. Trader Vic’s. I’d love to return to Trader Vic’s, like a refrain, like a song.