Does Everyone Have an Inner Voice?

There’s a voice in your head right now.

Or maybe there isn’t. That’s the point.

Most people who have an inner verbal monologue — the running commentary that narrates your day, rehearses conversations, reads text as you scan it — assume that everyone has one. It feels so fundamental to thinking itself that it’s hard to imagine cognition without it. And most people who don’t have one never brought it up, because it never occurred to them that there was anything unusual about how they think.

This collective assumption went unchallenged in mainstream science until fairly recently. The result: we built most of our cognitive psychology around a model that didn’t apply to everyone.

What Is Inner Speech?

Inner speech — the “little voice” in your head — is subvocalization: your brain running the language production system internally rather than externally. When you think in words, you’re using the same neural machinery as when you speak out loud: Broca’s area (language production), Wernicke’s area (language comprehension), and the motor cortex regions associated with articulation. The difference is that the output is suppressed before it reaches your throat.

This is why you can “hear” your own thoughts. They’re running through the auditory-language loop — the same system that processes incoming speech — just without the external signal.

Inner speech serves real functions: it helps with working memory (repeating a phone number to yourself), self-regulation (the internal voice that says “don’t say that”), planning, reading comprehension, and problem-solving. Children develop it around age 5–7 as they internalize the external self-talk that’s visible in younger kids narrating what they’re doing out loud.

The People Who Think Without Words

Psycholinguist Russ Hurlburt spent decades using a method called Descriptive Experience Sampling — giving participants a beeper that went off randomly throughout the day, prompting them to report exactly what was happening in their consciousness at that moment.

His finding: the variety of inner experience is vastly greater than most people assume.

Some participants had near-constant verbal inner speech. Others had primarily visual imagery — a running slideshow rather than narration. Some experienced “unsymbolized thinking” — knowing something, feeling the shape of a thought, without any verbal or visual representation attached to it. Some had sensory awareness dominant, emotional registers, or some mixture that shifted by context.

What Hurlburt did not find: a single dominant mode that most people used. The distribution was much more varied.

Anendophasia

The term “anendophasia” — coined in 2021 — describes the absence of inner verbal monologue. People with anendophasia report thinking in images, spatial relationships, abstract patterns, or what some describe as “knowing” without words.

When they read, they don’t hear the words as they process them. When they plan, they don’t narrate the steps. When they replay a conversation, they don’t hear voices — they have some other representation of the event.

Crucially, this is not related to intelligence, creativity, or cognitive capacity. People with no inner verbal monologue include artists, scientists, engineers, writers. (Writers with anendophasia report that writing is partly a process of discovering what they think by watching the words form — the writing is the thinking, not a record of prior internal speech.)

The prevalence is estimated between 5% and 15%, though these numbers are preliminary — the condition wasn’t studied systematically until recently, and self-report is complicated by the difficulty of describing something you’ve never compared to anything else.

Why It Went Unnoticed

The short answer: nobody asked.

The longer answer: the scientific study of consciousness and cognition was built by people who had inner speech, who assumed it was universal, and who designed experiments accordingly. The standard model of working memory includes a “phonological loop” — a system for rehearsing verbal information. That model accurately describes what many people do. But it was never validated against people for whom that loop is simply… absent.

Social factors compounded this. Asking “do you have a voice in your head?” sounds like asking someone if they’re hearing voices — which carries psychiatric connotations. People without inner speech who tried to mention it in conversation often got reactions suggesting something was wrong with them. So they stopped mentioning it.

The internet changed this in a specific way: anonymous discussion forums allowed people to compare notes without social cost. The first large-scale public realization that inner speech varied widely — around 2020 — came partly through Reddit threads where people were genuinely shocked to discover that their experiences differed from people sitting next to them.

What This Means for You

If you have an inner voice: it’s useful. It’s real. And it’s not how everyone works.

If you don’t: you’re not missing a cognitive function. You have a different architecture for the same underlying processes.

The more interesting question is what else we’re assuming is universal that isn’t. How many other features of your inner life — the way you experience time, visualize faces, process emotion — are things you’ve never thought to ask anyone else about because you assumed the default was shared?

The research suggests: less than you think.