WHY SOME PEOPLE HEAR INTERNAL VOICES WHEN THEY ARE READING
Even though we all may have similar appearances, a study indicates that our brains and thoughts are likely to differ greatly. For instance, I have no way of knowing whether the colors I perceive are the same for other people; as absurd as it may sound, my "blue" could be someone else's "yellow." Then there are the innumerable variations in our information processing, along with a 'internal monologue'.
The terms "inner dialogue," "inner monologue," "internal dialogue," "internal monologue," and, lastly, "intrapersonal communication" are used to describe this phenomenon. The process of talking to yourself in your own voice, your friend's voice when reading their text message, or—more bizarrely—that of a celebrity—though you could argue that's just unnecessary and fewer people claim to be able to do so anyway—is essentially what all of these terms refer to.
New York University Professor of Psychology Ruvanee Vilhauer published a study on the phenomenon of what he called 'inner speech', and delved deeper into 'inner voice reading', which is as the name describes. He discovered that 82.5 percent of readers indeed perceive a voice after examining 160 posts from a community Q&A website.
The findings showed that many people report regularly experiencing internal reading voices (IRVs), which frequently possess the aural characteristics of overt speech, including recognizable identity, gender, pitch, volume, and emotional tone, he stated. "IRVs were occasionally recognized as the voices of other individuals and other times as the readers' own voices. Some people claimed that they could hear their thoughts during continuous IRVs. He asked 570 participants to complete a survey for a second research published in 2017, and 80.7 percent of them "reported occasionally or always hearing an inner voice during silent reading."
Despite understanding the words being read, 19.3% of respondents said they did not hear an inner reading voice. "With 34.2 percent of respondents with IRVs hearing an IRV every time something was read and 45 percent experiencing an IRV regularly, the results showed that IRVs are a routine occurrence for many," the professor said. "Specific auditory characteristics, including gender, accent, pitch, loudness, and emotional tone, were recorded by the majority of responders in IRVs. Both the participants' own and other people's voices were used to report IRVs. While some respondents claimed to not influence any part of their IRVs, others claimed to have some degree of control. These findings suggest that inner speech during silent reading varies significantly among individuals.
