Chatter: The Voice in Our Head, Why It Matters, and How to Harness It

by Ethan Kross

Our verbal stream of thought is so industrious that according to one study we internally talk to ourselves at a rate equivalent to speaking four thousand words per minute out loud.

The key to beating chatter isn’t to stop talking to yourself. The challenge is to figure out how to do so more effectively.

The inner voice was always there with something to say, reminding us of the inescapable need we all have to use our minds to make sense of our experiences and the role that language plays in helping us do so.

Words are how we communicate with others most of the time (though body language and gestures are clearly instrumental too) and how we communicate with ourselves much of the time as well.

Our brain’s built-in affinity for disconnecting from what is going on around us produces a conversation in our minds, one that we spend a significant portion of our waking hours engaged in.

But the inner voice’s influence is often so subtle and fundamental that we are rarely if ever aware of all that it does for us.

The brain is a very talented multitasker. Otherwise, it would have to be the size of a bus to be large enough to support every one of its countless functions. Our inner voice, it turns out, is likewise a prodigious multitasker.

Our working memory relies on the phonological loop for keeping our linguistic neural pathways online so that we can function productively outside ourselves while also keeping our conversations going within. We develop this verbal doorway between our minds and the world in infancy, and as soon as it’s in place, it propels us toward other milestones of mental development. Indeed, the phonological loop goes well beyond the realm of responding to immediate situations.

Our verbal development goes hand in hand with our emotional development. As toddlers, speaking to ourselves out loud helps us learn to control ourselves.

As anyone who has spent significant time around kids knows, they often have full-blown, unprompted conversations with themselves. This isn’t just play or imagination; it’s a sign of neural and emotional growth.

Unlike other leading thinkers of the time who thought this behavior was a sign of unsophisticated development, Vygotsky saw language playing a critical role in how we learn to control ourselves, a theory that would later be borne out by data. He believed that the way we learn to manage our emotions begins with our relationships with our primary caretakers (typically our parents). These authorities give us instructions, and we repeat those instructions to ourselves aloud, often mimicking what they say. At first, we do this audibly. Over time, though, we come to internalize their message in silent inner speech.

Decades of research on socialization indicate that our environments influence how we view the world, including how we think about self-control. In families, our parents model self-control for us when we’re children, and their approaches seep into our developing inner voices. Our father might repeatedly tell us never to use violence to resolve a conflict. Our mother might repeatedly tell us to never give up after a disappointment. Over time, we repeat these things to ourselves, and they begin to shape our own verbal streams

In short, the voices of culture influence our parents’ inner voices, which in turn influence our own, and so on through the many cultures and generations that combine to tune our minds. We are like Russian nesting dolls of mental conversations.

The way children behave can likewise impact their parents’ voices, and we human beings of course play a role in shaping and reshaping our greater cultures as well. In a sense, then, our inner voice makes its home in us as children by going from the outside in, until we later speak from the inside out and affect those around

Moreover, it turns out that having imaginary friends may spur internal speech in children. In fact, emerging research suggests that imaginary play promotes self-control, among many other desirable qualities such as creative thinking, confidence, and good communication.

Present-day research with more advanced technology has shown that our dreams in fact share many similarities with the spontaneous verbal thoughts we experience when we are awake. It turns out that our waking verbal mind converses with our sleeping one. Fortunately, this doesn’t produce Oedipal wish fulfillments. It can help us.

Although we still have much to learn about how dreams affect us, at the end of the day—or night, rather—they are simply stories in the mind. And sure enough, in waking life, the inner voice pipes up loudly about the most foundational psychological story of all: our identities.

Our verbal stream plays an indispensable role in the creation of our selves. The brain constructs meaningful narratives through autobiographical reasoning. In other words, we use our minds to write the story of our lives, with us as the main character. Doing so helps us mature, figure out our values and desires, and weather change and adversity by keeping us rooted in a continuous identity. Language is integral to this process because it smooths the jagged and seemingly unconnected fragments of daily life into a cohesive through line. It helps us “storify” life.

By flitting back and forth between different memories, our internal monologues weave a neural narrative of recollections. It sews the past into the seams of our brain’s construction of our identity.