And is it possible to confuse it with the “voices in the head” heard by people suffering from hallucinations? No, the researchers say and explain why.
Those who hear “voices in the head” do not understand that they belong to themselves. Another thing is what we hear when we read to ourselves. To answer this question, psychologist Ruvani Wilhauer from New York University (USA) conducted a study summarizing and analyzing the experience of people who “hear” their own inner voice while reading.
Wilhauer used user responses on the largest English-language Q&A site, Yahoo! Answers: site visitors described their inner feelings while reading.
The majority of users (82%) stated that when reading to themselves, they hear a “voice in their head”, every tenth of them did not hear such a voice, from the rest of the answers it was impossible to unambiguously understand what a person felt while reading.
Almost all users of the site who heard the voice while reading stated that it had some kind of sound characteristics – volume, timbre, accent
Of those who heard an inner voice while reading, 13% heard it not always, but only in some situations (which could depend on various factors, including the degree of their interest in the text). Approximately half of them always heard the same voice, the rest of them “sounded” differently at different times.
At the same time, for example, the speech of different people in the text could be “voiced” by different voices, or the content of an SMS message or e-mail could be “voiced” by the voice of its sender. According to several users, the same inner voice “responsible” for reading them as for ordinary thoughts.
Those who always heard the same voice usually considered it to be their own ordinary voice, which, however, could differ in timbre or tone.
Almost all users of the site who heard the voice while reading stated that it had some kind of sound characteristics – volume, timbre, accent, and so on. The degree of control over the voice differed – for some it seemed distracting or even frightening, for others it was easy to change it with an effort of will.
It is noteworthy that for most of those who left comments, their personal experience seemed to be universal for everyone. For example, some commentators were sure that everyone heard the voice in the head while reading, while others could even consider it a sign of some kind of mental disorder.