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Constant inner talk
Most people talk to themselves covertly almost all the time, often with images mixed in, and it adds up to a ton of white noise in the mind. When a thought arises, it rarely registers as something appearing in consciousness. It feels like me, as if the mind contracts around it.
Looked at closely, a thought is just a sound with the voice of the mind. It arises and passes away, and when inspected it unravels into the least substantial thing there is. That makes it deeply inscrutable that anyone ever feels identified with a thought, especially one that defines a mood without being recognized, such as a thought of self-hatred.
No off switch
The internal dialogue has a strange structure: it tells the self things the self already knows. Someone spots the water, thinks there it is, and in doing so treats a second person as needing to be informed about what the first already saw. Evolution never built an off switch for this, because language is so useful that there was never a reason to shut it off, and nobody was handed the option of four hours of quiet.
This is why the first discovery in meditation is how hard it is to pay attention to anything, whether a breath, a mantra, or a sound. The thinking about what needs doing in an hour keeps sneaking up from behind, and it feels like me again.
Where does inner speech come from?
The psychologist Lev Vygotsky proposed in the 1930s that inner speech grows out of the private speech children use, the talking aloud they do while playing or solving a problem. Around age six or seven, that talk goes quiet and becomes silent verbal thought. Brain imaging studies show that silent speech activates regions of the left frontal lobe near Broca's area, which also helps produce spoken words. The researcher Russell Hurlburt, who samples people's experience with random beeper prompts, has found large differences between individuals in how much inner speech they report.
How often does the mind wander?
In a 2010 study published in Science, Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert used a smartphone app to ask about 2,250 adults what they were doing and what they were thinking about. People's minds were on something other than their current activity in 46.9 percent of the samples. This held across nearly every activity in the list except sex. Participants also reported being less happy when their minds were wandering than when they stayed with the task.
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