β
The odd thing about this little voice, this storyteller, is that it comes and goes. When researchers study the inner voice, they find that for some people, the inner voice is chattering away almost every second. Other people experience long periods of inner silence. Russell T. Hurlburt and his colleagues at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, found that, on average, people have an experience of inner speech about 23 percent of the time. The rest of the time the voice there may be a sense of mood, or a song bouncing around, but the sense of an inner narrator is absent.
β
β
David Brooks (How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen)