We're not there yet, but so many interesting questions lurk
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In the early twenty-tens, a British anthropologist named Andrew Irving went up to about a hundred random New Yorkers and asked them if they’d spend some time saying everything they were thinking into a small voice recorder. “An element of performance might have come into play,” Kross concedes. Still, Irving’s transcripts have the ring of truth. People used their inner voices to muse on attractive strangers and curse the traffic; often, they “dealt with negative ‘content,’ much of which sprang up through associative connections.” One woman says, “I wonder if there’s a Staples around here,” before thinking suddenly about a friend’s cancer diagnosis; she talks to herself about the bad news and then, just as suddenly, gets back on track: “Now, is there a Staples down there? I think there is.” A man reflects on a broken relationship and gives himself encouragement: “Clear, totally clear. Move forward.” It’s easy to get stuck in your loop: monologues can be insistent, and some people succumb to circular, negative inner talk—what Kross calls “chatter”—and end up “desperate to escape their inner voice because of how bad it makes them feel.” One of Irving’s subjects can’t stop wondering if her boyfriend, who is out of town, has died in a bus accident or run off with someone else. Kross tells the story of Rick Ankiel, a baseball player who had to leave pitching for the outfield because his inner voice wouldn’t stop talking about “the individual physical components of his pitching motion.”
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