'Don't have voice in my head': Life with no inner monologue

Mel May only realised she was different while reading a news article one day. "Wait, what? Some people hear a voice in their head?" she thought at the time.

- Agence France-Presse

PARIS: Mel May only realised she was different while reading a news article one day. "Wait, what? Some people hear a voice in their head?" she thought at the time.

She was stunned to discover that this was not just a figure of speech -- her friends were actually chatting to themselves in their minds.

May, a 30-year-old Australian video producer who lives in New York, remembers trying to explain to her family: "I don't have a voice in my head."

"My dad was like, 'You are lying'," she told AFP.

But her father came around once May started working with psychologists who agreed -- she is one of the very rare people who lack inner speech.

The idea that some people might not experience this phenomenon is so new that a clinical name, anendophasia, was only proposed for it in a paper last year.