We ask readers of fiction when they're
reading a book, they hear the voices of
the characters in their head.
>> A lie. But life uh finds a way.
>> Like one in seven of the readers said
that hearing the voice of the character
in a book was as real and lifelike and
vivid as if there had been an actual
person in the room with them. We un
uncovered some interesting phenomena
about the sort of crossover between real
and fictional world worlds. The best
example of this is that somebody's
reading Mrs. Doway by Virginia Wolf.
They put the book down. They go out down
into the street to get a coffee. They
walk into Starbucks, but instead of
seeing the inside of Starbucks as they
themselves would would experience it,
they're experiencing it as Mrs. Stanoway
as the character in this book that
they've been reading.
>> Charles Fernie, who is a psychologist
who has spent three decades studying the
voice inside your head and discovering
that almost everything you believe about
it is likely wrong. He led hearing the
voice, the world's largest scientific
study of why people hear voices,
revealing that the line between everyday
thinking and hallucination is far
thinner than anyone assumed. He's also
the author of The Voices Within and
Pieces of Light. His research has also
shown that your inner speech isn't
actually a monologue. It's a dialogue.
It's a conversation. If you want to
truly understand the contents of your
own inner conscious experience, like
your mental imagery, your own inner
speech, or your emotions, then click the
link in the description and take my
7-day inner experience challenge. It is
completely free to do and you will get
the most comprehensive breakdown of your
actual conscious reality using only
research proven methods. I am genuinely
so excited about this. Just click the
link in the description. I hope to see
you inside the community. Can you hear
other voices but it not give you any
negative emotion? Like can you have all
these other voices in your mind that you
model and talk to but it not have any
negative effect? Like it's only
positive.
>> We've done research on exactly that
topic. So it used to be assumed that
hearing voices was always a sign of
pathology. But then beyond the realms of
the psychiatric clinic, we know that a
substantial minority of people hear
voices quite regularly and are not
troubled by them, find them neutral or
actively positive. We see these huge
individual differences between people
and we see individual differences within
our own minds. Does it matter if it's
inner speech or unsymbleized thinking or
some other form of abstract conceptual
cognition? Are there actual implications
for an individual who is innerly
speaking 80% of the time versus 20% of
the time? Do those differences actually
show up daytoday for these people?
>> I think there are those differences. Um,
>> Charles, what do you think inner speech
is for?
I think it's for a bunch of things. If
we think about what regular out loud
speech does, it does all sorts of
things. It performs all kinds of
different functions. I mean, language is
pretty amazing for the range of things
you can do with it. So w with words you
can propose marriage to somebody. You
can divorce somebody. You can condemn
someone to death. You can say yes to
something. You can say no to something.
You can you can use language to regulate
other people in all sorts of interesting
ways. You can use language to control
people to to cajol people, coers people
and more positive, you know, more
positive effects as well. So language is
like this crazy
multi-purpose tool. this sort of Swiss
Army knife of functions. And when you
turn language back on yourself, I don't
think you really lose any of that
functionality. I think all the all the
things you can do with words, you can do
with words for yourself. Um, and I think
we're just starting to understand how
inner speech has so many different
things it can do for us, both positive
and negative.
>> Do you want to give one or two of the
say biggest examples that come to mind?
Well, I'm using inner speech myself all
the time for regulatory purposes. So, if
I'm on my way upstairs and I have a a
few things I need to do, I'll use words
to rehearse the things I need to do
upstairs so I don't have to make another
trip. So, you know, just just earlier
on, I had to pick up a book and get some
running socks. And I wanted to make sure
I did both of those things on that trip.
So I was just saying to myself in my
head,
book running socks. So that's
that's a really sort of simple everyday
example for the kinds of things we do. I
think it's also important to recognize
that inner speech has a whole range of
emotional and and motivational
functions. So it's not just about
planning our behavior and regulating
what we are doing and thinking.
It's kind of used for being nice to
ourselves, being nasty to ourselves,
geeing ourselves up, uh psying ourselves
up for doing something, encouraging
ourselves, but also for criticizing
ourselves, and we use it to beat
ourselves up when something goes wrong
or we think we're being dumb or
whatever. So, that's really not about
regulating
behavior or cognition. It's not about
the kind of logical stuff.
It's about the emotional stuff and the
motivational stuff and language does all
that kind of thing as well. You know, so
many of the words you use during the day
to other people are not about conveying
information
or making things happen. They're about
helping someone to feel better or or
encouraging somebody or making somebody
stop and think or you know all those
sorts of uh emotional and motivational
factors as well. So I use inner speech I
think in that sense as well to to keep
myself going to tell myself off that
kind of thing.
>> Couldn't that all be thinking? You know
thinking in sort of abstract concepts?
Does it need to be language to have all
those features that you mentioned?
>> Yeah, I don't think it needs to be
language and that's evident from the
fact that some people don't use nearly
so much in a speech. But it's like, you
know, you're carrying most people are
carrying this cool Swiss Army knife
around with them that does all these
things. Most people use it to that to
that effect because it's handy. It's
useful. It's not the only way of doing
it. There are other there are all sorts
of other ways of um doing this stuff.
But inner speech turns out to be pretty
useful for a lot of people. And that's I
think that's to do with the power of
language. language is just this
extraordinary tool, this extraordinary
cultural creation that we have that um
we can turn back on ourselves and and
benefit from in terms of uh all those
different functions.
How do you tease apart inner speech and
thinking? Because I think those concepts
are it can look very similar on first
glance. on first analysis they can seem
like they're the same thing almost. How
do you differentiate them?
>> I think we do that in cognitive science
by abolishing the term thinking. Okay,
so it's a it's a really useful term in
everyday language. I use it a lot in
everyday speech. It's very hard to to
avoid. But when we start getting
scientific, I think we can do much much
better. Thinking is too general a word.
It's too fluffy. It's too fuzzy. It
means what does thinking mean? It means
everything the conscious mind does.
Okay. Wow. You know, that's going to
take a while to unpick.
The point is that we can be so so much
more specific now about what the
conscious mind does. So, we can talk
about inner speech, right? And that
doesn't mean that inner speech is all of
thinking or what all of what we used to
call thinking. If I get my way and we
get rid of the word,
we can talk about visual imagery. Some
people will use visual imagery a lot for
the kinds of things we've been talking
about. We can talk about emotions. We
can talk about memories. We can talk
about um feelings in the body. We can
talk about mind wandering. We can talk
about all sorts of different stuff that
the mind does. And people are working on
all these different
um topics and finding out cool cool
things about them. But somehow we keep
coming back to this term thinking. And
what I want to do is get away from this
question which has dogged us for
thousands of years really which is that
you know the question of do you need
language for thinking I'd say let's just
get over that. Let's stop talking about
thinking and start asking do we need
language for computation? Do we need
language for solving chess puzzles? Do
we need language for thinking visually?
Do we need language for regulating our
behavior? then you can start getting
into some decent scientific questions.
Um, and the answers to those questions
will be different in each case. You
know, my first ever research project
was about a kind of study on inner
speech in relation to chess problem
solving and we we looked at some expert
chess players and looked at how they
solved chess puzzles and we found they
didn't really use that aspect of their
minds. They didn't really use
funological processing. they were
thinking vispatially, if you want to use
the term thinking in that in that
everyday um context. Um, so I'm
perfectly happy with the idea that a lot
of the cool stuff that we do has nothing
to do with language, but I think it's
useful for us to find out how much of
the things that we do do involve
language
and and why and how uh and what
differences there are between people in
in how much that happens. So, you know,
because we see these huge individual
differences between people and we see
individual differences within our own
minds. You know, our my inner speech
pretty sure changes from moment to
moment, from day to day. I guess yours
probably does as well. That's the
interesting question and I think we can
just move on from this question of
thinking and thought.
>> I really love that chess example as a as
a strategy game nerd. Um that's a super
interesting result that they don't they
don't uh you know use language to think
through that those processes as they're
um you know simulating different
different plays. The reason I ask about
this difference between inner speech and
thinking is I know you're you've
collaborated with Dr. Russell Herbert.
Um, we've had two great conversations
now and I did a 10-week experience
sampling with Russ. And one of the
things I really struggled to do was if I
had a beep and I wrote down, you know, I
was thinking these things and then for
people who aren't maybe clear about
descriptive experience sampling, I
carried it around this box that beeped
me at random times and my job was to
write down my experience in that moment.
And then I would get on a conversation
with Russ and he would kind of
interrogate me. He doesn't like that
word, but that's kind of how it feels.
Um, and a lot of the time I would write
down something like I was inner speaking
to myself and he would ask me what words
I was using. And then I was like, well,
that's a good question. I mean, was I
it felt like I was using words? Like a
lot of the time maybe I was doing a
value judgment or some sort of appraisal
in my mind and I was like comparing two
things and I was thinking like which of
these is better you know often times it
was in relation to a video or something
I was doing some judgment and I would
often write down that I was thinking
through using language but then when he
questioned me on it often times I wasn't
able to tell him the words that I was
thinking and then as the weeks went on
and I got kind of better at this
descriptive experience sampling
um protocol. I realized that a lot of
what I thought was previously in
language, it probably wasn't. It was
probably in some more abstract
conceptual,
he likes the the phrase unsymbleized
thinking. And so I was kind of mistaking
those two things. So I was curious, do
you think that's a very common
occurrence in your research? Do you
think people very very often only apply
language to the thought process after
the fact? It's a after you're an
analyzing whatever coitation was
happening in your mind, you sort of
apply the language to it, but in in a
lot of cases that there might not have
been language there to start.
>> Yeah, that is such an interesting
question. I think it's a question that
descriptive experience sampling gives us
something of a handle on. Um I've
enjoyed a fantastic collaboration with
Russ, which is continuing. But I think
one of the things that we kind of agree
to disagree on or are still I think
still constructively exploring is
whether some of the things that end up
getting classified as unsymbleized
thinking
which is one of the five most frequent
categories that come out of the sampling
process as you know inner speaking being
another one of them.
Some of the things that get categorized
as unsymplized thinking might actually
be highly condensed in a speech and that
because dees sets the bar quite high for
inner speech or inner speaking that's
how they end up getting categorized. So
in order for something to count in dees
as inner speaking Russ will say to you
what okay what were the words and it's
fine if you can only remember one or two
words that's fine it will still
categorize that as inner speaking but if
you can't remember any
it might actually not mean you you're
pushed over into a different category
which I think exists I think you know
that category is is a thing but the the
sort of the thing that we're trying to
figure figure out is that if you follow
the theory of inner speech that I do and
that has the strongest I think empirical
support that of Vigotssky
who was writing about this stuff 100
years ago in in the early in the young
Soviet Union
if you follow his um account then a lot
of our inner speech is what we call
condensed in other words it's like a
compressed note form telegraphic
condensed version of what you might say
out loud. So, to give you an example, if
you picked up my notebook and tried to
read it, you there's a lot of it you
just wouldn't understand.
>> Because I'm writing for myself, I don't
need to spell things out fully. I'll
use, you know, words, fragments of
words, letters, abbreviations,
squiggles, whatever. I I understand it
mostly. Um, and I think a lot of our
inner speech has that sort of quality
relative to the kind of language we're
doing now where I hope I hope I'm
speaking in full, you know, reasonably
fully formed grammatical sentences. And,
you know, most people who understand the
language would would understand what I'm
saying. Inner speech isn't like that.
So, a way of thinking about condensation
is that
everything that is languagey about the
inner speech gets stripped away. So
everything that is to do with tone and
tambber and accent and pitch and all the
sort of funological articuly stuff that
language gets wrapped in when it's
spoken that all just sort of drops away
and you're left with what Vigotsky call
thinking in pure meanings. Okay. So even
Votsky couldn't avoid the term thinking.
Um there's some complicated stuff there
about the words in Russian being being
quite specific and distinct from our
word. But anyway, we won't go into that.
The point is that some kind some forms
of inner speech are like language
without much of the language left
because of the way that inner speech
gets internalized and taken into the
self and gradually compressed and
condensed so that it seems to be
unfolding much faster than exter
external speech could do. So I submit
sub submit to to Russ that some at least
of what ends up being called unsyvilized
thinking is actually just highly highly
condensed inner speech.
>> Right. The
>> trouble is we've got no way to prove
that. Uh it is very much dependent on
what people understand by inner speech.
Um it very much depends on what kind of
what is out there in the culture about
inner speech. I think if you know we
fast forwarded 20 years and everybody
was talking about condensed in a speech
then it it might be a different kind of
thing. I actually think it might be a
puzzle that could be unpicked
neuroscientifically
and I think there's a lot of things
about psychology that neuroscience in
terms of brain scanning and so on
doesn't tell us much about but I think
this could be one and I'm excited about
the fact that we researchers in the
future might be able to take that on and
it's really good that people are
thinking about these different kinds of
inner speech not saying it is all just
one thing one kind of
are sensitive to its different forms,
its different functions, its variation
within individuals and between
individuals.
>> Yeah. I guess the prediction that you
might make there as a neuroscientist is
if you put someone in some sort of brain
scanning technology situation and then
you got them to flick between you know
inner speech and you know maybe you just
let let them sit there idly and and you
you wait till they do some thinking that
you should be able to see some signature
brain activity there. You should be able
to see language centers firing for what
is inner speech and you should be able
to maybe not see language centers firing
for what is I I know you don't like
thinking but whatever other level what
other processing coitation cognition
whatever else there is unsyvilized
thinking whatever else there is um is
that what we see do you know if there's
good evidence to show that inner speech
like fires the the language centers like
you might expect
>> the short answer is Yes, the longer
answer is yes, but
what a surprise. So, let me unpack that
a bit. So, the way you know neuroiming
has been around for 30 odd years, hasn't
it? Since with PET and then fMRI and the
way all the studies of inner speech have
been done is they put somebody in a
scanner and they give them a sentence
and they say think this sentence, you
know, say this sentence to yourself in
your head or some version of that.
And that is interesting. And what it
always shows is that broker's area,
which is this area, the left inferior
frontal um gyrus towards the front of
the brain to to the left. Um it lights
up, you know, it activates. It's it's
that kind of silent internal speech to
the self is associated with brokers area
activation. Just as my brain would be
lighting up there now as I'm speaking to
you out loud, you see the same sort of
pattern.
You also see broker's area lighting up
when we do a whole bunch of other things
that involve complex sequencing of motor
actions. So language is about a highly
complex, exquisitly timesensitive
sequence of complex motor actions. You
know that's it's hard work doing what
I'm doing right now. It seems completely
natural, but in terms of cognitive and
neurological demand, it's hard work.
So, leave that aside. Brokers areas
probably isn't that specific to
language, not as specific to language as
we'd like to think it is.
Having said that, you know, if you had
damage to that area, you would likely
have end up with profound aphasia,
difficulty in in producing spoken
speech. So, we know it's involved. The
interesting thing is to go back to that
experimental paradigm where you you
stick somebody in the scanner and you
say think this thing
they are not that that isn't really
anything like the kind of speech I'm
doing when I've gone upstairs and I I'm
telling myself to you know I'm
remembering I've got to pick up the
book. So we we have distinguished and
this is in the collaboration with Russ.
We've distinguished between these two
kinds of ways of assessing
or yeah of assessing um inner speech.
There's what we call elicited in a
speech which is where you elicit it
deliberately in an experimental context.
So when you put somebody in a scanner
and you ask them to to do this speaking
to themselves in their head that's
elicited in the speech. The other stuff
which is the stuff that dees captures is
the stuff that just happens anyway when
we're doing inner speech just because
for some reason in that moment our mind
brain body system
chucks that out you know wants to do
that thing does that thing okay so it's
it's speak inner speech that just
happens spontaneously
and what we were able to do with the
study that we conducted in Berlin with
Russ and our um German colleague
colleagues um Simona in particular
um we were able to compare those two
kinds of assessing inner speech for the
first time in the scanner. So part of
our procedure was to ask people to say
particular things to themselves whilst
they're in the scanner and we got that
signal of that what we call elicited
inner speech. In another part of the
procedure after people had been trained
in dees
and had got good at it and let's say
they they acquired skill rather than
they were trained in it. It's not really
a training process but they had acquired
skill at doing dees the kind of the
thing that you did. Once they've done
that, we then put them back in the
scanner and we just leave them to it and
we give them a a free sort of like a
mind wandering resting state context
where they're just lying there, you
know,
wondering why the hell they're in a
brain scanner and thinking whatever
thoughts come into their heads. And then
we were probing them in the scanner and
then taking them out of the scanner,
interviewing them in exactly the way
that you were interviewed, putting them
back in the scanner for another 25
minutes. And that was how the procedure
worked. So we only had a few
participants. We we gathered a lot of a
lot of data from those those
participants.
And we're able for the first time to
compare those illicited utterances with
those spontaneous utterances and to see
whether the brain signals looked
anything like each other. And we didn't
feel that we had, you know, a big enough
sample or, you know, to to to deliver
the ultimate truth on what the neural
underpinnings of spontaneous in a speech
are. What we set out to do was just see
whether they were the same, whether they
looked anything like the same patterns.
And as you'd expect from all the other
studies that have been done on inner
speech, if you tell people to do inner
speech in the scanner,
this lights up. Broker's area is
activating.
And we looked as as a region of
comparison, we took an area further back
in the brain in the left hemisphere
um in in the temporal region which we
know to be associated with with speech
comprehension, speech processing.
And so we figured if you're doing in a
speech you're focusing on producing,
you're not going to be doing so much
comprehending. And just as you'd expect
and just as other studies have shown
that that more frontal area was
activating
uh and the the more posterior area was
not was not activating.
Then switch to looking at the
spontaneous samples. So this is where
people are doing in a speech in the
scanner not because they've been told to
but just because they're doing inner
speech in that moment and we've captured
it using dees.
you get something very different. You
get very little activation in Broca's
area at the front. Get much more
activation further back in the brain in
that area that temporal area that we
associate associate with speech
comprehension.
So it's as if or or speech receiving
speech. So it's as if elicited inner
speech is more of a directed speaky kind
of thing and spontaneous inner speech is
more of a kind of comprehending listeny
kind of thing
but actually that's going beyond the
data. We can't conclude that we don't
have enough controls other areas of
regions of interest and so on. It's
preliminary findings, but that are
nevertheless really suggestive
in just making a stop and think. That's
that word again, stop and consider
when we ask somebody to do something in
the scanner on purpose deliberately. Is
it actually anything like the kind of
thing that happens that we're really
interested in, which is what happens to
people spontaneously in their heads? So
I guess the question that comes to mind
maybe for the listener is are we being
pedantic over these labels? Does it
matter if it's inner speech or
unsyvilized thinking or some other form
of abstract conceptual cognition? Are
there actual implications for an
individual who is innerly speaking 80%
of the time versus 20% of the time? Do
those differences actually show up
daytoday for these people?
>> I think there are those differences. Um
we we need to be on our guard against
being drawn back into this question of
whether we need language for thinking
because some people use inner speech a
lot. That doesn't make them smarter. It
just means they're doing things one way
and other people are doing it another
way.
So I think we can we can avoid those
questions and
the the the implications are that you if
you're using in a speech you're you're
doing it because you're able to make use
or you're enjoying or you're finding
benefit from making use of this cool
tool that you've got available to you.
Um when we look at how inner speech
develops in childhood again going back
to Vigotssky's theory his insight was
that inner speech develops through a
developmental process which begins with
social speech which begins with babies
and young children being in social
dialogues with others primarily their
caregivers parents and caregivers.
Those dialogues between the small child
and the parent gradually become
internalized and they form the stage
that we now call private speech. And
this is where you see kids talking to
themselves out loud as they're working
on a task, as they're playing, as
they're just dreaming and being creative
and mind wandering and whatever. And
then the idea is that there's another
stage of development which leads to that
stuff becoming completely internalized.
So it's going on totally silently and
that's the inner speech that we many of
us recognize
um in adulthood. Now we do know that
kids who use more more of a particular
kind of inner speech particularly a
self-regulatory
sorry a particular kind of private
speech the more of the self-regulatory
type. So when you see kids who are
talking themselves through a problem and
using words to guide themselves,
we do see some connections with
performance, we do see that those kids
seem to be benefiting from that kind of
speech because they're solving the task
quicker. They're solving the puzzle
quicker, for example.
Uh we also see these huge individual
differences uh between kids. So you
could argue that you you would expect to
see some cognitive effects of people in
adulthood using more in a speech
compared to those who using less.
And I think people are starting to ask
those questions empirically. They come
with huge problems. uh one is the way
that we assess in a speech and just
giving people questionnaires and you've
been through dees you know how detailed
and sophisticated a method it is simply
saying oh let's not bother let's not
bother with all that let's just fill in
this questionnaire it probably wouldn't
satisfy you very much in terms of what
the insight that it had given into your
mind it certainly doesn't satisfy me
having said that questionnaires are
pretty handy they're quick and easy to
use so we use them
so there's a question of how you assess
test the inner speech but also there's a
danger of just lumping all different
kinds of inner speech together.
So, if I asked you, you know, who are
the cleverest people you know, and then
I said, are they the people who talk the
most? You'd think that was a really dumb
question, right? Because some people
talk a lot, some people don't say very
much at all. It's not something you
particularly correlate with with
intelligence or otherwise. And asking
the same question about inner speech is
really just as misguided.
Is it just a lot of inner speech versus
not so much inner speech? Really the
question we should be asking is what
kind of inner speech are people using?
What forms is it taking? What functions
are those different forms mapping onto?
And then we'll build up a better pro
better profile of how somebody is using
inner speech. And then the next sort of
second bit to to the answer is inner
speech is not always a positive thing.
Inner speech can be really penicious and
we can use words, as I've already said,
to beat ourselves up, to punish
ourselves, to criticize ourselves. And
we do do that. We do that quite a bit.
And some people do that more than
others. And for some people, inner
speech is a real burden.
It's a real um weapon that they're using
against themselves. And in in contexts
like depression and anxiety, we call it
rumination. We we call it
excessive thinking, brooding on a
particular topic in words which is
really just a kind of negative inner
speech.
So you can kind of understand why some
people I mean when I give talks on this
topics or there's always somebody comes
up to me and says I'm I practice
meditation and I'm trying to silence the
inner voices and I'm like okay well if
your inner voices are bothering you then
that sounds like a pretty good idea
but just be aware that inner speech
comes in all these different forms and
it has all these different veilances
and maybe another approach would be to
say let's make the most of the positive
inner speech and use it and let's try
and cut out the more negative stuff.
>> Yes. Yeah, it's a good point. We think a
lot about frequency of inner speech, but
maybe a much more important dimension is
content. You know, I think there's
pretty, as you say, mind wandering has
pretty bad associations with mental
health in general. Um, you know, that's
default mode network activity. Mind
wandering is generally associated with
negative mental health outcomes. Not
necessarily the case for everybody, but
in general that's that's the case. I was
speaking to Did you ever collaborate
with Gualiaro Pichini?
>> No.
>> No. He a collaborator of Russ and he did
the dees interviews with me. He has a
Fantasia and zero samples of inner
speech and he's a consciousness
philosopher. So I mean right away sort
of just dispels any notion you might
have of you know you need inner speech
to be doing any sort of complex
thinking. You know you think of a
philosopher like what's their job is to
you know kind of think through weird and
abstract problems and apparently you
don't need inner speech for that because
even Russ who is incredibly skeptical of
people who don't have who report having
no inner speech admitted that there was
no samples that Guierro had with inner
speech. I think it a comment that I get
a lot which annoys me is that video with
Russ went went really viral for the
channel has over 300,000 views and has
thousands of comments and many many
comments with this idea of people
without inner speech are NPCs. I don't
know if you know what an NPC is but
non-playable character in in video games
like it's a zombie basically. And
obviously I think that's wrong and
ridiculous. But I was curious to get
your thoughts on why exactly that that
notion is so is so wrong.
>> The notion that some people have no
no inner speech or the idea as as a
result their minds are empty in some way
that they're zombies.
>> Yeah, exactly. The idea that if someone
doesn't have inner speech they are a
zombie.
Well, I think I've answered that. You
know, I think people use inner speech
because it's there for most people and
it's pretty handy, but it is not
compulsory and some people don't use it.
It's hard to know who those people are
because questionnaires are not reliable
in this context. I'd say if you found
somebody who has zero samples on a good
series of dees interviews, then that's a
pretty good sign that they've got no
inner speech. Um,
but there's no way that you then
conclude that there's nothing going on
in their minds. I mean, that's just
going back to the old equating thinking
with language. Of course, there is
plenty going on. I mean, if you want
proof, just, you know, find the nearest
12-month-old baby and see what they're
capable of doing. See what they are the
the extraordinary intelligence they are
demonstrating. 12 months is an age when
language is starting to get going for
for most most babies. So, pick a pick an
earlier date if you want, but you know,
when language hasn't got going, they're
still doing incredible things. Or talk
to the family dog or your local friendly
bonobo or who whoever and you'll see
humans, you'll see other animals doing
extraordinary clever things without
language. So that's one reason why this
just this question is just a non
starter. I don't know why we've become
so obsessed with this idea of total lack
of inner speech. I'm I'm in a way I'm
pleased because it means people are
talking about inner speech now in a way
that they weren't 10 years ago.
Um I think it's good in that it is
emphasizing the variability
in in a speech. I think it is not good
in the way it seems to be creating a new
psychiatric or neurological condition
which I have which I'm extremely uneasy
about. I don't think we need that. I
don't think it's accurate. I don't think
we've got good data on it. I think we
can focus instead on the
huge variety. You know, the the the
way that people differ both within
themselves, within their own experience,
but also differ from other people. and
>> try and understand that and celebrate
that.
>> Yes.
>> So,
you're right. There's been an awful lot
of um heat on the internet about this
question which ultimately stem has
stemmed from Russ's work on on on
descriptive experience sampling in a
kind of roundabout way, but some of it
isn't particularly productive. I hope it
gets channeled into these more
interesting questions of not how much
inner speech are used but what kinds of
inner speech are you use.
>> Yes.
>> Because you know you that's what you'd
say about another person. You know you
wouldn't say how much do they talk you'd
say what do they say with their words?
What do they do with their words? That's
what tells you about the person.
>> Yeah. I think it's it's insane. One of
the and again this wasn't just a small
amount of people. This was hundreds of
people. And it's it shows that if if one
person's inner experience is a
particular way, we have a strong bias to
assume that everyone else has the same
profile of of inner experience. And if I
learned anything from descriptive
experience sampling, it is exactly that
that could not be further from the
truth. And that that fact is beautiful.
We vary in an impossibly large amount of
dimensions. Like dimensions we don't
even know exist. And I think that is the
coolest thing in the world. But while
that's so obvious to me now, maybe it
wasn't as obvious before I started
descriptive experience sampling, so many
people just refuse to believe this is
the case at all. And it's the it's the
same with with a fantasia. You know, if
someone is a very dominant visual,
imagination, imaginer, they just refuse
to believe that other people aren't like
that. You know, so many comments of I
absolutely refuse to believe that
aphantasia exists. It's a myth. I even
got a comment today saying a Fantasia is
a myth. Um, they ab absolutely
completely refuse to believe that other
people's experience of the world could
be different than theirs. And that's
just kind of blows my mind. It's like,
how can you be that confident? It's such
a It's such a ridiculous especially
because they they clearly didn't watch
my episode with Russ because the one
thing that he keeps highlighting again
and again is that people don't really
understand their own inner experience.
their self-reporting is often is often
very wrong and that people vary in all
of these ways that we didn't know even
existed. But even with that, just
comment after comment and I'll put up a
bunch on the screen. It was wild. And
some of them got thousands of likes, you
know, of people. I inner speak all the
time. You know, I do this from inner
speaking. How can they even function as
human beings without this? you know,
like the the fact that there's any sort
of alternate strategy that someone could
develop throughout their life to do
these tasks. It was just completely a
completely impossible idea to them. Why
do you think that is? I This is such a
strange such a strange one. It's like
the human brain is the most complex
system in the known universe. It varying
a bit in how how we experience the world
surely is not that crazy a thing to
understand.
>> You'd think, wouldn't you? I'm also
having having published a book on this
topic you know 10 years ago now I where
are all these people when my book was
coming out because you know all these
people who are fanatical about inner
speech you know they weren't around then
>> it's a it's a sign of how things have
changed and I think it's thanks to the
work of people like Russ that's really
really careful I mean he's one of the
most interesting it's pretty much the
most interesting scientist I know in the
way that he has gone about just
carefully describing what is there and
plowing this fur totally against all
other trends and streams and you know
he's he's just pursued this
this goal in an extraordinary an
extraordinary way which I think has led
to real benefits for our understanding
of ourselves.
So there's a question of why has this
why has this come to light just now and
it has it is in the last five years that
it's happened since that tweet went
viral
>> and it is something to do with people
latching on to it's almost like seeing
something that was always there. I I
felt when I was writing my book and
publishing the book that people were
just so familiar with this thing they
just assume they had all these
assumptions about it and they didn't
really think about it. And the book did
help I think some people to look at
their own minds a new um and it really
you know the nicest thing that people
said to me about the book and I had this
comment a lot which was you know you
made me for a few days I just couldn't
function because I was just focusing on
my own thoughts and thinking oh is that
dialogic in a speech is that condensed
in a speech and then I came out the end
of that little wobble and found I was
enjoying my own mind so much more and
that was a lovely thing for people to
today. Um,
and I think that, you know, Russ's work
has really helped with that. There's
something there's something in the air
about it at the moment to do with maybe
just a recognition that we can we can
have a science of this. We when I was
starting out, people would say you can't
study inner speech. It's not it's not
science. You can't put it under a
microscope. You can't measure it. It's
not observable. And I kind of lively
carried on anyway. and other people
around the world were doing a very small
number of people working on this. But
the you know the graph of papers
published on inner speech is just is
just on a steady upward incline in the
last 10 years or so. So it's it's
happening in the scientific research
that's helping people to understand that
you can be scientific about this stuff.
You can say meaningful things about it.
It's all good in in in help helping us
to be more specific about what the mind
does to know our own minds better to
know other people's minds better and I
think as you say there's a real problem
of stigma there's a real problem of
people making judgments about other
people's minds on the basis of their own
minds that's not healthy really socially
is it
>> yes exactly
>> um but I think it's also revealing that
our minds are a mystery to ourselves as
well and revealing some of that mystery
and helping us to be at home in that
mystery and I think that can only be
positive in a well-being sense to have a
better idea
of what you should what you can expect
to be in your mind all the weird and
crazy stuff that is going to go on in
your mind not to be frightened about it
not to be worried about it just to
accept it as part of the wonderful
pageant of consciousness
um and to be a bit kinder on yourself as
as a result I think that's a that's a
real, you know, blow to, you know, for
for for increased well-being.
>> Yeah. Yeah. Well said. I have I have so
many thoughts on that. I guess one, you
know, we've seen this massive increase
in the term neurodeiversity, right? And
and and not usually in reference to
inner speech. It's it's mostly in
relation to ADHD and autism, which have
kind of also blown up as labels in the
last sort of 5 10 years. But I guess to
go back to to echo your earlier point on
the power of language. I think now that
neurodeiversity is so common amongst our
in our vocabularies maybe we are
thinking about all these other ways that
people can be neurodeiverse. Now I kind
of believe that there's not really
anything as typical neuro you know
there's nothing as no such thing as
neurotypical um we can all find ways
that we that we vary. Um but possibly
the fact that neurodeiversity has become
such a big trend and that's just
increased and exploded everywhere and
there's neurodiversity programs
everywhere that you know inner speech
and aphantasia I think aphantasia is
also exploding um are kind of
piggybacking on this trend of realizing
that we're you know we're quite
different and I think kinder to yourself
is a big implication of it but it's also
I think made me a lot more empathetic
towards others and if I'm having an
argument ment. Not really an argument,
but a disagreement with somebody and
we're not seeing things the same way.
Now I now I think about it as in oh
we're just really not actually seeing it
the same way. You know where I'm saying
things with my words and I have this
model of what my words mean. They just
might have a completely different
interpretation of what those words mean.
You know if I'm saying imagine this,
it's like this and I have this image in
my head and I'm like why can't they say
the image? Well, maybe they don't see
images or maybe they don't see images in
the way that I see images. You know,
there there's there's just so many ways
that people vary and I find it I just
think it's unbelievably cool. You
mentioned I want to go to um you
mentioned dialogical inner thinking
there. I want to I want to go to this.
What is your dialogical inner speech
model?
Well, this really just stems from ideas
that are there in Vagotssky's work, but
because he died so tragically young, he
wasn't able to see through. So, I feel
that, you know, a lot of my career has
just been about trying to unpack some of
those amazing insights. Um, and it's
there in what I've already said about
how in a speech develops that the idea
that it develops out of a social
dialogue between individuals between say
a mother and a child, small child, that
dialogue then gets taken on by the child
so that she's having a conversation with
herself in private speech talking to
herself.
Uh, and then that becomes inner speech.
But the crucial thing there is all the
way along all the way through that
process is dialogic. So when we're
talking to ourselves, we really are
talking to ourselves. We're asking
questions of ourselves and answering
them in exactly the same kind of way as
all those years before we were being
asked questions by a parent and we were
then answering those questions.
So it's really just an implication of if
that developmental model is right then
it follows that much of our inner speech
should have that dialogic quality.
And the work that we did starting 15 or
so years ago when the first paper was
published was to say look if you look at
Votssky's
theory there should be these different
kinds of inner speech. Nobody's ever
tried to figure that out. Nobody's ever
tried to assess them. Nobody's asked
people do you have these different kinds
of inner speech. So we did that for the
first time with our our questionnaire
the varieties of inner speech
questionnaire which then got revised
is now being used in a in a whole bunch
of different studies and translated into
lots of different languages.
Um and it's a it's a handle on those
different kinds of inner speech that I
was I was talking about. You know I
think we need to not be thinking about
inner speech as if it's just one thing
but rather thinking about the different
forms that it takes. And the
dialogicality bit of it is something
that falls out of this scale. If you if
you give it to people, they it seems
that they do respond to these items that
are about whether the inner speech has
this two and fro structure of a
conversation. It seems to be a thing for
a lot of people. There's huge individual
difference of course, but it is a thing.
Um replicated in several different
languages now. Um but it's what I I've
focused on what that sort of buys in a
cognitive
sense. And I think the dialogicality
of inner speech underpins something of
the extraordinary flexibility and let's
say open-endedness of human cognition.
And that relates in turn to creativity
and problem solving in all sorts of
different ways. So to give the best
example of that, you and I neither of us
knew where this conversation was going
to go. Okay, you had some questions
written down, you know, getting on for
an hour ago. You had some questions
written down, but we have covered ground
that neither of us could have predicted.
We didn't know where it was going to go
because you didn't know what I was going
to say and I didn't know what you were
going to say. We have gone somewhere
new. And you know, I have this has been
a brilliant conversation about inner
speech. You know, I do have the I've had
other conversations. They've all been
different because we've never known
where they're going to go. It's an
endlessly creative renewing process. And
if you put that into your own head and
instead of processing, you know,
crunching numbers in the way that, you
know, an oldfashioned computer would
just cr process some numbers, crunch
some crunch some ones and zeros.
Instead, what's going on is this endless
process of questioning and answering, of
taking a perspective on one's own
cognition and responding to it as if
that were another person.
that I think opens up
a lot of the um wonder of human
cognition to be creative, to be
flexible, to be adaptive,
to be open-ended, to not where not know
where it's going until it gets there. Uh
and to make new things happen. Um,
and I think that's something that inner
speech probably can
do
maybe not not uniquely, but because of
language, because it's couched in
language, it has that very powerful
vehicle for doing that. So, I can I can
think a thought, if we're going to use
those terms, and I can respond to that
thought, the utterance as if I were
another person. And I think that's what
allows me to be creative. It allows my
thinking to be flexible just in the same
way that our social dialogues with other
people are are creative and flexible and
open-ended.
>> Yeah. Yeah. Really well said. How common
is it that that dialogue
actually is another person or another
self like a simulated other person? And
then I'm curious again I'm fascinated in
all of the ways that people vary you
know have did are there any cases where
you've seen people having these like you
know eight person roundt discussions
where the each sort of identity in their
mind actually has sort of a different
perspective a different personality is
able to come at something from a
different angle. Um I'm curious, have
you seen cases like that?
>> In terms of everyday, let's say ordinary
cognition, non-pathological
non-pathological cognition, it's not
it's not something that's really very
easy to document and you'd be talking
about case studies. I have lots lots of
interesting correspondence with people
who have all sorts of interesting ways
in which their regular inner speech uh
varies, but we don't really have any
good scientific data on it yet. The
question also shades very interesting
interestingly into questions that come
up through clinical and abnormal
psychology, psychopathology
and questions around therapy where
therapeutically it can be very valuable
to think of the self as holding
different positions and yourself being
composed of
different roles, different characters.
That can be very helpful for therapists
and their and their patients. It's
slightly different. I mean, it's
substantially different really in that
what what I'm what I've been proposing
is a kind of cognitive developmental
hypothesis about how thinking works and
how brains get things done. It's not a
it's not a theory of the self. It's not
a therapeutic theory or anything like
that. But I think there are very
interesting points of commonality that
that'll be really exciting to explore in
in future research.
>> Yeah. And it's something that we I mean
the other another one of the five
there's five five factors that are um
questionnaire picks up. One of them is
we call other people and in this factor
basically people are are asenting to
endorsing statements along the lines of
I hear other people's voices in my in my
head in my inner speech. And they're not
it's not as common as dialogicality for
example, but it is there. And I it's
really quite common to hear people say
that they have conversations with other
people in their heads and like kind of
named identifiable other other people.
And so their inner speech is a kind of
internal dialogue between themselves
and their boyfriend or themselves and
their mom or themselves and another
figure who isn't real who is maybe no
longer alive or who is only ever of a
fictional or who was a fictional
character or a tulpa or a game character
or a spiritual being. You know that's
this has kind of led me to a a kind of
new model of what prayer is. prayer and
and meditation, spiritual meditation,
that really what you're doing is just
spending a bit of time with God or
spending a bit of time with whatever
spiritual
um being is important to you. And that's
a kind of inner speech.
Yeah. Cuz I'm pretty sure I can hold
conversations with other people that I
know in my life that I have models of
and I sort of know their personality
through interaction. And I'm pretty sure
I can hear in their voice. I don't it's
not extremely clear, but I'm pretty sure
I can hear a little bit in their voice
or at least there's some there's some
kind of accent coming across. And I
think I can model their perspective. It
might not be accurate all the time, of
course, because I'm filling in blanks
and kind of guessing. I think I can do
that with one other person, but I don't
think I can do it with two. or it might
I might be able to sit down and like
really if I put a lot of focus and
attention in it do it with two. So I'd
just be super curious what it looks like
to find people that you know have these
re very rich conversations with multiple
people and I you bring up a very
interesting point as well on like where
the the boundaries are with that and
where does it get pathological? Where do
where where does that become
hallucinatory? And is there a form of
hallucination that isn't pathological?
Can you hear other voices but it not
give you any negative emotion? Like can
you have all these other voices in your
mind that you model and talk to but it
not have any negative effect? Like it's
only positive. So many questions here. I
know I just threw like five at you, but
I I think there's just so many really
interesting I I don't know. Speak
broadly about that. What have you have
you seen this in your work?
>> Yeah, we've done research on exactly
that topic. So, it used to be assumed
that hearing voices was always a sign of
pathology.
You used to be assumed that hearing
voices was always a sign of
schizophrenia, which is a a
scientifically problematic construct in
the first place
in terms of how it hangs together. just
gets ringing is probably a bunch of
quite different things that some somehow
cluster together in in clinical
contexts. Um we know that hearing voices
is associated with a whole range of
other psychiatric diagnosis. In fact,
it's quite hard to find one which is not
associated in some way with hearing
voices. But then beyond the realms of
the psychiatric clinic, we know that a
substantial minority of people hear
voices quite regularly and are not
troubled by them, find them neutral or
actively positive. And this is something
that has grown in the last again 15 20
years. this recognition that there is
this group of people out there who are
hearing voices all the time and quite
complex voices and multiple voices in
some cases but they're not bothered by
them. They don't seek psychiatric help.
They're not distressed so they don't
need psychiatric help.
Um give you one example of a a group of
people that we've worked with. These are
spiritualists.
So they're people who um
experience
interacting with the voices, the spirits
of people who are deceased.
In the UK, they're actually an organized
religion. Uh in other cultures, they're
a bit more fringe, but they're they're a
church in in the UK. And we've worked
with people from these churches in a
really constructive way um to understand
what what those kinds of victory
experiences are like and what effects
they can have and how they can come to
be non-distressing for people. So that
would be one one sort of one group of
people who are interesting to work with.
another group of people who are not I'm
not suggesting a mentally ill at all um
just as the spiritualists are not
mentally ill
um writers fiction writers so typically
um writers of novels that we've worked
with but you could think of any kind of
fiction and probably you take this into
films and video games and as well but
we've worked with with professional
novelists and asking um this cliche, you
know, this kind of truism that writers
hear the voices of their characters or
have to hear the voices of their
characters in order to get started with
a book. Is that actually is there
anything in that? Is it really like
hearing a voice?
And we've done this with professional
writers, but we've also done it with
readers of fiction. So to take the
latter first, we ask readers of fiction,
do they ever when they're reading a
book, do they hear the voices of the
characters in their heads? And just as
you'd expect, there's a huge variation.
So we found in our sample like one in
seven of the readers said that hearing
the voice of the character in a book was
as real and lielike and vivid as if
there had been an actual person in the
room with them.
>> Wow. and it's got some press coverage
and of course the paper said one in
seven people hear the voices of the
characters as if they're a real person.
But of course the other side of that is
that six in seven don't.
So it is a minority of people who are
having that really rich vivid experience
of voice hearing. We asked these people,
some of them then responded in in
greater depth to say more about the
these experiences and we un uncovered
some interesting
phenomena about the sort of crossover
between real and fictional world worlds.
And my favorite is one that my colleague
Marco Benini uh called experiential
crossing.
And this is the the best example of this
is that somebody's reading Mrs. Doway by
Virginia Wolf. They're rereading it, in
fact, and I think maybe studying it for
a for a class. They put the book down.
They go out to the flat down into the
street to get a coffee. They walk into
Starbucks, but instead of seeing the
inside of Starbucks as they themselves
would would experience it, they're
experiencing it as Mrs. Doway, as the
character in this book that they've been
reading. And I've I've had this it was
great when we picked up on this because
I've had this experience a lot. I still
have it when I when I'm reading
something that I that I'm really taken
by a feeling like I'm entering that
mindset as a character that I'm becoming
that character in some way. But the
interesting thing here is you is that
it's one thing to be doing that whilst
you're sitting down with the book, but
then to be taking that out into the
world with you uh in your everyday
interaction is is something else again.
So there's something going on with with
readers of fiction in terms of the way
they take on the voices of of characters
that they're reading about. And this
might just be a kind of
specific kind of inner speech. That
might be one that might be the best way
of describing it. As far as the writers
are concerned, we asked a a group of
writers who were passing through an
international book festival this
question of whether they actually hear
the voices of their characters. And
again, as you'd expect, huge variation.
I think the press probably wanted us to
pin down some special psychological
detail that made a writer a writer.
Sorry, we weren't going to do that. We
we didn't expect to do that and we
didn't do that. We show we we showed
instead that there was a huge amount of
variation.
But I think the most you know one one
thing to take away from those finding is
that for writers
it isn't like an intrusive voice
addressing you commanding you
because in order to make it work as a
writer you kind of need that not to
happen. You need to be off the scene.
You need to be kind of in control but
not part of the action. And in fact, the
most common description that we found
was of writers describing it not like
hearing the voices, but more like
overhearing the voices,
>> more like eavesdropping on on a
conversation. And I write fiction myself
and I've had I have exactly this
experience that I um I need to hear my
characters speaking but I don't hear
them speaking to me and I don't really
want them speaking to me because I want
them to be speaking to each other and I
want to be picking up on what they're
saying to each other. And there's only
one exception to that where I felt that
a character that two two of my
characters were actually speaking
directly to me and it felt quite
strange. It felt like a a bit of a
glitch in in in the system. It wasn't
quite supposed to be like that.
>> Right. Can I give you I find this so
fascinating. I had a conversation with
your colleague Ben Alderson day and I I
I loved this. I thought it was so so
cool. But I have a hypothesis that for
this that I want to run by you and get
your get your thoughts on. So I'm a big
fan of predictive processing accounts of
of the brain, right? So the brain sits
in its black box and it's really trying
to figure out the causes of these
sensory signals that it's receiving. And
if you're a writer and you're putting
all this emotion into a character and
you're you're writing this story and
you're you're so engaged and you're
you're as you create this character,
you're your brain is also getting all of
this information.
And the best way it can maybe make sense
of all of this information about this
character that has again since you're
writing it, there's so much emotion,
there's so much intensity maybe to to
your relationship with that character
that the best explanation it has for all
of that data is possibly that it is
another self. And then your social
modeling infrastructure is kind of like
kicked up into gear there and it's
actually simulating this like it's
another self. It's a it's maybe part of
your social infrastructure because
that's just the best explanation for
having all this emotion about something
like what else could it be if you know
the brain didn't really it's actually an
interesting question if the if the brain
evolved with writing but you can you can
say that probably quite a lot of the
brain's evolution you know writing
didn't exist so maybe the only way all
of this information would come into the
brain about a character is if it was a
real person out there I'm curious if Do
you think that has any basis at all or
so maybe sort of fits the idea? Because
I think it's an interesting one.
Obviously, it's it's a hypothesis. It
sort of makes sense to me.
>> It could explain why people become
writers, why they feel they've got these
books inside them that they need to
set down. I think the actual process of
starting writing a new novel is more is
a bit more deliberate and that you have
an idea for a story and you you need you
start to shape the characters and you
have you have themes you want to explore
and you don't shape the characters they
sort of come to you in my experience
anyway.
I think the what you described actually
I think fits better with a hypothesis
that we've had about children's
imaginary friends. So the puzzle of why
a third to twothirds of regular kids
have these imaginary companions
and I've hypothesized that that could
and you can make sense of this in terms
of a predictive processing argument. You
can actually make sense of anything in
terms of a predictive processing
argument. It's just a different
framework for understanding how the mind
works. It's not a theory. It's a
different like the computer metaphor was
a useful way of thinking about how the
mind works. the predictive processing is
the is the same to my mind. But anyway,
I think that would be a useful way of
thinking about how young children start
to engage with these imaginary um if you
like fictional companions and it's very
common and it's used to be associated
with negative mental health outcomes but
it's not not now thankfully.
But if if you think about again going
back to Vigotssky and that process of
internalizing voices,
the young child's mind is going to be a
pretty strange thing, pretty strange
place to be in terms of all these
different voices, all these bits of
dialogue in the in the process of being
assimilated, being taken into the self,
all this learning going on, all these
new experiences. And there we've
actually hypothesized that creating an
imaginary companion might be a way of
raifying
these in these kind of semi-digested
social dialogues that they're take that
kids are taking into themselves to form
their own inner speech. And maybe when
when you you know we know that adults
continue to have imaginary companions
maybe are engaging with imaginary
companions with fictional characters
with game characters with topas
spiritual beings. Maybe all of that is
just a sort of long distance hangover
from from what was going on when we were
small children.
>> Yeah.
>> We tried to figure that out. We've asked
we've we've done some research asking
people about imaginary friends in
childhood whether they still have them
as adults and we found some some
connections with the different kinds of
inner speech that people have but it's
very very preliminary data and you know
lots more needs to be done in that space
I think. Very cool, Charles. I think
you're awesome. I think your work is so
important. I respect you so much because
I think it's so bloody hard to get at
firsthand phenomenology, right? To get
at subjective experience is just so
impossibly hard when people don't even
understand their own subjective
experience. I I respect researchers so
much who dedicate their life to to
really trying to understand it. You and
Russ, I've learned so much from it. I
want to keep having these conversations
because I think it is such an
interesting message. I want to help
spread it, but I know we're over time.
We didn't get to talk about
topammancers. I really wanted to talk
about topammancers because they're so so
ultra strange and bizarre and that could
could be a whole podcast in of itself.
Um, but games, let's do that sometime.
You mentioned NPCs and I'm doing some
work with video game companies asking
them to to think about the inner world
of their video game characters and that
that includes NPC.
>> Incredibly cool. Incredibly cool. We'll
have to save those for a round two. But
thank you so much for your time. Thank
you for your work. I look forward to
keeping in touch and yeah, thank you for
the time. That was that was so much fun.
>> Great to talk to you today and yeah,
let's speak again sometime. Thank you.
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