Charles Fernyhough

So we see those systems lighting up.

But I mean, that bit of the front broker's area lights up when we do a whole load of different things.

So we can't really pin too much onto that.

So we know it's important, but it's not the whole story.

So one of the things that we've argued, if inner speech comes from a dialogue with other people, it should have the structure of a dialogue.

In order to do that, your language system has got to be working, all that stuff on the left hemisphere that you'd expect to be working, but some other stuff must be going on as well.

Yeah, and what we find when we look at people doing dialogic inner speech, as opposed to something that's more like a single line of conversation, is that yes, you get that language system in the left hemisphere firing,

But you also get another region way on the other side of the brain, which we know from previous research is involved in representing other people's minds.

So you're representing yourself as a partner in that conversation.

The cool thing about working with Russ was that we had a study where we got people used to using descriptive experience sampling.

The beeper, yeah.

They got used to using the beeper.

Once they got pretty good at it, we then put them into the scanner.

And we saw what they were doing.

So we had two kinds of inner speech.

We sort of caught two kinds of fish.

One is the elicited inner speech where you're told to do it.

And the other is the spontaneous inner speech where you're not told to do it, it just happens.

And we could look to see whether these two kinds of things were the same.

And we've got a whole lot further to do on this topic.