Charles Fernyhough

But what we found is they didn't look the same in terms of that balance of activation.

between Broca's area and Wernicke's area.

So when we had elicited inner speech, there was lots of that Broca's area, the bit at the front on the left that's producing, producing, you know, doing these high complex movement patterns, including speech.

But when people were doing inner speech spontaneously, there was much less of that.

Exactly.

And it was more of that region a bit further back, the Wernicke's area.

Wow.

That was more the kind of listening, hearing bit of the brain.

So, you know, the exact areas of the brain doesn't matter too much.

But for us, it was a really important sign that more needed to be done here and that we shouldn't assume that when you put somebody in the scanner and tell them to do something, the thing that results is anything like the thing you're actually interested in.

So neuroscientists, beware.

Are people really doing the kind of thing in the scanner that you want them to be doing?

I love it.

Yeah, exactly.

So we use the term voice hearing to describe the experience of hearing a voice when there's nobody around to produce that voice.

And we usually associate it with severe mental illness, so diagnoses like schizophrenia.

What we've learned is that this experience happens to all sorts of people in all sorts of walks of life.

Many, if not most, psychiatric disorders have voice hearing associated with them.

But then there are a significant number of people who hear voices

who are not distressed by them, who don't seek psychiatric help, who don't need psychiatric help because they're not distressed, but find them useful, creative, guiding, spiritual, all these kinds of things.