Charles Fernyhough

So the question of how that relates to inner speech, the theory is that when somebody hears a voice, what's actually happening is that they're producing some inner speech.

So they're talking to themselves.

But for some reason...

That is not experienced as their own voice.

It's experienced as coming from some sort of other entity or some sort of other place.

And there's a good neuroscientific theory of why that works.

And it goes back to those two parts of the brain, in fact, that bit Broca at the front, that bit Wernicke a bit further back.

The idea is that usually when you're speaking, that bit at the front sends a little internal message to that bit in the middle and says, you're about to speak.

Don't pay too much attention to it.

Don't kind of process this like you'd process somebody else speaking because it's just you.

And the idea is that in the case of voice hearing, that message doesn't get through in the same way.

It's delayed or it's degraded or it doesn't happen at all.

Yeah, pretty much, yeah.

The work that Russ has done and the work that I've done with him has made it really obvious to me that some people don't use inner speech very much.

Maybe some never use it at all.

They do other things.

They use images.

They use music.

They use emotions.

They use all the other stuff that's going on in your head.