Charles Fernyhough

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.

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.