Charles Fernyhough

So neuroscientists beware.

You know, are people really doing the kind of thing in the scanner that you want them to be doing?

I love it.

Yeah, exactly.

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.

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.