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Chapter 1: What is the inner monologue and how does it vary among individuals?
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Hey, shortwavers. It's Emily Kwong. And Rachel Carlson, shortwave producer. And Emily, I think it's pretty safe to say that both of us read the team inbox, shortwave at NPR.org. Every morning, fervently. Exactly. And two months ago, you said something to reporter John Hamilton that really piqued our audience's interest. I don't have an inner monologue.
Not everybody has an inner monologue. This is something that doesn't work for everybody. I'm safe. Yeah, exactly.
I'm so proud of myself. And our inbox lit up about this. People wrote, is that even a thing? I don't understand. How is that possible? So we had to confirm science backs this up, right? Not everyone has an inner monologue.
It is true. Scientists confirm. For some people, inner speech is far less wordy. So my inner experience isn't really word-based. It's more like a moving landscape of images. It's kind of like soaking in an emotional bath and like feelings.
I love it.
Yeah, and feelings and images will rise and they'll fall. But there's no words. It's real silent.
Mine is loud. Oh, no. It does not feel like a bath. feels like it's dialogue heavy. So whether it's a conversation that I'm having with myself or an imagined conversation with other people. Yeah, it's a screenplay.
Me, myself and my voice. Yeah, totally.
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Chapter 2: How does science confirm that not everyone has an inner monologue?
People didn't know what they were talking about when they picked a number on a Likert scale. And I didn't know what they were talking about. The data was just rotten on the way in.
So he ditched the questionnaires and instead told participants every time the beeper goes off, write down what's going on internally in your own words.
And then we get together and talk about it.
Russ called this technique descriptive experience sampling. It was illuminating, sometimes even life-changing for the participants involved. But Russ is the first to say how highly imperfect his method is.
It's just people saying what's going on in their heads, but How do you confirm?
Yeah, like how do you check for accuracy? Like he believes that people do not fully know the characteristics of their inner experience, including me.
You've got no good reason to be confident that you do or do not have an inner monologue. Because there's just too many layers between what your inner experience actually is and what you might say about it.
That was humbling to hear.
It's humbling, yes. But, Emily, you know, even if people can't fully know themselves, scientists are still trying to figure it out, including a collaborator of Russell's, Charles Ferniho.
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Chapter 3: What techniques are used to study inner experiences?
Like a CT scanner, an MRI scanner?
These days, it's going to be an MRI scanner when we're doing fMRI research on the topic. 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.
How so?
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.
Oh, interesting. Okay, so you're saying that would involve more parts of the brain than just the language areas.
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.
Wow. Wow. We heard from Russell Hurlburt how there's like limits to surveying, like you can't really know what's going on in someone's inner experience fully, nor can they. How is the addition of scanning deepened our understanding of inner speech or complicated it to the point where maybe there's even more that we don't know?
The cool thing about working with Russ was that we had a study where we got people used to using descriptive experience samples.
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Chapter 4: How do language areas in the brain relate to inner speech?
I mean, okay, so you also lead this project on voice hearing. So can you just tell us what voice hearing is and how it differs from... spontaneous inner speech?
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.
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.
Wow. So your brain can't tell it's you who's talking.
Yeah, pretty much, yeah.
What's the difference between that and not having inner speech?
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Chapter 5: What is the difference between inner speech and voice hearing?
This episode was produced by none other than Rachel Carlson. She really does it all.
Thank you. It was edited by our showrunner, Rebecca Ramirez, and fact-checked by Tyler Jones.
Kweisi Lee was the audio engineer. And Beth Donovan is our vice president of podcasting. I'm Emily Kwong. And I'm Rachel Carlson. Thanks for listening to Shortwave from NPR.