Chapter 1: What is the significance of inner monologues in understanding ourselves?
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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.
No.
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Chapter 2: How do researchers study inner speech and its development?
You can have a science of it.
So today on the show, how far can the science go in the quest to know thyself?
I'm Emily Kwong. And I'm Rachel Carlson. You're listening to Shortwave, the science podcast from NPR.
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Okay, short wavers. Rachel and I are here with Charles Ferniho. He's a professor of psychology at Durham University and studies inner speech, which is one of many kinds of internal experiences.
Charles, what do we know about where inner speech comes from and what parts of the brain are involved?
Well, if you watch any small child, you're really likely to see them talking to themselves. Yes. So when kids are talking to themselves out loud, we call that private speech. And the idea is that it's the precursor. It's the thing that comes before inner speech. So the inner speech that you and I probably experience, or may not, where that comes from developmentally is from private speech.
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Chapter 3: What is the relationship between inner speech and voice hearing?
But what we found is they didn't look the same in terms of that balance of activation.
Wow.
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.
Just like chilling in the machine and they just had an errant thought that was inner speech.
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.
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Chapter 4: How does private speech evolve into inner speech?
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.
You know, are people really doing the kind of thing in the scanner that you want them to be doing?
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that kind of inner speech, like spontaneous inner speech sounds like birding. You scientists have to patiently wait and see if a bird shows up.
But the bird is your own brain.
I love it. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
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.
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