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This seemed to fulfill a function beyond just annoying nearby working-from-home parents. Fernyhough noticed that his subjects would spend a lot of their time talking to themselves out loud. His research began in developmental psychology, studying how young children behaved when playing alone. The reason it's had little attention, publicly, culturally, but also scientifically is that it's very hard to get a grip on one’s own inner speech,” says Fernyhough.įernyhough’s quest to understand inner speech began by observing outer speech at the beginning of the brain’s development.
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These test subjects often aren’t particularly cooperative: “People find it very hard to reflect on their own inner speech. Whilst behavioural neuroscientists can mimic fear responses in a mouse and neuroimaging researchers can look at highly-conserved reward pathways in non-human primates, studying inner speech in humans really requires human volunteers. Researchers in Fernyhough’s field have not chosen an easy area of study. As we’ll see, inner speech’s developmental origins and unique characteristics separate it from these other between-our-ears phenomena. Fernyhough has argued in his research that inner speech is a distinct type of auditory thinking, separate from, for example, imagining a siren going off. He suggests that the first challenge is defining exactly what to call the noises we make inside our head: “A lot of people talk about the inner voice, which is a term I avoid, because it is very vague and fluffy and hard to pin down.”įernyhough says that people may associate the term “inner voice” with concepts like “gut feeling” or “moments of inspiration”, but what he and his team study is inner speech, a formal scientific term that involves the word-based conversations we have with ourselves inside our heads.
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Charles Fernyhough is a professor in the Department of Psychology at Durham University and author of The Voices Within, a book focusing on inner speech. Similarly, our scientific investigation of inner speech has made surprisingly little headway. What’s strangest of all is that, despite coronavirus isolation making our internal chatter all the more apparent, we don’t often outwardly discuss the conversation in our heads. It’s even stranger that we do it virtually the whole time we are awake. It’s slightly strange that we talk to ourselves inside our own heads.