Radiolab - Voices in Your Head

Episode Date: September 8, 2010

Jad talks to Charles Fernyhough about the connection between thought, inner speech, and the voice in our heads.

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From W-N-Y-C-C-N-P-R. Hey, I'm Janetabum. This is Radio Lab, the podcast. Robert. Robert is not here. He is away, so it's just me. unfortunately, but I will do my best. So in this podcast, I want to dig a little deeper into something that we ran into in our last new full episode, which was on words.

Paper. Eagle. Clock. Green. Barrel. Cats. I like I eat a hat. Cardinal.

Door. Door. Door. Hi, you can you hear me. Name Charles Fronio. I'm a writer and developmental psychologist from Durham University. And we were having this conversation with him about what happens to young kids when they learn words. Orange, juice, apple, do you jay?

Think games. Like that, you know, like, what happens to the way they see the world? And in the middle of the chat, he said something kind of radical, which was that before they have words? I don't think very young children do think. Like, think, period? Was there a period at the end of that sentence? You don't think that they think, period? I don't think they think in the way that I want to call thinking,

which is a bit of a cheat. What he meant is that thinking, as he defines it, is basically just words sounding silently in your head. And before you have those words in your head, you can't think. This is a controversial idea, which we debated back and forth. But for the next few minutes, we're not going to debate it. We're going to jump into it farther. Because whether or not you think it's true,

if you follow the idea all the way through, as we're about to do, it does lead you to some interesting places. So, first of all, this whole idea, says Charles, goes back to this Russian guy. Russian psychologist. Named.

Vigotsky. Lev Vigotsky. And is he a contemporary dude? No, he died in the 30s. He was active. Anyhow, he came up with this idea. It's a really interesting notion of how kids learn to think.

And it all begins, he said, on the outside. Think about a small child who's sitting down, solving, a puzzle. Does that look like it goes somewhere? It goes here.

You're sitting down and you're working together on a puzzle and all you've got to do is get these shapes into this board in the right kind of order. If you watch any kid with their parent anywhere in the world doing this kind of thing, you'll see them thinking together. No, that doesn't have an edge. The child, for example, picks up a picture of a boat

and says, you know, where am I going to put this boat piece? And then the mom says, well, have a look at the shape. And then the kids looks at the shape and says, oh, it's got that pointed bit there. And the mom says, right, well, can you see anywhere on the board that has a pointed bit? Right there. And so on. According to Vagatsky, this is the beginning of thinking, this kind of dialogue. And at this point, it's completely external.

It's all happening in that space between the child and her mother. We don't know where it goes yet, but if you put it together. And only over time does it become internalized. And how that happens, Vagaski thought, is that as the child gets older, she'll start to take on the dialogue herself. She'll start to talk to herself. This is the stage we call private speech. We've all seen kids do this, right?

Where they narrate every single thing they're doing. Put the ball in the box. Take the ball out of the box. Now, what then happens is a few years further down the line. These kids who are narrating everything they're doing, then go to school, and the teachers tell them, shh, don't talk out loud. So they kind of get the message

that they need to start doing this internally. So they start to whisper to themselves out loud and then eventually they whisper to themselves silently because the words are now in their head. And that, according to Vigotsky's theory, that is thinking. Only then, he says, is the child having a thought. Now, forgetting the particulars for a second, the main point here is that those thoughts

that are humming along silently in your mind. Those thoughts began as a duo with your mom, or a trio with your mom and your dad, or a quartet with your mom and your dad and your sister. In other words, those thoughts began as a crowd. The logic of it is that all our thinking is full of other people's voices. Now, most of us know that the voices in our head are just us. But what got us interested in this whole Vagotsky thing,

is that maybe this idea has something to say to people who actually do hear other voices in their head. Yeah, Molly. Hi. Nice to meet you. You too. Thanks for coming up here. As we were thinking about this, it just so happened that our producer, Pat Walters, had taken a trip to Denver, had a little time on his hands, did a little research, and ended up tracking down this later. And I'm Molly Martin, and I am a psychotherapist, and I run the Hearing Voices Network of Denver.

They met up at this hotel. Molly works with people who hear voices in their heads, and she runs a support group for people to share their experiences. The day Pat was there, she introduced him to a fellow named Marcus. Hi, I'm Marcus Macias. I'm a voice hear myself. I hear voices, so I could kind of share my experiences. Can you kind of tell me this story of? Well, yeah.

You know, I first started hearing them 20 years ago, so I've been hearing them for 20 years. And so I'm 40 now, so it was when I was 20. when I first started hearing them. When it started for him, he says, the voices would kind of materialize out of background noise, like the hum of a refrigerator or the wear of a fan. When I first started hearing them, they were kind of guiding a little bit, you know, like guiding voices.

He says initially the voices would help him out. Like if he was in an argument and about to say something mean, the voices would warn him. Be careful, watch out. They say things like that, you know, kind of like they're helpful. But then there was like other negative. He's had periods in his life, he says, where the voices have even turned demonic. Yeah, so it was intense. Things are a lot better now, though. See, I'm learning how to manage

them, you know, because I'm taking care of myself, you know, so. Okay, so why do we bring this up? Well, clearly, for a lot of people like Marcus, hearing voices involves some psychiatric issues, which sometimes for people can be serious, really serious. But here's the weird thing. The experience of hearing somebody else's voice in your own head is actually way more common than you would think. Surveys have been done about this and the number seems to be between 5 and 10% of normal healthy people have that experience or have had it at one time. Which brings us back to this Fogotsky situation. What might be happening in those cases, at least if he asked Charles, is a kind of misattribution of your own inner voice. Those voices in your head,

which are you, get mistaken to be from someone else. A nice simple, elegant demonstration of this is that you take some people who are hearing voices, people with, in this case a diagnosis of schizophrenia who hear voices. And you sit them down at a microphone with some headphones on, and you show them some words on a screen. Just flash up some words on a screen, and their task is to repeat the words, to read the words out loud. Now, if you can imagine these subjects are.

seeing these words on the screen, they're repeating them into the mic, and they've got headphones on so they're actually hearing their own voices as they're doing this. Trick is, the researchers have rigged it so that the voice in their headphones, their voice, actually gets lowered just a little bit right before they hear it. What that means is that if I were to say, hello, my name is Chad. What I'd hear in my headphones is, hello, my name is Chad. And as you know, if you lower the picture of the voice by a few semitones, it becomes much harder to recognize it. Because when I'm speaking in this lowered voice, you can still kind of recognize it's me, but it's a little bit hard. Now, what the experimenters found is that most people, most non-voice hearing, quote-unquote, healthy people,

when they were presented with the sound of their own voice, lowered like this, and then asked, is this you, is it a stranger, or you not sure, they did make mistakes, some mistakes. The voice hearers made considerably more mistakes. Yeah. Not only that, when they heard their voices lowered, they would very, very often say, that voice is coming from a stranger. That's not me. That's not myself. That didn't come from me. Now, of course, that is potentially a frightening experience. That's potentially a very distressing experience. But not always. Because let's just imagine Vagatsky was right, that the internal voice of our thoughts

is actually a blend of all of those external voices from our childhood. So in other words, our mom, our dad, or sisters, brothers, whatever, they're all in there in some way. And that can actually be a comfort. Back at that hotel in Denver, Molly Martin had told Pat about a woman who had seen her father murdered. He was shot in front of her. And she was... It was a robbery.

And it was, I believe, at a convenience store. And for years afterwards, she says, this woman would hear her dad's voice. She would tell us that every morning, morning when she would wake up, he would tell her to make her bed. And he would remind her throughout the day to do more positive things. And if she was doing something, for example, if she wanted, she was a drug addict and if she wanted to use drugs again, her father would say to her things like, you know, don't do it, you know, it's bad for you, this is a horrible, you know, more looking after her.

I think she might have been 11 when he was killed. but it was a good relationship during that time. Yeah, and then it just kind of like stuck, like frozen. Yeah, I think so. I think so. If you want to read some more about hearing voices, you can do that on our website, RadioLab.org. Thanks to Charles Fernie Ho,

who wrote a great book called A Thousand Days of Wonder. Also thanks to Molly Martin, Marcus Macias, Stella Story, and Carrie Donahue, and Joanna and Alex Lau. They made the homemade Sonic ID that you heard at the very beginning. Okay, so before we go, I just want to let you know, we have a new website atradiolab.org. It's a new design, it's all organized, and if you go to the site, in fact, I'm going to do it right now. All right, here we go, radio lab.org. If you go there and you scroll down to the middle, you'll see a whole bunch of,

frightening looking people wearing t-shirts. That is the Radio Lab staff, myself and Robert included. And you will all see us wearing a t-shirt depicting a goat standing on a cow's back. This is a very meaningful image to us, perhaps to some of you. And if you just click a little bit more and you just follow the link to shop shop store.com, you will see that we, oh, what a cute baby. We have toddler sizes. I have a toddler.

I'm going to buy one for my toddler. I'm going to buy 70, in fact. Here you go. 7.0. All right, I'm going to make this purchase up. So I should sign off. I'm Chad I boomrod. Thanks for listening.

Catch in two weeks. Christopher Caldwell from Chicago, California. I'm a radio lab listener, and the radio lab podcast is funded in part by the Sloan Foundation. End of message.