The One You Feed - Charles Fernyhough

Episode Date: March 29, 2017

Please Support The Show With a Donation   This week we talk to Charles Fernyhough about the voices in our heads Charles Fernyhough is a writer and psychologist. His non-fiction book about his daughter’s psychological development, A Thousand Days of Wonder, was translated into eight languages. His book on autobiographical memory, Pieces of Light was shortlisted for the 2013 Royal Society Winton Prize for Science Books.  His latest non-fiction book is called The Voices Within. He is the author of two novels, The Auctioneer and A Box Of Birds. He has written for TIME Ideas, Nature, New Scientist, BBC Focus, Guardian, Observer, Financial Times, Literary Review, Sunday Telegraph, Lancet, Scotland on Sunday, Huffington Post, Daily Beast and Sydney Morning Herald. He blogs for the US magazine Psychology Today and has made numerous radio appearances in the UK and US. He has acted as consultant on theatre productions on Broadway and the West End (‘The River’, Royal Court, 2012, and The Circle in the Square, 2014; ‘Old Times’, Harold Pinter Theatre, 2013), numerous TV (BBC1 and Channel 4) and radio documentaries and several other artistic projects.  He was shortlisted for the 2015 Transmission Prize for the communication of ideas. He is a part-time chair in psychology at Durham University, UK, where he leads the interdisciplinary Hearing the Voice project, investigating the phenomenon of auditory verbal hallucinations.   In This Interview, Charles Fernyhough and I Discuss... His new book, The Voices Within: The History and Science of How We Talk to Ourselves The stages of speech in childhood development and how it relates to our inner voice in life The theory that says that our internal speech comes from external speech that we hear/the dialogue we hear as a child which we eventually move inward and it becomes our internal speech Vygotsky's theory What inner speech does for us Inner speech plays a role in regulating behavior It has a role in imagination and creativity It has a role in creating a self That the fact that we create and construct a self, doesn't mean that it is an illusion The theory that says that inner speech is how we bring different parts of our brain together into a coherent narrative How using inner speech skillfully can give us significant advantages in life That talking out loud to yourself actually probably serves some useful function Social speech - private speech - inner speech As the task gets more difficult, children and adults move from inner speech to more private speech How difficult it is to study inner speech The dialogic thinking model How his research that shows it can be helpful to teach mentally ill people who hear voices in their head to think differently about this form of inner speech Theories about why people hear different voices in their head That there is a strong correlation between childhood trauma and hearing voices in one's head as an adult That people hear the voices of the people in books that they've read Experiential crossing How to work with your inner speech to improve the quality of the experience of your life How difficult it is to silence your inner voice so it's better to learn how to productively interact with it, even dialogue with it     Please Support The Show with a DonationSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Having the ability to do in a speech plays a part in creating a self. Welcome to The One You Feed. Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like, garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think, ring true. And yet, for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity, self-pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction. How they feed their good wolf.

I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together, our mission on the Really Know Really podcast is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why the bathroom door doesn't go all the way to the floor, what's in the museum of failure, and does your dog truly love you? We have the answer. Go to reallyknowreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast

or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. The Really No Really podcast. Follow us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Charles Ferneyho, PhD in developmental psychology. His awards include a Time to

Write Award with the Northern Writers Awards and Arts Council of England Grants for the Arts, and his books have been translated into 11 languages. Charles has a new book called The Voices Within, The History and Science of How We Talk to Ourselves. If you value the content we put out each week, then we need your help. As the show has grown, so have our expenses and time commitment. Go to oneufeed.net slash support and make a monthly donation. Our goal is to get to 5% of our listeners supporting the show. Please be part of the 5% that make a contribution and allow us to keep putting out these interviews and ideas.

We really need your help to make the show sustainable and long-lasting. Again, that's oneufeed.net slash support. Thank you in advance for your help. And here's the interview with Charles Ferniho. Hi, Charles. Welcome to the show. Hi, thanks for having me on the show. And here's the interview with Charles Ferniho. self-talk and how that influences our lives. So your book was fascinating and we'll get more into it here in a second, but let's start like we usually do with the parable of the wolves. There's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson. He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love. And the other is a bad wolf, which represents things

like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second. He looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed. So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. I was struck when I started to put this book together about I had little attention the idea of internal dialogue had received over the years, particularly from a scientific point of view. I mean, the idea is a very old one. It goes back at least as far as Plato, and it figures in the work of many 20th century philosophers and scholars, But hardly anyone has written about it as a sort of psychological process. So I think what the parable illustrates to me is the fact of that conversation,

that we are talking to ourselves, we're working stuff through in a conversation, either internally or out loud. And sometimes that, often I think that that conversation has a moral dimension. Yeah, it seems to be a pretty common aspect of our lives that you're right, there's very little attention paid to it, which is why I was so interested when I saw your book. Tell everyone a little bit more about the type of work that you're doing to set the background for the book. Sure. I'm a research psychologist. I started out doing developmental psychology, in other words, focusing on young children and babies and how their minds develop. And that got me into this

phenomenon that we call private speech. This is a phase in development when children typically talk to themselves out loud. It's as if they're thinking through problems, they're doing all their thinking out loud. And I got interested in a particular theory of this that comes from the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky, who was writing in the 20s and 30s. And he had a very simple idea about how all this works. He argued that children start off in life engaged in social conversations, they're talking to other people. Then over time, those conversations that are happening externally become internalised, gradually taken inside. So you find this stage when children are doing it still out loud,

but they're having a conversation with themselves. And then a bit further on in development, that turns into our inner speech our internal dialogue which continues to have some of the properties of the stuff that happens out loud so that's how i got into it and realized that there'd been not much research attention to the idea of inner speech that that conversation that we have with ourselves a lot of the time. Hardly anybody had researched it. There's some pretty good reasons for that. It's a very difficult thing to study, but we are finding new ways of studying it. There have been new developments that mean that we can now have a science

and a speech, and it's something that has flourished over the last 20 years or so. It's a fascinating subject. So what you're saying there then is that, again, not completely proven, but there's a strong theory that says our inner speech comes from external speech that we hear, dialogue that we hear, that we eventually move internally to ourselves. Does that mean before that we weren't really talking to ourselves in our head? I think that is the logic of the theory, yeah. I think the idea is that you participate in these dialogues. It's not just that you listen to them, you're actually taking part in them. Yeah. And when that's happening, you're not doing the same kind of thing internally.

That's what follows from Vygotsky's theory. It would be a difficult thing to prove that either way. But you do get a sense of watching children thinking out loud in this way I've described, that it is all happening on the surface, that they're not kind of, you know, getting pensive and thinking things through to themselves silently in the way that we would do. So that's how I see it at the moment. I think that's the best evidence is that in the beginning, it's all external, it's all out loud.

And over time, this stuff is taken in and beginning, it's all external, it's all out loud. And over time, this stuff is taken in and becomes our inner speech. Why do we think that we have inner speech? What does inner speech do for us? Vygotsky emphasized a particular role for inner speech in regulating our behavior. So thinking through what we're going to do, controlling it from moment to moment, initiating new plans of action. So inner speech was a kind of self-directional tool. And I think he's pretty much right about that. There's lots of evidence that that's why both children and adults use inner speech. But I think inner speech does a whole bunch of other things as well. Inner speech seems to have a role in imagination as well. Inner speech seems to have a role in

imagination and creativity. Inner speech seems to have a role in thinking about the past and future. There's even some evidence to suggest that having the ability to do inner speech plays a part in creating a self and that people who lose that ability temporarily have a kind of erosion of their sense of self during that period of time. Yeah, that's very interesting to think of all the different things that it does. And one of the things that's interesting is we have people on the show, particularly some different spiritual teachers, Buddhist teachers, or etc., who will say that the sense of self is not real, that we truly do create it ourselves. is not real, that we truly do create it ourselves. And what you're saying here would sort of tie to that idea that the sense of a coherent self is something that we are creating as we go. It doesn't have an inherent basis. I would agree that the self is constructed. It's something that we

make. It's something that we're constantly editing. I don't think that means it's an illusion. I think it means it's a construction. I mean, you wouldn't call a picture or a house or a story an illusion. You'd say it was a construction. It's something that is created. That's probably a better word for it. It is constructed, but it's not a thing that's inherent in itself. Sure. And I think that's a very complicated process. All the many different processes that go into make are different selves. There's an awful lot going on there. I think inner speech is part of it. I'm sure it's not the whole story, though. One of the other theories is that inner speech is actually how we bring different parts of the brain together into a coherent narrative.

Different brain functions beyond just speech are actually aggregated and made coherent through inner speech? Yes, this is a nice line of reasoning in philosophy and in cognitive neuroscience, that language in the brain has a kind of special role of being able to bring different parts of our processing system together, to be able to tie different stuff together in a way that wouldn't otherwise be possible. There's some evidence that supports that, but it's something that really needs a lot more research. I think it's a slightly different idea to the idea that we narrate ourselves in inner speech. We tell a story about ourselves in words. I think those ideas are connected, but they're not quite the same thing. They may well both be true.

Yeah. Throughout the book, there were lots of different studies that show that people that use inner speech more, there's children who are able to solve puzzles better, and there's a tendency towards better self-regulation. So it seems that using inner speech skillfully can give us advantages. That's right. And the focus has been on private speech in children. In other words, the kind of inner speech that you do out loud during that period of development. But in recent times, as we've got better at studying inner speech, we've done the same kind of work with adults. We find that for at least some tasks, adults perform better if they're able to talk to themselves as they're performing the task. We think that adults also talk to themselves out loud,

and that will serve some of the same functions. But adult private speech is hardly studied. There's very little research on that topic. So there's this curious idea that talking to yourself as an adult is strange or even the first sign of madness, as the old saying goes. And that's an odd thing. I think people still feel self-conscious about talking to themselves out loud. But when I'm giving talks and lectures, I ask people to put their hands up if they ever do it. Most people will say they do talk to themselves out loud. So there's this odd sort of social embarrassment

about it, but it probably serves some really useful functions. Yeah, you've actually said that it appears that talking out loud might be a way to cut down the resource costs of doing inner speech, that talking out loud or writing things down might be easier for our brain to take less resources. I think that's right. I think in the first place, doing some inner speech helps you. It gives you a handle on your thoughts. So in a way, that in itself is cutting down the costs of the processing that you're trying to do. But going that step further and putting it out there into the open air probably helps you a bit more as well. So the idea is that if you actually say something to yourself out loud, it's kind of out there

in the air and you can hear the words coming back at you through your auditory memory or it sort of has a materiality that it doesn't have if it's just there in your head silent which would make sense if truly inner speech did come originally from dialogue then that would be a natural way for us to process it also is to hear it externally that's right the standard view of vigotsky's theory holds you go from social speech, social dialogue, to private speech, to inner speech. But I think you can move back along that trajectory as well. You can go back from inner speech to private speech as an adult as well, and that it brings different benefits. So we think that children talk to themselves more when the task gets a bit more difficult, and I think adults

do as well. I think adults are more likely to speak out loud when the going gets tough, when they're under stress, or when the task is challenging. Yeah, well, that certainly ties with my experience of when I would actually talk out loud to myself. But weirdly, as I say, there just isn't a huge amount of research on it. It's crying out to be studied more. In general, as you mentioned early on, it's a very difficult thing to study, right? Because you are having to basically get people's observations of what's happening in their head. And also that a lot of times when you're trying to control a study, you're sort of making inner speech sort of artificial, the repeating of certain things. So it remains an area that is challenging to study, although you guys have made tremendous

progress. Well, thank you. It is a tricky thing in terms of methodology. How do you go about studying this experience that is by definition private, that nobody else can share it? But as you say, there are a bunch of different things you can do you can ask people to fill in questionnaires about their experience you can interview them about their experience you can do clever things like stopping them from using any inner speech by giving them another task to do that blocks their language capacity for a brief period of time and looking to see whether that affects their performance and their behavior. So we do have different ways of studying inner speech and as far as studying what goes on in the brain when people are talking to themselves is concerned, you're right, we're getting better at working

out how to capture inner speech happening naturally in the scanner. I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk

gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Bryan Cranston is with us today.

How are you, too? Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really No Really.

Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast or a limited edition signed Jason bobblehead. It's called Really No Really and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, everybody. I know you're used to Eric kind of coming in after this first music break and talking to you and, you know, begging for money and telling you about what's going on. I thought that I, Chris,

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Can you talk a little bit about what that is? Sure. There's a really important implication of Vygotsky's theory, that fairly simple theory that I've just sketched out, going from social to private to inner speech. And that implication is that the stuff that goes on in our heads silently should share the structure of the thing it originated in. In other words, social dialogue. So your inner speech should at least some of the time have a dialogic or a conversational structure. It really should be a conversation with yourself as if as you would have if you were having a conversation with another person. And that's a slightly different way of thinking about inner speech to the one that I encountered when I started working in this area, where the idea is that your inner speech is just

kind of like the voice of the brain, it's the voice of the self, it's this monologue that is generated by a single point of view. What Vygotsky's theory encourages us to do is think differently and think about inner speech as a dialogue between different points of view. And what I've argued in my work is that if you recognize that dialogic quality of inner speech, certain things start to make sense. For example, understanding how a human mind can be creative and go to new places, places it hadn't anticipated going to. It's a lot easier to understand when you think about inner speech as a dialogue. What are the implications of that idea on cognitive behavioral

therapy? The idea that in CBT, we are in essence engaging in dialogue with ourselves, correct? Yes, I think that way of thinking about inner speech is very valuable. CBT comes in lots of different forms and this approach to inner speech can be valuable in all sorts of ways. So the work that I've focused on has been on CBT for psychosis, where people who are hearing voices, which we think is connected to the experience of inner speech, who are troubled by distressing voices, by thinking differently about their regular inner speech can help them to understand where the voices are coming from and why they have the properties that they have. Can you elaborate a little bit more on this idea of hearing voices and how this ties into your model and some of the things that you guys have been doing to help people who hear voices?

Sure. Hearing voices is seen as often a very scary thing. It often is a very scary thing. It's associated with severe mental illness diagnoses such as schizophrenia. It's associated with a whole range of different psychiatric diagnoses. schizophrenia is associated with a whole range of different psychiatric diagnoses. So it's not just about schizophrenia, it's about everything from bipolar disorder to eating disorders to post-traumatic stress disorder, borderline personality disorder. Lots and lots of different diagnoses are associated with hearing voices. It's not just schizophrenia is what you're saying, that that's the common idea. If you hear voices, then you have schizophrenia. And you're saying that's not true. It can be different things. Definitely. That is definitely not true that

hearing voices equals schizophrenia. Schizophrenia in itself is a complex group of disorders, probably, that isn't very well defined. But hearing voices is associated with a whole range of different disorders. And crucially, it happens to people across the spectrum of human experience. So roughly as many people who have a diagnosis of schizophrenia hear voices quite regularly, without any distress, they don't seek psychiatric help, they don't need psychiatric help, they're not mentally ill. They're voice hearers, they're people who hear voices quite regularly as i say that might account for maybe around one percent of the population and then there's a much larger group of people who have

intermittent or occasional or one-off voice hearing experiences best figures we've got at the moment are that somewhere between five and fifteen percent of regular people will have a voice hearing experience at some time in their life. So it's something that's associated quite strongly with mental illness. It's a very distressing experience for a lot of people, but it doesn't equate to mental illness. And what are some of the theories on why people hear voices? One of them that I remember from the book was that there's a part of our brain that basically tells other parts of our brain what we're doing, and that that signal doesn't get to the other part of the brain. So it's almost as if it's our own internal idea that when people hear voices what's actually happening is that they're generating some inner speech they're doing the regular thing that we

that most of us do from moment to moment you know they're talking to themselves but for some reason they don't recognize it as their own work they don't recognize that they themselves have generated the utterance and exactly as you say, there's some nice neuroscientific evidence suggesting that the part of your brain that generates speech usually sends through a message to the part of your brain that hears speech, as if to say, you're about to hear some speech, don't pay so much attention to it because it's just you speaking. And that for some reason, that message, that internal message, in the case of hearing voices, doesn't get through

in quite the same way. And so some speech is heard, it's perceived as external speech because it doesn't have the message attached saying, don't listen to this, this is you speaking. Along those lines, you're involved with an organization, is it called Hearing Voices? Our project is called Hearing the Voice. Hearing the Voice. And it sounds like there's a focus among that group that says that Hearing Voices is not necessarily a bad thing, and that there's a lot that can be learned from what we're hearing. Yeah, there are two different things to be distinguished here.

Our project's called Hearing the Voice. It's funded by the Wellcome Trust and based at Durham University in the UK. And we take a very broad interdisciplinary approach to hearing voices. We look at it from every angle, from neuroscience to theology. There's another entity, which is the Worldwide Hearing Voices Movement. It's okay. I was getting that mixed up i got it yeah and we work closely with the hearing voices movement but we work with people from a whole range of other different perspectives as well so the idea of the hearing voices movement is to say let's reject the standard psychiatric the biomedical view

that this stuff is just a glitch in the brain, it's just inner speech gone wrong. Let's instead see voice-hearing experiences as meaningful, as carrying information, as carrying vital emotional information about our own experience and about our own pasts in particular, about our own life stories. Now at at the first glance, initially, people in the hearing voices movement can be rather suspicious of the inner speech theory. So I've heard people within the movement say to me things like, how can it just be my inner speech? You know, I'm hearing this voice and it's saying all these weird things. How can that just be my inner speech? And what I say is if you look more closely at inner speech, you'll find that there's nothing just about inner speech.

Inner speech is itself an immensely rich, complex experience that carries all sorts of emotional weight as well. So the two things can fit together. I suppose the crucial difference is that inner speech can't be the only thing going on in hearing voices. Many people who hear voices have suffered trauma, they've suffered adverse experiences in their lives. There's a very strong association, for example, between hearing voices and childhood sexual abuse, which of course not to say that everybody who hears voices has a history of being abused, but it's true for some people. One thing that the hearing voices movement approach

has taught us is that there must be more to hearing voices than inner speech and in particular there seems to be a strong association between the experience of hearing voices and early adversity, so traumatic events happening in childhood. There's a strong association with childhood sexual abuse for example. That's not to say that everybody who hears voices suffered abuse but there is a connection some people for some people unfortunately that is the case so there must be more to it going on than in a speech it's very likely that memory processes are involved and that part of the voice hearing experience for some people at least is the intrusion of unpleasant memories, traumatic memories into consciousness that somehow takes the form of a voice.

Some people see those two theories as working against each other. You know, we've got to either take the memory approach or we've got to take the inner speech approach. I think the two can be integrated, but it's quite complicated. And I try and explain in the book how we might be able to do that, to use the idea of trauma reappearing in consciousness, but somehow being mediated through language so that it takes the form of a voice. And in general, a lot of the treatment for people who hear voices is to learn to hear what the voices are saying in a potentially helpful way yeah i think the important thing to realize is that the hearing voices movement is run by voice hearers this is historically this was voice here is coming together and saying we reject the

biomedical approach to our experience we reject the idea that it's just neural noise, it's just a glitch in the brain. We think our voices are important, they're meaningful, they have significance, and the way to understand them is to understand the message that they're bringing us, rather than just trying to make them go away. So actually you use the term treatment, if anything it's the opposite in the Hearing Voices movement. The idea is not just to make the voices go away. The idea is to understand them, to understand what they're saying about one's own past and to assimilate them in a more integrated fashion into oneself,

to understand them as parts of oneself I'm Jason Alexander. And I'm Peter Tilden. And together on the Really No Really podcast, our mission is to get the true answers to life's baffling questions like why they refuse to make the bathroom door go all the way to the floor. We got the answer. Will space junk block your cell signal? The astronaut who almost drowned during a spacewalk

gives us the answer. We talk with the scientist who figured out if your dog truly loves you and the one bringing back the woolly mammoth. Plus, does Tom Cruise really do his own stunts? His stuntman reveals the answer. And you never know who's going to drop by. Mr. Brian Cranston is with us today. How are you, too?

Hello, my friend. Wayne Knight about Jurassic Park. Wayne Knight, welcome to Really No Really, sir. Bless you all. Hello, Newman. And you never know when Howie Mandel might just stop by to talk about judging. Really? That's the opening? Really No Really. Yeah, really. No really. Go to reallynoreally.com

and register to win $500, a guest spot on our podcast, or a limited edition signed Jason Bobblehead. It's called Really, No Really, and you can find it on the iHeartRadio app, on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Turning hearing voices in a slightly different direction, Turning hearing voices in a slightly different direction, there was an interesting piece in New York Magazine recently that came from the research that you've done and you mention in the book about how people hear the voices from books they've read. You know, this idea of a character who comes alive in a book having a voice and that voice remaining in our brains. Really the starting point of our project Hearing the Voice is to say that these experiences happen in lots of different forms right across the spectrum of human experience, across history, across cultures, and how do we make sense of the unpleasant distressing voices heard by a psychiatric patient for example in relation to these other experiences that people have and have had for millennia in terms of the research you

just mentioned one strong experience that people have on a regular sometimes daily basis is that of reading a book and hearing words sound out in the head. So we were interested in that. You know, I remember being asked as a child, when you're reading a novel, do you hear the voices sounding out in your head? And I'm sure I said, yes. So what we wanted to do is interrogate that idea and say, let's do some real research on this. Let's really find out what people experience when they're reading fiction. So we got together with the Guardian newspaper and the Edinburgh International Book Festival and we created the study which had different components but in the component that we've just published the research on we asked a lot of people, a lot of readers of the Guardian book section, so they're all keen readers, keen

readers of fiction, we asked them questions about what goes on in their experience when they're reading. So do they, for example, hear the voices of the characters as they're reading the dialogue on the page? And we found that something like one in seven of our respondents would say that yes, they could hear the voices in the fiction as clearly as if there'd been someone else in the room with them. That was on the questionnaire part of the study. We also did a more in-depth analysis. We asked people to explain in more detail if they wanted to by just typing their answers in an open text box to explain more about their experience of reading. And then we very carefully coded the responses. We didn't just take a psychology approach.

We worked with a literary theorist, a narratologist, who brought in ideas from his discipline. And we came up with a coding system that allowed us to go into much more detail on the sorts of dynamics of reading that emerged from these accounts. And the recent news report picked up on one particular aspect of that, a thing that my colleague, the narratologist Marco Bernini, calls experiential crossing. The idea here is that you're not just hearing the voices vividly as you're reading, The idea here is that you're not just hearing the voices vividly as you're reading, but even when you put the book down, when you close the book and put it down and go out into your daily life, something about the book, the character, the narrators stays with you.

So we found people describing, for example, an experience of walking into a Starbucks, but not walking into the coffee shop as themselves, walking into the coffee shop as Mrs. Dalloway, and seeing what she would see, noticing what she would notice. And we found around about a fifth of the people who gave these more in-depth answers reported this kind of experiential crossing. So something about the book living on in their daily lives, even when they put the book down. It's important to note that we only analyze these free text responses. So maybe that the people who gave us that extra detail were the people with more vivid experiences. So it may not be as common as the sort of one in five figure suggests. It may be that we had a kind of slightly biased sample of giving that in-depth analysis of their experience.

The thing that I found so interesting is how the range of inner speech from sort of a very, it's just kind of all over the board. You know, one extreme being you actually hear voices, but it doesn't seem to be very uniform. It seems to take a lot of different forms for different people. Yes, I think inner speech comes in different forms for most people. So another implication of Vygotsky's theory is that sometimes our inner speech should be expressed in full sentences. So, you know, you'd hear a conversation as if you were listening to some people out on the street where all the sentences are fully formed and it's proper full-blown language. Other times, our inner speech is going to be much more compressed, what I call condensed,

much more stripped down and abbreviated. It's almost like thinking in note form rather than thinking in the full text. I think both things probably happen for most people from time to time. We kind of move between those different levels as we're doing inner speech. I think there's probably huge individual variation in this. Some people will have a more vivid inner speech, others much less, and some people don't report any inner speech at all. So there's a lot of variation. And there's also a lot of variation in the experience of hearing voices, which is a very diverse phenomenon as well. So both things that we sort of put side by side have a lot of variation in them. The crucial difference is there's something about the hearing voices experience that doesn't feel

like you speaking. You don't own it in the same way that you own your own inner speech. And that's part of what makes it so distressing. Right. Are there practical implications of this for people to take what you've learned and what we know about inner speech and use it more skillfully to regulate our emotions or to help us perform better or, you know, to make our lives better? What are the practical implications? The research in this area is still really in its infancy. There's a lot more to be done. There's a lot of findings that need to be replicated, and we're seeing the beginnings of a science of inner speech and private speech. And so, I'm wary about drawing too firm conclusions about advice for everyday life. But I would say that

understanding your inner speech understanding where it comes from understanding the different forms that it takes can be really beneficial you can be less alarmed by it you can use it to better effect i think you can be less less afraid for example or less ashamed about talking to yourself out loud if you know that that is a useful functional phenomenon you'll be less worried about doing it so i think simply having a better understanding of it as a phenomenon that is very private that's very important for the self in all sorts of ways but that has really useful functions i think that can beneficial. I think there's also a downside of inner speech that we haven't mentioned, which is separate to the issue of hearing voices. And

that is for a lot of people, the negative thoughts that can contribute to anxiety and depression probably take the form of speech. Surprising how little we know about how linguistic these negative thoughts actually are. The research really isn't done. People don't ask that question, and I hope they will do in the future. But my guess is that a lot of the time that somebody who's depressed, for example, is having negative thoughts, a lot of the time they'll be couched in language. So, again, understanding more about how inner speech works could be really beneficial in that respect as well. mindfulness meditation being another, really where a lot of those modalities, for lack of a better word, rely on is exactly what you're suggesting, which is to become more in tune with what is the

inner speech that's happening? What is our thought patterns? What's happening there? And being able to use your words, engage in dialogue with them, instead of them being unquestioned or the things that run our lives? Yes, I think so. I think a lot of this research will be of interest to people who are attracted to mindfulness. There's another aspect of meditation which kind of pulls in a different direction, and that is the idea that with some forms of meditation, you can actually silence the inner dialogue. I think that probably happens for some people, but I think they're few and far between. I think on the whole, this is something that is very hard to silence. And so a mindfulness approach to understanding it better, to recognize it when it's happening,

to understand its forms when it's happening, and taking that slightly distance approach to it, is likely to be beneficial. But I don't have any data I can point to in that respect. Right. Yeah, my experience certainly says that getting it to shut off is a losing battle. It's a lot better to just try and pay attention to it and understand it. It's very difficult to silence. And maybe that shouldn't be the goal in certain cases. Well, sure. And I think this understanding of where it comes from, what it's doing, I think it makes us less likely to want to beat ourselves up over the fact that we can't switch it off. You know, I think everything I've said points to it being something

that will just, if it happens to you, it's not going to go away. It's going to keep being there. So don't beat yourself up over the fact that you can't make it stop. Right, exactly. Well, Charles, thanks so much for taking the time to come on the show. I found the book really interesting and I've enjoyed this conversation a lot. Thank you, Eric. I've enjoyed it too. Okay, take care. Thanks, bye. Okay, bye. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a donation to the One You Feed podcast. Head over to oneyoufeed.net slash support.