A feast for the mind
ResourceGET TO KNOW
OUR INNER
VOICES
Your book is all about what you call ‘inner speech’. ‘What
do you mean by this?
At its most simple level, it’s the conversation that we have with
ourselves. A lot of people experience it, but for many of us these
inner voices are so intimate and familiar that we overlook them.
Where do these words in our heads come from? What are they
doing there? What functions do they serve?
Is this the same thing as our train of thought?
That’s the big question. What do we mean by thought? The
term ‘thinking’ gets used a lot, but it’s a really woolly term and
I think we should get rid of it. Can we carve off bits of what
we’d call ‘thinking’ and say, “they have a voice-like quality”?
In which case, let’s call that inner speech.
How many people experience inner speech?
It’s hard to put a number on that, because it’s so difficult
to find out. Most people would probably say they talk to
themselves in their heads, but there are also certainly
some people who never use inner speech.
How do scientists study inner speech?
There’s a technique called Descriptive Experience
Sampling (DES) that was invented by the US
psychologist Russell Hurlburt. This involves the
participant wearing a beeper for a few hours, which beeps randomly. The
participant’s task is to note down what was going on in their mind just
People often describe their thoughts as being like a conversation
between different voices of their consciousness. In his new book
The Voices Within, psychologist Charles Fernyhough explores this
secret world. He talks to James Lloyd
“Inner speech has a self-
regulatory function. We also use
it to motivate ourselves, to gee
ourselves up, to tell ourselves off,
or just to express emotion”