PHOTOS:GETTY
before the beep went off, and the next day
they come into the lab to be interviewed
about those moments. The most common
thing people say to us is, “oh, this beep’s
really boring.” But nobody’s experience is
boring – it’s fascinating to find out what’s in
someone’s mind.
We’ve just published the first studies
integrating this technique with fMRI
[functional magnetic resonance imaging].
When we captured inner speech happening
naturally in the scanner, we found a lot of
activation in a region of the brain linked
with auditory perception. This suggests that
spontaneous inner speech has a hearing/
listening aspect to it.Does inner speech serve a function?
Inner speech has a self-regulatory function –
we talk to ourselves when we’re planning or
thinking through options. But we also use it
to motivate ourselves, to gee ourselves up, to
tell ourselves off, or just to express emotion. It
does a lot of different things.Is there a relationship between inner
speech and the hallucinated voices
that someone with schizophrenia, for
example, might hear?
Hearing voices is typically associated with
schizophrenia, but also with a number of other
psychiatric conditions. Crucially, around 5 to
15 per cent of people without a psychiatric
illness also report hearing voices. It’s a much
broader aspect of human experience than
just a feature of mental illness. It can be
distressing, but many people find it positive
and uplifting too.
There might be a link between hallucinated
voices and inner speech. There’s a theory
that when somebody hears a voice, they’re
generating inner speech, but for some reason
they don’t recognise it as their own work. It
seems to come from somewhere else, so is
perceived as an external voice.THE VOICES WITHIN BY CHARLES
FERNYHOUGH is published on 21 AprilRating:NEMESIS: THE
FIRST IRON
WARSHIP AND
HER WORLD
Launched in 1839, Nemesis was
part of the first generation iron-clad,
steam-powered naval vessels that
established British dominance
in Asian waters in the nineteenth
century. The world’s first iron warship
represented a staggering new level of
military superiority over the oar and
sail-powered naval forces of Britain’s
Asian rivals.
The flow of the book is smooth,
simple, factual yet concise. It begins
with an introduction to key characters,
descriptions of the Nemesis ship,
unique craftsmanship and trade of iron
warships in the past before moving
gradually into colonisation of many
Asian countries and cities.
History buffs would definitely enjoy
this read as it provides an extensive
historical context of the last years of
the East India Company.Adrian G. Marshall
NUS Press (Paperback)