Q&A - The Science of the Voices in your Head - with Charles Fernyhough

[Music] when we think about these sorts of phenomena in our own selves in our own brains which are the product of a very long evolutionary process we normally try and think of think of them in some way as as useful or as having answered some need or imparted some some Advantage do you think there is such a an advantage to the internal uh Speech or the internal dialogue that you study yeah very much so and I think that's part of the developmental story children talk to themselves because it's useful so Athena when she's solving that puzzle to do with the train track she's thinking out loud she's help she's thinking herself through a problem and some of the research that we've done with children are looking at their private speech not not their inner speech but their private speech we find that private speech is useful it helps children to solve problems it helps them to Think Through uh things and to plan their behavior and so on and if you assume that the private speech gets turned into inner speech through through internalization then you can make the same argument about inner speech some slightly more direct evidence is that if you knock out inner speech temporarily by asking people to to do something that involves language that stops them thinking to themselves in language it messes up their performance on on certain tasks so yes function definitely functions very varied functions so vigotsky very much focused on the cognitive functions the the usefulness in helping you to think through a problem to plan to solve problems and so on but there are lots of other functions as well people use inner speech for all sorts of emotional and motivational purposes we talk to ourselves to G ourselves up to tell ourselves off to encourage ourselves and so on so I think there's a whole range of different functions I think inner speech has has as many functions as ordinary language out loud does which is a pretty large range and that was one of the things I was Keen to explore in the book really just the incredible range of this experience fascinating who'd like to go next we have a question in the second row just wait a second for the microphone that's right you were saying at the beginning that language is internalized and it's abbreviated from private speech of children surely the it's it's abbreviated because we think faster than we speak so our use of language internally is slowing down our feeling being able to understand them in sort of bite-sized blocks as opposed to feeling Everything at Once is that right or well I think why do we think faster than we speak somebody did a study on this actually and because we feel faster than than we can understand our feelings well feeling is very important but it's not it's not thinking most people would distinguish feeling from thinking we're more more and more interested rightly I think in the connections between the two but somebody did a study where they were able to use tiny electrodes on this part of the throat to pick up to basically pick up the tiny the tiny muscular movements that happen when you do inner speech and he argued that he'd got scientific evidence that we think 10 times faster we think in words 10 times faster than we can speak out loud and I think that's because of abbreviation because of these these Transformations that happen to language as it becomes internalized and it isn't it's not just about abbreviation there are various other Transformations that votsi described that happen to language as it's internalized so much so that if I could somehow put a microphone in your head and listen to your inner speech I really would likely not understand it because it would be so transformed to the language that you use out loud just like if just like if I picked up your notebook and tried to read it I probably wouldn't understand your notebook because you're making notes to yourself in your own kind of private note form so so it's the same sort of thing if I could listen into your thoughts if I were Mel giv I would not be able to understand you probably uh we have one up the top there and then we'll come to you mam thanks so much for a very interesting talk just to clarify what's how do you differentiate thought and inner voice secondly what happens to Inner Voice in times of stress or when your short-term memory is loaded and any tips on how to manage your internal inner negative voice thank you good very very good questions um I would I have a problem with the term thought philosophers love to sorry if there are any philosophers in the audience but philosophers love to use this term and they're usually so careful about the words they choose but they use this incredibly vague wooly term thinking in the thought and I think we should just do away with it I think inner speech is a kind of thinking it's a kind of thought but it's a kind of thought that we can be quite specific about we can say this is what this this is what the characteristics of this kind of thought are we can do some research on it we can do experiments and so on so I'd like to get a get a get rid of the term thinking to be honest So my answer to that bit of the question is inner speech is a kind of thinking it's verbal thinking um you use the term inner voice which I also have a problem with you you picked up two of my hobby horses in a voice is a frequently used term to refer to pretty much nothing at all people talk about the inner voice in a whole range of Highly metaphorical fluffy ways describing everything from artistic inspiration to gut feelings and I thought hard about this um when I Was preparing the book and I thought I'm not actually going to I can't say anything scientific about the way that people talk about the inner voice if you talk about inner speech if you can point to something that has something of The Voice or the speechy about it then we can do business but there's a huge amount of really vague metaphorical stuff about inner voice so I don't use that term myself um in terms of negative uh inner speech it's an incredibly important point that you make I've I've talked a bit about Psychopathology or some would call it I haven't talked about the negative thoughts of depression anxiety rumination and so on and that's largely because researchers haven't researchers have talked about negative thoughts they haven't really asked the question of whether those negative thoughts are verbal or not so again when we came to review all of the research on this topic we looked and looked to see if anybody had linked rumination for example to something specifically verbal and they haven't just hasn't been done it needs to be done I'm sure a lot of these negative thoughts are verbal uh in terms of how to help to get over them well CBT for depression for example does a pretty good job it asks you to to look at those thoughts scientifically to detach yourself from them to ask you to evaluate them as utterances to keep a record of them and so on so there's a negative side to Inner speech without doubt lots of people's inner speech including my own can sometimes be pretty negative the more we understand about where this phenomenon comes from and and the different forms it takes the better chance we'll have of of trying to tackle some of those problems fascinating there's a lady in a checker shirt over here and then one just behind thank you um yes thank you I was wondering if you've had any opportunity to do any uh longitudinal studies um I'm just thinking about the reliability of the phenomenon and that with respect to the um CA of schizophrenia I mean quite apart from the fact that therapeutic drugs usually remove hallucinations that there's a kind of Natural History to it in which um hallucinations tend to go and not to recur and unless the Paras singular gyus is like a bit of elastic uh would you expect it to remain at a constant size as it were within an individual or have you looked and um a related question I suppose is um whether the size of the sulkus represent something developmental that's related to the development of schizophrenia um the sulcus is is pretty much fixed early on it's it's one of the latest brain folds develop so it develops in the third trimester and that's one reason why we think it is so variable between people but then it becomes pretty much fixed in terms of the course of hallucinations over a person's mental illness diagnosis for example bearing in mind that hearing voices does not mean schizophrenia hearing voices is a aspect of experience that a lot of very varied people have but in those who have a diagnosis of schizophrenia there's a lot of really important work to do longitudinally to see how these experiences start and how they develop over time and that's one of the things that we're doing in our study a really detailed uh three-year longitudinal investigation of these phenomena because they very likely take different forms over the course of of of a psychiatric illness uh and we're really interested for example in how voices become personified so lots of people who Hear Voices um describe give their voices names characters they they interact with them as if they were real people they become highly personified for them and we're interested in how that process unfolds is it something that's there from the start or is it something that only develops over time and so on so they are very important questions to ask most of the research on this topic has been cross-sectional and just looked at people at snapshots of time and we really should follow up um people over time there's another question immediately behind that one and then we'll go upstairs for a couple and then I have seen you guys down here um I'm a Layman so forgive me if this is sounds a silly question but I'm interested in the subconscious um as I understand it your research revolts around people knowing or being a aware of this inner speech H has anybody thought of or is it relevant to consider whether the subconscious is responding to any of this inner speech that's a really interesting question um some people would say that if a thought is not conscious then it's not really a thought and that's a big debate that people have it's it's an important debate within psycho dnamic Theory and here I'm thinking of inner speech as a kind of thought so the same thing would apply if it's not conscious then to what extent is it really inner speech um emotional uh including unconscious emotional processes are incredibly important in every aspect of our cognition um there's not been a lot really to tie that in I I I was desperate actually in in writing this book to find something in either classical psychoanalysis or modern psychodynamic theory that would give me a psychodynamic take on it and it just isn't really there you can translate certain aspects of this into the you know the dialogue between the therapist and the client for example um but I didn't find a lot of useful stuff in that literature to be honest I didn't find that much to get my teeth into and you know Freud for example doesn't write about in a speech as far as I can see so I think that's an question how do you study that you know how do you how do you study I'm trying to do science here and so I need to be able to to study stuff um it's a tricky one far from a silly question you never need to apologize for asking a question there any more silly questions in the room I know we have a gentleman up the top there and then one over there and I have seen a couple down here as well you hello I have h two two quick questions hopefully not too silly but perhaps they are um I've uh become aware of someone with Alzheimer's having musical hallucination U I've seen the explanations for it online and so on uh but it does develop into verbal human hallucinations is that related to you and how old was Julian when she reported these uh activities in her in her own mind uh and is that related that's a really good question um Julian was 30 and a half when she had her experiences she spent the rest of her life trying to make sense to them so when she was met when she met Marjorie she was in her 70s um her experiences were likely related to well they were related to a very severe illness that she' previously suffered um when she was in which she was close to to death I think your question is about dementia uh hearing voices in later life it's organic brain damage at that that stage we we know very little about it and so another thing that we're doing in our project is we're recruiting a sample of older people who Hear Voices hearing voices in in Old in later life is probably very very common it's highly misunderstood on just not understood we don't we just don't know anything about it it hasn't been studied it needs to be studied and we're going to try and do that we'll be recruiting samples of older people to our studies it's very common in dementia it's a very different very difficult sample to work with obviously um one of the things I'm excited about Joe Atkinson's work is that she's developed nonverbal um methods for for asking people about their voices so in talking to deaf people who Hear Voices she uses she asks them to you know to look at pictures describing you know depicting their experiences and we think we might be able to apply some of these method me to working with more difficult populations to work with like people with Alzheimer's but it definitely needs to be done I think it's probably a big part of experience in dementia and it's maybe something we can help with in terms of easing people's distress my second question is perh I thought was more interesting is we had a functioning psychopath here at the ri talking about his experiences which you remember uh Andy McNab and he uh he very clearly had a very Superior theory of mind he could almost read your mind you could see him doing it very uncanny to to um and the Dutton Kevin Dutton said that autistic people have a very poor theory of mind is does that mean that if that's playing a part in these inner voices have you seen differences in their experiences of in in a voice between people on the a autistic spectrum and people with uh functioning psychopathy just while you're answering that Charles can we send that microphone over to the question over here and can I get you to go over to the gentleman in the suit so I haven't thought at all about psychopathy know nothing about I can't say anything meaningful about it um I've talked a bit about theory of mind so I hope that there is there's a connection there um as far as autism is concerned we've done a bit of work on private speech in autism and also a bit on inner speech in autism if you take a votan approach then there'll be a very clear implication of this idea that inner speech develops through social dialogues because people autism is defined partly by um unusual patterns of social interaction and so if people are not inter having those dialogues with others from the earliest days of life then they're not going to have the dialogues that they can internalize so they're not going to be developing inner speech in the same way that's the conjecture um when we research the topic there hasn't been nearly enough research on the topic there needs to be much more but the little research that there is suggests that people with Autism do develop inner speech um certainly children with autism talk to themselves out loud and we think they develop in a speech but they may not use it in quite the same way as typically developing people but it's a huge open question we need autism is such a varied um Spectrum as you say um and there's much much more work to be done on that topic I mean I would point to Temple Grand in for example and her famous account of her inner experience as not being at all verbal she says she thinks in pictures and I've heard other people on the Spectrum say similar things that kind of fits but I wouldn't want to go so far as to say that people with on the autism spectrum don't have inner speech I'm sure they do but I think it might well be different um in all sorts of ways we have five more minutes and let's try and rattle through as many as we can we'll start with you sir and there was one over that side wasn't it yeah you first yes very interesting the um using vocalization and its relationship to intention which I you know I know that when I'm speaking to myself it's trying to clarify something that I'm doing and I'm just wondering are you any thoughts on The evolutionary development of that I mean does this happen with dolphins with the uh gray parrots or can you can you look at their brains do they make a particular sound when they want a grape or something they associate it what have you any thoughts on The evolutionary development of this I don't want to get into the animal language debate which is very complicated there is some great research actually on Alex the gray parrot very famous parrot who worked in a literally worked in a cycl laab in the states I died a few years ago sadly um but there's there are papers describing Alex's private speech um I in terms of human beings um I think there is a bit of an evolutionary Story one I think one thing that you can say is that why why do we talk to ourselves silently why do we do it all silently up here why not just go around blurting out our thoughts to everyone well I mean partly the psychopathy Point ex explains that if you were telling everybody what you were thinking then you wouldn't last very long you'd quickly be outwitted um you'd quickly be in all sorts of trouble uh you'd on a more practical level you'd quickly give your position away if you're hiding in the undergrowth from the saber-tooth tiger and you're blabbering away to yourself you wouldn't you know you'd be you'd be lunch um so I think there all sorts of evolutionary reasons why we do it internally uh and there is also the comment about um stress and uh and cognitive challenge I think we do more of this stuff that a lot of you put your hands up when when I asked whether you speak out loud to yourselves I think you probably tend to do more of it when things are difficult when the going gets tough you're more likely to move down those levels of inner speech to private speech and say it out loud and we think children do something similar they're more likely to talk to themselves out loud if you give them a difficult puzzle to do so I think it's this constant Dynamic thing there's there's the there's The evolutionary and the social pressure to keep it silent but there's also the cognitive challenge which forces us to to say it out loud and I think there are some good reasons why that that happens that way going to try and get at least three more in we'll start there's one up there and then if you could send the mic along to the lady in the stripy shirt and I know there's one over here here as well starting with you is there is there one up there on the right hand side it's very hard to see above the lights someone waved at me a while ago no no longer all right lady in the stripy shirt um you were talking a bit about the difference between internal monologues and internal dialogues and I was wondering whether that there's any research that suggests that those are used in different contexts and whether that might imply they have different meanings or different uses yeah it's a really good question I it's hard to know how much in a speech is dialogic we do ask people about this we have this questionnaire that we give people and we find quite good test retest reliability in other words people who say their inner speech is very dialogic will say so the next time you ask them quite big individual differences um some people report it a lot some people report it less my guess would be we don't know we we need to we need to find out much more but my guess is that dialogic in a speech is particularly useful for the really tricky strategic thinking that we do so the kind of stuff that Athena was doing in that clip where she was talking to herself having a dialogue with herself she's solving problems she's planning what she's going to do next that's quite different to muttering the last few items on your shopping list to yourself which I would call monologic in a speech so I'm sure that different tasks different situations call for different kinds of inner speech but really until we started looking at this a few years ago everybody had treated inner speech as just one thing nobody had even asked whether there it takes different forms so we're at the beginning of what I hope will be a long fruitful research Journey thank you uh there's another lady up there in a floral dress but can I bring the other microphone over to this side because there's a gentleman waiting patiently in the middle yeah um in what way do you think um inner speech um relates to our experience of Consciousness and self-consciousness um and in what way might that transform our experience or make it different from that of animals for example um is it comparable um you know can animals be conscious of themselves is it something that is is linked to to experience like inner speech great question these have all been absolutely great questions but yeah let's let's leave the the really tricky ones till the end uh Consciousness I I think think I can say something about self-consciousness so there's a there's a Canadian researcher Alan Moran who's done a lot of great research on inner speech and he's focused on how inner speech helps to give us a sense of self and he finds in his studies that people who report using a lot of inner speech have a greater self- understanding they seem more aware of themselves as S as as having a particular identity so there's a bit of evidence um another bit bit of evidence comes from people with Aphasia so a woman called Jill bolt Taylor wrote about her period of time when she she was aphasic she lost because of brain trauma she lost the ability to speak out loud she also lost her ability to speak internally and she reports in her autography that she also kind of lost her sense of self she she lost an she lost a handle on who she was as a person and she linked it to her um her loss of her inner speech so it's another one of those functions I think that inner speech has I think it gives us it helps to Center us it helps to give us a handle on who we are as people yeah all right it's 8:31 so I think this is going to have to be the last question Yeah you mentioned about uh visualizing rather than just a linguistic point of view uh how does that work with if you have more so you can visualize your your thoughts and you can think through them by from from what words uh how would that affect your problem solving skills so for example Tesla used to think all of his experiments only in his mind and then he said I could save a lot of time by doing trial of error and redesigning and bettering those experiments thinking thinking visually then yes yeah I think thinking takes I've just said we shouldn't use the term and partly because it's so varied you know it's everything the Mind does and it comes in so many different forms and of course the visual is incredibly important I think inner speech has a maybe has a particularly important role I think inner speech is is the thing that helps us to knit it all together so I argue this in the book that inner speech is like the thread of the necklace that allows us to pull together the memories and the visual images and the feelings and all the other stuff relates very much to the question about selfhood that maybe it's the inner speech the the narrativizing that we're doing on ourselves the whole time that pulls together all these different varied aspects of our experience but the visual is incredibly important I've done descriptive experience sampling with people who have pretty much no inner speech I I completely accept that some people don't do it and I think that's fine you know the human mind is an incredibly wonderful varied thing uh I think a lot of people do it a lot of the time but by no means everybody and people will have different styles of thinking

Channel: The Royal Institution

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Length: 27min 0sec (1620 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 14 2016