whether we want to understand what’s happening in the brain when people ‘hear voices’,we first need to understand what happens during ordinary inner speechAccents, narrators and total silence: how you hear voices when you readRead more from the Inner Voices seriesMost of us will be familiar with the experience of silently talking to ourselves in our head. Perhaps you’re at the supermarket and realise that you’ve forgotten to pick up something you needed. “Milk!” you might say to yourself. Or maybe you’ve got an important assembly with your boss later in the day, and you’re simulating – silently in your head – how you deem the conversation might go,possibly hearing both your own voice and your boss’s voice responding.
This is the phenomenon that psychologists call “inner speech”, and they’ve been trying to study it pretty much since the dawn of psychology as a scientific discipline. In the 1930s, and the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky argued that inner speech developed through the internalisation of “external”,out-loud speech. whether this is true, does inner speech consume the same mechanisms in the brain as when we speak out loud?Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com