Speaker 1: Having the ability to do in a speech plays a
Speaker 1: part in creating self. Welcome to the one you feed
Speaker 1: Throughout time, great thinkers have recognized the importance of the
Speaker 1: thoughts we have, quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or
Speaker 1: you are what you think ring true. And yet for
Speaker 1: many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us.
Speaker 1: We tend toward negativity, self pity, jealousy, or fear. We
Speaker 1: see what we don't have instead of what we do.
Speaker 1: We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit.
Speaker 1: But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It
Speaker 1: takes conscious, consistent and creative effort to make a life
Speaker 1: worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep
Speaker 1: themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their
Speaker 1: good wolf m Thanks for joining us. Our guest on
Speaker 1: this episode is Charles Fernio, PhD and developmental psychology. His
Speaker 1: awards include a Time to Write Award with the Northern
Speaker 1: Writer's Awards and Arts Council of England grants for the Arts,
Speaker 1: and his books have been translated into eleven languages. Charles
Speaker 1: has a new book called The Voices Within the History
Speaker 1: and Science of How We Talk to Ourselves. If you
Speaker 1: value the content we put out each week, then we
Speaker 1: need your help. As the show has grown, so have
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Speaker 1: these interviews and ideas. We really need your help to
Speaker 1: make the show sustainable and long lasting. Again, that's one
Speaker 1: you feed dot net slash Support. Thank you in advance
Speaker 1: for your help. And here's the interview with Charles Fernie Hoe.
Speaker 1: Hi Charles, welcome to the show. Hi, thanks for having
Speaker 1: me on the show. I was excited to talk to
Speaker 1: you the minute I saw the title of your latest book,
Speaker 1: The Voices Within the History and Science of How We
Speaker 1: Talk to Ourselves. Listeners of the show will know we
Speaker 1: talk an awful lot about our internal self talk and
Speaker 1: how that influences our lives. So your book was fascinating
Speaker 1: and we'll get more into it here in a second.
Speaker 1: But let's start like we usually do, with the parable
Speaker 1: of the Wolves. There's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson.
Speaker 1: He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of
Speaker 1: us that are always at battle. When it's a good wolf,
Speaker 1: which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and
Speaker 1: the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like
Speaker 1: greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and
Speaker 1: he thinks about it for a second, and he looks
Speaker 1: up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which
Speaker 1: one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed.
Speaker 1: So I'd like to start off by asking you what
Speaker 1: that parable means to you in your life and in
Speaker 1: the work that you do. I was struck when I
Speaker 1: started to put this book together about had little attention
Speaker 1: the idea of internal dialogue had received over the years,
Speaker 1: particularly from a scientific point of view. I mean, the
Speaker 1: idea is a very old one. It goes back at
Speaker 1: least as far as Plato, and it figures in the
Speaker 1: work of many century philosophers and scholars, but hardly anyone
Speaker 1: has written about it as a sort of psychological process.
Speaker 1: So I think what the parable illustrates to me is
Speaker 1: the fact of that conversation that we are talking to ourselves.
Speaker 1: We're working stuff through in a conversation either internally or
Speaker 1: out loud, and sometimes that often I think that that
Speaker 1: conversation has a moral dimension. Yeah, it seems to be
Speaker 1: a pretty calm in aspect of our lives. That You're right,
Speaker 1: there's very little attention paid to it, which is why
Speaker 1: I was so interested when I saw your book. Tell
Speaker 1: everyone a little bit more about the type of work
Speaker 1: that you're doing it to set the background for the book. Sure,
Speaker 1: I'm a research psychologist. I started out doing developmental psychology,
Speaker 1: in other words, focusing on young children and babies and
Speaker 1: how their minds develop, and that got me into this
Speaker 1: phenomenon that we call private speech. This is a phase
Speaker 1: in development when children typically talk to themselves out loud.
Speaker 1: It's as if they're thinking through problems. They're doing all
Speaker 1: they're thinking out loud. And I got interested in a
Speaker 1: particular theory of this that comes from the Russian psychologist
Speaker 1: Love Bigotski, who was writing in the twenties and thirties,
Speaker 1: and he had a very simple idea about how this works.
Speaker 1: He argued that children start off in life engaged in
Speaker 1: social conversations that talking to other people. Then over time
Speaker 1: those conversations that are happening externally become internalized gradually taken inside.
Speaker 1: So you you find this stage when children are doing
Speaker 1: it still out loud, but they're having a conversation with themselves,
Speaker 1: and then a bit further on in development that turns
Speaker 1: into our inner speech, our internal dialogue, which continues to
Speaker 1: have some of the properties of the stuff that happens
Speaker 1: out loud. So that's how I got into it and
Speaker 1: realized that there's been not much research attention to the
Speaker 1: idea of inner speech, that that conversation that we have
Speaker 1: with ourselves a lot of the time. Hardly anybody had
Speaker 1: researched it. There's some pretty good reasons for that. It's
Speaker 1: a very difficult thing to study, but we are finding
Speaker 1: new ways of studying it. There have been new developments
Speaker 1: that mean that we can now have a science and
Speaker 1: then a speech, and it's something that has flourished over
Speaker 1: the last twenty years or so. It's a fascinating subject.
Speaker 1: So what you're saying there then, is that again not
Speaker 1: completely proven, but there's a there's a strong theory that
Speaker 1: says our inner speech comes from external speech that we hear,
Speaker 1: dialogue that we hear that we eventually move internally to ourselves.
Speaker 1: Does that mean before that we weren't really talking to
Speaker 1: ourselves in our head. I think that is the logic
Speaker 1: of the theory. Yeah, I think the ideas that you
Speaker 1: you participate in these dialogues, it's not just that you
Speaker 1: listen to them, you're actually taking part of them. And
Speaker 1: when that's happening, you're not doing the same kind of
Speaker 1: thing internally. That's what follows from Pigotsky's theory. It would
Speaker 1: be a difficult thing to prove that either way, but
Speaker 1: you do get a sense of watching children thinking out
Speaker 1: loud in this way I've described that it is all
Speaker 1: happening on the surface, that they're not kind of you know,
Speaker 1: getting pensive and thinking things through to themselves silently in
Speaker 1: the way that we would we would do. So that's
Speaker 1: how I see it at the moment. That's that I
Speaker 1: think that's the best evidence is that in the beginning
Speaker 1: it's all external, it's all out loud, and over time
Speaker 1: the stuff is taken in and becomes our inner speech.
Speaker 1: Why do we think that we have inner speech? What
Speaker 1: does inner speech do for us? Figotsky emphasized a particular
Speaker 1: role for in a speech in regulating our behavior. So
Speaker 1: thinking through what we're going to do, controlling it from
Speaker 1: moment to moments, initiating new plans of actions. So in
Speaker 1: a speech was a kind of self directional tool, and
Speaker 1: I think he's pretty much right about that. There's lots
Speaker 1: of evidence that that's why both children and adults use
Speaker 1: in a speech. But I think in a speech does
Speaker 1: a whole bunch of other things as well. In a
Speaker 1: speech seems to have a role in imagination and creativity.
Speaker 1: In a speech seems to have a role in thinking
Speaker 1: about the past and future. There's even some evidence to
Speaker 1: suggest that having the ability to do in a speech
Speaker 1: plays a part in creating a self, and the people
Speaker 1: who lose that ability temporarily have a kind of erosion
Speaker 1: of their sense of self during that period of time. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's very interesting to think of all the different things
Speaker 1: that it does. And one of the things that's interesting
Speaker 1: is we have people on the show, particularly some different
Speaker 1: spiritual teachers, Buddhist teachers or et cetera, who will say
Speaker 1: that the sense of self is not real, that we
Speaker 1: truly do created ourselves, And what you're saying here would
Speaker 1: sort of tie to that idea that that the sense
Speaker 1: of a coherent self is something that we are creating
Speaker 1: as we go. It doesn't have an inherent basis. I
Speaker 1: would agree that the self is constructed, is something that
Speaker 1: we make. It's something that we're constantly editing. I don't
Speaker 1: think that means it's an illusion. I think it means
Speaker 1: it's a construction. I mean, you wouldn't call a picture
Speaker 1: or a house or a story an illusion. You'd say
Speaker 1: it was a construction. It's something that is created. It's
Speaker 1: probably a better word for it. It is constructed. But
Speaker 1: it's not a thing that's inherent in itself. Sure, and
Speaker 1: I think that's a very complicated process, all the many
Speaker 1: different processes that going to make our different selves. There's
Speaker 1: an awful lot going on there. I think in a
Speaker 1: speech is part of it. I'm sure it's not the
Speaker 1: whole story. But one of the other theories is that
Speaker 1: inner speech is actually how we bring different parts of
Speaker 1: the brain together into a coherent narrative. Different brain functions
Speaker 1: beyond just speech are are actually aggregated and made coherent
Speaker 1: through inner speech. Yes, this is a nice line of
Speaker 1: reasoning in philosophy and in common to neuroscience, that language
Speaker 1: in the brain has a kind of special role of
Speaker 1: being able to bring different parts of our processing system
Speaker 1: together to being able to tie different stuff together in
Speaker 1: a way that wouldn't otherwise be possible. It's some evidence
Speaker 1: that supports that, but it's something that really needs a
Speaker 1: lot more research. I think it's a slightly different idea
Speaker 1: to the idea that we narrate ourselves in a speech,
Speaker 1: we tell a story about ourselves in words. I think
Speaker 1: those ideas are connected, but they're not quite the same thing.
Speaker 1: They may well both be true. Throughout the book, there
Speaker 1: were lots of different studies that show that people that
Speaker 1: use inner speech more. Um, there's children who were able
Speaker 1: to solve puzzles better, and there's a tendency towards better
Speaker 1: self regulation. So it seems that using inner speech skillfully
Speaker 1: can give us advantages. That's right. So the focus has
Speaker 1: been on private speech in children, in other words, the
Speaker 1: kind of in a speech that you do out loud
Speaker 1: during that period of development. But in recent times, as
Speaker 1: we've got better at studying in a speech, we've done
Speaker 1: the same kind of work with adults. We find it,
Speaker 1: for at least some tasks, adults perform better if they're
Speaker 1: able to talk to themselves as they're performing task. We
Speaker 1: think that adults also talks themselves out loud, and that
Speaker 1: will serve some of the same functions. But adult private
Speaker 1: speech is hardly studied. There's very little research on that topic.
Speaker 1: So there's this curious idea that talking to yourself as
Speaker 1: an adult is strange or even the first sign of madness,
Speaker 1: as the old saying goes. And that's an odd thing.
Speaker 1: I think people still feel self conscious about talking to
Speaker 1: themselves out loud. But when I when I'm giving talks
Speaker 1: and lectures, I asked people to put their hands up
Speaker 1: if they ever do it. Most people will say they
Speaker 1: you talk to themselves out loud. So there's this odd
Speaker 1: sort of social embarrassment about it, but it probably serves
Speaker 1: some really useful functions. Yeah, you've actually said that. It
Speaker 1: appears that talking out loud might be a way to
Speaker 1: cut down the resource costs of doing inner speech, That
Speaker 1: talking out loud or writing things down might be easier
Speaker 1: for our brain take less resources. I think that's right.
Speaker 1: I think in the first place, doing some in a
Speaker 1: speech helps you. It gives you a handle on your thoughts,
Speaker 1: so in a way, that in itself is cutting down
Speaker 1: the costs of the processing that you're trying to do.
Speaker 1: But going that step further and putting it out there
Speaker 1: into the open air probably helps you a bit more
Speaker 1: as well. So the idea is that if you actually
Speaker 1: say something to yourself out loud, it's kind of out
Speaker 1: there in the air, and you can hear the words
Speaker 1: coming back at you through your auditory memory or um.
Speaker 1: It sort of has a materiality that it doesn't have
Speaker 1: if it's just there in your head silent, which would
Speaker 1: make sense if truly inner speech did come originally from dialogue,
Speaker 1: then that would be a natural way for us to
Speaker 1: process it also is to hear it externally. That's right.
Speaker 1: The standard view of Vigotsky's theory holds you go from
Speaker 1: social speech social dialogue to private speech too in a speech,
Speaker 1: but I think you can move back along that trajectory
Speaker 1: as well. You can go back from in a speech
Speaker 1: to private speech as an adult as well, and that
Speaker 1: it brings different benefits. So we think that children talk
Speaker 1: to themselves more when the task gets a bit more difficult,
Speaker 1: and I think adults do as well. I think adults
Speaker 1: are more likely to speak out loud when the game
Speaker 1: gets tough, when they're under stress, or when the task
Speaker 1: is challenging. Yeah, well that's certainly ties with my experience
Speaker 1: of when I would actually talk out loud to myself.
Speaker 1: But weirdly, as I say, that just isn't a huge
Speaker 1: amount of research, and it's it's crying out to be
Speaker 1: studied more. In general, as you mentioned early on, it's
Speaker 1: a very difficult thing to study, right because you are
Speaker 1: having to basically get people's observations of what's happening in
Speaker 1: their head. And also that a lot of times when
Speaker 1: you're trying to control a study, you're sort of making
Speaker 1: inter speech sort of artificial the repeating of certain things.
Speaker 1: So it remains an area that is challenging to study.
Speaker 1: Although you guys have made tremendous progress. Well, thank you.
Speaker 1: It is a tricky thing in terms of methodology, you know,
Speaker 1: how do you go about studying this experience that is
Speaker 1: by definition private that nobody else can share it. But
Speaker 1: as you say, there are a bunch of different things
Speaker 1: you can do. You can ask people to fill in
Speaker 1: questionnaires about their experience. You can interview them about their experience.
Speaker 1: You can do clever things like stopping them from using
Speaker 1: any in a speech by giving them another task to
Speaker 1: do that blocks their language capacity for a brief period
Speaker 1: of time and looking to see whether that affects their
Speaker 1: performance and their behavior. So we do have different ways
Speaker 1: of studying in a speech, and as far as studying
Speaker 1: what go on in the brain when people are talking
Speaker 1: to themselves, it's concerned. You're right, we're getting better at
Speaker 1: working out how to capture in a speech happening naturally
Speaker 1: in the scanner. Hey, everybody, I know you're used to
Speaker 1: Eric kind of coming in after this first music break
Speaker 1: and talking to you and you know, begging for money
Speaker 1: and telling you about what's going on. I thought that
Speaker 1: I Chris would just kind of take over on this
Speaker 1: one because I figured you've suffered enough. But in all seriousness,
Speaker 1: Eric is not here to defend himself. So I just
Speaker 1: wanted to you know that, first of all, Cheryl is
Speaker 1: the winner of the final week of the book giveaway
Speaker 1: contest we did last week. So congratulations Cheryl. Eric will
Speaker 1: be in touch with you and get the books out
Speaker 1: to you. Uh. I also wanted to remind you that
Speaker 1: it would be great if everybody who hasn't already joined
Speaker 1: us on the Facebook group would join us. There's a
Speaker 1: lot of great discussion going on there. There always is
Speaker 1: everybody is involved. So you can go to one you
Speaker 1: feed dot net slash Facebook and become a part of
Speaker 1: the ongoing conversation. Something else I wanted to mention is,
Speaker 1: of course, it takes a lot of time and money
Speaker 1: and effort to get this podcast together every week. Eric
Speaker 1: and I are both very busy, but we always make
Speaker 1: time to do this. But it would really help if
Speaker 1: you would go to one you feed dot net slash
Speaker 1: support and just donate whatever you can. Anything helps, uh,
Speaker 1: and let's keep this going. So another way that you
Speaker 1: can support the show is if you go to one
Speaker 1: you feed dot net slash Amazon. You can buy all
Speaker 1: the book from the people we interview on there, and
Speaker 1: it really does help. We get a little bit of
Speaker 1: a kick back. So here's the rest of the interview
Speaker 1: with Charles fer Anyhow. You came up with something called
Speaker 1: the dialogic thinking model. Can you talk a little bit
Speaker 1: about what that is? Sure, there's a really important implication
Speaker 1: of the Sky's theory, that fairly simple theory that I've
Speaker 1: just sketched out going from social to private too in
Speaker 1: a speech, and that implication is that the stuff that
Speaker 1: goes on in our heads silently should share the structure
Speaker 1: of the thing it originated in other words, social dialogue.
Speaker 1: So you're in a speech should at least some of
Speaker 1: the time have a dialogic or a conversational structure. It
Speaker 1: really should be a conversation with yourself as if as
Speaker 1: you would have if you were having a conversation with
Speaker 1: another person. And that's a slightly different way of thinking
Speaker 1: about in a speech to the one that I encountered
Speaker 1: when I started working in this area, where the idea
Speaker 1: is that you're in a speech is just kind of
Speaker 1: like the voice of the brain is the voice of
Speaker 1: the self. It's this monologue that is generated by a
Speaker 1: single point of view. What Pigotsky's theory encourages us to
Speaker 1: do is think differently and think about in a speech
Speaker 1: as a dialogue between different points of view. And what
Speaker 1: I've argued in my work is that if you recognize
Speaker 1: that dialogic quality of in a speech, certain things start
Speaker 1: to make sense. For example, understanding how a human mind
Speaker 1: can be creative and go to new places places it
Speaker 1: hadn't anticipated going to. It's a lot easier to understand
Speaker 1: when you think about in a speech as a dialogue.
Speaker 1: What are the implications of that idea on cognitive behavioral therapy,
Speaker 1: the idea that in CBT, we are in essence, engaging
Speaker 1: in dialogue with ourselves. Correct. Yes, I think that way
Speaker 1: of thinking about in a speeches is very valuable and
Speaker 1: CBT comes in lots of different forms, and this approach
Speaker 1: to in a speech can be valuable in all sorts
Speaker 1: of ways. So the work that I've focused on has
Speaker 1: been on a CBT for psychosis, where people who are
Speaker 1: hearing voices, which which we think is connected to the
Speaker 1: experience of inner speech, who are troubled by distressing voices,
Speaker 1: by thinking differently about their regular inner speech can help
Speaker 1: them to understand where the voices are coming from and
Speaker 1: why they have the properties that they have. Can you
Speaker 1: elaborate a little bit more on this idea of hearing
Speaker 1: voices and how this ties into your model and some
Speaker 1: of the things that you guys have been doing to
Speaker 1: help people who hear voices. Sure, hearing voices is seen
Speaker 1: as as often a very scary thing. It often is
Speaker 1: a very scary thing. It's associated with severe mental illness
Speaker 1: diagnoses such as schizophrenia. It's associated with a whole range
Speaker 1: of different psychiatric diagnoses, so it's not just about schizophrenia.
Speaker 1: It's about everything from bipolar disorder, to eating disorders, to
Speaker 1: post traumatic stress disorder, borderline personality disorder. Lots and lots
Speaker 1: of dim diagnoses are associated with hearing voices. It's not
Speaker 1: just schizophrenia. Who's what you're saying that that's the common
Speaker 1: idea if you hear voices, then then you have schizophrenia,
Speaker 1: and you're saying that's not true. It can be different things. Definitely,
Speaker 1: there is definitely not true that hearing voices equals schizophrenia.
Speaker 1: Schizophrenia in itself is a complex group of disorders probably
Speaker 1: that isn't very well defined. But hearing voices is associated
Speaker 1: with a whole range of different disorders, and crucially, it
Speaker 1: happens to people across the spectrum of human experience. So
Speaker 1: roughly as many people who have a diagnosis of schizophrenia
Speaker 1: here voices quite regularly without any distress. They don't seek
Speaker 1: psychiatric help, they don't need psychiatric help, they're not mentally ill.
Speaker 1: Their voice hears. They're people who hear voices quite regularly.
Speaker 1: As I say, that might account for maybe around one
Speaker 1: percent of the population. And then there's a much larger
Speaker 1: group of people who have intermittent or occasional or one
Speaker 1: off voice hearing experiences. Best figures we've got at the
Speaker 1: moment that somewhere between five and of regular people will
Speaker 1: have a voice hearing experience at some time in their life.
Speaker 1: So it's something that's associated quite strongly with mental illness.
Speaker 1: It's a very distressing experience for a lot of people,
Speaker 1: but it doesn't equate to mental illness. And what are
Speaker 1: some of the theories on why people hear voices? One
Speaker 1: of them that I remember from the book was that
Speaker 1: there's a there's a part of our brain that basically
Speaker 1: tells other parts of our brain what we're doing, and
Speaker 1: that that signal doesn't get to the other part of
Speaker 1: the brain. So it's almost as if it's our own
Speaker 1: internal speech that we're unable to determine as our own
Speaker 1: internal speech exactly. That's that's very well put. That's the
Speaker 1: relatively simple idea that when people hear voices, what's actually
Speaker 1: happening is that they're generating some in a speech. They're
Speaker 1: doing the regular thing that we most of us do
Speaker 1: from moment to moment. You know, they're talking to themselves,
Speaker 1: but for some reason they don't recognize it as their
Speaker 1: own work. They don't recognize that they themselves have generated
Speaker 1: the utterance. And exactly as you say, there's some nice
Speaker 1: neuroscientific evidence suggesting that the part of your brain that
Speaker 1: generates speech usually sends through a message to the part
Speaker 1: of your brain that hears speech, as if to say,
Speaker 1: you're about to hear some speech, don't pay so much
Speaker 1: attention to it, because it's just you speaking, and that
Speaker 1: for some reason that message, that internal message in the
Speaker 1: case of hearing voices, doesn't get through in quite the
Speaker 1: same way. And so some some speeches heard it's perceived
Speaker 1: as external speech because it's not attacked, it doesn't have
Speaker 1: the message attached saying don't listen to this. This is
Speaker 1: you speaking. Along those lines, you're involved with an organization.
Speaker 1: Is it called Hearing Voices. Our project is called Hearing
Speaker 1: the Voice, Hearing the Voice, And it sounds like there's
Speaker 1: a focus among the group that says that hearing voices
Speaker 1: is not necessarily a bad thing and that there's a
Speaker 1: lot that can be learned from what we're hearing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there's there are two different things to be distinguished here.
Speaker 1: Our projects, called Hearing the Voice is funded by the
Speaker 1: Welcome Trust and based at Darren University in the UK,
Speaker 1: and we take a very broad interdisciplinary approach to hearing voices.
Speaker 1: We look at it from every angle, from neuroscience to theology.
Speaker 1: There is another entity, which is the worldwide Hearing Voices movement.
Speaker 1: It's okay, I was getting that mixed up. I got it.
Speaker 1: And we work closely with the Hearing Voices movement, but
Speaker 1: we work with people from a whole range of other
Speaker 1: different perspectives as well. So the idea of the Hearing
Speaker 1: Voices movement is to say, let's reject the standard psychiatric
Speaker 1: the biomedical view that this stuff is just a glitch
Speaker 1: in the brain, It's just in a speech gone wrong.
Speaker 1: Let's instead see voice hearing experiences as meaningful, as carrying information,
Speaker 1: as carrying vital emotional information about our own experience and
Speaker 1: about our own pasts, in particular about our own life stories. Now,
Speaker 1: at first glance, initially people in the Hearing Voices movement
Speaker 1: can be rather suspicious of the inner speech theory. So
Speaker 1: I've heard people within the movement say to me things like,
Speaker 1: how can it just be my inner speech? You know,
Speaker 1: I'm hearing this voice and it's saying all these weird
Speaker 1: things how can that just be my owner speech? And
Speaker 1: what I say is, if you look more closely in
Speaker 1: a speech, you'll find that there's nothing just about in
Speaker 1: a speech. In a speech is itself an immensely rich,
Speaker 1: complex experience that carries all sorts of emotional weight as well.
Speaker 1: So the two things can fit together. I suppose the
Speaker 1: crucial difference is that in a speech can't be the
Speaker 1: only thing going on in hearing voices. Many people who
Speaker 1: hear voices have suffered trauma, They've suffered adverse experiences in
Speaker 1: their lives. There's a very strong association, for example, between
Speaker 1: hearing voices and childhood sexual abews. Of course, not to
Speaker 1: say that everybody hears voices has a history of being abused,
Speaker 1: but it's true for some people. One thing that they're
Speaker 1: hearing voices. Movement approach has taught us is that there
Speaker 1: must be more to hearing voices than in a speech.
Speaker 1: And in particular, there seems to be a strong association
Speaker 1: between the experience of hearing voices and early adversity, so
Speaker 1: traumatic events happening in childhood, there's a strong association with
Speaker 1: childhood sexual abuse, for example. That's not to say that
Speaker 1: everybody who hears voices suffered abuse, but there is a
Speaker 1: connection some people. For some people, unfortunately that is the case.
Speaker 1: So there must be more to it going on than
Speaker 1: in a speech. It's very likely that memory processes are involved,
Speaker 1: and that part of the voice hearing experience with some
Speaker 1: people at least is the intrusion of unpleasant memories, traumatic
Speaker 1: memories into consciousness that somehow takes the form of a voice.
Speaker 1: Some people see there's two theories as working against each other.
Speaker 1: You know, we've got to either take the memory approach
Speaker 1: or we've got to take the inner speech approach. I
Speaker 1: think the two can be integrated, but it's quite complicated,
Speaker 1: and I try and explain in the book how we
Speaker 1: might be able to do that, to use the idea
Speaker 1: of trauma reappearing in consciousness but somehow being mediated through
Speaker 1: language so that it takes the form of a voice,
Speaker 1: and in general that a lot of the treatment for
Speaker 1: people your voices is to learn to hear what the
Speaker 1: voices are saying in a potentially helpful way. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: think the important thing to realize is that the hearing
Speaker 1: voices movement is run by voice. Here is this is
Speaker 1: historically this was voice. Here is coming together and saying
Speaker 1: we reject the biomedical approach to our experience. We reject
Speaker 1: the idea that it's just neural noise, it's just a
Speaker 1: glitch in the brain. We think our voices are important,
Speaker 1: they're meaningful, they have significance, and the way to understand
Speaker 1: them is to understand the message that they're bringing us,
Speaker 1: rather than just trying to make them go away. So
Speaker 1: actually you use the term treatment. If anything, it's the
Speaker 1: opposites in the hearing voices movement. The idea is not
Speaker 1: just to make make the voices go go away. The
Speaker 1: idea is to understand them, to understand what they're saying
Speaker 1: about one's own past, and to assimilate them in a
Speaker 1: more integrated fashion into oneself, to understand them as parts
Speaker 1: of oneself. Hym turning hearing voices in a slightly different direction.
Speaker 1: There was an interesting piece in New York Magazine recently
Speaker 1: that came from the research that you've done, and you
Speaker 1: mentioned in the book, about how people hear the voices
Speaker 1: from books they've read. You know, this, this idea of
Speaker 1: a character who comes alive in a book having a voice,
Speaker 1: and that voice remaining in our brains, really the starting
Speaker 1: point of our projects Hearing the Voice is to say
Speaker 1: that these experiences happen in lots of different forms right
Speaker 1: across the spectrum of human experience, across history, across cultures,
Speaker 1: and how do we make sense of the unpleasant, distressing
Speaker 1: voices heard by a psychiatric patient, for example, in relation
Speaker 1: to these other experiences that people have and have had
Speaker 1: for millennia. In terms of the research, you just mentioned,
Speaker 1: one strong experience that people have on a regular, sometimes
Speaker 1: daily basis is out of reading a book and hearing
Speaker 1: words sound out in the head. So we were interested
Speaker 1: in that. You know, I remember being asked as a child,
Speaker 1: when you when you're reading a novel, do you hear
Speaker 1: the voices sounding out in your head? And I'm sure
Speaker 1: I said yes. So what we wanted to do is
Speaker 1: interrogate that idea and so let's do some real research
Speaker 1: on this. Let's really find out what people experience when
Speaker 1: they're reading fiction. So we got together with the Guardian
Speaker 1: newspaper and the Edinburgh International Book Festival and we created
Speaker 1: the study which had different components, but the component that
Speaker 1: we've just published the research on. We asked a lot
Speaker 1: of people, a lot of readers of the Guardian book sections,
Speaker 1: so they all keen readers, keen readers of fiction. We
Speaker 1: asked them questions about what goes on in their experience
Speaker 1: when they're reading, So do they, for example, hear the
Speaker 1: voices of the characters as their speaking as they're reading
Speaker 1: the dialogue on the pitch And we found that something
Speaker 1: like one in seven of our respondents would say that yes,
Speaker 1: they could hear the voices in the fiction as clearly
Speaker 1: as if there had been someone else in the room
Speaker 1: with them. That was on the questionnaire part of the study.
Speaker 1: We also did a more in depth analysis. We asked
Speaker 1: people to explain in more detail if they wanted to,
Speaker 1: by just typing their answers in a in an open
Speaker 1: text box to explain more about their experience of reading,
Speaker 1: and then we very carefully coded the responses. We didn't
Speaker 1: just take a psychology approach. We worked with a literary theorist,
Speaker 1: a narrotologist who brought up in ideas from his discipline,
Speaker 1: and we came up with a coding system that allowed
Speaker 1: us to go into much more detail the sorts of
Speaker 1: dynamics of reading that emerged from these accounts, and the
Speaker 1: recent news report picked up on one particular aspect of
Speaker 1: that the thing that my colleague, the narratologist Marco Bernini
Speaker 1: calls experiential crossing. The idea here is that you're not
Speaker 1: just hearing the voices vividly as you're reading, but even
Speaker 1: when you put the book down, when you close the
Speaker 1: book and put it down and go out into your
Speaker 1: daily life, something about the book, the character the narrators,
Speaker 1: stays with you. So we found people describing, for example,
Speaker 1: an experience of walking into a Starbucks, but not walking
Speaker 1: into the coffee shop as themselves, walking into the coffee
Speaker 1: shop as Mrs Dallaway and seeing what she would see,
Speaker 1: noticing what she would notice. And we found around about
Speaker 1: a fifth of the people who gave these more in
Speaker 1: depth answers reported this kind of experiential crossing, So the
Speaker 1: something about the book living on in in their daily
Speaker 1: lives even when they put the book down. It's important
Speaker 1: to note that we only analyze these free text responses,
Speaker 1: So maybe that the people who gave us that extra
Speaker 1: detail were the people with more vivid experiences, So it
Speaker 1: may not be as common as the sort of one
Speaker 1: in five figure suggests. Maybe that we had a kind
Speaker 1: of slightly biased sample of giving that in depth analysis
Speaker 1: of their experience. The thing that I found so interesting
Speaker 1: is how the range of inner speech from sort of
Speaker 1: a very it's just kind of all over the board.
Speaker 1: You know, one extreme being you actually hear voices, but
Speaker 1: it's it doesn't seem to be very uniform. It seems
Speaker 1: to take a lot of different forms for different people. Yes,
Speaker 1: I think in a speech comes in different forms from
Speaker 1: for most people. So another implication of the Gootsky's theory
Speaker 1: is that sometimes are in a speech should be expressed
Speaker 1: in full sentences, so you know, you'd hear a conversation
Speaker 1: as if you were listening to some people out on
Speaker 1: the street, where where all the sentences are fully formed
Speaker 1: and it's proper full blown language. Other times are in
Speaker 1: a speech is going to be much more compressed, what
Speaker 1: I call condensed, much more stripped down and abbreviated. It's
Speaker 1: almost slight thinking in note form rather than thinking in
Speaker 1: the full text. I think both things probably happened for
Speaker 1: most people from time to time, where we kind of
Speaker 1: move between those different levels as we're doing in a speech.
Speaker 1: I think there's probably huge individual variation in this, as
Speaker 1: some people will have a more vivid in a speech,
Speaker 1: others much less, and some people don't report any inner
Speaker 1: speech at all. So there's a lot of variation. And
Speaker 1: there's also a lot of variation in the experience of
Speaker 1: hearing voices, which is a very diverse phenomenon as well.
Speaker 1: So both things that we sort of put side by
Speaker 1: side have a lot of variation in them. The crucial
Speaker 1: difference is there's something about the hearing voices experience that
Speaker 1: doesn't feel like you speaking. You don't own it in
Speaker 1: the same way that you own your own in a speech,
Speaker 1: and that's part of what makes it so distressing. Right,
Speaker 1: are there practical implications of this for people to take
Speaker 1: what you've learned and what we know about inner speech
Speaker 1: and use it more skillfully to to regulate our emotions
Speaker 1: or to help us perform better, or you know, to
Speaker 1: make our lives better. What are the practical implications? The
Speaker 1: research in this area is still really in its infancy.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of there's a lot more to be done,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of findings that need to be replicated,
Speaker 1: and we're seeing the beginnings of a science of in
Speaker 1: a speech and private speech. And so I'm wary about
Speaker 1: drawing two firm conclusions about advice for everyday life. But
Speaker 1: I would say that understanding your in a speech, understanding
Speaker 1: where it comes from, understanding the different forms that it takes,
Speaker 1: can be really beneficial. You can be less alarmed by it,
Speaker 1: you can use it to better effect. I think you
Speaker 1: can be less less afraid, for example, or less ashamed
Speaker 1: about talking to yourself out loud. If you know that
Speaker 1: that is a useful, functional phenomenon, you'll be less worried
Speaker 1: about doing it. So I think simply having a better
Speaker 1: understanding of it as a phenomenon that is very private,
Speaker 1: that's very important for the self in all sorts of ways,
Speaker 1: but that has really useful functions, I think that can
Speaker 1: be beneficial. I think there's also a downside within a
Speaker 1: speech that we haven't mentioned, which is separate to the
Speaker 1: issue of hearing voices, and that is, for a lot
Speaker 1: of people, the negative thoughts that can contribute to anxiety
Speaker 1: and depression probably take the form of speech. Surprising how
Speaker 1: little we know about how linguistic these negative thoughts actually are.
Speaker 1: The research really isn't done. People don't ask that question,
Speaker 1: and I hope they will do in the future. But
Speaker 1: my guess is that a lot of the time that
Speaker 1: somebody who's depressed, for example, is having negative thoughts a
Speaker 1: lot of the time, they will be couched in language.
Speaker 1: So again, understanding more about how in a speech works
Speaker 1: could be really beneficial in that respect as well. That's
Speaker 1: the idea of the rumination, and we talk about that
Speaker 1: on the show a fair amount. How we kind of
Speaker 1: just get caught in these loops. It seems interesting to
Speaker 1: me though, that a couple of different discipline CBT being one,
Speaker 1: mind fullness meditation being another, really where a lot of
Speaker 1: those modalities, for lack of a better word, rely on
Speaker 1: is exactly what you're suggesting, which is to become more
Speaker 1: in tune with what is the inner speech that's happening,
Speaker 1: what is our thought patterns, what's happening there, and being
Speaker 1: able to to use your words, engage in dialogue with
Speaker 1: them instead of them being unquestioned or the things that
Speaker 1: run our lives. Yes, I think so. I think a
Speaker 1: lot of this research will be of interest to people
Speaker 1: who are attracted to mindfulness. Um, there's another aspect of
Speaker 1: meditation which kind of pulls in a different direction, and
Speaker 1: that is the idea that with some forms of meditation
Speaker 1: you can actually silence the inner dialogue. I think that
Speaker 1: probably happens for some people, but I think they're few
Speaker 1: and far between. I think on the whole, this is
Speaker 1: something that is very hard to silence, and so and
Speaker 1: mindfulness approach to understanding it. Better to recognize it when
Speaker 1: it's happening, to understand its forms when it's happening, and
Speaker 1: taking that slide like the distance approach to it is
Speaker 1: likely to be beneficial. But I don't have any data
Speaker 1: I can point to in that respect, right, Yeah, my
Speaker 1: experience certainly says that getting it to shut off is
Speaker 1: a is a losing battle. It's a lot better to
Speaker 1: just try and try and pay attention to it and
Speaker 1: understand it. It's very difficult to silence, and maybe that
Speaker 1: shouldn't be the goal in certain cases. Well sure, And
Speaker 1: I think this understanding of where it comes from, what
Speaker 1: it's doing, I think it makes us less likely to
Speaker 1: want to beat ourselves up over the fact that we
Speaker 1: can't switch it off. You know, I think everything I've
Speaker 1: said points to it being something that will just if
Speaker 1: if it happens to you, it's not going to go away.
Speaker 1: It's going to keep being there. So don't beat yourself
Speaker 1: up over the fact you can't make it stop right
Speaker 1: exactly what, Charles, Thanks so much for taking the time
Speaker 1: to come on the show. I found the book really
Speaker 1: interesting and I've enjoyed this conversation a lot. Thank you, Eric,
Speaker 1: I've enjoyed it too. Okay, take care, okay, bye ye.
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