Charles Fernyhough

The Voices Within
Charles Fernyhough
6/4/2017
Subtitle: The History and Science of How We Talk to Ourselves

This psychological study ranges widely, from imaging studies of the brain, to literature and movies, exploring the phenomenon of inner speech. He begins with development, and argues that inner speech is an early development in childhood. He reminds the reader that almost everyone had an imaginary friend at some point when growing up. He thinks that the development of inner speech broadly follows the account given by Lev Vygotsky, a contemporary of Piaget, who thinks inner speech is dialogic; that is, it presumes a social interaction, and is not a egocentric commentary. The author describes the process of Descriptive Experience Sampling, in which subjects are given a beeper, and they write down what they are experiencing at the moment the beeper sounds. This method is the basis for neuroimaging of brain pathways in inner speech. The book is dense with ideas and facts, difficult to summarize.
I found it fascinating that St Augustine, writing in 385 AD, was astonished that Bishop Ambrose of Milan read silently. The ancients before that all read aloud, thinking of reading more as declaiming
There are many people who hear voices without having schizophrenia, so many that there are support groups and a weblog - the hearing voices movement
Fiction writers may imagine their characters speaking to them, Ray Bradbury was certain of it.… (meer)

Fernyhough has many questions about what we hear inside our heads, but not many answers. He presents a flawed and inadequate model that depends on research in the nineteen-twenties by Jean Piaget, modified by Lev Vygotsky and based on the observation of children: They communicate with others, and then they often use “private speech” when they are at play, asking themselves aloud what they plan to build or draw, answering their own questions, and elaborating. This thinking out loud is internalized as “inner speech,” which becomes the origin of the dialogues we sometimes perform in our imaginations as well as the hallucinated voices that plague schizophrenic patients and other sufferers from mental ailments. Fernyhough is candid in admitting that most researchers disagree with his model and think the voices in disturbed patients come from early trauma and repressed memory. But he persists. He offers little we have not already thought ourselves about the topic, though some anecdotal interest can be found here. The physicist Richard Feynman, he tells us, reports real dialogue with himself in problem-solving: “The integral will be larger than the sum of the terms, so that would make the pressure higher, you see?” “No, you’re crazy.” “No, I’m not! No, I’m not!”… (meer)