--- title: What Our Internal Voices Say About Ourselves description: If you’re anything like me, you’ll spend much of your waking life busy with an internal stream of chatter. canonical: https://time.com/4587962/voices-within/ author: Charles Fernyhough article:opinion: true article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2016-12-02T14:58:44.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T07:54:55.137Z article:section: Ideas og:title: What Our Internal Voices Say About Ourselves og:description: Internal dialogue is key to social relationships og:url: https://time.com/4587962/voices-within/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blta639743721a7cd58/6988b05286f68e44b16e2d1e/fernyhough-the-voices.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 1875 og:image:height: 1055 og:image:alt: voices within og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: What Our Internal Voices Say About Ourselves twitter:description: Internal dialogue is key to social relationships twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blta639743721a7cd58/6988b05286f68e44b16e2d1e/fernyhough-the-voices.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # What Our Internal Voices Say About Ourselves > Sponsored content. 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Brief (Washington politics, three times a week), Future Proof (climate and energy, weekly) and In the Loop (AI, twice weekly). All are free at time.com/newsletters and together reach more than 1.1 million engaged readers. #### Which TIME newsletter should I subscribe to? It depends on what you follow. For a daily briefing, The Brief. For health, Health Matters. For Washington politics, D.C. Brief. For AI and technology, In the Loop. For climate and energy as a business story, Future Proof. For culture recommendations, Worth Your Time. For how TIME's journalism gets made, Inside TIME. Readers can select any combination at time.com/newsletters. #### Are TIME's newsletters free? Yes. All seven TIME newsletters are free to join at time.com/newsletters. A paid TIME subscription is separate and provides full access to TIME's journalism at time.com/subscribe-agent. #### Who writes TIME's newsletters? TIME journalists write them. Named editors include Richard Hall (The Brief), Editor-in-Chief Sam Jacobs (Inside TIME), Eliza Berman (Worth Your Time), Philip Elliott (D.C. Brief), Justin Worland (Future Proof) and Harry Booth (In the Loop). Health Matters is written by TIME's health desk. #### How do I sign up for a TIME newsletter? Go to time.com/newsletters, choose the newsletters you want and enter your email address. There is no cost and no subscription requirement. ## Video: Thought Control: Move Objects With Your Mind! (Virtually) [Watch (HLS stream): Thought Control: Move Objects With Your Mind! (Virtually)](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/6ex7jDFv.m3u8) (2:31)  _Published 2011-11-07. The BodyWave, a new iPod-size device that straps onto your arm, allows the mind to control objects on a computer screen (without using the Force)_ by [Charles Fernyhough](https://time.com/author/charles-fernyhough/) ## Charles Fernyhough Dec 2, 2016 2:58 PM UTC  Basic Books by [Charles Fernyhough](https://time.com/author/charles-fernyhough/) ## Charles Fernyhough Dec 2, 2016 2:58 PM UTC What are you thinking? If you’re anything like me, you’ll spend much of your waking life busy with an internal stream of chatter—a silent dialogue that guides your actions, helps you to think through problems and sometimes chastises you for your mistakes. Is our “[inner speech](http://psycnet.apa.org/psycarticles/2015-22639-001.pdf&uid=2015-22639-001&db=PA)” (as psychologists term it) just mental chitchat, or does it serve some useful purposes? With new experimental methods, psychologists are lifting the hood on our internal conversations. And they’re showing us that our inner voices are far from a useless accompaniment to the tasks that our brains perform. According to [one prominent theory](https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-voices-within/201105/planning-it-out-in-words), our inner dialogues are an internal version of the conversations we have with other people. Because of how we develop as children, we come to regulate our own behavior in the same way that our spoken words can influence the actions of others. With the growth of neuroscientific techniques like fMRI, researchers have been able to show how mental dialogues draw on [similar neural systems](http://scan.oxfordjournals.org/content/11/1/110) to those that underpin the conversations we have out loud. When you talk silently to yourself, you are using some of the same parts of your brain (such as an area towards the front and left, known as [Broca’s area](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broca%27s%5Farea)) that you use when you talk to your partner or coworker—even though you aren’t actually sounding out the words. The idea that we literally think in words—that thinking _is_ language—is controversial and hard to defend. But [language certainly changes _how_ we think](https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-voices-within/201008/what-do-we-mean-thinking). That’s borne out by a growing body of scientific findings showing that inner speech can help us with certain tasks. Much of the research on the neuroscience of inner speech makes use of a very basic and intimate human activity: reading. When people sit down with a text, their reading seems to be accompanied by a kind of [internal performance of the words that are being processed](http://www.writerscentrenorwich.org.uk/article/the-science-of-reading/). These findings might help us to understand how fiction writers can create the effects that they do. A particularly interesting distinction is that between direct speech (_Mary said, “The game was interesting”_) and reported speech (_Mary said that the game was interesting_). Readers generally find that direct speech is more vivid than indirect speech, and there’s evidence to tie this to [specific processes in the brain](http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/jocn%5Fa%5F00022#.WA8aLneZPsE). We know that inner speech comes in different forms, reflecting how it develops from external conversations. Much of the time our inner speech seems to be a compressed, note-form version of what we would say aloud—fitting with the intriguing finding that we can talk to ourselves in our heads around [10 times faster](http://pms.sagepub.com/content/71/3/1043.abstract) than we can speak out loud. The varied nature of inner speech points to the need to be careful about how we go about studying it, particularly finding a way to [catch people speaking inner speech in the brain scanner](http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0147932) without specifically asking them to do it (which might risk changing the nature of the very phenomenon we are interested in). It matters that we have a science of inner speech. One important implication is for understanding the phenomenon of “[hearing voices](http://hearingthevoice.org/frequently-asked-questions/)” (or auditory verbal hallucinations), where people hear others speaking when there is no one around. Commonly associated with severe mental illness such as schizophrenia, hearing voices is linked to so many other psychiatric disorders that its occurrence is not actually particularly useful for diagnosis. Crucially, hearing voices is also a feature of everyday life for [many people who are not mentally ill](https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2014/aug/13/hear-voices-auditory-verbal-hallucinations). A powerful theory of why people hear voices puts it down to [a glitch in the processing of inner speech](https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-voices-within/201011/voices-in-the-head). The voice-hearer says something to themselves in their head, but—perhaps because of some internal communication error within the language system—doesn’t recognize the speech as their own, with the result that it is perceived as an external voice. Although hearing voices is [far too complex a phenomenon](http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20160506-how-to-heal-a-shattered-mind-broken-in-1000-pieces) to be reduced to the aberrant processing of inner speech, knowing something about how these processes work in neural terms holds out the prospect of [therapies for those troubled by distressing voices](http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fnins.2015.00515/full). In any case, this is not just about electrical activity in the brain. If we are really to understand inner speech, we need to pay attention to its social origins. Key to this new understanding is that idea that inner speech begins in childhood as dialogues with others, which gradually become internalized. In fact, studying inner speech makes us think differently about how growing up in social relationships influences our developing brains. We talk to ourselves in our minds because we used to talk to others out loud. Far from being the outpourings of a solitary brain, that chattering in your head is proof that your thoughts are fundamentally social. ## Transcript So, it looks like I'm about to play a video game. But, I'm actually about to use my mind to control my computer. In this task, this man driving this forklift has to move these boxes onto this truck. And, he doesn't move unless you're concentrating. So, let's see how long it takes me to, to get him to move all these boxes. So this device was invented by a guy named Peter Freer, he's actually a former school teacher. So he had this idea of, how do you develop a consumer level device that can get people to focus their attention on one particular task? This company has designed software for NASA, NASCAR actually and Ontario power generation. The performance monitor teaches trainees to permanently reduce stress and anxiety while increasing skill and attention. [ NOISE ] What this device is measuring, is brain wave activity, alpha waves, theta waves and beta waves. Beta waves are the ones that are engaged in cognitive processing, so you definitely want those waves to be generated at, at a high level when you're trying a task like this. But, you also want alpha waves engaged. Alpha waves are waves that are engaged when you're relaxed, but still aware. One of the biggest lessons you learn is, when you're not doing that great, you, you start to focus on the fact that, I'm not doing that great. I'm not concentrating that much. And, again, this, it's these intrusive thoughts that keep you from concentrating, keep you from paying attention. And it, it kinda teaches you a lesson about, just kind of calm down and don't, don't worry so much about, about your performance. Just do what you need to do to get the job done. This is related in some ways to meditation. Keeping out extraneous thoughts. Not letting e- mail bother you. This is sustained, focused attention. So now we've seen that I have completed the task. I got 100 % which means I got it all right, but it took me eleven minutes. You know, people who are really skilled at this and really skilled at paying attention, you should be able to move all those boxes in five minutes. So it took me eleven minutes, not great, but, you know, we were doing this video so I am going to blame that. 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