Charles Fernyhough

But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf m Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Charles Fernio, PhD and developmental psychology. His awards include a Time to Write Award with the Northern Writer's Awards and Arts Council of England grants for the Arts,

and his books have been translated into eleven languages. Charles has a new book called The Voices Within the History and Science of How We Talk to Ourselves. If you value the content we put out each week, then we need your help. As the show has grown, so have our expenses and time commitment. Go to one you feed dot net slash support and make a monthly donation. Our goal is to get to five of our listeners supporting

the show. Please be part of the five percent that make a contribution and allow us to keep putting out these interviews and ideas. We really need your help to make the show sustainable and long lasting. Again, that's one you feed dot net slash Support. Thank you in advance for your help. And here's the interview with Charles Fernie Hoe. Hi Charles, welcome to the show. Hi, thanks for having

me on the show. I was excited to talk to you the minute I saw the title of your latest book, The Voices Within the History and Science of How We Talk to Ourselves. Listeners of the show will know we talk an awful lot about our internal self talk and how that influences our lives. So your book was fascinating and we'll get more into it here in a second. But let's start like we usually do, with the parable of the Wolves. There's a grandfather who's talking with his grandson.

He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. When it's a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second, and he looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed.

So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. I was struck when I started to put this book together about had little attention the idea of internal dialogue had received over the years, particularly from a scientific point of view. I mean, the

idea is a very old one. It goes back at least as far as Plato, and it figures in the work of many century philosophers and scholars, but hardly anyone has written about it as a sort of psychological process. So I think what the parable illustrates to me is the fact of that conversation that we are talking to ourselves. We're working stuff through in a conversation either internally or out loud, and sometimes that often I think that that conversation has a moral dimension. Yeah, it seems to be

a pretty calm in aspect of our lives. That You're right, there's very little attention paid to it, which is why I was so interested when I saw your book. Tell everyone a little bit more about the type of work that you're doing it to set the background for the book. Sure, I'm a research psychologist. I started out doing developmental psychology, in other words, focusing on young children and babies and how their minds develop, and that got me into this

phenomenon that we call private speech. This is a phase in development when children typically talk to themselves out loud. It's as if they're thinking through problems. They're doing all they're thinking out loud. And I got interested in a particular theory of this that comes from the Russian psychologist Love Bigotski, who was writing in the twenties and thirties, and he had a very simple idea about how this works. He argued that children start off in life engaged in

social conversations that talking to other people. Then over time those conversations that are happening externally become internalized gradually taken inside. So you you find this stage when children are doing it still out loud, but they're having a conversation with themselves, and then a bit further on in development that turns into our inner speech, our internal dialogue, which continues to have some of the properties of the stuff that happens

out loud. So that's how I got into it and realized that there's been not much research attention to the idea of inner speech, that that conversation that we have with ourselves a lot of the time. Hardly anybody had researched it. There's some pretty good reasons for that. It's a very difficult thing to study, but we are finding new ways of studying it. There have been new developments that mean that we can now have a science and then a speech, and it's something that has flourished over

the last twenty years or so. It's a fascinating subject. So what you're saying there then, is that again not completely proven, but there's a there's a strong theory that says our inner speech comes from external speech that we hear, dialogue that we hear that we eventually move internally to ourselves. Does that mean before that we weren't really talking to ourselves in our head. I think that is the logic

of the theory. Yeah, I think the ideas that you you participate in these dialogues, it's not just that you listen to them, you're actually taking part of them. And when that's happening, you're not doing the same kind of

thing internally. That's what follows from Pigotsky's theory. It would be a difficult thing to prove that either way, but you do get a sense of watching children thinking out loud in this way I've described that it is all happening on the surface, that they're not kind of you know, getting pensive and thinking things through to themselves silently in the way that we would we would do. So that's

how I see it at the moment. That's that I think that's the best evidence is that in the beginning it's all external, it's all out loud, and over time the stuff is taken in and becomes our inner speech. Why do we think that we have inner speech? What does inner speech do for us? Figotsky emphasized a particular role for in a speech in regulating our behavior. So thinking through what we're going to do, controlling it from

moment to moments, initiating new plans of actions. So in a speech was a kind of self directional tool, and I think he's pretty much right about that. There's lots of evidence that that's why both children and adults use in a speech. But I think in a speech does a whole bunch of other things as well. In a speech seems to have a role in imagination and creativity. In a speech seems to have a role in thinking

about the past and future. There's even some evidence to suggest that having the ability to do in a speech plays a part in creating a self, and the people who lose that ability temporarily have a kind of erosion of their sense of self during that period of time. Yeah, that's very interesting to think of all the different things

that it does. And one of the things that's interesting is we have people on the show, particularly some different spiritual teachers, Buddhist teachers or et cetera, who will say that the sense of self is not real, that we truly do created ourselves, And what you're saying here would sort of tie to that idea that that the sense of a coherent self is something that we are creating as we go. It doesn't have an inherent basis. I would agree that the self is constructed, is something that

we make. It's something that we're constantly editing. I don't think that means it's an illusion. I think it means it's a construction. I mean, you wouldn't call a picture or a house or a story an illusion. You'd say it was a construction. It's something that is created. It's probably a better word for it. It is constructed. But it's not a thing that's inherent in itself. Sure, and I think that's a very complicated process, all the many

different processes that going to make our different selves. There's an awful lot going on there. I think in a speech is part of it. I'm sure it's not the whole story. But one of the other theories is that inner speech is actually how we bring different parts of the brain together into a coherent narrative. Different brain functions beyond just speech are are actually aggregated and made coherent

through inner speech. Yes, this is a nice line of reasoning in philosophy and in common to neuroscience, that language in the brain has a kind of special role of being able to bring different parts of our processing system together to being able to tie different stuff together in a way that wouldn't otherwise be possible. It's some evidence that supports that, but it's something that really needs a

lot more research. I think it's a slightly different idea to the idea that we narrate ourselves in a speech, we tell a story about ourselves in words. I think those ideas are connected, but they're not quite the same thing. They may well both be true. Throughout the book, there were lots of different studies that show that people that use inner speech more. Um, there's children who were able to solve puzzles better, and there's a tendency towards better

self regulation. So it seems that using inner speech skillfully can give us advantages. That's right. So the focus has been on private speech in children, in other words, the kind of in a speech that you do out loud during that period of development. But in recent times, as we've got better at studying in a speech, we've done the same kind of work with adults. We find it, for at least some tasks, adults perform better if they're

able to talk to themselves as they're performing task. We think that adults also talks themselves out loud, and that will serve some of the same functions. But adult private speech is hardly studied. There's very little research on that topic. So there's this curious idea that talking to yourself as an adult is strange or even the first sign of madness, as the old saying goes. And that's an odd thing. I think people still feel self conscious about talking to

themselves out loud. But when I when I'm giving talks and lectures, I asked people to put their hands up if they ever do it. Most people will say they you talk to themselves out loud. So there's this odd sort of social embarrassment about it, but it probably serves some really useful functions. Yeah, you've actually said that. It appears that talking out loud might be a way to cut down the resource costs of doing inner speech, That talking out loud or writing things down might be easier

for our brain take less resources. I think that's right. I think in the first place, doing some in a speech helps you. It gives you a handle on your thoughts, so in a way, that in itself is cutting down the costs of the processing that you're trying to do. But going that step further and putting it out there into the open air probably helps you a bit more

as well. So the idea is that if you actually say something to yourself out loud, it's kind of out there in the air, and you can hear the words coming back at you through your auditory memory or um. It sort of has a materiality that it doesn't have if it's just there in your head silent, which would make sense if truly inner speech did come originally from dialogue, then that would be a natural way for us to process it also is to hear it externally. That's right.

The standard view of Vigotsky's theory holds you go from social speech social dialogue to private speech too in a speech, but I think you can move back along that trajectory as well. You can go back from in a speech to private speech as an adult as well, and that it brings different benefits. So we think that children talk to themselves more when the task gets a bit more difficult,

and I think adults do as well. I think adults are more likely to speak out loud when the game gets tough, when they're under stress, or when the task is challenging. Yeah, well that's certainly ties with my experience of when I would actually talk out loud to myself. But weirdly, as I say, that just isn't a huge amount of research, and it's it's crying out to be

studied more. In general, as you mentioned early on, it's a very difficult thing to study, right because you are having to basically get people's observations of what's happening in their head. And also that a lot of times when you're trying to control a study, you're sort of making inter speech sort of artificial the repeating of certain things. So it remains an area that is challenging to study. Although you guys have made tremendous progress. Well, thank you.

It is a tricky thing in terms of methodology, you know, how do you go about studying this experience that is by definition private that nobody else can share it. But as you say, there are a bunch of different things you can do. You can ask people to fill in questionnaires about their experience. You can interview them about their experience.

You can do clever things like stopping them from using any in a speech by giving them another task to do that blocks their language capacity for a brief period of time and looking to see whether that affects their performance and their behavior. So we do have different ways of studying in a speech, and as far as studying what go on in the brain when people are talking to themselves, it's concerned. You're right, we're getting better at working out how to capture in a speech happening naturally

in the scanner. Hey, everybody, I know you're used to Eric kind of coming in after this first music break and talking to you and you know, begging for money and telling you about what's going on. I thought that I Chris would just kind of take over on this one because I figured you've suffered enough. But in all seriousness, Eric is not here to defend himself. So I just wanted to you know that, first of all, Cheryl is the winner of the final week of the book giveaway

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you feed dot net slash Amazon. You can buy all the book from the people we interview on there, and it really does help. We get a little bit of a kick back. So here's the rest of the interview with Charles fer Anyhow. You came up with something called the dialogic thinking model. Can you talk a little bit

about what that is? Sure, there's a really important implication of the Sky's theory, that fairly simple theory that I've just sketched out going from social to private too in a speech, and that implication is that the stuff that goes on in our heads silently should share the structure of the thing it originated in other words, social dialogue. So you're in a speech should at least some of

the time have a dialogic or a conversational structure. It really should be a conversation with yourself as if as you would have if you were having a conversation with another person. And that's a slightly different way of thinking about in a speech to the one that I encountered when I started working in this area, where the idea is that you're in a speech is just kind of like the voice of the brain is the voice of the self. It's this monologue that is generated by a

single point of view. What Pigotsky's theory encourages us to do is think differently and think about in a speech as a dialogue between different points of view. And what I've argued in my work is that if you recognize that dialogic quality of in a speech, certain things start to make sense. For example, understanding how a human mind can be creative and go to new places places it hadn't anticipated going to. It's a lot easier to understand when you think about in a speech as a dialogue.

What are the implications of that idea on cognitive behavioral therapy, the idea that in CBT, we are in essence, engaging in dialogue with ourselves. Correct. Yes, I think that way of thinking about in a speeches is very valuable and CBT comes in lots of different forms, and this approach to in a speech can be valuable in all sorts

of ways. So the work that I've focused on has been on a CBT for psychosis, where people who are hearing voices, which which we think is connected to the experience of inner speech, who are troubled by distressing voices, by thinking differently about their regular inner speech can help them to understand where the voices are coming from and

why they have the properties that they have. Can you elaborate a little bit more on this idea of hearing voices and how this ties into your model and some of the things that you guys have been doing to help people who hear voices. Sure, hearing voices is seen as as often a very scary thing. It often is a very scary thing. It's associated with severe mental illness

diagnoses such as schizophrenia. It's associated with a whole range of different psychiatric diagnoses, so it's not just about schizophrenia. It's about everything from bipolar disorder, to eating disorders, to post traumatic stress disorder, borderline personality disorder. Lots and lots of dim diagnoses are associated with hearing voices. It's not just schizophrenia. Who's what you're saying that that's the common idea if you hear voices, then then you have schizophrenia,

and you're saying that's not true. It can be different things. Definitely, there is definitely not true that hearing voices equals schizophrenia. Schizophrenia in itself is a complex group of disorders probably that isn't very well defined. But hearing voices is associated with a whole range of different disorders, and crucially, it happens to people across the spectrum of human experience. So roughly as many people who have a diagnosis of schizophrenia

here voices quite regularly without any distress. They don't seek psychiatric help, they don't need psychiatric help, they're not mentally ill. Their voice hears. They're people who hear voices quite regularly. As I say, that might account for maybe around one percent of the population. And then there's a much larger group of people who have intermittent or occasional or one

off voice hearing experiences. Best figures we've got at the moment that somewhere between five and of regular people will have a voice hearing experience at some time in their life. So it's something that's associated quite strongly with mental illness. It's a very distressing experience for a lot of people, but it doesn't equate to mental illness. And what are

some of the theories on why people hear voices? One of them that I remember from the book was that there's a there's a part of our brain that basically tells other parts of our brain what we're doing, and that that signal doesn't get to the other part of the brain. So it's almost as if it's our own internal speech that we're unable to determine as our own internal speech exactly. That's that's very well put. That's the relatively simple idea that when people hear voices, what's actually

happening is that they're generating some in a speech. They're doing the regular thing that we most of us do from moment to moment. You know, they're talking to themselves, but for some reason they don't recognize it as their own work. They don't recognize that they themselves have generated

the utterance. And exactly as you say, there's some nice neuroscientific evidence suggesting that the part of your brain that generates speech usually sends through a message to the part of your brain that hears speech, as if to say, you're about to hear some speech, don't pay so much attention to it, because it's just you speaking, and that for some reason that message, that internal message in the case of hearing voices, doesn't get through in quite the

same way. And so some some speeches heard it's perceived as external speech because it's not attacked, it doesn't have the message attached saying don't listen to this. This is you speaking. Along those lines, you're involved with an organization. Is it called Hearing Voices. Our project is called Hearing the Voice, Hearing the Voice, And it sounds like there's a focus among the group that says that hearing voices is not necessarily a bad thing and that there's a

lot that can be learned from what we're hearing. Yeah, there's there are two different things to be distinguished here. Our projects, called Hearing the Voice is funded by the Welcome Trust and based at Darren University in the UK, and we take a very broad interdisciplinary approach to hearing voices. We look at it from every angle, from neuroscience to theology. There is another entity, which is the worldwide Hearing Voices movement. It's okay, I was getting that mixed up. I got it.

And we work closely with the Hearing Voices movement, but we work with people from a whole range of other different perspectives as well. So the idea of the Hearing Voices movement is to say, let's reject the standard psychiatric the biomedical view that this stuff is just a glitch in the brain, It's just in a speech gone wrong. Let's instead see voice hearing experiences as meaningful, as carrying information, as carrying vital emotional information about our own experience and

about our own pasts, in particular about our own life stories. Now, at first glance, initially people in the Hearing Voices movement can be rather suspicious of the inner speech theory. So I've heard people within the movement say to me things like, how can it just be my inner speech? You know, I'm hearing this voice and it's saying all these weird things how can that just be my owner speech? And what I say is, if you look more closely in a speech, you'll find that there's nothing just about in

a speech. In a speech is itself an immensely rich, complex experience that carries all sorts of emotional weight as well. So the two things can fit together. I suppose the crucial difference is that in a speech can't be the only thing going on in hearing voices. Many people who hear voices have suffered trauma, They've suffered adverse experiences in their lives. There's a very strong association, for example, between

hearing voices and childhood sexual abews. Of course, not to say that everybody hears voices has a history of being abused, but it's true for some people. One thing that they're hearing voices. Movement approach has taught us is that there must be more to hearing voices than in a speech. And in particular, there seems to be a strong association between the experience of hearing voices and early adversity, so traumatic events happening in childhood, there's a strong association with

childhood sexual abuse, for example. That's not to say that everybody who hears voices suffered abuse, but there is a connection some people. For some people, unfortunately that is the case. So there must be more to it going on than in a speech. It's very likely that memory processes are involved, and that part of the voice hearing experience with some people at least is the intrusion of unpleasant memories, traumatic memories into consciousness that somehow takes the form of a voice.

Some people see there's two theories as working against each other. You know, we've got to either take the memory approach

or we've got to take the inner speech approach. I think the two can be integrated, but it's quite complicated, and I try and explain in the book how we might be able to do that, to use the idea of trauma reappearing in consciousness but somehow being mediated through language so that it takes the form of a voice, and in general that a lot of the treatment for people your voices is to learn to hear what the

voices are saying in a potentially helpful way. Yeah, I think the important thing to realize is that the hearing voices movement is run by voice. Here is this is historically this was voice. Here is coming together and saying we reject the biomedical approach to our experience. We reject the idea that it's just neural noise, it's just a

glitch in the brain. We think our voices are important, they're meaningful, they have significance, and the way to understand them is to understand the message that they're bringing us, rather than just trying to make them go away. So actually you use the term treatment. If anything, it's the opposites in the hearing voices movement. The idea is not

just to make make the voices go go away. The idea is to understand them, to understand what they're saying about one's own past, and to assimilate them in a more integrated fashion into oneself, to understand them as parts of oneself. Hym turning hearing voices in a slightly different direction. There was an interesting piece in New York Magazine recently that came from the research that you've done, and you mentioned in the book, about how people hear the voices

from books they've read. You know, this, this idea of a character who comes alive in a book having a voice, and that voice remaining in our brains, really the starting point of our projects Hearing the Voice is to say that these experiences happen in lots of different forms right across the spectrum of human experience, across history, across cultures, and how do we make sense of the unpleasant, distressing voices heard by a psychiatric patient, for example, in relation

to these other experiences that people have and have had for millennia. In terms of the research, you just mentioned, one strong experience that people have on a regular, sometimes daily basis is out of reading a book and hearing words sound out in the head. So we were interested in that. You know, I remember being asked as a child, when you when you're reading a novel, do you hear the voices sounding out in your head? And I'm sure

I said yes. So what we wanted to do is interrogate that idea and so let's do some real research on this. Let's really find out what people experience when they're reading fiction. So we got together with the Guardian newspaper and the Edinburgh International Book Festival and we created the study which had different components, but the component that we've just published the research on. We asked a lot of people, a lot of readers of the Guardian book sections,

so they all keen readers, keen readers of fiction. We asked them questions about what goes on in their experience when they're reading, So do they, for example, hear the voices of the characters as their speaking as they're reading the dialogue on the pitch And we found that something like one in seven of our respondents would say that yes, they could hear the voices in the fiction as clearly as if there had been someone else in the room

with them. That was on the questionnaire part of the study. We also did a more in depth analysis. We asked people to explain in more detail if they wanted to, by just typing their answers in a in an open text box to explain more about their experience of reading, and then we very carefully coded the responses. We didn't

just take a psychology approach. We worked with a literary theorist, a narrotologist who brought up in ideas from his discipline, and we came up with a coding system that allowed us to go into much more detail the sorts of dynamics of reading that emerged from these accounts, and the recent news report picked up on one particular aspect of that the thing that my colleague, the narratologist Marco Bernini

calls experiential crossing. The idea here is that you're not just hearing the voices vividly as you're reading, but even when you put the book down, when you close the book and put it down and go out into your daily life, something about the book, the character the narrators,

stays with you. So we found people describing, for example, an experience of walking into a Starbucks, but not walking into the coffee shop as themselves, walking into the coffee shop as Mrs Dallaway and seeing what she would see, noticing what she would notice. And we found around about a fifth of the people who gave these more in depth answers reported this kind of experiential crossing, So the something about the book living on in in their daily

lives even when they put the book down. It's important to note that we only analyze these free text responses, So maybe that the people who gave us that extra detail were the people with more vivid experiences, So it may not be as common as the sort of one in five figure suggests. Maybe that we had a kind of slightly biased sample of giving that in depth analysis

of their experience. The thing that I found so interesting is how the range of inner speech from sort of a very it's just kind of all over the board. You know, one extreme being you actually hear voices, but it's it doesn't seem to be very uniform. It seems to take a lot of different forms for different people. Yes, I think in a speech comes in different forms from

for most people. So another implication of the Gootsky's theory is that sometimes are in a speech should be expressed in full sentences, so you know, you'd hear a conversation as if you were listening to some people out on the street, where where all the sentences are fully formed and it's proper full blown language. Other times are in a speech is going to be much more compressed, what

I call condensed, much more stripped down and abbreviated. It's almost slight thinking in note form rather than thinking in the full text. I think both things probably happened for most people from time to time, where we kind of move between those different levels as we're doing in a speech. I think there's probably huge individual variation in this, as some people will have a more vivid in a speech, others much less, and some people don't report any inner

speech at all. So there's a lot of variation. And there's also a lot of variation in the experience of hearing voices, which is a very diverse phenomenon as well. So both things that we sort of put side by side have a lot of variation in them. The crucial difference is there's something about the hearing voices experience that doesn't feel like you speaking. You don't own it in the same way that you own your own in a speech,

and that's part of what makes it so distressing. Right, are there practical implications of this for people to take what you've learned and what we know about inner speech and use it more skillfully to to regulate our emotions or to help us perform better, or you know, to make our lives better. What are the practical implications? The research in this area is still really in its infancy.

There's a lot of there's a lot more to be done, there's a lot of findings that need to be replicated, and we're seeing the beginnings of a science of in a speech and private speech. And so I'm wary about drawing two firm conclusions about advice for everyday life. But I would say that understanding your in a speech, understanding where it comes from, understanding the different forms that it takes, can be really beneficial. You can be less alarmed by it,

you can use it to better effect. I think you can be less less afraid, for example, or less ashamed about talking to yourself out loud. If you know that that is a useful, functional phenomenon, you'll be less worried about doing it. So I think simply having a better understanding of it as a phenomenon that is very private, that's very important for the self in all sorts of ways, but that has really useful functions, I think that can

be beneficial. I think there's also a downside within a speech that we haven't mentioned, which is separate to the issue of hearing voices, and that is, for a lot of people, the negative thoughts that can contribute to anxiety and depression probably take the form of speech. Surprising how little we know about how linguistic these negative thoughts actually are. The research really isn't done. People don't ask that question,

and I hope they will do in the future. But my guess is that a lot of the time that somebody who's depressed, for example, is having negative thoughts a lot of the time, they will be couched in language. So again, understanding more about how in a speech works could be really beneficial in that respect as well. That's the idea of the rumination, and we talk about that on the show a fair amount. How we kind of

just get caught in these loops. It seems interesting to me though, that a couple of different discipline CBT being one, mind fullness meditation being another, really where a lot of those modalities, for lack of a better word, rely on is exactly what you're suggesting, which is to become more in tune with what is the inner speech that's happening, what is our thought patterns, what's happening there, and being able to to use your words, engage in dialogue with

them instead of them being unquestioned or the things that run our lives. Yes, I think so. I think a lot of this research will be of interest to people who are attracted to mindfulness. Um, there's another aspect of meditation which kind of pulls in a different direction, and that is the idea that with some forms of meditation you can actually silence the inner dialogue. I think that probably happens for some people, but I think they're few

and far between. I think on the whole, this is something that is very hard to silence, and so and mindfulness approach to understanding it. Better to recognize it when it's happening, to understand its forms when it's happening, and taking that slide like the distance approach to it is likely to be beneficial. But I don't have any data I can point to in that respect, right, Yeah, my experience certainly says that getting it to shut off is

a is a losing battle. It's a lot better to just try and try and pay attention to it and understand it. It's very difficult to silence, and maybe that shouldn't be the goal in certain cases. Well sure, And I think this understanding of where it comes from, what it's doing, I think it makes us less likely to want to beat ourselves up over the fact that we

can't switch it off. You know, I think everything I've said points to it being something that will just if if it happens to you, it's not going to go away. It's going to keep being there. So don't beat yourself up over the fact you can't make it stop right exactly what, Charles, Thanks so much for taking the time to come on the show. I found the book really interesting and I've enjoyed this conversation a lot. Thank you, Eric, I've enjoyed it too. Okay, take care, okay, bye ye.

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