What can be learned about the brain when we talk to ourselves

Studies of the conversations people have with themselves open a window to hidden mental processes

Image: pixabay.
illustration: pixabay.

By Charles Ferneho, the article is published with the approval of Scientific American Israel and the Ort Israel Network 21.09.2017

  • Most people talk to themselves in their heads. Psychologists call this phenomenon "inner speech".
  • Our self-talk plays important roles. Among other things, it helps us make plans, control our emotions, and be creative. But until recently it was almost unexplored.
  • In recent years, psychologists have made great strides towards the ability to analyze the inner discourse, thanks in part to medical imaging methods that make it possible to observe the brain while it is working.
  • The findings reveal part of the neural basis for these internal conversations, and they shed light on some old mysteries about our mental lives.

The alarm clock woke me up early in a hotel room close to the BBC headquarters building in London. I didn't sleep well. When I looked in the mirror in the bathroom I saw a pale and somewhat terrified figure. I had good reason to be nervous. In just over an hour I had to go live on the Start the Week talk show, an important BBC radio program with an audience of millions of listeners. While I was looking in the mirror it dawned on me that I was actually mumbling inside my head. The words were words of encouragement and I was the recipient of the words. "Calm down," I said. "You have already participated in Start the Week." I had the impression that I was talking to myself, but I also heard something inside me, something that sounded a bit like a familiar voice.

This story is about an everyday experience: the thoughts, images and feelings that go through our heads when we are lying in the bath, chopping onions in the kitchen, or waiting for the door to open to enter an important meeting. When people are asked about this phenomenon, they often testify that their inner lives include a lot of words. People talk to themselves silently inside their heads. Psychologists call this phenomenon "inner discourse", and it has a relative, "private discourse" - the phenomenon of people talking to themselves out loud. If you say things to yourself, for example "don't forget to buy coffee" or "don't deviate from the plan", without expressing it out loud, this is an internal conversation. If you say similar things to yourself and use your voice to say it out loud, this is a private conversation.

The two forms of language use seem to play diverse roles. Among other things, they are involved in planning programs, controlling our behavior, controlling emotions and encouraging creativity. Among adults, inner speech seems to be more common than private speech, so it is probably the form of self-talk that plays the greatest role in thinking and in which psychologists are particularly interested. This form is also much more difficult to study. When I started my career as a researcher, in the 90s, there was almost no scientific literature on this subject, but over the past twenty years the situation has changed completely - partly because researchers have developed new experimental methods for studying inner discourse, and also because we now have A richer understanding of its modes of operation, of the forms in which it appears, and of the ways in which it can benefit or hinder the thinking person. The truth is that it is beginning to dawn on us that the inner discourse sheds light on some big questions about our mental activity and the brain.

Our chatter with ourselves

Henry lies on a mat with a toy train in each of his hands and describes to himself in enthusiastic speech the imaginary city he is about to build. "First all the cars. Then a big train," he says to himself. Henry is three years old. In any kindergarten you enter, anywhere in the world, you will see (and hear) similar things. With a whole room full of kids thinking out loud to themselves, it can be quite a noisy environment. But the phenomenon of children's private discourse is a natural phenomenon that provides us with important clues about the origin of the words in our heads.

The private discourse of young children has been of interest to researchers for a long time. In the 20s the developmental psychologist proposed Jean Piaget that the way children speak to themselves reflects their inability to adopt the point of view of other people and adapt their speech to their listeners. In his opinion, the private discourse is the result of the children's inability to communicate adequately with others, and therefore, he believed, it stops when the children grow up, and become more skilled and able to consider the viewpoints of their listeners.

In the 30s, the Russian psychologist proposed Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky An alternative explanation for private speech: children deliberately invent a new use for words they have used before successfully in social interactions with other people. Instead of influencing the behavior of others, they learn how to use language to control themselves. In the decades that have passed since then, research has confirmed Vygotsky's theory about the development of inner discourse and the roles it plays.

I remember that when I discovered Vygotsky's writings as a student of developmental psychology, I was surprised by the simplicity of his idea, because I felt that the theory of the development of verbal thinking should be more complicated. But even though the idea proposed by Vygotsky was simple, its implications are quite complex. Vygotsky believed that the internal discourse of adults is the internalization of the conversations we have with others when we develop as children. Almost a hundred years after Vigotsky put his insights into writing, I and other researchers dealing with the inner discourse are only beginning to understand their meaning in the context of the function of words in our thinking.

One of the most important conclusions derived from Vygotsky's theory is that the structure of the internal discourse should be the same as that of a conversation out loud. In other words, it should be similar to a dialogue between different points of view. The idea that in thinking there is a kind of mental dialogue is not a new idea, it was already put forward by the Greek philosopher Plato, if not earlier. But I believe it has the potential to help redefine some deep mysteries of human cognition. One of these mysteries is the question of self-control: how does an intelligent system invent new courses of action and then act upon them? A robot can react in very intelligent ways to what is happening around it, but can it come up with new ideas for new actions by itself? If you have to tell the system what to do, then it is missing one of the important elements of intelligence.

What I find exciting about the idea of ​​dialogue is that it is an activity that by its very nature allows a person to criticize himself. When you talk to someone else, the conversation takes place without the presence of a third party, without someone waving the baton of winners and telling you at every moment where the conversation should go. You and your interlocutors direct each other through a set of processes we are all familiar with: questions, appeal, response, agreement, and so on. It seems to me that if we understand the inner discourse in the same way, we might be able to explain how human thinking can be open (that is, not always striving towards a certain goal) and flexible by its very essence.

But in order to have a dialogue, we need the ability to represent things from the point of view of the person with whom we are having the conversation. (The inability to adopt such a point of view is, according to Piaget, the explanation for the private discourse of young children.) We often do not know in advance what the other person is thinking, but when it becomes clear to us, we must be able to remember it and update the representation of his point of view as we go. conversation progress. Scientists now know quite a bit about the neural basis of adopting someone else's point of view, thanks in part to studies usingFunctional magnetic resonance imaging(fMRI) and other medical imaging methods that can reveal where in the brain various operations are performed.

Armed with these insights, my colleague and I explored a new idea about how internal dialogues are created, based on the premise that these dialogues use the parts of the brain we use when we adopt others' points of view. In an experiment using fMRI in which the main researcher was my colleague Ben Alderson-Day From Durham University in England, we asked the volunteers who participated in the experiment to produce two forms of inner speech while lying inside the brain scanner. Sometimes we asked them to have an internal dialogue with a monologic structure, that is, one that did not involve an exchange of words as in a conversation conducted from different points of view; And sometimes we asked them to have an internal dialogue. In each of the cases, we presented them with a certain scenario as a topic for the internal discourse - for example, a visit to a school where they once studied. To produce a monologue, participants could, for example, imagine that they were carrying things in front of students; In the dialogue they could have a conversation with their former school principal.

We predicted that internal discourse of both types would recruit the normal language systems that are activated when humans are asked to have discourse of any kind. These are areas located on the border between the left frontal lobe and the temporal lobe and a more posterior region of the brain - the upper temporal ridge. But we thought that the internal dialogue would be different in that it would also activate parts of the brain that are known to be involved in thinking about what is going on in the minds of others. These brain regions are the areas whose activity is the basis of social-cognitive functions, and they help us to represent the thoughts, beliefs and desires of others.

The results confirmed our expectations. When people engaged in internal dialogues, their language system seemed to work in concert with a part of the social-cognitive system located in the right hemisphere of the brain, near the junction between the temporal and parietal lobes. This pattern of brain activity was not seen in the subjects when they were conducting internal monologues. These are findings that now need to be reproduced, but they provide us with preliminary evidence for cooperation, which includes both brain hemispheres, between two systems that are usually considered separate systems that play different roles. It therefore seems that the neural connection between language and social cognitive functions supports the intuitions of Vygotsky, who believed that when people talk to themselves, they are having real conversations.

in real time

There are many reasons to be cautious in interpreting brain imaging findings in general, and in this case also because the findings overturn things that scientists thought they understood in the past about the neurological basis of inner speech. In most of the previous studies, the participants were simply asked to repeat certain sentences in their minds, like a monologue, not in the form of a conversation. We may use this kind of internal discourse, for example, when we shop at the supermarket and try to remember a few last items from the shopping list. A monologue is extremely useful in certain moments, but it is very different from the creative and flexible internal dialogues that are created when we treat ourselves as participants in an exchange that can take place, for example, in a social context. Our group of researchers placed the dialogic features of inner speech at the center, but in this study we still asked our volunteers to do something quite unnatural: to speak to themselves in response to instruction, instead of waiting for the inner speech to emerge naturally. The problem is that cognitive neuroscientists need to have control over the things they test in order to understand the interpretation of the findings in the experiment, and waiting for the natural onset of internal discourse seems incompatible with the strict requirements of the experimental method.

The new studies on internal discourse teach us that it is far from being a process that exists only between us and ourselves. Much of the power of our self-talk comes from the fact that it orchestrates a dialogue between different points of view.

Medical imaging of human brains during self-talk reveals fascinating differences between internal dialogues and internal monologues in terms of the underlying neural activity. However, caution is needed in the interpretation of these brain simulations, because the structure of the experiment may affect its results: the brain areas activated during inner speech that arises spontaneously are not the same as the areas that are activated when the inner speech is created following an instruction. Source: The Brain's Conversation with Itself: Neural Substrates of Dialogic Inner Speech.
Medical imaging of human brains during self-talk reveals fascinating differences between internal dialogues and internal monologues in terms of the underlying neural activity. However, caution is needed in the interpretation of these brain imaging, because the structure of the experiment may affect its results: the brain areas activated during inner speech that arises spontaneously are not the same as the areas that are activated when the inner speech is created following an instruction. source: The Brain's Conversation with Itself: Neural Substrates of Dialogic Inner Speech.

What we need are ways to capture and record the internal discourse as it occurs by itself. Recently, our group has been making progress toward this goal by using a sophisticated method to collect descriptions of people's inner experiences. In this method, called "descriptive experience sampling" (DES), participants are taught to report moments of internal experiences following a beeping alert. Upon hearing the beep, the subjects should focus on what they thought, felt, heard, etc., immediately before the beep, and briefly record these experiences. The following day, the subjects are interviewed in depth about each of the moments of the experience that were recorded with the help of the beeping, to allow the researchers to determine whether these moments were characterized by inner speech, sensory awareness, or other familiar phenomena.

My colleagues and I conducted the first study that combined this useful method with fMRI. In this study we included a standard inner speech experiment, where we asked people to say certain words to themselves in their head while lying in the scanner. In addition, we used DES to record moments of experience as they occurred naturally. We chose those beeps in which we were quite sure that an internal conversation took place, according to what we learned from the interviews we conducted using the DES method, and compared the brain activity in these moments with the patterns of activity we found in the normal task.

We found considerable differences. The usual method, the method of reciting sentences, employed the Broca area (a part of the brain that is involved in the production of speech, internal or external), spontaneous internal speech was manifested in a stronger activation of a more posterior brain area in the temporal lobe, in the ridge named after Hashel. There is therefore a dramatic difference between the pattern of brain activity during inner speech that occurs naturally and that which appears during inner speech created in response to instruction.

These findings have weighty implications for the methods used to study inner experiences in cognitive neuroscience. They raise difficult questions regarding the approach of researchers to the study of inner discourse and regarding the assumptions that can be made regarding any type of mental experience that subjects are asked to carry out according to instruction. They emphasize the need for what I call "slow neuroscience": harnessing the power of the research methods found in neuroscience for highly accurate descriptions of human experiences.

There are other reasons to make an effort to accurately describe all the variety of forms of inner discourse. In Vygotsky's theory, dialogue and monologue are not the only variables in our inner discourse. An important part of his scenario is the idea that following the internalization of language, expressed first in private discourse and then in internal discourse, its form changes. Vygotsky saw several ways in which this could occur, including various types of abbreviations or summaries. Thinking my anxious thoughts in the London hotel, I found myself saying a complete sentence to myself: "You've already participated in Start the Week before." At other times, the language I speak to myself is much more simplified. If I hear a chime coming from the kitchen while I'm cooking, I might say to myself something like "the oven timer is going off," but I'm much more likely to just say to myself "the timer." Vygotsky said that often, inner and private discourse is shortened compared to what is said to another person. When we talk to ourselves we usually don't need to phrase things in complete sentences, partly because the things are being said to ourselves, and therefore we don't need to express all the details. The great Russian-American writer Vladimir Nabokov Notice how our thoughts can be concise compared to the things we might say out loud. According to an interview from 1964, in his preparation notes for the novel "Pale Fire" Nabokov wrote: "We don't think in words but in the shadows of words."

Surprisingly, until recently no one had studied this feature of the inner language. me andSimon McCarthy-Jones, who currently works at Trinity College Dublin in Ireland, we put together an online questionnaire in which we asked people about various features of inner speech. Our group also used an application (app) for mobile phones to collect such data during people's daily lives. The results of our initial research, published in 2011, reveal four main features of the inner discourse: its dialogic nature, its tendency to summarize, the degree of its ability to integrate the voices of others, and its role in evaluating our behavior or in creating motivation for our actions. Only a minority of respondents stated that their internal discourse tends to be abstract, but this feature is common enough to warrant further investigation.

Most of all, our questionnaire-based study confirms the view that inner speech is not one and the same thing. It appears to appear in different forms, which may be adapted to perform different functions, and which may have different neural bases. One of the challenges for the future is to understand if the brain handles concise internal speech differently than speech in the form of complete sentences. To find out, we will have to find a way to get people to have a condensed internal conversation in an experimental way, while inside a brain scanner, or wait for further developments of the ability to perceive such a conversation when it appears naturally. The inner discourse is still an elusive research goal.

A key to creativity

Since I began to ponder the phenomenon of inner discourse as a research student, in the 90s, the study of inner discourse has advanced in great strides. Today it is no longer considered, for the most part, an aspect of mental life that cannot be reached by scientific methods. Efforts to study it have yielded new experimental methods and new means of examining what is going on in the brain. It now turns out that this intimate aspect of consciousness can help in finding answers to important questions about the human mental life.

The inner discourse may, for example, give us some clues about the origins of human creativity. We can use an infrastructure that allows us to have internal conversations in all kinds of forms - from arguing with ourselves to conversations with those who are not present or do not even exist. As a result of internalizing the dialogues we can have with others, we have an "open channel" to the points of view of others - even those who are not present, or are no longer alive, or never existed. My dialogues with God, with a dead parent or with an imaginary friend can be just as creative as those I have with myself. Our ability to ask ourselves questions and then answer them can be an essential part of the mechanism that allows us to direct our thoughts into new areas.

Another routine experience related to our talking to ourselves is one of the most familiar and also the most private experiences. As soon as we open a book, the inner speech is "hijacked" in all sorts of interesting ways by the words we read. Neuroscientists have shown that reading the words of fictional characters activates the same parts of the brain that we use to process other people's voices. In an online survey, we recently asked a large sample of book readers about the "voices" they hear when reading fiction. About a seventh of the respondents said that the voice of the fictional characters lived in their imagination as if someone was present there speaking the words.

Some of the participants described to us in detail how they experience fictional voices. Using the tools used in the study of literature to analyze narratives, we searched in their open descriptions for further clues to the power of literature to take over our thoughts. At least for some of the respondents in our survey, the voices of fictional characters continued to echo in their heads even after they put the book down. Some of them even incorporated the fictional characters into their daily lives. For example, they looked around through the eyes of Mrs. Dulway (the character from the novel of the same name by Virginia Woolf) during a regular visit to a coffee shop. Marco Bernini from Durham University calls this phenomenon "experiential crossing". These findings give us important clues about the ways in which the voices and figures of those around us, in our social world, may be represented in our mental lives.

The study of internal discourse is a new scientific field that reveals to us that internal discourse is far from being a process that exists only between us and ourselves. The power of our self-talk lies largely in the fact that it orchestrates a dialogue between different perspectives. My colleague and I saw a combined activity of the language system in the left hemisphere of the brain and the cognitive-social networks in the right hemisphere of the brain. In the same way, the neural network underlying the internal discourse needs to be able to "connect" to other systems in the brain according to what is needed in different situations - when we have verbal thoughts about the past and the future, when we use words to help ourselves complete demanding tasks, or simply when our thoughts wander, without any particular goal . If the researchers manage to design appropriate experiments, it seems that verbal thinking can shed light on all these aspects of our cognitive functions.

It is possible that the reason why internal discourse has received so little attention until recently is that it is such a normal and everyday phenomenon. But the next time you find yourself cheering yourself on for some challenge, or discussing among yourselves how to solve some dilemma, or scolding yourself for making a mistake, or simply planning the evening ahead of you in a murmur intended only for you, maybe it will make you reflect on the private and intimate wonder of your use in words with yourselves. As in the laboratory also in everyday life, voices of the inner discourse can reveal many things to us.

About the writers

Charles Fernio - Professor of Psychology at Durham University in England. His research focuses on child development, memory and hallucinations. He writes fiction and non-fiction. Franjo's latest book, The Voices Within (Basic Books), 2016 is about self-talk.

for further reading

  • The Varieties of Inner Speech: Links between Quality of Inner Speech and Psychopathological Variables in a Sample of Young Adults. Simon McCarthy-Jones and Charles Fernyhough in Consciousness and Cognition, Vol. 20, no. 4, pages 1586–1593; December 2011
  • Inner Experience in the Scanner: Can High Fidelity Apprehensions of Inner Experience Be Integrated with fMRI? Simone Kühn et al. in Frontiers in Psychology, Vol. 5, Article No. 1393; December 9, 2014
  • The Brain's Conversation with Itself: Neural Substrates of Dialogic Inner Speech. Ben Alderson-Day et al. in Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, Vol. 11, no. 1, pages 110–120; January 2016
  • Uncharted Features and Dynamics of Reading: Voices, Characters, and Crossing of Experiences. Ben Alderson-Day et al. in Consciousness and Cognition, Vol. 49, pages 98–109; March 2017
  • Charles Fernhue

2 תגובות

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