FUNNY SLICES OF CHEESE 9

When I first started thinking about this topic as a graduate stu-

dent in the 1990s, it did not look like a healthy subject of inquiry.
Studying something as private and ineffable as our inner voices was,
my elders might have warned me, never going to furnish a successful
research career. For a start, it would seem to depend on the almost
impossible task of introspection (reflecting on one’s own thought
processes), which had long fallen out of favor as a scientific method.
Another problem is that the idea of an “inner voice” is often used,
vaguely and metaphorically, to refer to everything from gut feelings
to creative instincts, with none of the robust attempts at definition
that you need for doing sound research. There were good reasons,
though, for pursuing the quarry, and in recent years the scientific
picture has changed profoundly. One thing that is emerging from
this research is that the words that sound out in our heads play a vi-
tal part in our thinking. Psychologists are demonstrating that “inner
speech,” as they term it, helps us to regulate our behavior, motivate
ourselves for action, evaluate those actions, and even become con-
scious of our own selves. Neuroscientists are showing how mental
voices draw on some of the same neural systems that underlie exter-
nal speech, fitting with important ideas about how they develop. We
now know that inner speech comes in different forms and speaks in
different tongues, that it has an accent and an emotional tone, and
that we correct errors in it in some of the same ways that we fix slip-
ups in external speech. Many of us really do think in words, and
there are good and bad forms of this kind of thinking. Negative
thoughts, perpetuated in inner speech, contribute to the distress
caused by certain mental disorders, and they may also be the key to
ameliorating them.

9780465096800-text.indd 9 5/10/16 8:39 AM

 10 THE VOICES WITHIN

Beyond the science lab, questions about inner speech have been a
source of fascination for as long as humans have been thinking about
their own thoughts. One thing we can say about thinking is that it
often appears to us as a kind of conversation between different voices
propounding different points of view. But what do these voices
sound like? What language do they speak? Does your thinking self
speak in fully grammatical sentences, or is it more like listening to
something written down in note form? Are your thoughts softly spo-
ken, or do they ever raise their voice? And anyway, who is listening
when your thinking selves are speaking? Where are “you” in all of
this? Such questions may sound strange, and yet these qualities of
thinking must define what it is like to inhabit our own minds.
All of these puzzles might be explicable if we take seriously the idea
(so persuasive to our introspection) of thinking as a voice, or voices,
in the head. I want to explore this view and test it to its limits. In one
way or another, this approach, which I term the “Dialogic Thinking”
model, has informed most of my scholarly work in psychology, and it
will be a focus throughout this book. It follows from a particular the-
ory of the emergence of thinking in early childhood, and it is sup-
ported by psychological and neuroscientific studies of normal and
disordered cognition. Yet, no matter how strong the evidence for the
model, it is clear that there are many aspects of our inner experience
that are not verbal and voice-like, and I will explore whether the hy-
pothesis can be developed and expanded to account for thinking in
people who do not have a language to think in, as well as the evidence
that much of inner experience is visual and imagery-based.
I am fortunate in having a very wide range of evidence to draw
on. Some aspects of the mystery of mental voices have had hundreds,
even thousands of years’ worth of attention. Philosophers have
struggled with thorny problems about how a mind can represent
knowledge, constructing principled arguments about, for example,
whether thinking could occur in natural language. Psychologists
have set their participants reasoning tasks and asked them to speak
their thought processes out loud for close analysis. Neuroscientists
have tracked inner speech by recording electrical signals from the

9780465096800-text.indd 10 5/10/16 8:39 AM

 FUNNY SLICES OF CHEESE 11

articulatory muscles of people who are thinking silently, or by stimu-

lating parts of the brain and seeing how language processes are af-
fected. Writers through the centuries have filled their novels and
poems with verbal thinking, and their depictions of streams of con-
sciousness, trains of thought, and knight’s-moves of the mind pro-
vide an unparalleled source of evidence about how our mental voices
do their work.
In the chapters that follow, I will draw on all of these sources of
evidence. We will hear from young children and the elderly, sports-
men, novelists, practitioners of meditation, visual artists, and people
who hear voices. Is it true that young children don’t think in words?
Do some psychiatric patients’ voices really disappear when they open
their mouths? Is it possible to think one thing in inner speech at the
same time as saying the complete opposite out loud? What was hap-
pening in Joan of Arc’s mind, brain, and body when she heard a
“beautiful, sweet, low voice” exhorting her to lift the siege of Orléans?
How is it that inner speech can happen faster than ordinary speech,
without seeming at all rushed to the person doing the thinking? Why
do some voice-hearers’ voices say such funny things? I will look at
how literary and other artistic depictions of the phenomena align
with the facts thrown up by scientific research, and how such “objec-
tive” treatments compare with the evidence from introspection. I
will submit myself to functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)
and see how my brain weaves thoughts on its enchanted loom. I will
try to describe the ephemera of the voices in our heads as well as
tracing their weightier trajectories. I will also detail the stories of sev-
eral individuals who hear voices, trying to capture how the experi-
ence feels, how it can be managed, and what it reveals about the
nature of the self.
By the end of this book, I hope to have persuaded you of several
things. Talking to ourselves is a part of human experience that, al-
though by no means universal, seems to play many different roles in
our mental lives. According to one important theory, the words in
our heads act as psychological “tools” that help us to do things in our
thinking, just as a handyman’s tools make tasks possible that would

9780465096800-text.indd 11 5/10/16 8:39 AM

 12 THE VOICES WITH IN

not be tractable otherwise. Our inner speech can plan, direct, en-
courage, question, cajole, prohibit, and reflect. From cricketers to
poets, people talk to themselves in all sorts of ways and for a whole
range of very different purposes.

9780465096800-text.indd 13 5/10/16 8:39 AM