The science of how we talk to ourselves in our heads

Studying the ways people talk to themselves in their own minds is incredibly tricky because as soon as you ask them about it, you're likely interfering with the process you want to investigate. As William James said, some forms of introspective analysis are like "… trying to turn up the gas quickly enough to see how the darkness looks."For many years Russell Hurlbert and his colleagues have used a technique that they believe offers the best way to study what they call "pristine" inner speaking, unaltered by outside interference. They provide participants with a beeper that goes off randomly several times a day, and ask them to record in precise terms their mental activity that was happening just before the beeps. Early in the process, this "descriptive experience sampling" (DES) approach also involves cooperative interviews between the participants and a trained researcher, so that the participant can learn to identify true instances of inner speaking from other mental phenomena.Now Hurlbert's team has documented some of what they've learned so far about the ways that we talk to ourselves in our own minds. Our inner voices usually sound to us like our external spoken voice - instances of inner speaking occurring in another person's voice are very rare. Just like our spoken voice, the voice of inner speaking can also express degrees of volume and emotion.Inner speaking is perceived as wilful - something done, rather than experienced passively. There is huge variation in the ...
Source: BPS RESEARCH DIGEST - Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Authors: Source Type: blogs