Sep 7, 2010

Voices in Your Head

Jad talks to Charles Fernyhough about the connection between thought, inner speech, and the voice in our heads.

In our last episode, Words, we got into a debate about whether kids can think before they have words. For this podcast, Jad revisits that question with Charles Fernyhough, who tells Jad about a theory developed by a Russian psychologist name Lev Vygotsky. Vygotsky’s theory describes how words and thoughts move from speech outside our heads to speech inside our heads. We also talk to someone who hears other people's voices in his head, and ask Fernyhough about whether Vygotsky's ideas could shed light on this surprisingly common phenomena.

If you want to read more about voice-hearing and schizophrenia, check out the study that Fernyhough mentioned in this podcast.

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